AMERICA’S FUTURE BELONGS TO ISLAM:PAUL L. WILLIAMS, PHD

http://www.ruthfullyyours.com/2013/02/07/americas-future-belongs-to-islampaul-l-williams-phd/

AMERICA’S FUTURE BELONGS TO ISLAM:PAUL L. WILLIAMS, PHD

By Ruth King on February 7th, 2013

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/americas-future-belongs-to-islam?f=must_reads
(author of Crescent Moon Rising)

Islam, according to newly released data from the Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies, is now the fastest growing religion in America, verifying President Barack Obama’s claim that the United States is “no longer a Judeo-Christian country.”

How many Muslims now live within the country remains anyone’s guess, since the U.S. Census Bureau neglects to collect data on religious identification. A 2008 study by Cornell University projected that the number of Muslims in America had climbed from 1.6 million in 1995 to 7 million.[i] A U.S. News and World Report survey, which was conducted at the same time, placed the figure at 5 million,[ii] while the Pew Research Center set the number at 2.35 million.

But Pew researchers admit that their survey was not thorough since it neglected to take into account immigrant and poor black Muslims.[iii] What’s more, these researchers only contacted Americans with telephone landlines and failed to take into account the fact that nearly 50% of U.S. residents and age 18-35 and the nearly 100% of the illegal immigrants who communicate exclusively by cell phones.[iv]

Muslim organizations, such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), supported the Cornell University projection of 7 million – - based on mosque attendance.[v]

In any case, all demographers agree that throughout the coming decades, the faith of the Prophet Mohammed will continue to impact and transform all aspects of American life: social, political, and economic. They further maintain that, save for a cataclysmic sea-change in population trends, Islam by 2050 will emerge as the nation’s dominant religion.

Such an assertion may seem hyperbolic, save for these findings:

• The US fertility rate is now below 2.1 per woman, meaning Americans are no longer giving birth to enough children to keep the population from dwindling.[vi] But this statistic does not hold true for the average Muslim American woman who displays a robust fertility rate of 2.8.[vii]
• Muslims continue to pour into the country to occupy positions vacated by aging Americans as physicians, engineers, and scientists. Others arrive here to perform tasks that American workers are unwilling to perform in food processing plants, agricultural facilities, and telecommunications. In addition to the Muslims who come here with employment visas, thousands more arrive with student visas to enroll in colleges throughout the country. Still others arrive with “diversity” visas to enrich America’s racial composition. In 1992, nearly 50,000 Muslims arrived in the US and received permanent residency status. In 2009, that number soared to 115,000.[viii] In truth, no one knows for certain how many Muslims immigrants are presently living in the country. A GEO report released to the press released by Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Joe Lieberman (ID-CT) and Ranking Member Susan Collins (R-ME) show that half of the 12 million US illegal immigrants have entered the country legally but have overstayed their visas. Many of the over-stays are from Islamic countries. Five of the 9/11 hijackers overstayed their visas, and GAO found that 36 of the roughly 400 people convicted of terrorism-related charges since September 2001 had overstayed their visas.>[ix]
• In addition to the legal and illegal Muslim immigrants, 80,000 refugees enter this country under resettlement programs. Nearly, 75,000 come from Islamic countries.[x]
• As the now defunct Christian Church militant, America is witnessing the mosque militant. Muslims, unlike main-line denominational Christians, are fervent in their beliefs and are eager to spread the faith. Islam, at present, is the most rapidly growing religion in the country with outreach programs on college campuses, in prisons, and within the military.[xi]
• Islam provides an antithesis to secular America. It offers a return to the country’s “traditional values” with a vengeance. The vast majority of US Muslims oppose abortion and same-sex marriage. They call for a curtailment of women’s rights and a return to “law and order” (as mandated by sharia). They are enterprising, hard working, and deeply devoted to their families.[xii]
• Unlike America’s political leaders, Muslims do not recognize the legitimacy of all faiths. Their religion, according to Bernard Lewis, divides the world into two: the House of Islam (dar al-Islam), where Muslims rule and the law of Islam prevails, and the House of War (dar al Harb), comprising the rest of the world. “Between these two,” Lewis writes, “there is a morally necessary, legally and religiously obligatory state of war, until the final triumph of Islam over unbelief.”[xiii] For this reason, Muslims are unlikely to relinquish the cherished claims of their tradition before the prevailing Zeitgeist.

The belief that America could be transformed into an Islamic state was first expressed by a small group Muslim missionaries in 1922, who declared to a gathering of disgruntled city blacks in Syracuse, New York: “Our plan is: we are going to conquer America.”[xiv] The audacity of this remark provoked the following commentary in the Syracuse Sunday Herald:

To the millions of American Christians who have so long looked eagerly forward to the time the cross shall be supreme in every land and the people of the whole world shall have become the followers Christ, the plan to win this continent to the path of the “infidel Turk” will seem a thing unbelievable. But there is no doubt about its being pressed with all the fanatical zeal for which the Mohammedans are noted.[xv]

Ninety years later, the remarks made by the early Islamic missionaries no longer seem audacious but prophetic. The transformation of America into an Islamic nation, Muslim scholars say, is a matter of destiny. It is kismet (quisma). The words of the country’s future, such scholars contend, have been written – - and these words no mortal man may alter or erase.

---

[i] “Michigan Has Largest U.S. Muslim Population,” Psychiatric News, The American Society of Psychiatrists, Vol. 40, Number 2, January 21, 2005.
[ii] Susan Headden, “Understanding Islam,” U.S. News and World Report, April 7, 2008.
[iii] Paul M. Barrett, American Islam: The Struggle for the Soul of a Religion (New York: Faraar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), pp. 8-9.
[iv] Kathleen Parker, “Pew Study of U.S. Muslims Isn’t ‘Largely’ Reassuring,” The Scranton Times-Tribune, February 28, 2008.
[v] http://www.cair.com/Portals/0/pdf/The_Mosque_in_America_A_National_Portal,pdf The most rigorous estimate was from the Mosque Study Project 2000 (Bagby, Perl, and Froehle, 2001) which combined seven lists of mosques, eliminated duplicates, and attempted to verify the existence of each place. This generated a final list of 1209 mosques in 2000. The researchers then drew a sample of 631 and were successful in obtaining information about 416 of the mosques. They found that 340 adults and children regularly participated in the average mosque, and that 1629 were “associated in any way with the religious life of the mosque.” This converts to a national estimate of 1,969,000 mosque-associated Muslims nationally. The study supports the projection of 6 to 7 million Muslims in the U.S. by assuming that for every Muslim associated with a mosque, three remain without association.
[vi] Rob Stein, “U.S. Birth Rate Falls Again: A Possible Effect of Economic Downturn,” Washington Post, August 27, 2010.
[vii] “A Demographic Portrait of American Muslims,” Pew Research Center, Auguhttp://www.people-press.org/2011/08/30/section-1-a-demographic-portrait-of-muslim-americans/
[viii] Ibid.
[ix] Jim Kouri, “Almost Half of Illegal Aliens Entered U.S. Legally, But Overstayed Visas, Senators Say,” Family Security Matters, May 20, 2011, http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.9562/pub_detail.asp
[x] “Presidential Memorandum – - Refugee Admissions,” The White House, Press Release, October 8, 2010, http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2010/10/08/presidential-memorandum-refugee-admissions
[xi] “The Future of the Global Muslim Population,” Pew Research Center, January 27, 2011, http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1872/muslim-population-projections-worldwide-fast-growth
[xii] “A Demographic Portrait of American Muslims.”
[xiii] Bernard Lewis, The Political Language of Islam (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 73.
[xiv] Daniel Pipes, Militant Islam Reaches America (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2003), p. 113.
[xv] Ibid.

FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Paul L. Williams is the author of The Day of Islam: The Annihilation of America and the Western World, The Al Qaeda Connection, and other best-selling books. He is a frequent guest on such national news networks as ABC News, CBS News, Fox News, MSNBC, and NPR.

Read more: Family Security Matters http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/americas-future-belongs-to-islam?f=must_reads#ixzz2KD8DToJ5
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Vishwaroopam, an American story - By Muzamil Jaleel - The Indian Express, New Delhi - India

" This is an American film" - Muzamil Jaleel


http://www.indianexpress.com/news/vishwaroopam-an-american-story/1070356/0

Vishwaroopam, an American story

Muzamil Jaleel : Thu Feb 07 2013, 03:29 hrs
Kamal Haasan's freedom to tell a story the way he wants must be respected. But there is a need to debate the responsibilities of the artist

When the religion of the Kathak teacher Vishwanath, or "Wiz", is accidentally exposed by a detective employed by his nuclear oncologist wife Nirupama, who looks bored with a dysfunctional marriage, the meaning of the twist in the tale is evident. Kamal Haasan has twisted the narrative and given his "hero" a Muslim identity, while pitting him against the obvious villains who share his faith. Perhaps this is the reason Haasan had said Indian Muslims would be proud of his spy thriller, Vishwaroopam. The intention behind this balancing act may well be noble, but it amounts to little more than an interesting twist.

Contrary to the general impression, the problems with the movie would have been inconsequential if its content had, indeed, been "blasphemous" or "offensive". The movie does, after all, tell a story that has been playing in the media for decades now. Yes, al-Qaeda and the Taliban do exist, and they are all-Muslim. Vishwaroopam over-simplifies this, and places it in a fictitious narrative where everything is black and white. The debate over the film, however, is entirely misplaced. The question is not whether it hurts or offends the religious feelings of Muslims. The problem is that the imagery and metaphors employed by the film have turned stereotypes into reality. The people who've watched the film will take away the image of bomb blasts and suicide bombers — not just those young men who wear bombs and blow themselves up to inflict death and destruction, but also a new breed of imaginary fidayeens who accept "slow, miserable deaths" that can take up to "six months" happily, because they volunteered to prepare a dirty bomb without protection against radiation, which they would then explode in New York City.

This is an American film. From the plot details to the larger narrative of the so-called war on terror, where hi-tech American soldiers are fighting "savage" Muslims in the barren landscapes of Afghanistan, it bears a strong American imprint. Haasan would have been better served staying true to this narrative and not bringing in an Indian angle. And if the domestic subplot was essential to make the film accessible to Vishwaroopam's audience, it needed to be at least a little more true to the facts. The ground zero of the war between the United States and the Taliban-al-Qaeda is geographically closest to India. And Abbottabad and Kabul are closer to Delhi than NYC. Yet, there is no evidence that individuals or groups from the vast Indian Muslim population or, for that matter, from Kashmir, have joined those groups. Nor have al-Qaeda or the Taliban opened a front in India. The only links the security agencies claim are the larger connections between Pakistan-based groups like Lashkar-e-Toiba or Jaish-e-Mohammad and al-Qaeda/ Taliban.

Was Haasan trying to emulate John Wayne or is he the new, Indian-origin Rambo who goes out to fight America's war? Has America's war now become India's war? Even if Vishwaroopam is a cinematic representation of India's new foreign policy priorities, there remains a need to understand the dangerous implications of Hollywood's historically stereotypical representation of the Soviets, Arabs and Muslims. Sulaiman Arti, who investigated this Hollywood phenomenon, says that "the intensification of the Arabs' stereotypical image over the last century from 'comic villains' to 'foreign devils' did not occur in a vacuum but, certainly, with the intertwinement of both political and cultural interests in the region". Lina Khatib's scholarly work, Filming the Modern Middle East: Politics in the Cinemas of Hollywood and the Arab World, and Jack Shaheen's Reel Bad Arabs, which scrutinised 900 films to shed light on this dangerous trend, make similar claims.

While Bollywood must not imitate the Hollywood war cinema model, the portrayals and metaphors in Vishwaroopam have immediate ramifications. Though Islam has been in India for a thousand years, there is still ignorance about the religion and its tenets. The war on terror and its simplified media narrative have created a mindset that wrongly attaches Islam to terrorism, which has even affected law enforcement.

During my investigation into terror cases across the country late last year, I found that the police had classified anything written in Urdu or Arabic — a list that included Quranic verses, books on Islam and the Prophet Mohammad's life and Ghalib's poetry — as "incriminating material" and used this to brand Muslim men as terrorists and charge them under the stringent Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act. In one such chargesheet, the police translated "Seerat pak Jalsa" — a religious gathering to talk about the life of the Prophet — as "goodness of Pakistan". The police claimed to have seized an "incriminating document" from an accused, saying it contained "bhadkane wali ayatein (provocative verses)" from the Quran, which would "incite Muslims against other religions".

When, in this context, Haasan shows namaz consistently before or after a terror attack and plays Quranic verses as a background score to an attack, it strengthens the perception that anything Muslim equals terrorism. When Vishwaroopam's hero, a Muslim RAW agent, shoots a Nigerian terrorist before he can trigger the dirty bomb in NYC, the latter is offering namaz. Namaz comes across as a compulsory ritual for terrorists before a bombing.

Then there is a little play with Kashmiri identity too. When the RAW agent infiltrates al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, he adopts the alias Wisam Ahmad Kashmiri, and then states that he was always, and will always remain, a Hindustani. This is a deliberate reinforcement that has become a hallmark of Bollywood's depiction of Kashmir. 

Bollywood has never questioned the Indian state's view on Kashmir. Haasan's use of "Kashmiri" as an alias is problematic, because al- Qaeda has never managed to gain entry in Kashmir, even as it remains active in its backyard. Where the image of Kashmiris is so maligned that they find it difficult to rent a house in any city, this new cinematic stereotype further complicates the issue.

There is no doubt that the film must not be banned. Haasan's freedom to tell a story the way he wants must be respected. There is, however, a pressing need for debate on the responsibilities of an artist. The best fiction bears close resemblance to non-fiction, and Haasan's film would have done better if he had researched his subject and come up with portrayals that weren't alarmist. Art is not bound by facts, but it should not be devoid of nuance.

muzamil.jaleel@expressindia.com