A Conversation About Obama and McCain

The conversation started out innocently enough. I sent my sister and her husband a link to a 12-page PDF document of Walid Phares' analysis of the two candidates on how well they understand the issue of Islamic Jihadis.

I got back this message from my brother-in-law:

This is indeed an important election. That's why I am urging everyone I know to vote Obama. We just endured 8 years of GOP policies. McCain is an admitted Bush-clone, voting with him 95% of the time. This country cannot tolerate any more. And Sarah Palin is a joke; she has made the GOP the laughing stock of the world — ask her yourself: she can probably see the people in Russia laughing at her from her back porch. Were the GOP to win, with McCain's age, a Palin Presidency is a likelihood, and would be the biggest disaster to befall the planet since that asteroid struck 6 million years ago and wiped out the dinosaurs.

For me, this election is simple: I choose integrity over lies, and hope over fear. The GOP is the party of fear; their entire message boils down to "be afraid — of Iran, Islam, and especially of Obama". I choose unity over division. I choose intelligence over blind ambition. I choose diplomacy over bombs. I choose Obama.

In a second message, he wrote:

The endorsement that really clinched it for me was Colin Powell's. Who do you think is better qualified to evaluate McCain and Obama regarding national defense: you, Phares, me, or Colin Powell — one of the most respected men in Washington, a 5-star general, former secretary of state of a Republican president? If national defense is your issue, how can you discount an endorsement like that? Have you read Powell's endorsement? Most of it can be found here: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1008/14714.htm.

This was my response:

I watched in horror when Powell endorsed Obama.

Colin Powell knows very little about the basic teachings of Islam, as is true of most of the people associated with Bush's administration. I believe Powell is a good-hearted man, but he doesn't understand what the Jihadis are trying to do. He knows a lot about conventional warfare and political maneuvering. But what the Jihadis are doing in Iraq and Afghanistan is not very conventional, and what they're doing in America and Europe is about as far from conventional warfare as you can get! And that is a much bigger and more important long-term problem than Iraq and Afghanistan.

By the way, "national defense" is not my issue. That was Walid's issue. National survival is definitely important to me, but the much bigger problem of the progressive Islamization of Europe and America is my issue, and voting for McCain is an important step in the right direction. At least he is aware of the problem. That's more than you can say for either Bush or Obama.

In answer to this, my brother-in-law gave me this sharp response (the conversation is heating up):

You wrote: "Colin Powell knows very little about the basic teachings of Islam."

I don't know how you can know that; knowing that something is absent is almost impossible without the person in question saying as much — like McCain did when he said "The issue of economics is not something I’ve understood". He then demonstrated his ignorance by saying "I believe the fundamentals of this economy are strong". That's who you want to lead this country? If he's such an admitted bonehead about basic economics, what makes you think he knows his ass from Mecca? Last time I looked, being tortured by the Vietcong does not impart any such wisdom.

Frankly, I find your assertion that Powell knows little about Islam arrogant and naive. I find it very hard to believe that you know what Powell knows or does not know. What I know is that cabinet members are briefed by the CIA regarding current threats. If Powell does not understand Islamic Fundamentalism — again, an extremely suspect assumption — then I would conclude either that he was not properly briefed (highly unlikely), or that he received the data and came to a different conclusion. To imagine that he "knows little about Islam" seems ignorant, and I cannot imagine how you came to it. Too much Fox news?

It is my judgment that the GOP owns your political mind — you appear to have completely bought into their marketing campaign of fear-based politics. That makes me sad. Islamic fundamentalism is indeed a very real problem. Those guys truly are crazy. But I fear that you have merged in your mind the Muslim faith and people with Islamic Jihadis. Your letter accompanying the "Obsession" DVD certainly does — you repeatedly reference "Islam" when you are referring only to Islamic militants. Re-read it to see.

Here, he is referring to a DVD I sent them called Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against The West. I wrote a letter to go along with the DVD explaining what it's about. Here was my response to the message above:

Either Powell is ignorant of basic principles of Islam or he was deliberately deceiving the American people. Knowing what I know about him, I conclude he must simply be ignorant. I base this on what he said about the claim that Obama is a Muslim. I personally don't believe Obama is a Muslim. But Powell's point was that basically, it wouldn't matter if he was a Muslim.

But it would matter.

I invite you to read the Qur'an, as I have (cover-to-cover), and discover it for yourself. The big mistake most of Bush's cabinet has made, and that Powell has apparently made, is to know very little about basic Islamic teachings, and yet proclaim confidently that "Islam has been hijacked" and "Islam is a religion of peace." It is nothing of the kind.

"Islamic fundamentalists" is actually a good word for the Jihadis. They are actually following the basic teachings of Islam. The Muslims who are not violent and have no political goals are not following the fundamental teachings of Islam.

You may be surprised to learn two things about me: I do not watch television, I have not followed the campaign except to watch all four debates, and so I have not "bought into their marketing campaign" because I haven't seen it. I don't watch Fox News. I don't have cable. That's the first thing. The second thing is that I have read 35 books or so (I am not exaggerating, it probably more than that) and innumerable articles by experts on Islam, as well as reading the Qur'an and the Sira (an official Muslim biography of Mohammad). I also have a friend who is an ex-Muslim and I've had correspondence with Muslims and ex-Muslims for years.

I've been studying Islam for a little more than seven years, and very intensely for the last two. And when I "study something intensely" I really dig in.

I did not make a mistake when I referred to "Islam" rather than "Islamic militants." The movie "Obsession" makes that error because people who don't know much about Islam would not tolerate the information very well otherwise. But I don't make that mistake.

I am concerned that a huge section of the U.S. population knows almost nothing about Islam, and Jihadis here in the U.S. in the form of the Muslim Brotherhood (which you can read about here) and many other groups, are actively suppressing free speech and attacking people with litigation and "public outcries" to silence critics of their basic teachings. As well as plotting to blow stuff up.

The percentage of Muslims in Europe is higher than the United States, and Muslims are pressing their advantage vigorously there. Islam is a political religion. In Islam, whether Sunni or Shia, political action is a religious duty. It is the most important way, according to Mohammad, of showing your devotion to Allah. And it is not just any political action; it is political action that advances the goal of Islam, which is to make every government on earth follow the law of Allah (Shari'a law).

This is the DUTY of every Muslim. Some of them ignore that duty but still call themselves Muslims. And they are constantly exhorted by their Imams and their publications (I have six subscriptions to mainstream Muslim publications so I know what they say to their constituents) to get more involved politically.

Muslims don't call it "Islamization," but that's what the people who are trying to resist it in Europe call it. Muslims constantly push for special concessions for Muslims. They constantly seek to gain power. Some do it with violence, but that is a small percentage. Some do it by using their billions in oil money to build mosques and maddrassas in the United States and around the world to promote hatred against the West and urge their followers to, as the Muslim Brotherhood puts it, "wage jihad from within." Some simply try to have as many Muslim children as they can. Some organize their complaints in order to ban YouTube videos that reveal anything critical of Islam. Some organizations like CAIR (Counsel of American-Islamic Relations) criticize anyone who criticizes Islam, and try to get them fired, or sue them.

It is all-out war on a scale that is almost unbelievable. Muslim nations are in the U.N. as we speak trying to suppress criticism of Islam worldwide. These efforts on so many fronts are the reason not many of us know what's going on. They are impeding free speech in America. Or at least impede it on the subject of Islam.

This is not paranoid rabble-rousing. I invite you to look into it. What you find will blow your mind.

I know the GOP uses the Jihadi issue to motivate voters. Politicians do what they do. But that doesn't mean they're making it up. The threat is real, and they are having a very difficult time, like the rest of us who know about it, saying exactly what the problem is without immediately being slandered as racist (although Islam is not a race) or bigoted or "Islamophobic" and the politically-active Muslims combine with the blindly-multicultural media to drown them out and silence them. The only place they can get their message across is on conservative stations, and most of those listeners or watchers or readers already know about it.

It's people like you — good-hearted liberals — who not only are not exposed to the information, but actively resist the information because it is somehow associated with conservatives or it seems like hate-speech or it seems like fear-mongering or it seems like religious intolerance (rather than something legitimate in a free society like religious and political criticism). I don't like the right-wing religiosity, and I don't like the Republican position on abortion. The reason I want McCain is because I've seen him in several interviews where he clearly demonstrates he understands the Jihadi issue as much bigger than something that can be solved by simply "hunting down the terrorists and putting them behind bars." Walid Phares and the organization, ACT! for America, both did their own independent analysis of the statements Obama and McCain have made, and they both came to the same conclusion: McCain understands the issue far better than Obama.

I had already determined, after watching the debates, that either Obama doesn't understand the issue, or he is deliberately deceiving us. Either way, it is too important an issue to let that pass.

Back to Powell: Anyone who really understood the basic fundamentals of Islam would not blandly say it doesn't matter if a president is a Muslim or not. One of the first and primary principles of Islam is that loyalty to Islam comes before any other loyalty, including family and country.

The principles of Islam, by the way, are not difficult to decipher like the Bible. The Qur'an is not a collection of writings by different people at different times. It was written by one man in direct language. And it says in the Qur'an that these teachings cannot be modified or modernized or "improved" or changed in any way, and none of the teachings can be ignored.

As far as Muslims are concerned, the Qur'an is Allah's final word. The bad news is that it advocates violence, intolerance, and the overthrow of "man-made" governments (like democracies) until the "whole world submits to Islam," that is, until the whole world is ruled by Shari'a law.

If Powell knew that, I don't think he would say it doesn't matter if we have a Muslim president, especially if he is concerned with national security, which he surely is. That's not to say a Muslim should be banned from being president. But it is certainly not a consideration that should be taken lightly. Islam is an exacting, powerful faith that demands dedication and commitment, and that commitment is reinforced five times a day, every day (the five times a day they must pray).

I tried several Qur'ans before I found one that was really readable. For some reason, most of the translators have chosen to write their translations in King James-style English, which I find hard to read. Also, the traditional way of arranging the chapters (known as Surahs) is from the longest to the shortest chapter. The Qur'an also repeats itself a lot, saying the same stories again and again. The version I found easiest to read is called A Simple Koran. It has every single verse in the Koran in it, but it is arranged in the order the "revelations" were received rather than in the somewhat random order of the traditional arrangement.

But there is an even better version called An Abridged Koran, which is exactly the same as A Simple Koran, except it consolidates all the repetition. One of the stories is told in the original Qur'an 39 times! In An Abridged Koran, that story is only told once. It's not a very big book once you take out all the repetition. Only 203 pages.

When I first got A Simple Koran, I wanted to make sure it said the same thing that my other two "official" (mainstream Muslim, respected by important Imams, etc.) Qur'ans did, so I would look up a verse in one and check it with the same verse in A Simple Koran. It always said the same thing, only clearer and in normal, modern English. Both books are published by CSPI Publishing (http://cspipublishing.com). They have many good resources, but I would start with An Abridged Koran. Don't listen to what other people tell you about Islam — look at Islam's source document and decide for yourself.

By the way, the first three-fourths of the book are unbelievably boring, but keep at it. The last part gets really interesting. That's because the nature of Mohammad's revelations totally changed once he gained military power. When he first started out, when Islam was a small minority, Mohammad preached peace and tolerance. But once he gained enough followers and started raiding caravans and gained military and financial power (from the booty he stole from the caravans), he stopped trying to curry favor with the Jews and Christians — once he was no longer afraid of them — and his revelations became intolerant and then downright hateful. Don't take my word for it. Find out for yourself. When I came across some of those later passages, I was horrified! This is their holy book?!

But wait a minute, you might be thinking, the fact that his revelations changed means there are conflicting passage in the Qur'an, right? So can't believers pick and choose what they want? Unfortunately, the Qur'an itself tells the believer how to handle its own contradictions. It says if a revelation contradicts one that came before it, the new one overwrites the earlier one. This is the principle known as "abrogation." The bad news for us infidels is that all the intolerant and violent passages abrogate the earlier tolerant and peaceful ones.

Anyway, I can understand why you would think I was being arrogant and naive. How were you to know I've become a kind of informal "Islamic scholar?" I don't share it with too many people because it tends to be an upsetting topic of conversation.

Thank you for engaging with me, however, and not simply writing me off. I hope you try to read the Qur'an, even if you're trying to prove me wrong. It will open your eyes. With effort, you, too can become a racist, Islamophobic bigot and live in fear! Just kidding. I personally think learning about Islam makes you LESS racist, since Islam is clearly not a race. There are Muslims of every race, and there are more Muslims who are NOT Arab than Muslims who are Arabic. And I think I live in LESS fear because I understand what's happening in the world. When I see the strange phenomenon of people coming from all over the world to Iraq for the joy of being killed by Americans, it does not confuse me as it once did. They are following another basic Islamic principle: You must always defend Islam. And any land that was once under Shari'a law must be returned to Shari'a law. It is a Muslim's duty if he is able.

And they are abiding by still another Islamic teaching: That the BEST way to show your devotion to Allah and your belief in Islam is to fearlessly die while fighting for Islam. According to the Qur'an, that is the ONLY guaranteed way of making it to Paradise. Being afraid of dying in battle is a demonstration of a lack of faith, which is to say, a kind of proof that you are an unbeliever! And in Islam, becoming an unbeliever is not only despised, it is punishable by death, and this time, you go to eternal hell rather than Paradise.

Anyway, it's a big issue, obviously, and the solutions will not be simple or easy. But the first step is to know what we're dealing with.

Sincerely, Your Bro-in-Law


I haven't heard any response back from this last long missive, but if I do, I will add it here.