Analysis, Side Feature

Views on the News – 3 Dec 2016

Headlines:

  • Trump selects Anti-Islam Cabinet Members
  • Tens of Thousands Flee from Eastern Aleppo
  • Obama meets with incoming United Nations Chief
  • Trump’s Coming Witch Hunt against Political Islam
  • Slovakia Passes Law to BAN Islam from being Registered as a Religion
  • Pakistan says Trump Declared its PM Terrific in Call


Trump selects Anti-Islam Cabinet Members

As US President-elect Donald Trump continues to announce his choices for cabinet members, it is becoming increasingly clear that in security matters he is favouring those overtly opposed to Islam. According to an article on Thursday in the Washington Post:

President-elect Donald Trump said Thursday he has chosen retired Marine Gen. James N. Mattis, who has said that responding to “political Islam” is the major security issue facing the United States, to be secretary of defense.

“We are going to appoint Mad Dog Mattis as our secretary of defense,” Trump told a rally in Cincinnati, the first stop on a post-election “thank-you tour.”

(General Mattis is known in military circles by the nickname ‘Mad Dog’ Mattis because of his outrageous comments about killing.)

It is noteworthy that General Mattis’ last assignment was as head of Central Command, the US military structure undertaking operations within most Muslim countries. It is said that he was removed from his position by the Obama administration for his excessively argumentative stance against American rapprochement with Iran.

General Mattis is only saying aloud what all Western leaders whisper amongst themselves. The West has clearly decided that Islam is their enemy. Their only disagreements are over tactics.

Our present rulers are not fit for defending Islam and Muslims; these rulers need to be replaced by sincere Islamic leadership that will implement Islam and carry its message to the world. Will the Muslim Ummah rise to the challenge?

 

Tens of Thousands Flee from Eastern Aleppo

With Obama’s presidential term close to ending, it is evident that America has allowed Russia and Syria to undertake massive strikes on eastern Aleppo in order to rapidly achieve their goals. According to a report by the Associated Press published in the New York Times:

“The U.N. said Friday an estimated 31,500 residents have been displaced following Syrian government advances into the besieged eastern Aleppo enclave this weekend, as government media reported from those newly-captured areas, demonstrating its restoration and resettlement efforts there.

The advance of government and allied troops was one of the most dramatic shifts in the conflict now in its sixth year, as their troops marched into areas controlled by the opposition since 2012. Losing eastern Aleppo would cost the opposition its most significant urban presence.”

Muslim rulers are either remaining silent or paying mere lip service to calls for a ceasefire. According to the same article:

Speaking in Beirut at a joint press conference with his Lebanese counterpart Friday, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said a cessation of hostilities should be announced “as soon as possible, immediately.”

America will surely soon call a ceasefire, but it will be announced only after major gains have been made by Syria’s illegitimate regime and their barbaric Russian backers. The purpose of such ceasefires is to consolidate fresh gains and give rest to advancing forces.

Instead of protecting the civilian Muslim population of Syria, our rulers are conspiring with America to return Syria to its control.

 

Obama meets with incoming United Nations Chief

Obama met on Friday with the incoming United Nations chief. According to Reuters:

U.S. President Barack Obama on Friday said he was confident that United Nations secretary general-elect Antonio Guterres would be an effective leader of the international organization.

“He has an extraordinary reputation,” Obama told reporters ahead of his meeting at the White House with Guterres, a former prime minister of Portugal.”

In fact, the secretary-general has little independence, and is almost wholly subservient to the global powers. The United Nations is in fact a mechanism for a few leading powers to resolve conflicts amongst themselves at the expense of the rest of the world’s countries. The UN is the true descendent of Europe’s great power conference of the 19th Century.

Muslims must reject the United Nations Organisation and expose it for what it is: a vehicle for great power exploitation of the world. The re-established righteous Khilafah working upon the method of the Prophet ﷺ will, with Allah’s permission, demonstrate to the world the true meaning of service to humanity.

 

Trump’s Coming Witch Hunt against Political Islam

On the day after Donald Trump won the election, one of his campaign’s advisers and endorsers made a prediction. “You are going to see a purging,” retired Lt. General Jerry Boykin told Frank Gaffney on his “Secure Freedom Radio” podcast. Boykin predicted that Trump as president would purge “people inside the government that are known to have connections to the Muslim Brotherhood and its front groups and its entities here in America.” This kind of comment is expected from Boykin, one of the founders of the Army’s elite Delta Force. When he served in Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon during George W. Bush’s administration, he boasted that his God was mightier than the one worshipped by Muslim terrorists. Since retiring from the Army, Boykin has been a leader of a movement fighting against what it calls a civilization jihad, a network of Muslim ideologues trying to take over American society. Until now, this movement was largely ignored by elites in the Republican and Democratic parties. Both George W. Bush and Barack Obama have gone to great lengths to distinguish between Muslims who commit violence in the name of Islam and Muslims who seek to impose Islamic rule on secular societies through elections and free debate. In Iraq, Bush embraced Sunni and Shiite leaders from Islamist parties. Obama went further. His government eliminated terms like “jihad” and “radical Islam” from official FBI and Homeland Security documents. In his first term, Obama explored a deeper relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood abroad in places like Egypt and Turkey. There are strong indications that Trump will be taking a different approach. First consider what Trump has said. It’s not just his off-the-cuff remarks about Muslims. On Aug. 15, Trump gave a prepared policy speech in which he said the U.S. should not only wage an ideological war against our Islamist enemies but also should instate a screening test for immigrants to keep out those who “believe that Sharia law should supplant American law,” similar to Cold War era tests to keep out committed communists.  It’s still early days for a Trump administration but there are signs that the purges may be coming. To start, there is legislation in Congress today sponsored by Senator Ted Cruz, a Republican who was beaten by Trump in the primaries, to ask the secretary of state to review whether the Muslim Brotherhood should be designated as a foreign terrorist organization. Walid Phares, an adviser to the Trump campaign, told an Egyptian news channel after the election that Trump would support the Cruz bill that was opposed by the Obama White House. If indeed this is what a Trump administration does, it will be entering dangerous territory. While it’s true that CAIR’s founders were Islamists and linked to Hamas, the organization and its chapters today spend a lot of time documenting anti-Muslim hate crimes. A federal prosecution of CAIR and organizations like it would be perceived in many quarters as an abuse of power and a return to the witch hunts of Senator Joseph McCarthy. The thing to remember about the McCarthy era was how much harm the senator ended up doing to his own cause of anti-communism. It’s a lesson Trump would do well to learn as he decides how to prosecute his ideological war against radical Islam. [Source: Bloomberg]

There is no doubt that Trump’s efforts to fight political Islam will only serve to embolden the Muslim Ummah to redouble efforts and establish the rightly guided Khilafah Rashidah (Caliphate) upon the method of the Prophethood.

 

Slovakia Passes Law to BAN Islam from being Registered as a Religion

Slovakia has passed a law which will effectively ban Islam from gaining official status as a religion, in the latest signs of a growing anti-Muslim sentiment across Europe. The legislation hints at a dramatic changing attitude towards the religion in the past year across the continent, which has struggled to stem the escalating migrant crisis. The former communist state has fiercely resisted European Union (EU) efforts to cope with an influx of migrants travelling into Europe by turning its back on the bloc’s introduction of migrant quotas. But Prime Minister Robert Fico’s government has repeatedly said Islam has no place in Slovakia. Attitudes toward the religion appear to reflect fear of so-called Islamisation. Parliament adopted a bill sponsored by the Slovak National Party (SNS), which requires a religion to have at least 50,000 members, up from 20,000, to qualify for state subsidies and to run its own schools. The change will make it much harder to register Islam, which has just 2,000 supporters in Slovakia according to the latest census and no recognised mosques. The Islamic Foundation in Slovakia estimates the number at around 5,000. The SNS said the new law was meant to prevent speculative registrations of churches, such as the satirical Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, which has amassed followers worldwide. SNS Chairman Andrej Danko said, “We must do everything we can so that no mosque is built in the future.” [Source: Express UK]

While Europe increases measures to ban Islam in various ways, the Gulf countries see nothing wrong in promoting Christmas and New Year celebrations that are more extravagant than those funded in the West.

 

Pakistan says Trump Declared its PM Terrific in Call

Pakistan said Donald Trump praised its Prime Minister Muhammad Nawaz Sharif as a “terrific guy” and offered support for a “fantastic” country, in an effusive phone call that baffled many after sharp criticisms in the past. The Pakistani government released the candid account, complete with Trump’s trademark language, after Sharif phoned the billionaire real estate mogul to congratulate him on his election victory. Widely circulated on social media, the statement released late Wednesday caused surprise given the anti-Muslim rhetoric of the Trump campaign and the president-elect’s past description of the country as “not our friend”. It said Trump told the embattled Pakistani leader, currently embroiled in a corruption court case, that he has a “very good reputation”. “You are a terrific guy. You are doing amazing work which is visible in every way. I am looking forward to see you soon. As I am talking to you Prime Minister, I feel I am talking to a person I have known for long,” it quoted Trump as saying. “Your country is amazing with tremendous opportunities. Pakistanis are one of the most intelligent people,” Trump said according to the statement, while also offering to help solve the nation’s many challenges which include a violent insurgency. “I am ready and willing to play any role that you want me to play to address and find solutions to the outstanding problems. It will be an honor and I will personally do it.” Trump has long been disdainful of Pakistan on social media. On January 17, 2012, he tweeted: “Get it straight: Pakistan is not our friend. We’ve given them billions and billions of dollars, and what did we get? Betrayal and disrespect, and much worse. #TimeToGetTough”. Trump courted Indian-American voters in the run-up to election day. He spoke with Indian leader Narendra Modi last month and has met with Indian business leaders since winning the election. Pakistan heavily relies on US aid and is likely to get around $1 billion in economic and security assistance in the 2017 financial year. [Source: CBN News].

Trump’s praise for Sharif is likely to be temporary, and it is very likely that America will demand more terror operations under Trump. Pakistan should fully expect the expansion of these terror operations to encompass major cities of Pakistan like Lahore, Karachi and Peshawar.