Our Vulnerable Religious Freedoms

Our greatest National strengths can also be our biggest points of vulnerability. I have written earlier that our freedom of expression, freedom of equal protection as citizens, and the “wall of separation” between church and state in the United States, as guaranteed by the Constitution and the 1st, 2nd and 14th amendments, is vulnerable to being undermined for one specific reason. Our nation has never attempted to define what constitutes a religion.

Today Islamists have succeeded in hijacking Islam from Islamic moderates. The voices of the moderate Muslims calling out and condemning these Islamist terrorists is virtually absent or so highly nuanced as to appear deliberately ambiguous. We must therefore conclude that moderate Muslims have lost or given up control of the religion of Islam. There have been many excuses offered as to why this silence exists, but the end result is a fact. Islam is now controlled by those who wish to establish a world-wide government (Caliphate) under Sharia law.

Islam, once a religion of peace, has become perverted by those Islamists who have turned Islam into a terrorist political movement that is inimical to all secular nations. Unless moderate Muslims speak out Now, and speak out loudly against these Islamist terrorists, we must ask this next question. Should Islam even be considered a religion any longer or should it be considered a dangerous and hostile political movement?

Today, Henry Porter, (The Observer) wrote “Tolerating intolerance is still this country's besetting sin,” as he reflects on the effect of the Islamists call for a few beheadings in Britain.

ISLAMIC terror cells in Britain have been instructed to carry out a series of kidnappings and beheadings of the kind allegedly planned by the nine terrorist suspects arrested in Birmingham last week.

Porter wrote (bold added by me):

I suspect the lack of outrage has a lot to do with the degree of separate development that has taken place in Britain while so many of us were living the multiculturalist dream. Whatever Muslims say, the standards that most British institutions live by simply do not apply to the missionaries of Saudi fundamentalism who, . . .are attempting to poison relations between Muslims, Christians and Jews in Britain and to establish what amounts to a separate community under Sharia law.

. . . Again, I stress the majority of Muslims wish to live peacefully and integrate into British society. This was emphasised by the Policy Exchange report last week which was written by three researchers, two of whom have Muslims backgrounds. 'The majority of Muslims,' says the report, 'feel they have as much, if not more, in common with non-Muslims in Britain as with Muslims abroad.' Nearly two- thirds of Muslims would prefer to send their children to a mixed state school, compared with the 35 per cent who would prefer to use Islamic schools. And well over a third agree that one of the benefits of modern society is the freedom to criticise other people's religions or political views, a much higher proportion than I would ever have guessed.

It is a shrewd and balanced study that needs careful reading. 'By treating Muslims as a homogenous group,' it says, 'the government fails to see the diversity of opinions among Muslims.' So while 84 per cent of Muslims say they have been treated fairly in our society, 75 per cent of young Muslims want women to wear the veil, one in eight expressed some admiration for al-Qaeda and 40 per cent want to live under Sharia law.

Minette Marrin wrote (highlights added by me) “We're far too nice to Muslim extremists”

. . . The usual immigrant experience of gradual integration has failed for more than a third of Muslims. All the exhaustive and intrusive efforts of the race relations industry have been counter-productive.

The Policy Exchange report argues that this alienation is largely due to more than 20 years of official multiculturalism. This benighted orthodoxy has emphasised differences and divisions and promoted a sense of grievance that is sometimes almost paranoid. This amounts to full-blown victimhood, whipped up not just by Muslim spokesmen but also by non-Muslim journalists and commentators and human rights activists in the victim industry, who complain, in defiance of the evidence, of growing Islamophobic attacks and persistent police harassment; they make comparisons with Nazi Germany. The mayor of London, no less, called at a recent conference for an end to the “media’s orgy of Islamophobia”.

Why have we been so reluctant to define religion, or more specifically, to define the difference between a religion and a hostile political movement? The following passage is a good reason, but good reasons (or excuses) now pale to the daunting task ahead. We must make every effort to define religion or watch this great national ship go down to the coming Caliphate. Doubters, what part of “Islam is the fastest growing religion in the United States,” don’t you understand?

Is there any way that religion, and the religiousness of people, can be separated from government and the role of people in government? Can religion and government co-exist without crossing over each others' boundaries? What are those boundaries? What exactly is the separation of church and state?

. . .In the end, the 1st Amendment not only prevents the establishment of a national religion, but it also prohibits government aid to any religion, even on an non-preferential basis, as well as protecting the right of the individual to choose to worship, or not, as he or she sees fit.

Jules Crittenden has written “Battlefied Shifts Westward”?
. . .many countries in Europe are on the verge of internal “wars” with Islamic radicals (though many will probably fight them with law enforcement and special anti-terror units rather than predominantly military force). And in fact, I have been long-arguing (most recently, here) that the multiculturalist social philosophy in much of Europe (Britain, Denmark, Germany many other EU countries)—with the hypernationalism (and anti-assimilationist snobbery) of countries like France acting as philosophical outliers—has been laying the groundwork for war from within by Islamists on their host countries. . . .

Here’s why the 1st Amendment just isn’t sufficient!

Let me quote from an earlier article, An “Honest” Terrorist Writes: “No Muslim Can Pledge Loyalty to the Constitution”

Read the words of Supreme Court Justice Harry A. Blackmun in the Lee v. Weisman ruling, 1992.

When the government puts its imprimatur on a particular religion it conveys a message of exclusion to all those who do not adhere to the favored beliefs. A government cannot be premised on the belief that all persons are created equal when it asserts that God prefers some.

I submit that the corollary to Blackmun’s statement might go like this:

(1) When a government fails to define what constitutes a religion it conveys a message to all that any ideology can pass for religion, and that freedom of religious expression supercedes all other freedoms and overrules all duties of government – specifically the primary duty of government to protect its citizens from harm.

(2) When a government fails to define what constitutes a religion, any ideology with intent to destroy the very constitutional protections it enjoys can hide in plain view while actively undermining the very system of government that gives it protection.

In December I suggested a proposed amendment to the Constitution in my article Keith Ellison, Islam, American Sovereignty : Should we Amend the Constitution?

I submit for example: “No person shall hold any office or public Trust under the United States who adheres to or gives allegiance to any religion, ideology, or organization which by word, nature, association, or action has shown intent to undermine the sovereignty of these United States!”

Let me assure the politically sensitive accommodators, the complacent dreamers, the religiously plural, the historically illiterate, the morally relative, the inane multiculturalists, and the useful idiots on the left, that once enough “peace-loving” Islamists masquerading as moderate Muslims gain a foot-hold in our nation’s state legislatures and congress, changes WILL come to our laws – and it won’t be pretty. It will be Sharia!

Trackposted to Wake Up America, Right Truth, Big Dog's Weblog, stikNstein... has no mercy, basil's blog, Blue Star Chronicles, The Pink Flamingo, Cao's Blog, Dumb Ox Daily News, Adam's Blog, Pursuing Holiness, and Gone Hollywood, Right Pundits, Outside the Beltway, The Virtuous Republic, Maggie's Notebook, basil's blog, and OTB Sports, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.