Mosque Busting: English vs. American Styles

Gavin Boby is a British barrister. He has a new website and a brilliant idea: he is offering to work pro bono for anyone wishing to fight the erection of a mosque anywhere in England.

If you live in England and are concerned about the possibility of having to cope with yet another Islamic political center in your neighborhood, express your concerns by contacting your local planning council to ascertain what’s in the pipeline. If it should turn out to be the case that they’re considering yet another request to build yet another mosque, then contact Mr. Boby.

Note: It is important that he receive your request early enough in the process to be able to act on it. All he needs from you is the planning council’s information.

Below is Mr. Boby’s video discussing the particulars of his idea. The sound quality isn’t great but the meaning of his mission statement is clear. This is a man with a plan; the man is courageous and the plan is simple and stunningly courageous. Listen particularly at ~7.00 minutes in, where he describes “the original mosque” and the purpose of any mosque anywhere in the world. Here, he defines the word mosque for us.


What can I add to this beyond our applause? Here’s a man willing to share his skills and resources to save his country from further degradation. We all know that the cost is far broader and deeper than simply offering his services for a civil process. Gavin Boby is refusing to “go gently” into the dark night Islam has planned for Western culture.

There is now a donation button on the Law and Freedom Foundation website. Scroll down and look on the right. Consider helping in this effort. At the very least, Mr. Boby is going to need a Kevlar vest or two.

The fact that Mr. Boby has stepped forward with his offer makes one wonder: where was/is the rest of the legal profession in Britain? Agreed, this kind of action takes courage, but if enough of his colleagues had banded together years ago, this problem wouldn’t be mushrooming all over England. Let us hope that he will not be left standing alone, that others in his profession will join him in wresting their country back from the invaders.

Hat tip: Vlad Tepes

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Vlad Tepes called his post on the Law and Freedom Foundation “Mosque Busters”. Indeed.

Back here in the US, we have another kind of mosque ‘busting’ — busting, that is, in the sense of the more dangerous forms being systematically exposed.

Just as Mr. Boby’s singular action is a remedy for the pestilence that radical mosques inflict on the culture of England, the following study done here in America uncovers some of the rot, letting in a little disinfecting sunlight on our affliction. As Diana West puts it:

…I’ve lived through 9/11 and the 17,298 Islamic terror attacks since (as tabulated by the website The Religion of Peace). I’ve seen pictures of Muslims rampaging around the world over a cartoon. I also understand Islam’s animating role in the terror and subversion designed to extend Islamic law (Shariah) to a point where an Islamic government, or caliphate, rules the world.

But there is something transfixing about the new study, “Shari’a and Violence in American Mosques.” The authors have amassed a solid bank of peer-reviewed data attesting to the presence and promotion of literature advocating violence in the majority of 100 randomly selected American mosques. And yes: that’s majority of “American” mosques. Not Saudi mosques. Not Pakistani. Not Iranian. Not Turkish. Not even British mosques.

American mosques.

There goes that post-9/11 myth — the one that tells us that American Islam is a happily assimilating creed, wholly different from the aggressive Islam transforming Europe. The new data collected by Israeli scholar Mordechai Kedar and attorney David Yerushalmi of the Center for Security Policy (and one of my 18 co-authors on the book “Shariah: The Threat to America”) indicate that most American mosques are sanctioning, if not also promoting, the study of material of similar peril.

For me, the six tables of data boil down to two simple and stunning facts. More than 80 percent of the mosques in the study feature Islamic literature that advocates violence…

“Myth” is one way of putting it. “Lie” is another, though it’s less friendly and it distresses the Kumbayah crowd who don’t want to know. That’s the crowd led by Mr. Obama, and they all have one sad feature in common: a recurring silence-the-messenger response to uncomfortable truths. People grow to deserve whatever it is they need to believe, and if the Political Class wants to believe in Islam as THE religion of peace, then that’s what they devise and that’s what they revise, endlessly cropping the picture of reality until they have an image that suits their revisionist delusions.

No doubt they will ignore this study as fast and furiously as possible. They’ll bury it. They’ll sneer and jeer and question the motives and integrity of those who participated in rolling back the rock, in pulling up the blinds to let a little sunshine rest on this clear and present danger in our midst.

The results of the two-year investigation by Mordechai Kedar and David Yerushalmi in Shari’a and Violence in American Mosques have just been published in the summer issue of the Middle East Quarterly, which gave their study a most apt subtitle “Strictly observant imams are more likely to promote jihad”. The pdf can be found here.

The study is the only one of its kind… so far. The measurements they chose are empirical and specific. They could be easily duplicated by sociology departments in colleges all across this country. But don’t hold your breath. Those same colleges have been bought with Saudi money. They won’t do no stinkin’ studies on mosques. The funds would dry up quicker than you can say “Motoons”.

I’ve excerpted a few salient points below, but they don’t begin to do justice to the breadth of the study. All the emphases are mine, as well as the enumerations (which make for quicker comprehension in my experience).

Under Root Causes and Enabling Mechanisms, they say:

… there are few empirical studies that attempt to measure the relationship between specific variables and support for terrorism. To date, almost all of the professional and academic work in this field has been anecdotal surveys or case studies tracing backward through the personal profiles of terrorists and the socioeconomic and political environments from which they came.

In the section Identifying Shari’a-Adherent Behaviors, they explain “Shari’a” and then explain what their survey encompassed, and again, the emphases are mine:

…the authors of this article undertook a survey specifically designed to:

1.		[D]etermine empirically whether a correlation exists between observable measures of religious devotion linked to Shari’a adherence in American mosques and the presence of violence-positive materials at those mosques.
2.		he survey also sought to ascertain whether a correlation exists between the presence of violence-positive materials at a mosque and the promotion of jihadism by the mosque’s leadership through recommending the study of these materials or other manifest behaviors.

Surveyors were asked to observe and record selected behaviors deemed to be Shari’a-adherent. These behaviors were selected precisely because they constitute observable and measurable practices of an orthodox form of Islam as opposed to internalized, non-observable articles of faith. Such visible modes of conduct are considered by traditionalists to have been either exhibited or commanded by Muhammad as recorded in the Sunna and later discussed and preserved in canonical Shari’a literature.

Among the behaviors observed at the mosques and scored as Shari’a-adherent were:

(a)		women wearing the hijab (head covering) or niqab (full-length shift covering the entire female form except for the eyes);
(b)		gender segregation during mosque prayers;
(c)		enforcement of straight prayer lines.

Behaviors that were not scored as Shari’a-adherent included:

(a)		women wearing just a modern hijab, a scarf-like covering that does not cover all of the hair, or no covering;
(b)		men and women praying together in the same room;
(c)		no enforcement by the imam, lay leader, or worshipers of straight prayer lines.

Crucial to this survey was a look at the literature in American mosques. In the section Sanctioned Violence, they explain their methodology:

The mosques surveyed contained a variety of texts, ranging from contemporary printed pamphlets and handouts to classic texts of the Islamic canon.

From the perspective of promoting violent jihad, the literature types were ranked in the survey from severe to moderate to nonexistent.

The texts selected were all written to serve as normative and instructive tracts and are not scriptural. This is important because a believer is free to understand scripture literally, figuratively, or merely poetically when it does not have a normative or legal gloss provided by Islamic jurisprudence.

Works by several respected jurists and scholars from the four major Sunni schools of jurisprudence, dating from the eighth to fourteenth centuries, are all in agreement that violent jihad against non-Muslims is a religious obligation.

Such behavior is normative, legally-sanctioned violence not confined to modern writers with a political axe to grind. Nor does its presence in classical Muslim works make it a relic of some medieval past. While Umdat as-Salik (Reliance of the Traveler) may have been compiled in the fourteenth century, al-Azhar University, perhaps the preeminent center of Sunni learning in the world, stated in its 1991 certification of the English translation that the book “conforms to the practice and faith of the orthodox Sunni community.”

…this certified, authoritative text spends eleven pages expounding on the applicability of jihad as violence directed against non-Muslims…

There are charts and tables breaking down all the variables and methodologies. In the end, the authors conclude, tentatively:

Unfortunately, the results of the current survey strongly suggest that Islam-as it is generally practiced in mosques across the United States-continues to manifest a resistance to the kind of tolerant religious and legal framework that would allow its followers to make a sincere affirmation of liberal citizenship. This survey provides empirical support for the view that mosques across America, as institutional and social settings for mosque-going Muslims, are at least resistant to social cooperation with non-Muslims. Indeed, the overwhelming majority of mosques surveyed promoted literature supportive of violent jihad and a significant number invited speakers known to have promoted violent jihad and other behaviors that are inconsistent with a reasonable construct of liberal citizenship.

On a bright note, they acknowledge that we have no way of knowing the numbers of Muslims in America who are secular, those who seldom or ever visit a mosque. In addition, they point to the nineteen percent of mosques they found which did not promote violence, and offered them as a place to start:

The survey also demonstrates that there are mosques and mosque-going Muslims who are interested in a non-Shari’a-centric Islam where tolerance of the other, at least as evidenced by the absence of jihad-promoting literature, is the norm. Mosques where violence-positive literature was not present exhibited significantly fewer indicators of orthodox, Shari’a-adherent behaviors and were also significantly less likely to promote violent jihad or invite speakers supportive of violent jihad. These non-Shari’a-centric mosques may provide a foundation from which a reformed Islam and its followers can more completely integrate into liberal, Western citizenship.

This study is rich with empirical detail. It is a beginning. The authors managed to get inside Islam’s OODA loop, at least as it is concerns American mosques and the implications for their teachings.

Six years of Islam-monitoring doesn’t leave one hopeful that most Americans will leave off watching the ball game on television (including our President) long enough to pay attention to what is going on around them. However, there are a gallant few who are on guard, who are willing to risk in order that the truth will be told.

In England, Gavin Boby has taken up the reins. We’ll have to see who is willing to help him.

In the US, this study gives us relevant information we didn’t have before. Let us hope Congress is forced to read it. Never underestimate their fear of their constituents. Insist that they read it. Go on line to buy a copy of the Summer 2011 issue of The Middle East Quarterly and have the magazine’s editors mail it to your Congressman. Perhaps they could mark the relevant pages for whatever staff person has to read it?