The Congregation of Jihad

Last year the Riverdale Jewish Center made headlines by accommodating a female Muslim exchange student's need for a prayer space during school hours. As Rabbi Rosenblatt described it, “We’re just helping to welcome somebody’s child from overseas,” an announcement that was greeted by loud applause in his congregation.

King Solomon said in Kohelet, "Cast your bread upon the waters and it will return to you after many days."

It took only a few months for the "bread" to return with a Muslim plot to bomb the Riverdale Jewish Center. Since no good deed done for Muslims goes unpunished, while the Rabbi and congregants of the Riverdale Jewish Center were congratulating themselves on their tolerance and open-mindedness, their eagerness to throw open the doors of their house of prayer to an enemy, their friendly neighborhood Muslims were plotting to kill and destroy.

The murderous plot came out of a congregation, but a Muslim congregation radically different in its outlook and worldview. The Masjid Al-Ikhlas, whose name refers to purging non-Islamic beliefs from oneself. The Masjid Al-Ikhlas is run by Imam Salahuddin Muhammed, who was converted and recruited to Islam while serving a 12 year sentence for armed robbery.

The man who recruited him, Imam Umar was closely tied to Saudi backed Islamist groups and supported the attacks and the attackers of 9/11. Imam Umar, originally Wallace Gene Marks, himself had been sent to prison as part of the "Harlem 5" for conspiring to murder police officers using guns and bombs, an attack plan whose crudeness and viciousness had a great deal in common with the planned attack on the Riverdale Jewish Center.

A former member of the Nation of Islam, Marks or Umar, found his mission in recruiting convicts into Islam by working as a prison chaplain, eventually rising to Chief Muslim Chaplain in theNew York State Department of Correctional Services, a position which gave him every opportunity to convert and recruit. Imam Salahuddin Muhammed was one of his recruits. Imam Salahuddin Muhammed in turn became a prison chaplain himself, and at his mosque a number of Muslim ex-cons, some of who had found Islam behind bars, plotted their own Jihad.

Naturally the Rabbi of the Riverdale Jewish Center appeared at an event with Muslim leaders to affirm that the plans of the attackers had absolutely nothing to do with Islam. There was the usual round of interfaith handshaking and agreement that we're all the same underneath the skin. Which of course served to demonstrate how little liberal clergy learn from their attackers.

Terrorism is not a thing apart from Islam, it is based on the teachings of Mohammed and the words of the Koran. To claim that Islamic terrorism stands apart from Islam as a deviant branch, is as absurd as claiming that the Holocaust was perpetrated by people who may have been members of the Nazi party and may have been following the will of Adolf Hitler-- but Nazism and Hitler had nothing to do with the Holocaust.

Islam is based on hate, its followers are driven by the need to passively or actively destroy non-Muslim civilizations, nations and individuals. The Rabbi and congregants of the Riverdale Jewish Center believed that there was a fundamental difference between the Muslim exchange student they took in to pray in their halls, and the Muslim ex-cons who plotted to blow up the synagogue. But they were both Muslims, and hate for non-Muslims is at the heart of their belief system.

While the Center had accommodated Dinar Pupista, the Muslim exchange student, and her need for an afternoon prayer time, and the New York Times wrote it all up as a glowing testament to the willingness of Americans to accommodate Muslims... they might have done better to consider just what exactly those prayers involved.

Within a synagogue, Dinar began by facing toward Mecca. Mecca was Mohammed's second choice of a holy land, after turning away from Jerusalem because his new faith was rejected by the Jewish population. Mohammed managed to compensate for that by wiping out the Jewish population of Mecca. His followers would go on to seize the Temple Mount in Jerusalem and frequently bar Jews from even worshiping at the Western Wall. There oriented toward the Masjid Al Haram, the Mosque of Mecca, whose Imam called Jews "Pigs and Monkeys", she would begin her prayers.

When Dinar prayed Asr, the Islamic afternoon prayer, she would recite a sentence which reads as, "Guide us to the Straight Way. The Way of those on whom You have bestowed Your Grace, not (the way) of those who earned Your Anger (such as the Jews), nor of those who went astray (such as the Christians)"

While the Riverdale Jewish Center's congregants and staff were patting themselves on the back for their tolerance, the hapless Muslim exchange student would be participating in a daily ritual of hate within their synagogue walls. And cursing them in the process.

The difference between Dinar and the Bronx Jihadis was that they tried to take action based on the hate for Jews embedded in Islam. Dinar by contrast will likely never go beyond using her mandatory Zakat donations to help fund terrorist groups such as Hamas. That is what many fallaciously assume to be difference between the moderate and extremist Muslim. In fact it is the difference between the passive and the active Muslim.

Despite the differences between Sunni and Shia, between the preaching styles and public face that some Muslim mosques show, there is only one true congregation within Islam, the Congregation of Jihad.

Tolerance toward Islam means tolerance toward hate. That hate may or may not morph into actual violence, but there is no reason to be surprised when it does. A Muslim trying to bomb a synagogue is no more aberrant, than a Klansman trying to bomb a black church. Both are acting on their hateful beliefs. The difference is that no black church would be foolish enough to invite a Klansman in, (unless he happened to be a prominent Democratic Senator), but liberal clergy, both Jewish and non-Jewish, roll out the welcome mat for Muslims all the time... little understanding the kind of hate they are welcoming inside.

Tolerance toward an evil ideology, whether it is Islam or Communism, Nazism, Satanism or Scientology, legitimizes it and gives it a foothold. Those who show tolerance toward Islam become accomplices in their own destruction. Because there is only one Islam, the Congregation of Jihad, the sword raised over the neck of the infidel, the Jihadis ranging across the Dar Al Harb to throw it down and replace it with the Dar Al Islam.

(Addendum: Soccer Dad reminds me that Rabbi Jonathan Rosenblatt was part of a delegation of liberal Rabbis who traveled to Washington in 1995 to lobby for aid to the PLO. Naturally that aid money went to fund terrorism against Israelis, and the private bank accounts of Arafat and the rest of his gang.)