Last weekend, Lance Silver and Andrew Palashewsky attended a conference on Islamic concepts of justice at the University of Pennsylvania. They then prepared the following report on what they had witnessed, and requested that it be publicized as widely as possible.
Muslim Obligations in Promoting Justice in America
By Lance Silver and Andrew Palashewsky
Saturday evening a week ago, Feb. 22nd, the University of Pennsylvania Law School hosted the “Eighth Annual Muslim Law Students Conference,” on the topic of “Muslim Obligations in Promoting Justice in America.” Our interest in Islamic law as American citizens is to learn first-hand exactly what Muslim American law students are being taught.
The fairly innocuous and well-meaning title of the program masked the true intent, which we believe is to lull the audience and our society into a false sense of complacency regarding the real aims and effects of Islamic incursion in our society — which Maj. Stephen Coughlin [pdf] covers in his must-read thesis, “To Our Great Detriment.”
We were greeted with “As-Salamu ’Alaykum” (peace be upon you) upon entering the conference and by each speaker, prior to presentation. What a comforting greeting. I responded with “Aslim Taslam.”
As is typically the case, conference attendees were highly educated and polite. This was a high-end mix of people who are difficult to fault on any personal level.
The attendees, primarily American and foreign Muslim law students, as well as a few foreign lawyers, presented a mixed canvas racially, yet each person was culturally Islamic and a member of the ummah, the global body of believers. The speakers and each future American lawyer we spoke with advised us that Islam has been misinterpreted for 1,400 years. Isn’t that amazing? As if we had no ability to study the history of Islam from both Muslim and non-Muslim sources on our own.
We are authoring this report in response to what we believe is attempted hoodwinking, enabled by the practice of Taqiyya and Kitman, forms of lying encouraged in Islam, if such lying is deemed to be useful for the spread of Islam. No other religion/culture encourages its adoption by lying. But, because Islam is also a political theory that embodies military notions, the ability to further aims by deception is enshrined in the Qur’an and in Shari’ah, as it would be on the battlefield. The intended recipients of this mendacity were not only us, but the attendees and the law school itself.
The first speaker, Professor Faisal Kutty, presented us with a bogus definition of the terms “jihad” and “Islamophobia.” He spoke of jihad, as if it were apple pie with vanilla ice cream, splitting the term jihad into its normative components — the “Lesser Jihad,” meaning defensive or offensive military struggle, and the “Greater Jihad,” meaning, personal struggle for good against evil. He downplayed to relative insignificance the importance of the military meaning of Jihad, ignoring the vast majority of references in the Qur’an on Jihad, compelling Muslims to wage a military struggle as the Sixth Pillar of Islam.
Jihad is offensive. Duplicity and deception as tactics to throw off the opponent are inherent in Islam, and that’s why Islam states that jihad is purely defensive. In fact, jihad was (and is still) used as the normative call to action in the military conquest of vast tracts of formerly Christian, Jewish, Hindu lands within 100 years of its founding by Muhammad. That empire still stands in terms of the Islamic culture it forced on the conquered Nations and cultures.
The reality of jihad is that Islam considers itself to be supremacist and must triumph, be victorious, over all other religions and cultures. Islam compels Muslims to spread Islam to all corners of the earth, first by invitation, Aslim Taslam, which means, “Submit and Be At Peace.”