The Pentagon’s Bow to Islamic Extremism
“Caving to pressure
from Muslim groups, the Pentagon has relaxed uniform rules to allow Islamic
beards, turbans and hijabs. It’s a major win for political correctness and a
big loss for military unit cohesion,” said a recent report.
This new relaxation of
rules for Muslims comes at a time when the FBI is tracking more than 100
suspected jihadi-infiltrators of the U.S. military. Just last month,
Craig Benedict Baxam, a former Army soldier and convert to Islam, was sentenced
to seven years in prison due to his al-Qaeda/jihadi activities.
Also last month, Mozaffar Khazaee, an Iranian-American working for the Defense
Department, was arrested for sending secret documents to America’s enemy, Iran.
According to a Pentagon
spokesperson, the new religious accommodations—to allow Islamic beards,
turbans, and hijabs—which took effect very recently, would “reduce both the
instances and perception of discrimination among those whose religious
expressions are less familiar to the command.”
The report concludes
that, “Making special accommodations for Islam will only attract more Muslims
into the military at a time when two recent terror cases highlight the ongoing
danger of Muslims in uniform.”
But it’s worse than
that; for not only will it attract “more Muslims,” it will attract precisely
the wrong kinds of Muslims, AKA, “Islamists,” “radicals,” etc.
This is easily
demonstrated by connecting the dots and understanding that Muslims who adhere
to visible, non-problematic aspects of Islam—growing beards and donning
hijabs—often indicate their adherence to non-visible, problematic aspects of
Islam.
Consider it this way:
Why do some Muslim men wear the prescribed beard and why do some Muslim women
wear the prescribed hijab? Most Muslims would say they do so because Islam’s
prophet Muhammad commanded them to (whether via the Koran or Hadith).
Regarding the Muslim
beard, Muhammad wanted his followers to look different from “infidels,” namely
Christians and Jews, so he ordered his followers to “trim closely the moustache
and grow the beard.” Accordingly, all Sunni
schools of law maintain that it is forbidden—a “major sin”—for men to shave their beards
(unless, of course, it is part of a stratagem against the infidel, in which case it
is permissible).
The question begs
itself: If such Muslims meticulously follow the minor, “outer” things of Islam
simply because their prophet made some utterances concerning them in the
Hadith, logically speaking, does that not indicate that they also follow, or at
the very least accept as legitimate, the major, “inner” themes Muhammad
constantly emphasized in both the Koran and Hadith—such as enmity for and
deceit of the infidel, and, when capable, perpetual jihad?
Even in the Islamic
world this connection between visible indicators of Islamic piety and jihadi
tendencies are well known. Back in 2011, when Islamists were dominating
Egypt’s politics, secularist talk show host Amr Adib of Cairo Today mocked the then calls for a
“million man beard” march with his trademark sarcasm: “This is a great
endeavor! After all, a man with a beard can never be a thug, can never rape a
woman in the street, can never set a church on fire, can never fight and
quarrel, can never steal, and can never be dishonest!”
His sarcasm was not
missed on his Egyptian viewership which knew quite well that it is precisely
those Muslims who most closely follow the minutia of Muhammad—for example, by
growing a beard—that are most prone to violence, deceit, and anti-infidel
sentiments, all of which were also advocated by Islam’s prophet.
Speaking more
seriously, Adib had added that this issue is not about growing a beard, but
rather, “once you grow your beard, you give proof of your commitment and fealty
to everything in Islam.”
Similarly, after
Egypt’s June 30 Revolution ousted the Muslim Brotherhood, “overt signs of piety [beards and hijabs] have
become all it takes to attract suspicion from security forces at Cairo
checkpoints and vigilantes looking to attack Islamists.” Clubs and
restaurants banned entrance to those wearing precisely
these two “overt signs of piety.”
While Egyptians
instinctively understand how fealty to the Muslim beard evinces fealty, or at
least acceptance, to all those other problematic things Muhammad
commanded, even in fuzzy Western op-eds, the connection sometimes peeks out.
Consider the following excerpt from a New York Times piece titled “Behold
the Mighty Beard, a Badge of Piety and Religious Belonging”:
[A]ll over the Muslim
world, the full beard has come to connote piety and spiritual fervor…. Of
course, the beard is only a sign of righteousness. It is no guarantor, as Mr.
Zulfiqar [a Muslim interviewee] reminds us: “I recall one gentleman who came
back from a trip to Pakistan and remarked to me, ‘I learned one thing:
the longer the beard, the bigger the crook.’ His anticipation was people with
big beards would be really honest, but he kept meeting people lying to him.”
The italicized portion
speaks for itself. Whereas the Muslim beard ostensibly represents religious
piety, some people, mostly Westerners, are shocked to find that those who wear
it are often “crooks” and “liars.”
In Islam, however,
outer signs of religiosity on the one hand, and corruption and deceit on the
other, are quite compatible. After all, the same source—Islam’s prophet
Muhammad, as recorded in the Hadith—that tells Muslims to grow a beard also advocates deception, the plundering of
infidels, the keeping of sex slaves, adult “breast feeding,” and all sorts of other
practices antithetical to Western notions of piety if not decency.
Incidentally, it’s the
same with the hijab, or cloak that some Muslim women wear, also on Muhammad’s
command. One reformed Islamic jihadi from Egypt accurately
observes that “the proliferation of the hijab is strongly correlated
with increased terrorism…. Terrorism became much more frequent in such
societies as Indonesia, Egypt, Algeria, and the U.K. after the
hijab became prevalent among Muslim women living in those communities.”
And so, at a time when
the U.S. should at the very least be wary of those who openly wear their
Islamic radicalism around their face and head—beards for males, hijabs for
females—the U.S. Pentagon (of all places) is embracing them in “celebration of
multiculturalism.” Wear loyalty to the U.S. is most needed, the Pentagon
embraces those who show that their loyalty is elsewhere (among other things,
the beard and hijab are meant to separate “pure believers” from “impure
infidels”).
Of course, none of this
is surprising considering that the Pentagon also considers Evangelical
Christians and Catholics as “extremists” on a par with al-Qaeda.
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About
RAYMOND IBRAHIM is a widely published author, public speaker, and Middle East and Islam expert. His books include Crucified Again: Exposing Islam’s New War on Christians (2013) and The Al Qaeda Reader (2007). His writings, translations, and observations have appeared in a variety of publications, including Fox News, Financial Times, Jerusalem Post, Los Angeles Times, New York Times Syndicate, United Press International, USA Today, Washington Post, Washington Times, and Weekly Standard; scholarly journals, including the Almanac of Islamism, Chronicle of Higher Education, Jane’s Islamic Affairs Analyst, Middle East Quarterly, and Middle East Review of International Affairs; and popular websites, such as American Thinker, the Blaze, Bloomberg, Christian Post, FrontPage Magazine, Gatestone Institute, the Inquisitr, Jihad Watch, NewsMax, National Review Online, PJ Media, VDH’s Private Papers, and World Magazine. He has contributed chapters to several anthologies and been translated into various languages.
Ibrahim
guest lectures at universities, including the National Defense Intelligence
College, briefs governmental agencies, such as U.S. Strategic Command and the
Defense Intelligence Agency, provides expert testimony for Islam-related
lawsuits, and has testified before Congress regarding the conceptual failures that
dominate American discourse concerning Islam and the worsening plight of
Egypt’s Christian Copts. Among other media, he has appeared on MSNBC, Fox News,
C-SPAN, PBS, Reuters, Al-Jazeera, Blaze TV, CBN, NPR, and dozens of radio
interviews.
Ibrahim’s
dual-background—born and raised in the U.S. by Coptic Egyptian parents born and
raised in the Middle East—has provided him with unique advantages, from equal
fluency in English and Arabic, to an equal understanding of the Western and
Middle Eastern mindsets, positioning him to explain the latter to the former.
His interest in Islamic civilization was first piqued when he began visiting
the Middle East as a child in the 1970s. Interacting and conversing with the
locals throughout the decades has provided him with an intimate appreciation
for that part of the world, complementing his academic training.
Raymond
received his B.A. and M.A. (both in History, focusing on the ancient and
medieval Near East, with dual-minors in Philosophy and Literature) from
California State University. There he studied closely with noted
military-historian Victor Davis Hanson. He
also took graduate courses at Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary
Arab Studies—including classes on the history, politics, and economics of the
Arab world—and studied Medieval Islam and Semitic languages at Catholic
University of America. His M.A. thesis examined
an early military encounter between Islam and Byzantium based on arcane Arabic
and Greek texts.
Ibrahim’s
resume includes serving as Associate Director of the Middle East Forum and
working as a Reference Assistant at the Near East Section of the Library of
Congress, where he was often contacted by, and provided information to, defense
and intelligence personnel involved in the fields of terrorism and area
studies, as well as the Congressional Research Service.
He
resigned from both positions in order to focus exclusively on researching and
writing and is currently a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom
Center, an associate fellow at the Middle East Forum, a Hoover Institution
Media Fellow (2013), and a CBN News contributor.
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A Comment by Brianroy
Why is the Pentagon changing the rules and pushing a conversion toward jihadi Islamic beards with a goal of jihadi Islamic conversions to religiously justify wearing them? It's an Obama thing. Like the illegal occupant in the United States Presidency just quipped to reporters regarding changing any law and expected legal compliance to an unconstitutional Law signed by an unconstitutional Presidential occupant (himself) said,
"I CAN DO WHATEVER I WANT."
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