NONIE DARWISH: OBAMA’S MUSLIM ADVISOR AND SPEECH WRITER IS AN ISLAMIC IDEALOGUE…….

When President Obama spoke to the Muslim world in Cairo last June, a large portion of his guests were leaders and members of the Muslim Brotherhood. The speech was designed to please them more than supporting the reformist movement in Egypt and across the Muslim world.

The Obama administration has hired the first White House Muslim advisor, Dalia Mogahed, who helped with writing Obama’s speech. Mogahed is herself an Islamic ideologue who supports Islamic Sharia and denies any connection between radical Islam and terrorism. Mogahed, who was born in Egypt, has also been a firm defender of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA). Both of these US groups are tied to the Muslim Brotherhood.

As an American of Egyptian origin myself, I can tell who is a reformist and who is a radical Muslim sympathizer, and I do not think that Ms. Mogahed’s views are in any way supportive of a reformation in Islam or of its concept of jihad. To the contrary, she denies the existence of any problem with Islamic ideology and she acts in total harmony with the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood. Her excuses are the same old excuses we Egyptians learned day in and day out in defense of Islamic jihad and in blaming others for misunderstanding of Islam. Her answers are always given with total confidence and conviction, as she tells her audience that any violent actions by Muslims have nothing to do with Islam. Never mind that Islamic mosques, education, art and songs all glorify jihad as a holy war for the sake of Allah.

Mogahed brings nothing new to Islamic propaganda but she certainly sounds interesting to Americans who are unfamiliar with this same old Islamic propaganda and who find it hard to question a religion. The truth about Mogahed is that she combines the good old Muslim sheikhs rhetoric with a better presentation that Americans can understand. Sheikhs never take any kind of criticism of Islam and they ridicule those who question Islam with statements like: “Who are you to speak for Islam? Leave the analysis to the experts on Islam.” Mogahed’s logic is very similar and, coincidentally, her book is entitled: “Who Speaks for Islam.” It is a meaningless title showing statistics that are designed to show that Muslims are different and are not all terrorists, which is no news.

Of course among Muslims there are good and bad people, like in any other group. What Mohahed refuses to admit is that reputable critics of Islam have nothing against Muslim people, but they correctly decipher that the problem stems from the ideology of Islam and its scriptures and commandments. What Mogahed refuses to discuss are the actual laws of Sharia, the history of jihad, the ideology and education that produced 9/11, Islamic imperialism, oppression of human rights, women and minorities.

Her answers are usually simplistic, such as the argument that Sharia cannot be bad to women because the majority of Muslim women allegedly support Sharia? The bottom line of Mogahed’s propaganda is the same old complaint: that Islam is misunderstood and that Muslim people’s anger and violence is triggered by politics and not by religion. The problem with the West is all a misunderstanding, she argues, and with some education and sensitivity training the West will accept Islam as a religion of peace. Her position in the White House has given her a powerful opportunity to enhance the standing of radical Islamist groups in the eyes of our government instead of the reformists and anti-Sharia Mulsims.