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A review by lpm100
Shariah: The Threat To America: An Exercise In Competitive Analysis (Report of Team B II) by Henry Cooper, Christine Brim, Harry Edward Soyster
dark
informative
fast-paced
4.0
Book Review
"Shariah. The Threat to America"
4/5 stars
"Realization of sharia across the globe via jihad - - whether by the pen, the purse, or the sword."
*******
In a nutshell: kinetic (military) jihad ≠ institutional jihad.
Of the book (loses one point on account of 2 and 3):
1. It's not exactly dated, because a lot of these things are time independent.
2. No index!!!
3. Needs some editorial work/formatting,
4. 18 different authors, and I'm not sure who wrote what. There is a bit of repetition.
5. 264 pages / 8 chapters. 33 per. Many subsections, about 4-5 hours of reading time.
*******
The best thing to learn from this book is some of the background of schools of Islamic jurisprudence.
Acquired Islamic information:
1. The Quran is not chronologically ordered, but the verses are arranged from longest to shortest.
2. 4 schools of Sunni jurisprudence: Hanafi, Hanbali, Shafi, Maliki; 2 schools of Shia: Jafari, Ismaili Fatimid
3. The Islamic doctrine of abrogation means that later verses supersede the earlier ones. (So, if you can find a verse that talks about living in peace and harmony with Christians and Jews, make sure that there's not something later that tells you otherwise. As is the case.)
4. There are two periods of revelation. The first is in Mecca, and is more calm; the second is in Medina and is a lot more violent. Islamic law is substantially derived from the Medinan period (p. 60).
5. (p. 102) Taqiyya is the Islamically legal basis for deception / dual messaging. (But, then, they don't have any monopoly on this notion. "The devil can cite scripture for his purposes"; Saul Alinsky said that people who are radicals/destructive have no debt of honesty to the people that they are deceiving.)
*******
Extended second order thoughts........
Even if the situation is as bad as it seems, much (most?) of the damage sustained in the case of the United States is self-inflicted:
1. Since 1965 with the Immigration and Nationality Act, they have lost control over the people that they bring to the country and have turned it into a dumping ground for people from the third world. It was a cynical political calculation several decades ago that has never been fixed.
2. There are a lot of kooky things that are in the American political landscape that are making enemies of lots of people (transgender hysteria, litigation to put men in women's locker rooms, and DEI training, to name but a few) and they start to make the stability of Islam look a lot better to people that would not otherwise be interested in political Islam see it as a viable alternative to a bunch of Weird White People Asininity.
3. There were lots of policy blunders in the States over things that were clear and present issues. (HIV/AIDS went on for several years because the government was trying to formulate a policy to deal with it. Covid was another fiasco.) So, for something that is as slow-moving as the Islamic infiltration of the West, who would even be able to see it coming well enough to put a policy together?
4. Ironically: the ACLU is a heavily Jewish organization. And they have actually gone very far making it more difficult to surveil people that they know are a problem (Muslims). But then, we have Jewish authors in this book (David Yerushalmi and Frank Gafney) who point this out, and are assailed by other Jewish organizations. The ADL.
There may be some overstatement here on both sides.
1. Just recently, I read a book called "The Arab Mind," and they made it clear about the Arab penchant for theatrical overstatement. Also, a penchant for being very long on words but very short on concrete plans of action.
2. Intelligence analysts also need to have a reason to have a job, so they might make the situation seem worse than it actually is.
*******
Some of this situation is mistakes that have been made by other places, but it just SEEMS like making this mistake in The West is the first time it's ever happened before.
1. During the days that China was the center of the world, they could never have seen themselves being colonized by westerners, or "inferior" Japanese.
Hubris made them think that they were the center of the world and that everybody would just magically want to be the same thing they are.
The US and Western Europe seem to be taking slightly different paths to the same destination: being caught off guard and VOLUNTARILY importing a bunch of people that have held a grudge for the last 1,000 years and want to destroy them. (When there was this rioting in New York after the latest Israel Hamas conflict, where do you think all these Arabs came from that were climbing poles and tearing down US flags and replacing them with Palestinian flags?)
2. The collapse of a civilization / country is autocatalytic. So, Muslims are about 1% of the US population right now, and if they have a long-term plan (in spite of the high degree of assimilation/mixed marriages), it's interesting to speculate whether or not the United States would/will have already torn itself apart from other internal conflicts (transgender hysteria, litigation to put men in women's locker rooms, and DEI training, to name but a few) before this Islamic plan could come to fruition.
If it wasn't something to do with Islam that will cause a nation to be damaged/perish, then it would / will be just something else--which appears to be frivolity in the case of the United States, and failing to learn from history in Europe.
3. Russia has been dealing with these troublesome Arabs-Muslims for the last thousand years. It took Spain many centuries to be free of them. There's plenty of historical record, and if these Western countries choose not to learn from it then it's nobody's fault but their own.
4. In spite of various degrees of connection between the mosque and the government in these many Arab states..... It has not brought the Utopia that they expect. (What was the genesis/purpose of the Arab spring, again?)
I was recently reading that 90% of Israeli Arabs do not want to live in any future Palestinian state.
5. (p.190) It has been known for at least 15 years that Hezbollah is involved with Latin American weapons smugglers and traffickers and use the porousness of the US Southern border as a way to bring things into the United States. There is no doubt that intelligence services know this, but: Democratic administrations refuse to address the issue because it could be future voters. Republicans refuse to address it because it could be cheap labor.
6. Okay, see you have Western intellectuals that believe something stupid that penetrates the mainstream as a "luxury belief." Communism/Marxism in one generation, Islamic victimhood in the next
*******
The book is very heavily Arab centric (as you would expect it to be if it's about people blowing up things), but there are some problems with this:
1. Most Muslims are not Arab, and they don't have the single-minded ax to grind against the West as the Arabs do. (Indonesian, Malaysian, Turkish, etc Islam are emphatically not the same thing as Arab Islam.)
2. Within the United States, Arabs are (surprisingly) remarkably keen on assimilation. According to Andrzej Kulczycki, 74% of Arab men and 69% of Arab women had non-Arab spouses. And 96% of children of partial Arab ancestry married non-Arabs. Also, Muslims have 21% interfaith marriage.
3. 90% of these ones that I live nearby (I'm talking about Dearborn, Michigan which is a heavily Shia area) are NOT islamically well educated. (If I have questions about things such as Islamic jurisprudence, I have frequently had to pass through 9 people before I found a 10th one that could answer questions for me about it.)
4. As of now, about 20% of US Muslims are black. Given the high rate of criminal activity among this racial group, is it a surprise that there are criminals associated with Islam? Who over the age of 12 did not know about Prislam/prison converts?
Verdict: Recommended
Vocabulary:
ijtihad
Quotes:
(p.98): "The prophet said, 'If I take an oath and later find something else better than that, then I do what is better and expiate my oath.'"
(p. 174): "Both groups are committed to the supremacy of sharia and his realization of across the globe via jihad - - whether by the pen, the purse, or the sword."
"Shariah. The Threat to America"
4/5 stars
"Realization of sharia across the globe via jihad - - whether by the pen, the purse, or the sword."
*******
In a nutshell: kinetic (military) jihad ≠ institutional jihad.
Of the book (loses one point on account of 2 and 3):
1. It's not exactly dated, because a lot of these things are time independent.
2. No index!!!
3. Needs some editorial work/formatting,
4. 18 different authors, and I'm not sure who wrote what. There is a bit of repetition.
5. 264 pages / 8 chapters. 33 per. Many subsections, about 4-5 hours of reading time.
*******
The best thing to learn from this book is some of the background of schools of Islamic jurisprudence.
Acquired Islamic information:
1. The Quran is not chronologically ordered, but the verses are arranged from longest to shortest.
2. 4 schools of Sunni jurisprudence: Hanafi, Hanbali, Shafi, Maliki; 2 schools of Shia: Jafari, Ismaili Fatimid
3. The Islamic doctrine of abrogation means that later verses supersede the earlier ones. (So, if you can find a verse that talks about living in peace and harmony with Christians and Jews, make sure that there's not something later that tells you otherwise. As is the case.)
4. There are two periods of revelation. The first is in Mecca, and is more calm; the second is in Medina and is a lot more violent. Islamic law is substantially derived from the Medinan period (p. 60).
5. (p. 102) Taqiyya is the Islamically legal basis for deception / dual messaging. (But, then, they don't have any monopoly on this notion. "The devil can cite scripture for his purposes"; Saul Alinsky said that people who are radicals/destructive have no debt of honesty to the people that they are deceiving.)
*******
Extended second order thoughts........
Even if the situation is as bad as it seems, much (most?) of the damage sustained in the case of the United States is self-inflicted:
1. Since 1965 with the Immigration and Nationality Act, they have lost control over the people that they bring to the country and have turned it into a dumping ground for people from the third world. It was a cynical political calculation several decades ago that has never been fixed.
2. There are a lot of kooky things that are in the American political landscape that are making enemies of lots of people (transgender hysteria, litigation to put men in women's locker rooms, and DEI training, to name but a few) and they start to make the stability of Islam look a lot better to people that would not otherwise be interested in political Islam see it as a viable alternative to a bunch of Weird White People Asininity.
3. There were lots of policy blunders in the States over things that were clear and present issues. (HIV/AIDS went on for several years because the government was trying to formulate a policy to deal with it. Covid was another fiasco.) So, for something that is as slow-moving as the Islamic infiltration of the West, who would even be able to see it coming well enough to put a policy together?
4. Ironically: the ACLU is a heavily Jewish organization. And they have actually gone very far making it more difficult to surveil people that they know are a problem (Muslims). But then, we have Jewish authors in this book (David Yerushalmi and Frank Gafney) who point this out, and are assailed by other Jewish organizations. The ADL.
There may be some overstatement here on both sides.
1. Just recently, I read a book called "The Arab Mind," and they made it clear about the Arab penchant for theatrical overstatement. Also, a penchant for being very long on words but very short on concrete plans of action.
2. Intelligence analysts also need to have a reason to have a job, so they might make the situation seem worse than it actually is.
*******
Some of this situation is mistakes that have been made by other places, but it just SEEMS like making this mistake in The West is the first time it's ever happened before.
1. During the days that China was the center of the world, they could never have seen themselves being colonized by westerners, or "inferior" Japanese.
Hubris made them think that they were the center of the world and that everybody would just magically want to be the same thing they are.
The US and Western Europe seem to be taking slightly different paths to the same destination: being caught off guard and VOLUNTARILY importing a bunch of people that have held a grudge for the last 1,000 years and want to destroy them. (When there was this rioting in New York after the latest Israel Hamas conflict, where do you think all these Arabs came from that were climbing poles and tearing down US flags and replacing them with Palestinian flags?)
2. The collapse of a civilization / country is autocatalytic. So, Muslims are about 1% of the US population right now, and if they have a long-term plan (in spite of the high degree of assimilation/mixed marriages), it's interesting to speculate whether or not the United States would/will have already torn itself apart from other internal conflicts (transgender hysteria, litigation to put men in women's locker rooms, and DEI training, to name but a few) before this Islamic plan could come to fruition.
If it wasn't something to do with Islam that will cause a nation to be damaged/perish, then it would / will be just something else--which appears to be frivolity in the case of the United States, and failing to learn from history in Europe.
3. Russia has been dealing with these troublesome Arabs-Muslims for the last thousand years. It took Spain many centuries to be free of them. There's plenty of historical record, and if these Western countries choose not to learn from it then it's nobody's fault but their own.
4. In spite of various degrees of connection between the mosque and the government in these many Arab states..... It has not brought the Utopia that they expect. (What was the genesis/purpose of the Arab spring, again?)
I was recently reading that 90% of Israeli Arabs do not want to live in any future Palestinian state.
5. (p.190) It has been known for at least 15 years that Hezbollah is involved with Latin American weapons smugglers and traffickers and use the porousness of the US Southern border as a way to bring things into the United States. There is no doubt that intelligence services know this, but: Democratic administrations refuse to address the issue because it could be future voters. Republicans refuse to address it because it could be cheap labor.
6. Okay, see you have Western intellectuals that believe something stupid that penetrates the mainstream as a "luxury belief." Communism/Marxism in one generation, Islamic victimhood in the next
*******
The book is very heavily Arab centric (as you would expect it to be if it's about people blowing up things), but there are some problems with this:
1. Most Muslims are not Arab, and they don't have the single-minded ax to grind against the West as the Arabs do. (Indonesian, Malaysian, Turkish, etc Islam are emphatically not the same thing as Arab Islam.)
2. Within the United States, Arabs are (surprisingly) remarkably keen on assimilation. According to Andrzej Kulczycki, 74% of Arab men and 69% of Arab women had non-Arab spouses. And 96% of children of partial Arab ancestry married non-Arabs. Also, Muslims have 21% interfaith marriage.
3. 90% of these ones that I live nearby (I'm talking about Dearborn, Michigan which is a heavily Shia area) are NOT islamically well educated. (If I have questions about things such as Islamic jurisprudence, I have frequently had to pass through 9 people before I found a 10th one that could answer questions for me about it.)
4. As of now, about 20% of US Muslims are black. Given the high rate of criminal activity among this racial group, is it a surprise that there are criminals associated with Islam? Who over the age of 12 did not know about Prislam/prison converts?
Verdict: Recommended
Vocabulary:
ijtihad
Quotes:
(p.98): "The prophet said, 'If I take an oath and later find something else better than that, then I do what is better and expiate my oath.'"
(p. 174): "Both groups are committed to the supremacy of sharia and his realization of across the globe via jihad - - whether by the pen, the purse, or the sword."