Two more Arabic words to learn from the global insane asylum called Islam

 Introduction:

The words are iqtiham and inghimas.

Why are these two recondite words from a medieval desert language important to us?

Because an influential Muslim scholar who lives in London (yes, in this 21st century, not the 18th, or the 13th, or the 7th) wrote:

"On the one hand, we use the proofs and the texts calling for bravery and penetrating [iqtiham] and storming [inghimas] enemy lines - but this without being foolhardy - and [this is permitted] even if it leads to one's being killed by the enemy, so long as there is in one's storming [enemy lines] an overriding benefit to the jihad, to Islam, and to the Muslims. On the other hand, we have the proofs and the texts that forbid one to kill one's self. The reconciliation [of these two groups of texts] is possible and easy, and there is absolutely no need to have recourse to limiting [the application of] or abrogating [texts]!"

Doesn't this Islamic scholar have better things to think about?

Of course he doesn't.  My apologies for that silly question.  Onward.

The words are, unfortunately, important because this modern Islamic scholar living in the West is parsing the proprieties and niceties of how and why to kill us.

Background:

A manual of Islamic law, Reliance of the Traveler, approved today in the 21st century (not in the Middle Ages) by the most prestigious Islamic university in the Muslim world, Al Azhar Madrassa in Cairo, states:

"There is no disagreement among scholars that it is permissible for a single Muslim to attack battle lines of unbelievers headlong and fight them even if he knows he will be killed." 
(q2.4(4))

Literally, the word inghimas, as we see in its Persian cognate, means:

Being plunged into water.  

And the word iqtiham, means:

Rushing headlong...

(From: A Comprehensive Persian-English Dictionary, ed., Francis Joseph Steinglass)

Both words, as used by our scholar of the Religion of Peace, seem to be rough equivalents, in terms of a particularly fierce and ferocious battle tactic.

The former, inghimas, then acquired the meaning of "plunging into", as an intransitive verb, denoting a person plunging into a crowd -- which, for non-Muslims, would mean in some happy, celebratory capacity (say, going moshing at a rock concert); but for Muslims, ever obsessed about the Enemy around them and how to kill them, is meant in the more deadly-serious way, as a plunging into a crowd of the Enemy in order to kill them with your sword (before the Infidels helpfully invented explosives, automobiles and planes for Muslims to pirate).

Discussion:

To get back to our mainstream Islamic scholar living in London.  His full Arabic name is Sheikh 'Abd Al-Mun'im Mustafa Halima, but he is known for short as Al-Tartusi, and that's what we'll call him, avoiding the unpleasant mouthful of his more official Islamic moniker.

As the excellent website Memri.org tells us, Al-Tartusi is a Syrian expatriate living in London (though perhaps more recently he has decided to plunge back into his homeland to help out with the Arab Spring there), "considered to be a prominent theoretician of the Salafi jihadist trend in Islam [i.e., mainstream Islam]. On August 24, 2005 he posted, on his eponymous website, an article that included a fatwa against suicide attacks."

Al-Tartusi's fatwa primarily deals with the analysis of the distinction between suicide (unlawful in Islam) and the aforementioned impetuous military tactic:  it is not suicide (intihariya), says the modern Muslim scholar, but rather martyrdom (istishhadiya) -- a-ok in Islam; indeed, a veritably honorable achievement, guaranteeing Paradise to the Mohammedan ever anxious about whether he will be sent to Hell to be tortured, or to Paradise to have sex and eat fruits and drink wine forevermore.

At first blush, when reading this fatwa, one gets the impression that Al-Tartusi is trying to delegitimize suicide bombing as... suicide.  However, on a closer reading, we see that when he is making this distinction,  he is not on Islamic grounds objecting to the headlong plunge into enemy lines that will result in the Mohammedan being killed as he valiantly kills the enemy: he only objects to the Mohammedan doing this in order to be killed -- i.e., when, that is, suicide unrelated to the jihad would be an ulterior motive for plunging into battle.

The primary guiding motivation, for the representative of the Religion of Peace, should be killing, with one's consequent death being fully accepted but not primarily sought out.  So, you see, Muslims are capable of complex logical arguments.  The problem is not that they are all stupid barbarians; the problem is that their religious and cultural authorities use their intellectual training and tradition to analyze questions and issues pertaining to concerns that are, to the non-Muslim, monstrously unethical and fanatically dangerous.

Thus, for example, Al-Tartusi writes of:

...proofs and the texts calling for bravery and penetrating [iqtiham] and storming [inghimas] enemy lines - but this without being foolhardy - and [this is permitted] even if it leads to one's being killed by the enemy, so long as there is in one's storming [enemy lines] an overriding benefit to the jihad, to Islam, and to the Muslims.

Al-Tartusi in his fatwa "against suicide bombing" goes on to more closely examine the distinction between "storming [the enemy's ranks]..., and killing one's self, as in suicide attacks...":

One who storms [enemy ranks] is killed by the enemy, whereas one who carries out a suicide attack kills himself, and so in this they are not equal.

At this particular juncture, Al-Tartusi is being a bit sophistically literal. At the very least, he would have to present an argument that proves that the death resulting in attack has to be directly inflicted by an enemy.

That the one who storms enemy ranks will be killed is probable, but not certain, since many of those who storm the ranks of the enemy disperse their army and succeed in their mission without being killed. There is no better witness to this than the history of jihad in Islam. In contrast, someone who blows himself up in a suicide attack has killed himself for sure, and so in this they are not equal.

I guess Al-Tartusi then would congratulate the Mumbai jihadists, for the fine Islamic example they demonstrated in killing the enemy the old-fashioned way.

...one cannot say that [this is because] our forefathers did not have explosives at their disposal so as to be able to draw the analogy, since there was no shortage of ways of killing one's self, and they are plentiful in every time and place.

Al-Tartusi is ignoring the precise difference between modern explosives (and airplanes), and what was available to pre-modern Muslims. Pre-modern devices and weapons were not conducive to simultaneously inflicting casualties on an enemy and killing oneself (we are not considering here malfunctioning catapults that may have fired backwards) -- whereas modern explosives are perfectly suited to the carrier of explosives doing so.  And this gains advantage when a human carrier of explosives is more capable of effectively penetrating enemy lines -- i.e., crowded areas where Unbelievers (= Enemies) are gathered (particularly Unbelievers who are glibly gullible in preening themselves about how multiculturally "tolerant" they are of the Other).

Al-Tartusi's main complaint with suicide-bombers is that they are not scrupulously following the stipulations in the Sunna (he also disingenuously tries to piggyback onto that a claim that suicide-bombings are not strategically effective, as well as the anxiety that they are bad for the image of Islam, and that they tend to foment discord among Muslims). And yet, he notes a fact that is "very discomfiting" -- namely, that over 90% of suicide attacks by Muslims are deficient in adherence, so he claims, to all the proper jots and tittles of the Sunna. Even if Al-Tartusi is correct about the Islamic unacceptability of suicide attacks, his own admission that over 90% of such attacks are not following his version of Islamic compliance shows that there is obviously a monstrous problem in Islamic education conducive to such a rampant culture of violence that is, of course, threatening us Infidels. If exploding Muslims aren't listening to Al-Tartusi, then what good is he? At any rate, he believes in killing the Enemy -- properly -- and that should be all we need to know.

Back in 2005, Walid Phares wrote in an essay published in The Washington Times (also reported by Jihad Watch) that: 

Sheik al-Qardawi went as far as linking today's suicide bombing to what he called "inghimass" (to throw oneself against the enemy). According to him, this has been permitted by religious teaching since the early days of Islam. A fatwa issued in the West or in the United States must respond to Sheik al-Qardawi and the jihadists theologically, and not state globally what international law and 52 Muslim countries subscribe to already.

And if the reader doesn't know how popular and mainstream Qaradawi is, this report from the mainstream media shows that Qaradawi was at the epicenter of the recent Egyptian Revolution, and in an unprecedented rally of over 200,000 in February of last year, he delivered the solemn Friday prayers to all those Egyptian “secularists” gathered there. The writer of that news article also notes that Qaradawi is “spiritual leader to the Muslim Brotherhood” in Egypt, and is “very much in the Sunni mainstream”.

And Memri.org has also documented how Qaradawi presided over a discussion at a major conference among Islamic clerics held in 2003 in Stockholm) in which he supported the following statement articulating the relationship between Muslims and non-Muslims in the context of the justification for terror attacks:
  
It has been determined by Islamic law that the blood and property of people of Dar Al-Harb [the "Realm of War" -- i.e., all non-Muslim lands] is not protected. Because they fight against and are hostile towards the Muslims, they annulled the protection of [their] blood and [their] property…

Postscript:  "Running Amok"

I recall, a few years before 9/11 while working in a doctor's office, I was looking through a Dorland's Illustrated Medical Dictionary (26th edition, 1985), my eyes happened to alight on the word "amok" (a word I never would have expected to see in a medical dictionary).  The definition provided an intriguing multicultural glimpse:

[Malay "impulse to murder"] a psychic disturbance seen chiefly in Malaysia, the Philippines,and parts of Africa, marked chiefly by sudden homicidal mania, screaming, and attacks on people and inanimate objects, tending to result in social retribution and leading to the death of the individual.

While I commend the 1985 Dorland's medical dictionary for being so "culturally incorrect", I suspect they, and the Western medical and anthropological community in general have not even bothered to consider the Islam factor in explaining this "psychic disturbance" -- particularly as the regions cited are all heavily influenced by Islamic demographics and historical conquest.

More recently, I checked the charming "Hobson-Jobson" reference, subtitled A Glossary of  Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases, and found some interesting entries for "amok" (and its older variant, "amuck").  We see that the problem of running amok also included India.  Hm; another place where millions of Muslims live.  Coincidence?

On pages 18-19, for example, we read:

 

A MUCK, to run, v. There is we believe no room for doubt that, to us at least, this expression came from the Malay countries, where both the phrase and the practice are still familiar. Some valuable remarks on the phenomenon, as prevalent among the Malays, were contributed by Dr Oxley of Singapore to the Journal of the Indian Archipelago, vol. iii. p. 532; see a quotation below. [Mr W. W. Skeat writes --

"The best explanation of the fact is perhaps that it was the Malay national method of committing suicide, especially as one never hears of Malays committing suicide in any other way. This form of suicide may arise from a wish to die fighting and thus avoid a 'straw death, a cow's death'; but it is curious that women and children are often among the victims, and especially members of the suicide's own family. The act of running amuck is probably due to causes over which the culprit has some amount of control, as the custom has now died out in the British Possessions in the Peninsula, the offenders probably objecting to being caught and tried in cold blood. I remember hearing of only about two cases (one by a Sikh soldier) in about six years. It has been suggested further that the extreme monotonous heat of the Peninsula may have conduced to such outbreaks as those of Running amuck and Latah.]"

The word is by Crawfurd ascribed to the Javanese, and this is his explanation:

"Amuk (J.). An a-muck; to run a-muck; to tilt; to run furiously and desperately at any one; to make a furious onset or charge in combat." -- (Malay Dict.) [The standard Malay, according to Mr Skeat, is rather amok (mengāmok).]

Sounds like inghimas to me.

Pages 19-21 have more on the Indian origins and incidences, as well as Javanese -- though of course never do the sources, even old ones before the dominance of PC MC, consider Islam as a root cause.  One even went so far as to conjecture that the Indian climate was to blame.  How can people be so dense?

Then we have this evidence from the Muslim history of the Philippines, concerning the 16th century (though can we doubt it continued to flare up in the following centuries...?):

With the possible exception of Japan's kamikaze pilots in the closing days of World War II, warfare has rarely known a more frightening phenomenon than the juramentados. Known as sabers by the Maranao and sabils by the Tau Sug, juramentados were [Muslim] fanatics who, believing that they would enter Paradise if killed in battle against infidels, would whip themselves into obsessed states of self-hypnosis and, kris [a dagger] in hand, charge blindly into the ranks of the enemy, be he Spaniard, American, Japanese or Filipino. In this semimystical trance the juramentados often raced directly into heavy volleys of rifle fire, shrugged off incredible wounds, and had to be killed on their feet literally, before their attack ended.

Sounds like inghimas to me.

The article adds that:

These slashing attacks kept the Spanish in a constant state of terror...

Yep.  That's the Islamic idea.

Interlude #2

This second installment of Interludes features pop muscian Al Stewart and his song "Constantinople", from his album 24 Carrots (1980):

I see the hosts of Mohammed coming

The Holy Sister bars her doors against the East
Her house has stood too long divided
The uninvited guests are breaking up the feast
She may not bid them leave again
So here in the night
Leave your home it's time for running
Out of the light.

I see the hosts of Mohammed coming
I dreamed I stood like this before
And I'm sure the words that I heard then
Were much the same
It's just an old Greek tragedy they're acting here
Held over by popular acclaim
So here in the night
Leave your home it's time for running
Out of the light
I see the hosts of Mohammed coming.

It's the Violence, Stupid

Introduction:

The lovely story which greeted my morning breakfast of scrambled eggs, sourdough toast with orange marmelade, OJ and coffee as I browsed the headlines at Jihad Watch (a morning ritual for a few years now):

Muslim shouting "Allahu akbar" beheads wife in front of their six children, throws her head off apartment roof 

Not in some Islamic hellhole in darkest Africa or the jungles of the south Philippines, mind you, but in the heart of Germany.

Discussion:

I would tolerate Muslims and their Islam -- and I would support our societies fully tolerating Muslims and their Islam on a legally-based equality with the practitioners of any other religion -- if Muslims were not physically violent. 

As repellant and ridiculous as I may find most of their ideas and texts, if they didn't act on them -- if they showed that they have learned like the rest of mankind has (with the usual exceptions based on human imperfection noted) how to modernize their religion and had long ago ceased to perpetrate physical violence as a relgiously motivated imperative -- I would defend their right to be equally tolerated in my society.

I sometimes think many in the anti-Islam movement start blurring the issue and deeming Muslims and Islam unacceptable even without the physical violence they perpetrate.  As though the mere act of wanting to wash their feet in airport bathroom facilities, for example, were intolerable.  Ewww, icky Muslims washing their feet in public sinks!  We must deport them!   No:  if Muslims perpetrated no physical violence, their desires for us to accomodate their odd Oriental practices should be tolerated.

Closely related to this, I think many in the anti-Islam movement don't realize that all laws require physical violence to maintain.  In freer, more orderly and progressive societies such as exist in North America and Western Europe (and Australia/New Zealand), authorities enforcing the law do not have to resort to physical violence nearly as much as they do in more corrupt and disorderly societies (with various countries in the Muslim world particularly egregious in this regard).  However, the basic principle is still operative:  Law requires physical violence to enforce.  And this principle is reinforced when some subculture is pushing for laws that go profoundly against the grain of the society into which they have immigrated.  Simply put, Muslims will never be able to implement their Sharia laws in the full-blooded way they want, without at some point the rubber meeting the road -- without at some point forcing us, through physical violence, to comply.  And Muslims will probably never enjoy that power, because they are too weak, and we are too strong -- with "strength" here including civilizational sophistication and all the technological and social infrastructure that brings along with it.  Even most of our PC MCs will wake up when the rubber is getting close to meeting the road.  They may not wake up in time to prevent horrific terror attacks to come in the decades ahead -- and for this grievously irresponsible recklessness they will have a lotta 'splainin' to do -- but they will at least wake up in time to prevent the Muslim dream of conquest from succeeding; namely, by doing what they should have done years or decades before that grim future we reasonably envision.

Conclusion:

Stories like the one that greeted my breaking of fast this morning, and thousands of other stories like this of various flavors of atrocity, should serve to keep our eye on the ball -- preventing the likelihood of increasing terror attacks in the coming decades.  And given the nature of the problem, there is only way feasible: extricating Muslims from our societies, simply because physical violence, often to a grotesque and ghoulish degree, is obviously an essential ingredient in their religious culture -- magnified to a level far beyond ordinary criminal violence by the supremacist expansionism which is at the heart of their religion.

Interview with "CGW" -- an ordinary citizen who decided to make a difference

Introduction

"Dr. Elhagaly is no longer employed or caring for patients at Mayo Clinic Health System in Albert Lea. We are working with his patients to transition their care to another physician."

This is what the Public Relations department of the Mayo Clinic located in Rochester in southeastern Minnesota wrote in an email on May 16. 

And why was Dr. Elhagaly "no longer employed" at Mayo Clinic?  The email went on to say:

"Female circumcision in children, referred to as female genital mutilation in U.S. legal statutes, is a felony-level child abuse crime. Mayo Clinic strongly opposes the procedure and it has never been performed at any Mayo Clinic facility."

Though this Mayo Clinic memo in its rather flat affect doesn't clarify the point, the problem was not (apparently) that they had found out that Dr. Elhagaly was actually practicing female circumcision/mutilation on his patients, or that he had been counseling others to do so; it was the fact that he had been caught red-handed delivering a paper in which he advocated the practice of female circumcision/mutilation as a time-honored form of feminine hygiene in Islamic culture and had indeed noted that it was deemed by some Muslim authorities (whom he uncritically cited) as an "honor" for the girls involved.

The Mayo memo reflects an important victory for those concerned about human rights and the law -- and particularly about the practice of female circumcision/mutilation, a practice in flagrant and hideous violation of both human rights and all Western laws.

The rather monotonal announcement by the Mayo Clinic quoted above was sent to one individual, an ordinary citizen who a couple of weeks before May 16 had taken it upon himself to do something about Dr. Elhagaly, and to inform Mayo Clinic of their responsibility in this regard.  Along the way, he garnered the support and help of many friends and supporters.

For most of us concerned about the problem of Islam, it seems like a hopelessly complex and sometimes bewildering variety of issues, too often spanning the globe in far-flung places where we feel impotent to do anything about it.  

Rarely, it happens in our backyard.  And even then, we may not know about it until it's too late; or we may still feel ineffectual to do anything about it.

One day in early May, an ordinary citizen who goes by the online name of "CGW" learned of a particularly galling outrage against human rights happening right in his neck of the woods.  This outrage involved a doctor -- a pediatrician no less -- working in a clinic in the Mayo Clinic system of a small southeastern Minnesota town called Albert Lea in the heartland of the U.S.A.   As we noted above, this pediatrician had been documented to have advocated (by expounding at glowingly uncritical length) female circumcision not clearly distinguishable from the worse crime against humanity of FGM (female genital mutilation), both of which are felony crimes for underage females throughout the U.S.A. (and even for grown women in most states).

I have asked CGW if I could interview him with a few questions about how he got this done.  He graciously consented.  

The Interview

Hesperado:  How did you first hear about Dr. Elhagaly and his advocacy of FGM? 

CGW: I first heard about Dr. Elhagaly's advocacy of FGM on May 3, 2012 during my daily perusal of the articles posted on Jihad Watch, where I saw the article titled Leading Muslim jurist: Female genital mutilation an "honor" in Islam. I followed the link in that article to the original article at Translating Jihad and subsequently read that.

Hesperado:  You mean this doctor had advocated female circumcision/mutilation in Arabic?

CGW:  Yes.  It was a paper he presented to an organization of which he is a senior member, the Association of Muslim Jurists of America (AMJA).  I guess if it hadn't been for the individual at Translating Jihad, who regularly translates Arabic documents into English, we may have never found out about this American Muslim doctor's position on this issue.

Hesperado:   Yes, that website, Translating Jihad, does good work.  In fact, not long ago, in early April, they published a translation of another document relating to this Dr. Elhagaly -- namely, a paper delivered again at his organization, the AMJA, in which the Muslim members, all esteemed professional Muslims living and working in the U.S.A., were warned against working in law enforcement and were reminded that as Muslims they should "not be pleased with a legal system that does not come from Allah".

CGW:  Yes, I recall reading about that at Jihad Watch, though at the time I hadn't learned of the doctor's position on FGM.

Hesperado:  And so reading the May 3rd article was the first time your learned that a doctor working in your region of the U.S. was advocating what is tantamount to FGM?

CGW:  Yes.

Hesperado:  So your own local mainstream news media failed you in this regard -- they had failed to report a very important, and disturbing fact about a local doctor?

CGW:  That's right.

Hesperado:  What first moved you to do something about this issue?  Why this particular issue, and not any number of the 1,001 other issues and problems caused by Islam?  Did you just throw a dart at a board of Islamic Outrages and pick the first thing your dart hit, so to speak?

CGW:  I have long been a vocal opponent, both in my personal life and in online forums, of the barbaric practice known in all its forms in US statutory language as Female Genital Mutilation.

I live in a community with one of the highest immigrant Somali populations in the United States, and have heard from people in my community (both Somali immigrants and native locals) that the immigrant community here in Minnesota continues the practice of FGM, even though it is illegal in this country and in this state. 

Hesperado:  How bad is this problem in this immigrant community?

CGW:  Upwards of 98% of Somali females are "circumcised"; typically this takes the form of one of the more severe forms of the practice, including complete clitorectomy/clitoridectomy, excision or removal of the labia (both majora and minora), and infibulation, or "sewing up" of the external tissue that remains, leaving only a pencil-sized opening for the flow of menstrual blood and urine.  For graphic evidence of these practices, see this link.

Hesperado:  Let me understand you on this:  you've just listed various stages of the process, from less severe to worse, where "infibulation" is the worst form?

CGW:  That's right -- but remember, they are all just forms of the same practice, which has been deemed under our American laws to be a felony crime, no matter by what degree of severity it's practiced.  

Hesperado:  And so these Somalis are getting away with this right in our backyard, under our noses?

CGW:  Children are taken back to Somalia for the procedure, or are having it performed locally, both of which are illegal. There are individuals in various positions in municipal government agencies who have told tales of botched procedures done on kitchen tables at home using a razor blade where the children were in danger of bleeding to death, and which resulted in 911 being called; the cases have never been prosecuted due to a pervasive climate of deferring to "cultural sensitivity" here in Minnesota. None of these individuals would go on the record or pursue prosecution of these cases as they were warned that they would lose jobs, pensions, and would face physical retribution by the Somali community if they spoke out on the issue. 

Hesperado:  And you know of this through personal knowledge, but the specifics you do not, or cannot divulge, in order to protect certain individuals?

CGW:  Yes.  For example, I could provide a witness who could "name names" but that person made a pledge of confidentiality to the individuals involved and declines to go on the record.

Hesperado: Fascinating, and it's disconcerting that even with your relative knowledge of the local scene in terms of this problem, you had not heard of Dr. Elhagaly, who was right there in your general region.  That makes one wonder how many other Dr. Elhagaly's there are out there whom we don't know about -- not only in Minnesota, but in other areas of concentration of Muslim immigrants in America, not to mention anywhere in the West.

CGW:  True.  I guess we have to take these problems one step at a time.

Hesperado: Just out of curiosity, do you know if Dr. Elhagaly is himself Somali or is he just being an "ecumenical" Muslim helping his Muslim brothers from another culture?

CGW:  I believe that Dr. Elhagaly is from Egypt. This is what I found in the course of my research. Your readers can go here for more information.

And this is a cached copy of a page formerly at the Mayo Health System website. 

Hesperado: Thanks, that's interesting.  As we know, Egypt also has an incredibly high incidence of FGM itself -- over 90%.  Birds of a feather, as they say...  Now let's get back to you.  At the point when you learned about Dr. Elhagaly, what did you begin to do about the situation?  Did you have any previous experience with any kind of social activism before?  

CGW: Aside from the occasional participation in online activities, (such as Pamela Geller's effort to encourage Butterball to label their whole turkeys "halal" when they are indeed certifying them as such, both for export to the Middle East and for the broader American market, around Thanksgiving 2011), and participation in the comments sections of online forums, I had no experience with any kind of activism whatsoever.

Hesperado: What were your first steps then?  Were you (pardon the expression) flying by the seat of your pants?

CGW: My first step was to try and find out what I could about the pediatrician in question. I contacted the Mayo Clinic in a series of phone calls, trying to determine who to call to make an official complaint about what I perceived to be advocacy of an illegal procedure. The first hurdle I encountered was determining that the pseudonym of the physician was not his legal name for the purposes of employment. I asked about a "Dr. Hatem Al-haj", the name in the original article at Translating Jihad, and was told that no such physician worked there. Several of my online comrades also had this problem as they tried to contact Mayo directly. So I searched the Mayo Clinic Health System site for Albert Lea, MN and found his photo identifying him as Dr. Hatem Elhagaly. With that name in hand, I resumed calling Mayo. I was pretty much given the run-around; it was clear that the individuals I spoke to were not all that willing to address the situation. I left several messages for different individuals but never received a call back. Finally I was given the email address of an individual in the Public Affairs Department to whom to address emails. After a few exchanges, he provided me with another contact email address for the general public to use to address the issue with the Mayo Health System.

From there, I consulted an acquaintance with an interest in health-and-wellness issues who volunteered to organize a petition on the website Change.org. This petition being established, I began the process of attempting to disseminate the information that I had gathered to various organizations, websites, etc. 

Hesperado: It's interesting to contemplate that you had little experience of political activism under your belt, but you plunged in anyway, making all those phone calls until you finally tracked down at least someone at Mayo Clinic you could begin to contact to communicate your concerns.  At that point, after you had the public relations contact and your friend began the online petition, what was the next step?  Did you just sit back and wait for the petition to grow numbers, or did you have to do more phone-calling work?  

CGW: After I had left a few phone messages for several parties at the Mayo Clinic Health System -- both at the Rochester and Albert Lea facilities -- that went unanswered, I pretty much despaired of hearing back from anyone by phone and shifted my efforts to Internet communication. All of this was still happening on the very first day, May 3. Both the phone calling and initial email contact began before the petition was ever organized; that came later in the evening.

Hesperado:  And so the Mayo Clinic wasn't timely about responding?

CGW: Actually, Mayo never got back to me independently on the resolution of the matter; I never received anything from them regarding my initial inquiry except an email saying that they were investigating the matter and thanking me for my "outreach". I followed up on May 16, and received a short response stating that Dr. Elhagaly was no longer employed or caring for patients at the Mayo Clinic facility in Albert Lea. I responded, asking if he continued to be employed by Mayo in any capacity.  The reply was in the negative.

Hesperado:  How did you find that out?

CGW: This came from the Public Affairs Department.

Hesperado:  And so how did the process play out from there?

CGW: The rest of the process was pretty straightforward. I posted a few comments online during the day about my progress in getting in touch with people, as well as additional information on the issue. Once the petition was complete and ready to sign, I began a series of outgoing emails alerting people to the issue.

Hesperado:  Now I know the petition had specific people and/or entities slated to be contacted with the petition results.  Did you contact anyone else?

CGW: Yes.  Along with the designated recipients named in the petition, who each received an email for every signature added, I contacted local, regional and national media (both television and print - no response), the MN BCA (Bureau of Criminal Apprehension), the MN Attorney General (asking the last two to investigate whether or not anything criminal was taking place or had occurred), a few hundred Mayo Clinic Health System physicians and practitioners, a few websites, some online acquaintances, friends and family members. I also posted the same information in the comments sections of several websites, especially those which had already carried the initial article from Translating Jihad. I spent the better part of a 24-hour period composing and sending out emails, with little sleep. I felt driven.

Hesperado:  Your perseverance is much appreciated by all of us concerned about this issue.  When I first saw your notices in comments threads on Jihad Watch about the petition, I just imagined some guy who had a link trying to alert other readers to sign a petition.  I had no idea of all the work you were putting into this project. 

CGW: I did receive a helpful reply from the MN BCA, advising me that they only follow up on referrals from law enforcement agencies and from county attorneys' offices. They suggested that I contact  the MN Attorney General’s Office, the Minnesota Board of Medical Practice and the Dept. of Human Services Protective Services Unit. The second was already being contacted through the petition, and I had already contacted the first directly. At that point I decided not to pursue contacting the DHS-PSU, keeping the option open for a later date if necessary.

Hesperado:  After the initial point starting the whole process, and before the Mayo Clinic announced that Dr. Elhagaly was no longer working for them, did you hear from them?

CGW: No Mayo Clinic physicians/practitioners replied to me directly, but I did receive notification that one of the pediatricians that worked with Dr. Elhagaly in Albert Lea had forwarded the email to the Public Affairs Department at Mayo. I also received a supportive response from the administrator of one of the websites that I frequent. Online acquaintances posted additional helpful information and encouraging comments. One friend reported that he had posted links on 10 separate FaceBook pages that he visits regularly, as well as at additional websites.  

Hesperado:  When you said that you -- 

"...contacted local, regional and national media (both television and print - no response), the MN BCA (Bureau of Criminal Apprehension), the MN Attorney General (asking the last two to investigate whether or not anything criminal was taking place or had occurred), a few hundred Mayo Clinic Health System physicians and practitioners..."

-- am I correct in assuming by "contact" you mean you emailed and phone-called?  Did you have a system?  Did you first try to phone-call, then if that didn't get through, you emailed?  Or did you just do one and the other in no apparent order?  Or did you just do one form (email or phone) and not the other for all these?

CGW: I only emailed them. As I mentioned previously, after an initial day spent waiting in vain for Mayo representatives to return my calls, I decided that email contact would be more fruitful, as it would provide all the information I needed to convey in a written format that could be referred to at any time, saved and passed on to others. I knew that I could effectively reach more people in a shorter amount of time by sending out an informational email. Calling and waiting on the line an inordinate amount of time to get passed around from person to person only to ultimately be forwarded to a voicemail system seemed unproductive and proved frustrating as well.

Hesperado: How did you get the email contact info for all those medical people you contacted?  In my (limited) experience, I've found that often doctors and other medical practitioners don't like their email addresses out in public for non-patients to see.

CGW:  I've had the same experience trying to get my own doctor's email address, to no avail, ultimately.

I accomplished the mass-emailing in a rather interesting way. Once I've let the secret out of the bag, I hope they don't change the system to shield their employees from further contact from the public!

When I had trouble getting in contact by telephone with anyone in Public Affairs at the Mayo Clinic who could be responsive to me, I called both the PA office and the facility in Albert Lea and requested an email address for the public to contact, warning that absence of the same would risk tying up their phone system for days with calls of complaint and protest. Upon being given three such addresses, I noticed a pattern of how the addresses were structured, using the first and last names of the intended recipients. I then began researching a list of Mayo Clinic physicians/practitioners by accessing their online database which lists all of them by name and specialty. This information in hand, I stayed up all night typing in each deduced address one by one.

Hesperado:  Amazing, all the ingenuity and patient attention to detail you put into this.  

CGW:  I literally hand-typed each address, referencing the names on each printed page one by one, spelling the names out loud to myself both as I read them  and as I typed them. I contacted hundreds of doctors in the Mayo System, primarily in the departments of Pediatrics (Community Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine, Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics, Pediatric Emergency Medicine, Pediatric General Medicine, General Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine-Pediatric Diagnostic and Referral Clinic, Pediatric Gynecology, Pediatric Nephrology, Pediatric Critical Care Medicine, Pediatric Pain Management, Pediatric Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, Pediatric Plastic Surgery, Pediatric Psychiatry and Psychology, Pediatric Research, Pediatric Urology), Obstetrics and Gynecology (Gynecologic Surgery, Gynecology, Nurse Midwives, Obstetrics, Reproductive Medicine, Urogynecology), Family Medicine in Minnesota, Urology in Minnesota, Women's Health Clinic in Minnesota, along with a few other individual names. Primarily, I chose departments whose physicians/practitioners I felt would have either a direct or tangential interest in the subject of FGM.

Hesperado: When you spell it out like that, it's really staggering, and all of us concerned about this issue remain indebted to you.  Even so, it sounds like you didn't get much response from any of these people.  Did you follow-up with everyone who did not respond to you anyway, during the time before the day you were informed that Dr.Elhagaly was no longer employed (May 16)?

CGW:  The only responses I received are outlined above; and I did not follow up with any of the other parties that I contacted initially, with the exception of the request for information that I made to the Mayo Clinic on May 16. I figured that, if people were interested or concerned, they would reply to my initial email or forward it onward to the indicated parties.

 

Hesperado:  Sorry for seeming a little dense here, but I'm still unclear as to whether you emailed people independently of sending them the petition, in addition to emailing them the petition.  Or was there only one emailing of all those people, and it included the petition?  When you mentioned about how you contacted all those medical personnel including doctors etc. Did that precede the emailing of the petition, or was it the same process?

CGW:  There was only one email directly from me to the entire list of recipients. It included a link to the translation of the original Arabic article at the Translating Jihad website; a link to the doctor's employment information page at the Mayo Clinic Health System (Albert Lea website); a link to his own website, where he uses the pseudonym "Sheik Hatem Al-Haj"; a link to some information about the practice of FGM; and lastly, a link to the first draft of the petition.

Hesperado:  How long did it take for the first petition to be complete?  Was it simply ongoing until the "victory day" (May 16)? 

CGW:  The number of signed names on the petition grew slowly but steadily. 

Hesperado:  How long did it take for the petition to garner a sufficient number of names?  Like, how long did it take for 100 names to appear? 
 

CGW:  I think that it took a couple of days to reach 100 signatures or so.

Hesperado:  To whom exactly was the petition communicated ?  

CGW:  The petition letter was communicated to the Mayo Clinic Public Affairs Department, the American Board of Pediatrics (Board of Directors), the American Academy of Pediatrics (Board of Directors), the Minnesota Board of Medical Practice (Board of Directors), the American Medical Association, and the American Board of Pediatrics (Maintenance of Certification). The petition organizer did all the legwork, i.e., the research necessary to determine which organizations should receive the petition letter and their contact information.

Hesperado:  Did they receive the complete list of the petition signers as it was growing?

CGW:   No, actually, each time someone signed the petition, an email went out to each of the above-named recipients with that person's signature, generating a veritable flood of individual emails to their inboxes.

Also, a link to the petition was sent to all the recipients that I enumerated before in various medical departments and offices. I have no idea if any of the individuals with whom I communicated directly signed the petition, but the petition organizer is privy to that information. We'd need to compare lists to see.

I also posted a link to the petition online at several websites.

Hesperado:  And, of course, the petition has "morphed" into a second petition.  

CGW:    That's right.  It has been modified to reflect Dr. Elhagaly's departure from the Mayo Clinic (the Mayo Clinic has been removed from the list of contactees).   And the petition is still ongoing as we speak.  It can be seen at this link.

Hesperado:  As significant as the May 16 victory was, it's not enough that Dr. Elhagaly is no longer working at a particular clinic.  What is the purpose of this second petition?
 

CGW:  Two main purposes:  1) to urge proper authorities to revoke Dr. Elhagaly's medical certifications; and 2) to refute the statements made by followers of his that the entire petition effort has been the result of "Islamophobia" -- a word, by the way, invented by the Muslim Brotherhood in America to suppress all legitimate criticism of Islam, sharia law and Islamic practices -- which in this case serves the purpose of trying to deflect the public's attention away from genuine problems, such as a concern for the medical and health implications of the situation. 

Hesperado:  And to whom all is this petition going to be sent?

CGW:  The American Board of Pediatrics, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Minnesota Board of Medical Practice, the American Medical Association, and the American Board of Pediatrics.  

Hesperado:  It boggles the mind that this advocate of female circumcision/mutilation is a pediatrician practicing in the U.S.A.!  

CGW:   Indeed.  

Hesperado:  How is this second petition going so far?

CGW:   Very well.  The total signatories at any given time can be checked by visiting the link I gave you.

Hesperado:  And that link, to remind the readers, is this one.  Well, CGW, I thank you for taking the time out to answer my questions.  I think it has been quite enlightening to any of my readers interested in the nuts and bolts of how an ordinary person can get involved and make a difference.  I wish you and the petitioners the best of luck with their goal.

CGW:  Thank you very much.

Left and Right in Black and White

The following roll call of votes from a recent U.S. House of Representatives vote shows, in vivid and stark black and white, the difference between Democrats and Republicans with regard to the issue of the problem of Islam.

The vote concerned an amendment meant to punish the New York City police department by taking away their funding for a long-standing operation they have been conducting of surveillance of Muslims in mosques and other community and private settings.

Thankfully, the amendment was defeated.  But taking a look at the link I provided above of the roll call, one sees that overwhelmingly, Democrats voted against the amendment, while overwhelmingly, Republicans voted in favor of it.  (A good brief overview of the vote may be read here.)

This demonstrates powerfully that there is more rationality resident in the Republican sociopolitical culture, compared with that of the Democratic sociopolitical culture.

Good God, with the metasasizing problem of deadly Islamic terrorism, the least we ought to do is institute such programs of surveillance of our growing Muslim populations.  Shame on our representatives for voting against this amendment.

While I have often stressed that the problem of PC MC is not a Leftist problem, but a much broader sociopolitical problem precisely because it has infected, and affected, too many among the conservatives, centrists -- as well as that often ignored sociopolitical demographic, the Comfortably Apolitical -- nevertheless, this does not mean that Left and Right are exactly equal in this regard.  My rhetorical efforts over the years in stressing the broadly deleterious effects of PC MC -- spanning across the Left/Right divide -- have been conducted in the spirit of countering what I have perceived to be a simplistic hyperbole that almost obsessively sees only "Leftists" and "liberals" as the problem; where, obviously, the Bush Epiphany (you know, George "Islam is a great religion of peace" Bush) ought to have disabused us of that long ago.

Nevertheless, May 12 was a day to remind us of the other side of the coin: the remarkable degree of irrationality cultivated by Democrats, contrasted with Republicans, with regard to the problem of Islam.

Shame on Democrats.  When are they going to wake up and see that Islam is the most virulently, and dangerously, anti-liberal ideology on the face of the planet? 

Psalm 110:1's footstool: an ottoman? Inshallah!

An analysis published in the American Thinker by Andrew Bostom helps us to make more sense of the modern history of Turkey and the phenomenon of its attempted genocides of Greeks and Armenians during its transition from an Ottoman theocracy to a Kemalist "secularism". 

We must begin with the premise that Ottoman Islam was a formidably Islamic geopolitical and cultural Rasputin -- and thus see its slow, increasing demise and disease over the 18th and 19th centuries as a spectacular catastrophe (for Muslims) in and of itself.  Then we see the kinetic acceleration of Western global superiority throughout the 19th century as another major ingredient in the process; with the tumultuously protean outburst of WW1 thus wracking the Body Geopolitic of the world (since by then the West had the entire world by its balls, mostly in a good sense, pace all the handwringing PC MCs (not a few of whom seem to be in the anti-Islam movement) who feel "ashamed" of their Western Colonialist heritage) -- impinging, among other regions, upon the dying Ottoman Empire. 

In the context of this devolving maelstrom and welter, the death of the Ottoman Empire transferrred its necessarily and intrinsically Islamic electricity Frankensteinianly from a corpse to a St. Vitus Revolution -- the "Young Turks" led by Ataturk -- animated not by greatness or freedom but by Turkish fascism and racism. 

Their feat nevertheless had to be nothing short of herculean, for no galvanizing ideology is as strong as the monster of Islam (that had, at any rate, centuries before already gobbled up Turkish pride and self-identity through "reversion"); and we thus realize, obviously, that its supposedly "secular" purgation of Islam was always partial (reflecting the Islamic limits of its astounding feat), not total -- for Islam in such an inveterately Islamic region can never be purged from the hearts and minds and psyches and culture of a people once possessed by its demon. 

Which is why, also, "modern secular" Turkey, ever since in the early 1920s it was carved out of the dead meat (mostly dark meat) of the Ottoman Empire, has been in constant tension against its own inner Islam, and has barely held the upper hand only by dint of a military dictatorship, not any kind of "democracy" the West would ever recognize as such -- free and institutionally and culturally respectful of equality under the law -- if only because, when you have a majority population ever diseased by the social disease of Islam, you simply cannot permit such freedoms (as Ataturk knew), for such freedoms would lead, with such a demon-possessed demos with its natural appetite for Islam, to more Islam, not less.  Which means, perforce, less freedom and respect for others in society. 

And now, just the other day (Turkish American CNN columnist: Kemalist secularism is dead), we see signs that the Rasputin of Islam -- never quite dead in Turkey -- is coming back to life to resume its throttle on humanity there; aided and abetted in no small measure, naturally, by the Muslims who are the agents of their own eternal sadomasochism.

Not to mention this recent story:

Thousands of devout Muslims prayed outside Turkey's historic Hagia Sophia museum on Saturday to protest a 1934 law that bars religious services at the former church and mosque.

Actually, to clarify what that mainstream news story implies is some kind of equivalency:  the Hagia Sophia had been a Christian church -- one of the greatest in history -- for centuries, before the Mohammedans brutally conquered Byzantium and its prize jewel, the Paris of the Middle Ages, Constantinople, transforming in its baseline tribalistic triumphalism the city's central church into a mosque.  Even after the "secular" revolution of the Kemalists, although the military dictatorship of modern Turkey did render the church an inert museum, it also pointedly has never restored it to its rightful owners, the Christians of Turkey.

Worshippers [i.e., Turkish Muslims] shouted, "Break the chains, let Hagia Sophia Mosque open," and "God is great" before kneeling in prayer as tourists looked on.

Yeah, modern Turkey sounds so "secular"...!
 
Further Reading:

The Conquest of Constantinople: A Jihad Planned in Prayer for Centuries

April & May: isn't this the season for bluebells and marisols...?

There's been a curious absence of both this spring at Jihad Watch, however. And, typically, nary a peep from Robert Spencer about either.

Actually, there was one tiny peep, ensconced within a comments section of an article utterly unrelated to the person in question -- Marisol, and her absence. We refer to the seemingly indefatigable busy bee who for a long while as editor and poster of articles along with Spencer at Jihad Watch seemed to be the one posting every third or so entry there -- adding, in her own style, her own salt and pepper of editorial commentary; like Spencer's, wry and acerbic, but with an indefinable twist that distinguished hers from his. It got to a point in 2011 when, as I began scanning a Jihad Watch article and reading the sparsely interlaced commentary introducing and/or interspersing its content, that I could tell, just from the style, whether it was a Robert entry or a Marisol entry -- and my guesses invariably turned out to be correct.

Spencer only piped up with his peep, apparently, because two or three readers, in the comments section to some article about a Muslim getting sentenced in Virginia, began to voice their wonderment and concern about Marisol's absence.  At that point it was approximately April 13; and Marisol's last official entry before that was on March 26.  In that comments thread, on April 14, Spencer responded to these faint queries with:

Friends:

After six years of extraordinary work here, Marisol decided it was time to move on. She asked me to make no public announcement, and I very reluctantly complied, although I am going against her wishes by posting this comment. Her consistently excellent work added more to this site than I can properly encompass in words. She is very much missed.

It seems odd that after six years of working hard on Jihad Watch, Marisol would not wish to pen at least a small farewell to all her fans.  Of course, if I saw a statement directly from Marisol indicating that it was for "personal reasons", I would immediately leave it at that.  But absent that, I have to wonder if perhaps she was not being remunerated sufficiently for her tireless efforts at Jihad Watch (if she was being paid at all); given that, apparently, she had a day job in addition, and a family to be with. Or did she come to have ideological, or methodological, or personal issues with Spencer and/or some of his close associates, that reached a point where she felt she could no longer stay?  Such non-personal reasons are the business of all of us who have a concern for the problem of Islam, and for the optimum quality and efficiency of any part of the Anti-Islam Movement. (And, somehow, something tells me Spencer did not sack her because of her penchant for unfairly banning good commenters who actually are on the side of the good guys.  But that's another story...)

Has Spencer ever had a normal parting with anyone?  I can't think of one.  Hugh Fitzgerald's was similarly fishy.  Oh well, I guess we peons of the hoi ochloi will never know what goes on in the plushly carpeted back halls of the Gentlemen's (and Ladies') Club of the Anti-Jihad Movement.

By bluebell, now, I mean that blue-state ex-Leftist non-Leftist Occupy Movement supporter Eric Allen Bell, who for a while there was the New Kid on the Block at Jihad Watch.  Spencer introduced him as a sort of ex-Leftist who had "seen the light" and who had the distinction (and honor) of having been kicked out of that rabidly radical Leftist forum Daily Kos for daring to do the unthinkable -- to actually criticize Islam.  Bell began occupying the pages of Jihad Watch quite visibly -- both in formal posts and video debates showcased as part of the Internet radio show of Jamie Glazov (recently christened with the overly cute name "The Glazov Gang"), as well as quite volubly at times in comments threads at Jihad Watch.  For more than you want to know about Bell, see my previous essay Bell's curve flatlined (in which, at the end, I link to two further essays on him).

Coincidentally enough, Bell's last post was also on March 26.  Hm, is this mere coincidence?  Anyway, if the reader combs through the 71 comments there, he will get the distinct impression that Jihad Watchers had, by that time, had it with Bell, and weren't buying whatever he was selling -- viz., his epiphany about how bad Islam is seemed, increasingly, to have cracks and holes behind the front stage of his medicine show.  Is this why the fields of Jihad Watch have not had any bluebells since the end of March, throughout the month of April, and into May now?  Why hasn't Spencer made mention of this mysterious disappearance of Eric Allen Bell?  Perhaps someone should alert the authorities?  A missing person (or missing blogger) case?  While I say good riddance to that most unsonorous Bell, I'd still like to know why he's gone, after Spencer touted him as nearly the next best thing to sliced bologna.