Dr. Tawfik Hamid Coming To Washington, D.C.

(All emphases by Always On Watch)

Excerpt from this source, an essay by Tawfik Hamid, and subtitled "Sadly, mainstream Muslim teaching accepts and promotes violence":

...Women are stoned to death and undergo clitorectomies. Gays hang from the gallows under the approving eyes of the proponents of Shariah, the legal code of Islam. Sunni and Shia massacre each other daily in Iraq. Palestinian mothers teach 3-year-old boys and girls the ideal of martyrdom. One would expect the orthodox Islamic establishment to evade or dismiss these complaints, but less happily, the non-Muslim priests of enlightenment in the West have come, actively and passively, to the Islamists' defense.

[...]

It is vital to grasp that traditional and even mainstream Islamic teaching accepts and promotes violence. Shariah, for example, allows apostates to be killed, permits beating women to discipline them, seeks to subjugate non-Muslims to Islam as dhimmis and justifies declaring war to do so. It exhorts good Muslims to exterminate the Jews before the "end of days." The near deafening silence of the Muslim majority against these barbaric practices is evidence enough that there is something fundamentally wrong.

[...]

...[M]any non-Muslim, Western intellectuals--who unceasingly claim to support human rights--have become obstacles to reforming Islam. Political correctness among Westerners obstructs unambiguous criticism of Shariah's inhumanity. They find socioeconomic or political excuses for Islamist terrorism such as poverty, colonialism, discrimination or the existence of Israel. What incentive is there for Muslims to demand reform when Western "progressives" pave the way for Islamist barbarity? Indeed, if the problem is not one of religious beliefs, it leaves one to wonder why Christians who live among Muslims under identical circumstances refrain from contributing to wide-scale, systematic campaigns of terror.

[...]

Progressives need to realize that radical Islam is based on an antiliberal system. They need to awaken to the inhumane policies and practices of Islamists around the world. They need to realize that Islamism spells the death of liberal values. And they must not take for granted the respect for human rights and dignity that we experience in America, and indeed, the West, today.

Well-meaning interfaith dialogues with Muslims have largely been fruitless. Participants must demand--but so far haven't--that Muslim organizations and scholars specifically and unambiguously denounce violent Salafi components in their mosques and in the media. Muslims who do not vocally oppose brutal Shariah decrees should not be considered "moderates."...

Read the entire article.

The author is Dr. Tawfik Hamid, author of the book The Roots of Jihad. His online biographical sketch states the following:

Born in Egypt to a secular Muslim family, Tawfik Hamid joined the extremist Islamic Group GI when he was in Medical School . His colleagues in the terror movement included Al Zawaherri, then a friend with whom Tawfik used to pray, and now the number 2 person of Al Qaeda.

Eventually Dr. Hamid questioned the feelings of hatred and impulses to violence that his participation in extremist Islam was fomenting within him. He became a physician, and also a scholar of Islamic texts. When he began to preach in Mosques to promote a message of peace instead of violence and hatred, however, he himself became a target of the Islamic extremists who had been his friends. They threatened his life, forcing him and his family to flee Egypt , and then Saudi Arabia. As Dr. Hamid says "The powers of darkness were overwhelming and I was forced to emigrate with my family to the West seeking freedom."

From his insider understanding of terrorist mentality, Tawfik predicted the Sept. 11th, Madrid, and London attacks. Now his mission has become "to speak out against radical Islam, a cancer that is spreading with frightening rapidity across the globe today."...

It appears that Dr. Hamid is qualified to speak of the subject of which he's written in the above commentary, which serves as a reality check.

Dr. Tawfik Hamid will be speaking in Washington, D.C., on Friday, June 29, 2007. I received and accepted the following invitation via Andrew Whitehead, Director, Anti-Council on American-Islamic Relations (Anti-CAIR):

The Hon. Rick Santorum

and

The Victory Coalition

cordially invite you to a public lecture

“Radicalization of Young Muslims”

by Dr. Tawfik Hamid

Friday, June 29, 2007

12 to 2 p.m.

The lecture will be at The Ethics and Public Policy Center

1015 Fifteenth Street NW

Suite 900

Washington, D.C. 20005

Lunch will be served.

Dr Hamid is a former member of Jema’a Islameia, an Islamic extremist group, and a former associate of Ayman al-Zawaheri, Al-Qaeda’s second in command. He is a lecturer and author of The Roots of Jihad, as well as several articles, including “How to End ‘Islamophobia’” in The Wall Street Journal, and “The Development of A Jihadist's Mind” published by the Hudson Institute.

For more information and to RSVP contact Simone Lorenzo

at slorenzo@eppc.org or 202.682.1204.

Please RSVP before Wednesday, June 20.