In 2007, Family Security Matters, an American conservative group, published a controversial article that called for the United States to engage in “mass slaughter” of Iraqis and for President George W. Bush to become “permanent president of America.”
Evaluating where the U.S. went wrong in Iraq, the author, Philip Atkinson, stated:
The wisest course would have been for President Bush to use his nuclear weapons to slaughter Iraqis until they complied with his demands, or until they were all dead.
Apparently the organization was getting some backlash, so shortly after it was published, that article, and much of the other articles, at FSM were scrubbed. (Atkinson’s masterpiece “Conquering the Drawbacks of Democracy” lives on at webcitation.org.)
That doesn’t mean Family Security Matters has stopped publishing articles advocating unconstitutional abuses of power.
Just one week ago one of their writers advocated banning the practice of Islam. On September 18, Paul Hollrah, whose bio states that he is a Senior Fellow at the Lincoln Heritage Institute, argued for amending the law such that Islam is banned. Specifically, he proposed “tailor[ing] the language of Section 2 of the Communist Control Act of 1954″ to read in part:
Therefore, the organization known as Islam shall be outlawed in the United States.
It’s a strange article because Hollrah shifts between condemning Islam as a whole (and calling for it to be banned) and also making distinctions between moderate Muslims and extremists.
Here he goes on about winning the hearts and minds:
First, while we’re busily engaged in bombing individual cars and trucks with $110,000 Hellfire missiles, just to make us feel as if we’re doing something to eradicate ISIS, we must pursue a strategic two-pronged non-military effort to, a) Separate the good Muslims from the bad by prosecuting radical Islamists here at home, and b) Use whatever means we have at our disposal to change the hearts and minds of Muslims around the world.
But in his very next paragraph he says:
Islam is not a religion, as we understand the term. Rather it is a complete political, judicial, economic, military, and cultural system, masquerading as a religion. Its adherents refuse to assimilate into host country cultures, insisting that they be allowed to exist as an independent entity, not subject to the laws of their host nations. In order to accomplish their ends, they regularly preach the overthrow of their host governments, by violence if necessary.
Where did all the talk of separating good Muslims from bad go?
Then he goes into the proposed text of his law, which would ban Islam completely. Then he writes a paragraph with specific mention of “radical Islamists”:
With that statute on the books we can make it very uncomfortable for radical Islamists. … With eyes and ears planted in every mosque and every Muslim cultural center in America, radical Imams such as the late Anwar al-Awlaki could be readily identified and FBI agents could quickly make arrests.
With that statute on the books, you wouldn’t even have to have “eyes and ears planted in every mosque” to find radical Imams. That statue would criminalize all of them.
The rest of his article deals with trying to deny the spread of radical interpretations of Islam by using technology to project a holographic prophet Mohammed in Afghanistan warning that terrorism goes against the teachings of Islam:
In a loud booming voice, with a slight echo chamber quality, the Prophet would awaken the terrified throng. His reason for returning, he would say, is to tell the radical Islamists that they have misinterpreted his teachings and that he looks with great disfavor upon the radical Islamic interpretation of the Quran. He would declare that Islamic jihad is a great sin, it is Hirabah (prohibited war against society), and that ISIS leader Bakr al Baghdadi is the leader of the Mufsidoon (evil-doers condemned by the Koran). He would tell them that all those who follow the evil ways of ISIS and the Taliban will suffer Jahannam (eternal hellfire) unless they repent.
That is basically the thinking behind President Obama and other leaders around the world who say, “ISIS is not Islamic.” Not that Obama’s statement has much credibility to fundamentalist Islamic extremists. Unless you believe Hollrah’s previous columns. In 2010, in an article also published at Family Security Matters, Hollrah said Obama was “the most revered man in the Muslim world.”
The first article can be read here (or here, if FSM scrubs their website again), and the later article is archived here.
