Analyst's note:  I recommend listening to Dialog: East Coast - West Coast  for an honest discussion series on Islam & America. Please point your friends to this broadcast series. Bob Anderson, a retired U.S. Marine and national security consultant and open source intelligence analyst is joined by experts around the virtual round table and delivers news, studies, analysis & opinion on U.S. national security. Bob has seated at the table, Will Dell, a retired U.S. Navy Master Chief;Dr. Lloyd Case, a theoretical physicist and computer scientist; Paul Taylor, a professional hunter; and John Bernard, a First Sergeant, USMC (Retired). There is no more timely or topical radio show in the world today connecting-the-dots to frustrate designing U.S. enemies both foreign & domestic. 

We listen and then discuss as Congresswoman Sue Myrick talks with Mainstream Muslim leaders about the rise of homegrown, radical terrorism, and the importance of having a mainstream Muslim voice in the conversation about terrorism in America. Guests include: Dr. Hedieh Mirahmadi, the President of the World Organization for Resource Development and Education; Zeyno Baran, the Director of the Hudson Institutes Center for Eurasian Policy; and Farid Ghadry, an Executive Member in the Reform Party of Syria. 

Part 6: Mainstream or Moderate Muslims - Third Segment

Part 5:  Mainstream or Moderate Muslims - Second Segment

Part 4:  Mainstream or Moderate Muslims - First Segment   

Part 3  How to identify the Islamist enemy.   

Part 2  Sharia:  Threat to America 

Part 1  Why Islam is or is not protected under the U.S. constitution?

We also urge an internal search within this site on the terms of "jihad", "sharia" (this gets both spellings),  and "Muslim Brotherhood", "Awlaki", "CAIR", "Caliphate", "Caliph", "Constitution", "Cordoba", "Deradicalization", "Dhimmi", "Hezbollah", "Hizb ut-Tahrir", "Holy Land Foundation", "Islamist", "Moderate Muslim", "Salafists", and "Taqiyya".

Please note that the needed reformation discussed above with Congresswoman Sue Myrick is NOT going to happen in our lifetime.

"[....] If many multiculturalists, if many well-meaning albeit somewhat naïve citizens of the West, insist on projecting their most optimistic and myopic visions onto Islam, in total indifference to the fatwas and intolerance everywhere evident, then support for the Muslim moderates will never spring forth, and the radicals will hold ground.   

If there remains no allowance in the Muslim world for alternative interpretations of their scriptures, or tolerance for an evolving set of applications, lifestyles, beliefs and allowances, and if jihad is not replaced by an acceptance of other religions, cultures and peoples, then any reformation will remain, as it has for 1400 years, a dim fantasy.   

And in those instances Rebecca Bynum's vision of Islam (or radical Islam in the view of many) will keep ringing true, and the one overarching face of medieval Islam in our modern age will remain all-powerful, omnipresent.  All the world's major religions except mainstream Islam (Wahabism, Iranian Shiism, and the many offshoots like the Taliban) have largely learnt over thousands of years to live and let live. ¹ Moderates and apostates in the Islamic world still fear for their lives.  Bibles are banned in Saudi Arabia, as are women drivers.  Honor killings and beheadings should have no place in a modern civilization; nor should supremacist and exclusitory interpretations of any religion.

[....] One of the best essays on the website is "A Manifesto for Reform," by the eloquent Hasan Hanafi, chairman of the philosophy department at Cairo University. He writes that "no real change can take place if there is not a change in the mindset first." This is the reason, he says, that prior efforts at reform have failed because they "started with social, political and economic structures rather than with inherited intellectual substructures, which remained unchanged even as liberal, western enlightenment-derived structure was superimposed over them." This has not worked because "the imported freedom therefore perches on an infrastructure of inherited fatalism, while the imported Rights of Man sit atop a substructure of the inherited Rights of God, in the same way that the imported sciences are superimposed over an infrastructural legacy of miracles." As this brilliantly insightful sentence implies, the real problem is theological, and it is at this level reform must take place. 

Without a different theology, can one have democracy? Iranian philosopher, Dr Abdulkarim Soroush, explicitly answered this question: "You need some philosophical underpinning, even theological underpinning in order to have a real democratic system. Your God cannot be a despotic God anymore. A despotic God would not be compatible with a democratic rule, with the idea of rights. So you even have to change your idea of God."    Can this be done? Can what seems to be the bedrock of Islam change? This seems a very tall order, though there is precedent for it in Muslim history. However, if it is going to be done, it will no doubt be accomplished by courageous Muslim thinkers such as those appearing on [the Almuslih website]. Through it, you will feel spring in the air.

"