Front Page Magazine posted an article today showing the cultural differences in the way America and Egypt view our foreign aid to that country.

The article reports:

As earlier suggested, the wonderful thing about Salafis—those extra “radical” Muslims who seek to emulate as literally as possible prophet Muhammad’s teachings and habits—is that they are so unabashed and frank about what they believe.   Such is the degree of brainwashing that they have undergone.  Unlike the Muslim Brotherhood, which was founded much earlier, doublespeak is not second nature to the Salafis.

The most recent example comes from Al Hafiz TV, an Egyptian Islamic station.  During a roundtable discussion on the U.S. and foreign aid to Egypt, an Islamic cleric, clearly of the Salafi bent—he had their trademark mustache-less-beard—insisted that the U.S. must be treated contemptuously, like a downtrodden dhimmi, or conquered infidel; that Egypt must make the U.S. conform to its own demands; and that, then, all the money the U.S. offers to Egypt in foreign aid can be taken as rightfully earned jizya.

For those of you who may be new to this site, I need to explain what these terms mean. Under Sharia law, which is the legal system the Salafis want to bring to Egypt, non-Muslims are to be given three choices–convert to Islam and conform to Sharia, submit as second-class citizens (dhimmis), or be killed. The jizya is the money paid to the Muslims by the dhimmis every year in a ceremony which is designed to demean them as people and to remind them that the government is generously allowing them to keep their heads. There is no honor in being a dhimmi.

The article further reports:

When the host asked the sheikh “Do the Americans owe us jizya?”  he responded, “Yes,” adding that it is the price Americans have to pay “so we can leave them alone!”  When the host asked the sheikh if he was proclaiming a fatwa, the latter exclaimed, “By Allah of course!” The sheikh added that, to become a truly Islamic state, Egypt must “impose on America to pay aid as jizya, before we allow it to realize its own interests, the ones which we agree to.”

If giving Egypt foreign aid is interpreted by the Egyptian clerics as our acceptance of dhimmi status, then we need to stop that aid immediately. It is not in our best interests as a country to continue feeding this idea. Under Sharia Law, Muslims are not at all obligated to be truthful to dhimmis or to threat them well.