During the recent Tyson Chicken controversy, I published an article at FrontPage in which I argued that Tyson and the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) should not have agreed to make Eid al-Fitr a paid day off for employees at the Tyson plant in Shelbyville, Tennessee, on the grounds that it set a bad precedent for accommodation of Islamic practices at a time when the Muslim Brotherhood is pressing forward a stealth jihad agenda of trying to impose Islamic Sharia law bit by bit and make American businesses and individuals grow used to the idea that Muslims must have special accommodation.

In that piece I quoted the Hot Air blogger “Allahpundit”:

The popular blogger “Allahpundit” noted at Hot Air.com that “according to Tyson, fully 80 percent of the union’s 1,000 members agreed to the new holiday arrangement. If a workforce with a huge Muslim contingent wants to make a deal with management to have their biggest religious holiday off, who cares? And why are there rumblings about boycotting Tyson when it’s the union that’s driving this?…What am I missing? Is there an anti-Eid exception to freedom of contract?”

In a follow-up post, “Allahpundit” suggested that the whole controversy was about religious one-upmanship. “What the debate is really about,” he said, could be found in a piece to which he linked, in which the spokesman for a group called Christians Reviving America’s Values (CRAVE) said: “What makes Tyson think they have the right to replace our American holidays by substituting a Religious Muslim holiday in its place? This nation was founded by Christians and we are still the majority, not the Muslims.”

Since my objection to Tyson’s new holiday had nothing to do with whether or not “this nation was founded by Christians,” and everything to do with the stealth jihad, I wrote this in the comments field at Hot Air:

It has to do with a great deal more than simply freedom of contract, and the opponents of Tyson on this issue are not simply “This Is A Christian Nation” hysterics, as Allahpundit disappointingly implies with his last link above.

There is a perfectly justifiable reason to oppose the union’s action here — one that has nothing to do with religious cheerleading or chauvinism. It has to do with the fact that avowedly Islamic supremacist groups are pursuing an agenda in the U.S. that involves compelling American groups to accommodate Islamic practices and beliefs, bit by bit, until the “miserable house” of “Western civilization” is “destroyed.” This is not hysterical or hearsay. It is by the own words of a Muslim Brotherhood operative in a strategic plan for America enunciated in 1991.

Given that such an initiative exists, and is being put advanced today by Brotherhood-linked groups in the U.S., it is foolish for American companies to adopt a posture of accommodation — even when such accommodation might be entirely reasonable and in keeping with American pluralism in other contexts, when requested by groups that do not have this supremacist agenda.

In response to an email asking him why he didn’t even consider that angle and portrayed all the opposition to Tyson’s decision as based on religious chauvinism, “Allahpundit” wrote this, and he has allowed me to reprint it here:

I forgot about your Frontpage article, but now that you mention it I wasn’t sure what to make of it after I read it. I said in my original post that opponents of the Tyson agreement seem to be suggesting there should be an anti-Eid (read: anti-Islam) exception to civil liberties like freedom of contract. I took your piece to be suggesting essentially the same thing -- that Islam’s simply too dangerous because of its supremacist tendencies to allow Muslims the same free exercise rights as everyone else (at least in cases where they choose to observe an Islamic custom instead of an American one), no matter how lawful they might be and how innocuous the Islamic custom is. Frankly, the idea that we need to draw the line at letting some union -- which also approved paid holidays for Christmas and Independence Day -- choose to take a paid day off on Eid instead of Labor Day lest it send us down the path to the “complete Islamization of American society” strikes me as less persuasive than the Christian press release. But we’ll agree to disagree.

It’s a fair question. Do I believe that there should be an “anti-Eid (read: anti-Islam) exception to civil liberties like freedom of contract”? No. It is imperative that we do not surrender our values and liberties in the process of defending them, or the defense would have been for naught. If a Jewish bakery has all Jewish employees and wants to close on Yom Kippur, that’s just great. If a Muslim business in the United States closes on Eid al-Fitr, no one can legitimately object. And if Tyson’s Shelbyville plant employs such an overwhelming majority of Muslims (which is disputed in some reports) that it is reasonable to close the plant on Eid al-Fitr, that’s an entirely private matter.

The main problem -- and I didn’t make this fully clear in my FrontPage article, as I thought it was too obvious to mention -- is that Labor Day is an American holiday. Dropping an American holiday that we all share in favor of an Islamic holiday that only Muslims celebrate is just the opposite of what we should be doing for immigrants -- any and all immigrants. We should be expecting that if immigrants come here, they will become American. Not only does the taking away of Labor Day make that assimilation less likely, but it also prevents any Americans who may work at the Shelbyville Tyson plant from observing this American holiday if they wish to do so.

Tyson has now reinstated Labor Day in Shelbyville, and that’s all to the good. But the precedent has been set, and will certainly be followed in the future.

And why will it be followed in the future? Because of the Muslim Brotherhood agenda. That agenda, again, in their own words, is “a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and Allah’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.”

That’s from “An Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Brotherhood in North America,” a 1991 presentation by Muslim Brotherhood operative Mohamed Akram.

It is a genuine initiative, and it encompasses many of the most influential Islamic groups in the U.S. -- many of which are named in the same memorandum, including the Muslim American Society, the Muslim Students Association, the Islamic Society of North America, and many others. It is proceeding not by terrorist attacks, but through a stealth jihad that has up to now consisted primarily of trying to compel American businesses and other institutions to make special accommodation for Islamic practices: workplaces have had to change their schedules to allow time for Islamic prayer, airports and universities have installed footbaths to accommodate Islamic ablutions, etc.

All of these are small things. About every one it would be reasonable to say, What’s the big deal? Let them have their footbaths, or their prayer breaks, or their hijabs at McDonald’s, or their publicly-funded Islamic school. The sky isn’t falling. Acting as if all this was sending us, as Allahpundit put it, “down the path to the ‘complete Islamization of American society’“ is just hysterical. Isn’t it?

Well, if one were viewing each of these incidents and others like them in isolation, then sure. But what is the effect of each of these isolated incidents? Each one reinforces the idea that Muslims are not in the U.S. to assimilate into American society, but are determined to force accommodation of their customs. Each one reinforces the idea that such accommodation is only good and proper, and should be pursued by American entities in an exercise in multiculturalism.

These initiatives, in other words, are all supremacist in intent. In every case, they’re asking non-Muslims not just to allow for or tolerate Islamic practices in a live-and-let-live spirit, but to change our own practices and accept inconveniences in order to accommodate those Islamic practices. We’ll have to use the gym at different hours to allow for Muslimahs-Only gym time. And work our work breaks around the times for Islamic prayer. And give up the Labor Day cookout so that Muslims can celebrate Eid al-Fitr. Or find some other way home so that the Muslim cabbie doesn’t incur Allah’s curse by carrying someone who’s holding a bottle of whiskey.

And the idea that non-Muslims must be inconvenienced in order to accommodate Muslims is precisely the problem. And the fact is that there is an organized effort to build on such accommodations in order to create a privileged status for Muslims and Islam in the U.S. The Brotherhood memorandum speaks of the Islamization of the U.S. as happening slowly and incrementally. Obviously they don’t announce their overall goal with each initiative, but the Brotherhood has turned out to be behind many of these incidents -- notably the refusal of cab drivers at the Minneapolis airport to carry passengers with alcohol, and the charter school that was teaching Islam while receiving public funds. In light of its involvement with such incidents, can they really be viewed as isolated? Can the Brotherhood’s own stated overall goals safely be discounted as having nothing to do with these initiatives? Is it not possible that their goal of Islamization might be being pursued incrementally, in small steps?

I don’t think that possibility can safely be discounted, and that’s why I am wary of the Tyson incident and other initiatives aimed at accommodating Islamic practices. Each may be in itself utterly innocuous -- but that Brotherhood plan is real, and I believe we ignore it at our own risk.

Remember: Islam means “submission.” That’s what it’s all about.