Last week, I wrote about the progressive agreements technique that is used to win people over to your way of thinking. I first learned how to use this technique for the purpose of selling a product or service, but the technique is not limited to selling. Without realizing it, most of us routinely use this technique in our everyday lives to influence others.

The proper use of progressive agreements is to start with a simple question or proposition that the person you are attempting to influence can agree on. Once you get the person’s agreement, you can then go on to the next question or proposition to be agreed upon. Then you continue the process until you’ve been able to get the person to agree on what you set out to achieve.

It’s important to understand that you will not be able to leapfrog to the end result without first taking the person through several sequential agreements.

There’s been an intentional process that has been occurring in our country for several years now in which the mainstream media and a number of our lawmakers have been attempting to convince a majority of Americans that it is our obligation to allow Muslims who may be a threat to our country to migrate to the United States.

The process that the media and lawmakers have used has been to put forth five propositions that we are all asked to agree on. After agreeing to each of the propositions, there is a strong likelihood that the majority of us will not resist the end result of allowing thousands of radicalized Muslims into our country.

Here are the five propositions:

1. We all love the same God.
2. All religions have extremists.
3. The vast majority of Muslims are good people.
4. We’re a country of immigrants.
5. It’s not fair to discriminate against an entire religion because of a few extremists.

Earlier this year, several hundred people gathered at a local mosque in Peoria for an event that was hosted by the Islamic Foundation of Peoria. The event featured a panel of speakers from different religious backgrounds, as well as Peoria Mayor Jim Ardis, State Representative Jehan Gordon-Booth, and Jim Lewis, a U.S. Attorney for the Central District of Illinois.

At the event, Imam Kamil Mufti told the people who were in attendance, “We are like anybody else you will meet in America. We are not a threat. We are not terrorists. There is no reason to be suspicious of Muslims.” According to the Journal Star, Mufti’s comments were met with “thunderous applause.”

A similar event took place a couple of months later in Peoria. Doug Oberhelman, the CEO of Caterpillar Inc., gave a speech in which he stated, “There is no room inside Caterpillar for intolerance. There should be no room for it in Peoria either. We should all be better than that.”

When I was a boy, my grandfather, Tom Williams, told me that when he was a teenager in Lebanon, some of his best friends were Muslims. He said that they were very trustworthy and could always be counted on for help. If he were alive today, he would be upset about the fact that a small minority of radicalized Muslims have tainted the reputation of all Muslims.

Regardless of whether you agree with the five propositions that I set forth above, none of the propositions addresses the fact that the terrorist events that occurred in our country over the past few years have all been committed by radicalized Muslims who were all tied in one way or another to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

ISIS has proclaimed that it is a worldwide caliphate that has the right to exercise religious, political, and military authority over all Muslims worldwide. A “caliphate” is an Islamic state that is led by a political and religious leader who is known as a “caliph.” A caliph is a successor to the Islamic prophet Muhammad. The power and authority of a caliph is absolute.

According to a recent report — ISIS: The Threat to the United States — written by Dr. Sebastian Gorka and his wife, Katharine Gorka, ISIS published a list of punishments that are imposed on offenders of the Caliphate:

•  Blasphemy against Allah: Death.

•  Blasphemy against the Prophet Mohamed: Death — even if the accuser repents.

•  Blasphemy against Islam: Death.

•  Adultery: Stoning until death if the adulterer was married and 100 lashes and exile if he or she were unmarried.

•  Sodomy (homosexuality): Death for the person committing the act, as well as for the one receiving it.

•  Theft: Cutting off the hand.

•  Drinking alcohol: 80 lashes.

•  Stealing (as part of banditry): Cutting off the right hand and the left leg.

The young man who recently executed 49 people at the gay bar in Orlando, Florida declared his allegiance to ISIS prior to going on his killing spree. That man had something in common with the other recent terrorists in America — Major Nidal Hassan, the Fort Hood Shooter; the Tsarnaev brothers who were responsible for the Boston Marathon Bombing; and Malik and Farook, the San Bernardino killers — they all believed they were fighting for the same Allah that ISIS is dedicated to.

We need to be clear about one thing. “Allah” is not the same God that we Christians believe in. Allah is the God of Islam.

According to a recent Judicial Watch report, the FBI currently has nearly 1,000 ongoing ISIS probes in the United States. According to the Gorka report that was referenced above, “Ahmad Musa Jibril, an Arab-American Islamist preacher living in Dearborn, Michigan, had 38,000 Twitter followers before his site went silent. A report by the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation (ICSR) found that 60% of surveyed foreign fighters in Iraq and Syria followed Jibril on Twitter.”

The Obama Administration and the United Nations currently have a program in place that gives Muslim “refugees” preferential status over Christians in entering the United States and receiving financial aid and resettlement privileges. These so-called refugees are flooding into our country despite the fact that FBI Director James Comey has admitted that we do not have an effective program in place to determine their background.

Until we have an effective way to screen out the radical Islamic terrorists, we cannot continue to allow the media and our lawmakers to use the five propositions that I outlined above to bully us into continuing to allow Muslim “refugees” into our country. Yes, only a small percentage of Muslims have been radicalized, but they’re like needles in a haystack when it comes to identifying who they are.

ISIS cannot beat us militarily, but if we allow enough of their members to live among us, they will eventually take us down from within. If only one-tenth of one percent of Muslims have been radicalized, then for every million of them that we allow into our country, 1,000 of them are a potential threat to our families and communities.

It’s time to put a stop to allowing new Muslim refugees into our country until we have an effective way of screening out the ones who have been radicalized. Until that happens, we are playing Russian roulette with the safety and security of our families, communities, and nation.

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