At war? Absolutely.

This morning Robert Spencer at Jihad Watch posted an elegy to the conservative activist Paul Weyrich, who died today. In the comments thereto, a Muslim troll who posts under the moniker of "Abdullah Mikail" responded to Spencer's characterization of Weyrich as a man "determined to defend the West and present the truth" about Islam with the snide quip that "he knows the truth now." Several commenters having taken him to task for the implication that the deceased is now suffering the sundry torments prescribed in the Qur'an for unbelievers, he protested that he had made his statement with "no malice intended." This struck your correspondent as being very much in line with Muhammad's dictum (recorded in the hadith collection of Bukhari, Volume 4, Book 52, numbers 268, 269) that "War is deceit," and I made a brief post to that effect. This prompted a declaration that I am an "idiot who thinks you are at war."

One generally oughtn't to get sucked into these Internet micturition competitions, as they can be a great waste of time. However that may be, I composed a rejoinder that seems worth putting up here:

"Listen up, boy. I know I'm at war with the odious creed of Islam, because the book the adherents to said creed hold to be the immutable word of God has made that incontrovertibly clear. For example, Verse 9:29 commands Muslims to:

Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, nor acknowledge the religion of Truth, (even if they are) of the People of the Book, until they pay the Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued.

And were there any doubt as to the gist of that Qur'anic mandate, the exegis of Ibn Kathir clears things up. In his tafsir on Verse 9:29, that eminent Muslim scholar explained that "subdued" means

... disgraced, humiliated and belittled. Therefore, Muslims are not allowed to honor the people of Dhimmah or elevate them above Muslims, for they are miserable, disgraced and humiliated.

Ibn Kathir goes on to note in this tafsir that

`Umar bin Al-Khattab, may Allah be pleased with him, demanded his well-known conditions be met by the Christians, these conditions that ensured their continued humiliation, degradation and disgrace.

He also lists Umar's conditions, among which are that

We will not teach our children the Qur'an ...

Indeed. The better to keep them in ignorance of Islam, the malign creed whose true believers will ever be at war with free men who refuse to 'feel themselves subdued.' "

'Islam is not a religion of peace.'

UK imam Anjem Choudary lays it on the line in London's Evening Standard:

"Islam is not a religion of peace. It is a religion of submission. We
need to submit to the will of Allah."

This, in a report on British Muslim reaction to "tough new measures to name and shame foreign-based extremists and prevent them coming from abroad to stir up hatred in the UK." More money quotes, spoken to an enthusiastic meeting of 200 London Muslims:

It is our religious obligation to prepare ourselves both physically and mentally and rise up against Muslim oppression and take what is rightfully ours. Jihad is a duty and a struggle and an obligation that lies upon the shoulders of us all. We will not rest until the flag of Allah and the flag of Islam is raised above 10 Downing Street.

-- Choudary

Do not obey the British law. We must fight and die for Islam - this is the map and road to Jennah [heaven].

-- Omar Bakri Muhammad, exiled imam, speaking from Lebanon

You must destroy the West.

-- Abu Muaz, head of the UK Salafi Youth Movement

Delete unnecessary material from your computers, take precautions not to attract attention to yourself and prepare your family for [police] raids.

-- Abu Rumaysah, a student at the London School of Shari'ah

Say what one will about once-Great Britain and its current misleadership, at least several mainstream papers in the UK are willing to report candidly on "The Prophet's" followers. All we get on this side of the pond is the kind of pathetic pap noted and quoted in the foregoing post.

UPDATE: Robert Spencer, having been alerted to this story by your correspondent, has a post on it at Jihad Watch. Robert's new book, "Stealth Jihad: How Radical Islam is Subverting America without Guns or Bombs," is now out and should be read by all.

Journalistic ignorance

Traveling across New Mexico yesterday, I saw a column in the Albuquerque Journal about a Navajo woman who was raised as a Muslim after her divorced mother married a Palestinian immigrant. The writer casts it as a "human interest" story and treats her subject with complete sympathy, admiringly quoting her to the effect that her hijab is "a sign of dedication to my religion. Completely practicing the religion. Doing what the Quran says we have to do and just being a good Muslim" and never once asking what "doing what the Quran says we have to do" entails -- such as being "hard against the unbelievers" (48:29) or refusing to have them for "friends and protectors" (3:28, 5:51, 60:1, et al.). To make any such critical inquiry she would have had to look into the Qur'an, and this she clearly had never done -- or, evidently, had any interest in doing.

As one who toiled for fifteen years at a mainstream newspaper, I can testify that such willful ignorance is ubiquitous in the American media. Its consequences must inevitably be dire.

Ihsanoglu's heinous harping

On Oct. 22, Secretary General Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu of the Organization of the Islamic Conference addressed a UNESCO meeting in Copenhagen; a follow-up to the "Rabat Conference on Fostering Dialogue among Cultures and Civilizations through Concrete and Sustained Initiatives" held in Morocco on June 14-16, 2005. In his speech, Ihsanoglu revisited a theme on which he has been harping for some time -- to wit, the intolerability to the Muslim world of the quintessential Western value of freedom of expression when that freedom is employed in the exposure, analysis, criticism, or mockery of the odious creed of Islam, and the goal of that world to suppress the same through laws prohibiting it. Excerpts:

"... in exercising the fundamental right of freedom of expression, one should act within the responsibility inherent in this freedom, through showing respect to the rights of others, and refraining from incitement for hatred, causing hurt to others or eroding their basic human right [sic]."

"... the OIC has never had any problem with the freedom of expression, on the contrary we regard it as a fundamental value and advocate it in the Muslim World within our new vision. The point we have been making is that the abuse of this right, in a way to contradict and violate the international human rights documents, should not be allowed.

"... we should not allow the extremists and opponents of diversity in both the Muslim world and the western societies to derail our joint endeavors and manipulate and exploit the interaction between the ones who are yearning for respect to their ethnic, racial and religious identities and values and the others who are misled to misperceive that their fundamental human rights of freedom of expression are challenged or under attack by the Islamic world." (Emphases mine.)

Ihsanoglu's speech and his organization's ongoing campaign are part and parcel of what Robert Spencer noted in June is "a worldwide and ongoing movement by Islamic jihadists and their allies and dupes to classify all critical examination of Islamic supremacism as "hate speech." This would render us, he added, "mute and hence defenseless in the face of the jihadist onslaught," for "true statements about Islam and jihad will be suppressed, and precisely as Islamic supremacists are pressing forward as never before with their program of stealth jihad against the West." (Emphasis original.)

Spencer concluded his June post with a warning that "we are far closer to restrictions on free speech than most people realize." Now, with only a week to stop the Obamachine's grasp for power and forestall its dire consequences, the truth of his statement is more stark than ever.

Obama's goon tactics

Andrew McCarthy has written an article for National Review Online entitled "Obama's assault on the First Amendment." It is spot-on, and deserves to go viral.

Moreover, McCarthy sums up in one paragraph not only what Obama is trying to keep from scrutiny but what must compel our active opposition to his candidacy:

"... his radical record, the fringe Leftism that lies beneath his thin, centrist veneer, his enabling of infanticide, his history of race-conscious politics, his proposals for unprecedented confiscation and distribution of private property (including a massive transfer of American wealth to third-world dictators through international bureaucrats), his ruinous economic policies that have helped leave Illinois a financial wreck, his place at the vortex of the credit market implosion that has put the U.S. economy on the brink of meltdown, his aggressive push for American withdrawal and defeat in Iraq, his easy gravitation to America-hating activists, be they preachers like Jeremiah Wright, terrorists like Bill Ayers, or Communists like Frank Marshall Davis."

We have a month to stop this creature -- and if we fail, we face the menacing prospect of another Lyndon Johnson-style transmogrification of America.

The perfect propaganda storm gathers

In Geneva, Switzerland next April, the UN will convene yet another conference "against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance" ("Durban II"), whose focus is going to be on "Islamophobia" -- an event for which former UN Special Rapporteur "on racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related forms of intolerance" Doudou Diène spent much of his tenure assiduously laying the intellectual and rhetorical groundwork. As I noted on June 20, were this event to occur three months after the inauguration of Barack Obama and a lopsidedly Democratic Congress, it could create a "perfect storm" of conditions for repression of the Counterjihad through "hate speech" legislation.

Such a confluence of conditions would be greatly excerbated were another anti-"Islamophobia" conference, proposed by the Malaysian government at the behest of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, to be held in the United States as stipulated by OIC Secretary General Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu. Ihsanoglu, according to Malaysian Foreign Minister Datuk Seri Dr Rais Yatim, "said the United States was chosen as the venue for the convention because of the polemic on Islam in that country as well as the wide media coverage it would get."

The clear intention of this is to maintain the operational tempo of the jihad in the propaganda sphere by amplifying "Durban II's" call for "hate speech" legislation criminalizing "Islamophobia." That this would fall on receptive ears in an Obama administration is shown by several remarks Barack Obama has made during the course of his campaign:

A certain segment has basically been feeding a kind of xenophobia. There’s a reason why hate crimes against Hispanic people doubled last year. If you have people like Lou Dobbs and Rush Limbaugh ginning things up, it’s not surprising that would happen.

-- Remarks to a gathering of donors at the Westin Hotel, Palm Beach, Florida, May 22, 2008

There is a consequence to the demagoguery [over immigration]--hate crimes against Latinos have gone way up over the last year. We've also seen over the last several months this epidemic of nooses being hung all across the country since the events down in Jena, Louisiana. ... So, what can we do to strengthen the enforcement of hate crimes legislation? It is something that I will prioritize as president but I don't want to have to wait until I am.

-- Remarks at the Iowa Brown and Black Presidential Forum, Des Moines, Iowa, Dec. 1, 2007

From the day I take office as President, America will have a Justice Department that is truly dedicated to the work it began in the days after Little Rock. I will rid the department of ideologues and political cronies, and for the first time in eight years, the Civil Rights Division will actually be staffed with civil rights lawyers who prosecute civil rights violations, and employment discrimination, and hate crimes.

-- Speech at Howard University, Washington, D.C., Sept. 28, 2007

In order to countervail the malign effects of "Durban II" and the OIC conference, an educational campaign similar to the "Islamofascism Awareness Week" programs put on by the David Horowitz Freedom Center should be launched, culiminating in a series of teach-ins, demonstrations and media events during and in close proximity to the OIC's propagandafest. I urge the Horowitz Center to consider such a campaign, which would redound greatly to its credit -- and to the survival of our liberties.

A grim moment of candor

In a speech at Columbia University on Sept. 18, Organization of the Islamic Conference Secretary General Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu had this to say:

The Muslim Ummah, means the 'community of the faithful'. It is a unique bond that has no similar example under any other political or religious system in the world. It is a belonging to ideals which bring Muslims together in an eternal brotherhood lock which transcends all other consideration of allegiance or loyalties or barriers of nationhood, ethnicity, geography or language.

Hence, according to one of the senior representatives of the Muslim world, it would seem that there is no such thing as a "Muslim American" or an "American Muslim," the two categories being mutually exclusive. This is implicitly recognized by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the compound modifier in whose name is used advisedly. (See also Qur'an 48:29, which mandates that Muslims be "hard against the disbelievers and merciful among themselves.")

Ihsanoglu also assured his audience that:

Though the OIC is not a religious organization, we feel compelled on many occasions to clarify that Islam is the religion of moderation and compassion, a religion that celebrates diversity, pluralism, and recognition of the other.

Recognition indeed: as a crawling, cringing subordinate, as per Qur'an 9:29 and its exegesis by Ibn Kathir, who pointed out that a Muslim-conquered person is “disgraced, humiliated, and belittled. Therefore, Muslims are not allowed to honor the people of Dhimmah or elevate them above Muslims, for they are miserable, disgraced, and humiliated."

Ihsanolu went on to conflate criticism of Islam with "racial hatred," then boast, in the next breath, of considerable progress in our subordination:

A major bone of contention with the proponents of Islamophobia is the question of freedom of expression. Although all agree that any freedom is always linked to responsibility, such as respecting human rights, and avoiding any form of incitement to hatred on the basis of race or religious belief, we find that some circles tend to ignore this basic universal and moral value and accuse Muslim victims of this racial hatred, who are defending their human rights, nevertheless, of trying to stifle freedom of expression.

The collective efforts of the OIC and the member states have made an impact on the international community and have contributed towards raising global awareness of the dangerous implications of the phenomenon. Political leaders and opinion makers including academics and civil society leaders of the western world have now started to speak out against Islamophobia. ... The United States Government also showed its sensitivity to the concerns of the OIC by its decision to avoid anti Islamic terminology in their official memos and correspondences.

In the days after the Muslim-orchestrated atrocity of 9/11, the president of the United States declared that the jihadist attackers "hate our freedoms ... our freedom of speech," that they "kill not merely to end lives, but to disrupt and end a way of life," and that in resisting them "we will not falter, and we will not fail." How terribly, how dreadfully, how shamefully hollow these words now sound, in light of Ihsanoglu's braggadoccio.

(Hat tip: Baron Bodissey at Gates of Vienna.)

Doudou done

On August 1, Doudou Diène was replaced by Githu Muigai of Kenya (shown at right) as UN Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance. Muigai, a Nairobi attorney and a graduate of the Columbia University School of Law, appears at first glance to be carrying forward Diene's campaign against "defamation of religion," which, as I have noted, is a threat to the rights of those of us with the temerity to analyze, criticize, expose and make mock of the inimical aspects of Islam's scripture, traditions, history, and contemporary practice. However, this report describes a setback for the Organization of the Islamic Conference in the UN Human Rights Council in which he appears to have had a hand.

Muigai is managing/lead partner of Mohammed Muigai Advocates in Nairobi. His C.V. may be seen here. ("Mohammed Muigai" is not Muigai's name but the firm's, another senior partner bearing the name of Mohammed Nyaoga.) The firm's address may be found here. UN radio has a brief report on a speech by Muigai here.

With the UN's follow-up conference to the notorious 2001 Durban conference on racism and xenophobia (which turned into an anti-Semitic saturnalia) fast approaching, it is very much to be hoped that Muigai will bring a less doctrinaire attitude to his new position than his predecessor showed.

Securing whom, from what?

At FrontPage this morning, the indefatigable Robert Spencer comments on a New York Daily News report that Gotham's police department is beefing up security around Muslim mosques during the upcoming Islamic holy month of Ramadan. After noting the preponderant influence of the Saudi Arabian Wahhabi strain of Islam over American mosques and the malign propaganda exuded by them, Spencer points up the irony of the fact that NYPD's effort is not directed at protecting New Yorkers from their baleful activities but rather at protecting the mosques themselves. "The mosques are well protected," he observes, "but how well protected are the potential victims of the jihadists who may be inside those mosques?"

That is a damn good question, in view of the traditional Muslim view that Ramadan is a time of victory and conquest. Nor is New York the only place where infidel tax dollars are being spent on Muslim security. Last year the Council on American-Islamic Relations (note the compound modifier denoting two separate and distinct entities: America and the Umma al-Islamiya) posted an "action alert" calling upon "American mosques and other Islamic institutions" to apply for Department of Homeland Security grants "to receive training and to purchase equipment such as video cameras, alarm systems and other security enhancements," with an eye toward "target-hardening." This, through a $24 million DHS program intended to protect "organizations who are deemed high-risk for a potential international terrorist attack."

American taxpayers may be forgiven for wondering which "international terrorists" are the least bit likely to attack Muslim mosques in the U.S. -- and why, if said "targets" are in need of "hardening," they have to pay for it instead of the cash-flush Saudis whose petroboodle built the things in the first place.

Muhammad cartoon fear strikes again

From Baron Bodissey at Gates of Vienna comes word that Flemming Rose, the culture editor of the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten whose publication of a dozen caricatures of Islam's prophet Muhammad touched off Muslim demonstrations against freedom of expression worldwide, has written a book on the crisis and tried to shop it to American publishers -- without success.

“They are enthusiastic about the project, but concerned about the consequences that may ensue if they publish the book,” Rose told the Danish paper Berlingske Tidende.

This is the third time -- and the third different medium -- in which the leadership of the American mass communications media has cravenly capitulated to intimidation rather than push back against Muslim demands for self-censorship. First came the near-unanimous refusal of American newspapers to print any of the relatively tame Muhammad images with their coverage of the original crisis in February 2006, despite their manifest centrality to the story and the clear imperative to show solidarity with a fellow journalist. Only three major American papers had the guts and integrity to do so: the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Austin American-Statesman, and the Rocky Mountain News of Denver. The editors of the rest (including the one for whom your correspondent then wrote) justified their pusillanimity with weasel words about "good taste" and "editorial judgment" and "respect for Islam."

Then came the capitulation of American television, in the person of the Comedy Central network that broadcasts the cartoon show "South Park." Much beloved by kids of all ages for an outrageous brand of humor that holds nothing sacred, "South Park" in April 2006 addressed the Muhammad cartoon crisis in a two-part episode on "The Cartoon Wars." The show's position, of course, was that the right to free expression is absolute and ever in need of strong defense. And "South Park's" creators did push back, by showing a cameo cartoon image of Muhammad. But Comedy Central's executives wouldn't allow that image to be shown, out of fear of reigniting "the intense and deadly reaction" of the Muslim world to the Danish cartoons. A black screen was shown instead, with a message from the "South Park" team citing corporate censorship as the reason.

And now we have American book publishers' spurning of Flemming Rose's report on the crisis, a far more egregious incidence of pre-emptive capitulation to Muslim demands than Random House's recent decision not to publish a bodice-ripper novel about Muhammad's bint. While the latter is mere entertainment, the former is critically important information of which the American people are in dire need. The American reading public should raise an unholy stink about this until some publisher reconsiders -- or at least grows a pair -- and puts Flemming Rose's book on the Muhammad cartoon crisis into print.

Omitting the lede in North Carolina

On March 3, 2006, one Mohammed Reza Taheri-Azar drove a rented Jeep Cherokee SUV into a group of pedestrians on the Chapel Hill campus of the University of North Carolina. Nine people were injured in the attack, for which Taheri-Azar, a 22-year-old UNC graduate, told police he had rented the biggest, heaviest vehicle he could find.

After his arrest, Taheri-Azar declared in open court that he was "thankful for the opportunity to spread the will of Allah.". During his incarceration, he wrote a series of letters to the student newspaper the Daily Tarheel, outlining in considerable detail his Islamic justification for the assault, quoting the Qur'an by chapter and verse. Among the Qur'anic mandates he cited were "To release anger and rage from Allah's followers' hearts: (9:14-15)," "To test Allah's followers' faith: (8:17)," "To prevent mischief on earth: (2:251)," and "To be rewarded by Allah: (2:154, 9:19-22, 9:111, 9:120-121)." He also declared that "Due to my religious motivation for the attack, I feel no remorse and am proud to have carried it out in service of and in obedience of Allah. Considering that I injured several people both physically and psychologically, who were also American taxpayers, I feel that I succeeded in obeying Allah's commandment to fight against the enemies of His followers."

This morning, after more than two years of machinations, Taheri-Azar pleaded guilty to nine counts of attempted murder, as part of a plea bargain in which the nine counts will be consolidated into two for sentencing purposes and nine counts of aggravated felonious assault will be dropped. Depsite the manifest centrality of Taheri-Azar's Muslim creed and its scripture to his motive, the Orange County News and Observer reported on this development without once mentioning Islam, Muslims or the Qur'an.

Perhaps News and Observer reporter Jesse James Deconto (or those who edit his copy) were following the "diversity guidelines" adopted by the Society of Professional Journalists on Oct. 6, 2001 (before the ashes of 9/11 had quite cooled), which admonish journalists to "Use language that is informative and not inflammatory." But frequently language that is informative -- to wit, the truth -- is inflammatory. To refuse to inform the public because the hoi polloi might become inflamed bespeaks an arrogant disdain for the people's right to know. That such self-censorship has become standard operating procedure for American journalists bodes ill not only for the integrity of their profession but for its future.

Burying the lede in New York and St. Paul

The insidious concealment of Islam's ideological jihad against Western culture, values and rights is being aided and abetted -- indeed, facilitated -- by American newspaper editors, who nearly always bury jihad-related stories in the back pages of their publications (that is, when such stories are even run at all). Examples in this morning's press are the New York Times's running of the story of Random House's abrogation of its agreement to publish a novel concerning Muhammad's child-ride Aisha -- a front-page story if there ever was one -- under the rubric "Arts, Briefly" on page B8 of the New York edition and A18 of the national edition. The role of an American academic in setting this chilling precedent for self-censorship went unmentioned.

And in this morning's St. Paul Pioneer Press, a report on a Muslim teenager's complaint that she was rejected for employment by a restaurant chain because of her insistence on wearing a hijab to work was run not on page one but in Section C, with the business news. To amplify her bellyaching, the kid has teamed up with the local CAIR chapter, which is demanding a written apology from the firm and its submission to "the group's workplace sensitivity and diversity training" -- that its owners might "feel themselves subdued," in accordance with Qur'an 9:29.

Yet another call for repression

DhimmiWatch has a post on the conclusion of the Saudi-instigated "World Conference on Dialogue" in Madrid, and the declaration issued by its participants. Certain points in this document are worthy of note:

The participants also thank the Spanish Government for having the conference in Spain. This great country is home to a historical heritage that belongs to the followers of different religions and has contributed to human civilization.

As Debbie Schlussel points out, "is there something funny about a King who can't hold his phony interfaith conference in his own country, because it's illegal there?" Actually, King Abdullah's rationale isn't funny; it cames straight from the mouth of Islam's prophet Muhammad -- who, according to an authoritative hadith, declared: "I will expel the Jews and Christians from the Arabian Peninsula and will not leave any but Muslim." Moreover, a 2000 fatwa by the ruling clerics in Abdullah's country barred the construction of "houses of worship for unbelievers in the Arabian peninsula," baldly stating that "All religions other than Islam are heresy and error. ... Therefore, religion necessitates the prohibition of unbelief, and this requires the prohibition of worshiping Allah in any way other than that of the Islamic shari'a." And the reason Spain's "historical heritage ... belongs to the followers of different religions" is because the followers of one -- to wit, Islam -- invaded the place in 711, conquering and cruelly subjugating the followers of others -- to wit, Christianity and Judaism -- and ruling until their final expulsion in 1492.

... the participants affirm the following principles: ...

5. Respecting heavenly religions, preserving their high status, condemning any insult to their symbols, and combating the exploitation of religion in the instigation of racial discrimination.

"Based on the above, the conference has adopted the following recommendations: ...

5. To work on urging governmental and non-governmental organizations to issue a document that stipulates respect for religions and their symbols, the prohibition of their denigration and the repudiation of those who commit such acts. (Emphases mine.)

This, of course, is another demand for the repression of free speech regarding Islam and its scriptures, traditions and adherents, as called for by UN Special Rapporteur "on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance" Doudou Diène in a Feb. 20 report to the UN Human Rights Council: "The main challenge is now to define the threshold for legitimately restricting freedom of expression in order to protect the victims." (Emphases mine. The report number is A/HRC/7/19; to access it on the linked page, scroll down to the number and click "E" for the English version.)

Note also the conflation of race and religion in the above, which has become standard operating procedure among Muslim propagandists.

A lie fit for a king

On the eve of the Saudi-instigated interfaith "World Conference on Dialogue" in Madrid, the Arab News has a story with several specious statements from Saudi King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz al-Saud. The most preposterous one, for my money, is this:

"We have adopted a comprehensive anti-terror strategy that not only focuses on the security side but also includes preventing financing of terrorism and dealing with its intellectual roots as well as rehabilitating the followers of deviant ideologies after giving them counseling.” (Emphasis mine.)

In view of the just-released report on hatemongering in Saudi school textbooks by the Center for Religious Freedom of the Husdon Institute, this is patently false. The center found that the textbooks "assert that unbelievers, such as Christians, Jews, and Muslims who do not share Wahhabi beliefs and practices, are hated 'enemies.' Global jihad as an 'effort to wage war against the unbelievers' is also promoted ... Lessons remain that Jews and Christians are apes and swine, Jews conspire to 'gain sole control over the world,' the Christian Crusades never ended, the American universities of Cairo and Beirut are part of the continuing Crusades, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion are historical fact, and on Judgment Day 'the rocks or the trees' will call out to Muslims to kill the Jews."

Nor is this the first, or even the second time this issue has come up. Again and again, the Saudis have been found to be filling the heads of their elementary and secondary school students with enmity toward the Western world, Christians, and Jews. Each time, officials of the kingdom solemnly assure Western media and officials that the offensive material will be removed or altered, and it never is. And yet the king of Saudi Arabia, spiritual center of the Muslim world, has the cosummate gall to assure us that his realm is "dealing with the intellectual roots" of terrorism. This flagrant lie bespeaks a contemptuous attitude that is right in line with several Qur'anic verses, notably 48:29 (Muhammad is the messenger of God, and those who are with him are hard against the unbelievers and merciful one to another ...) and 98:6 (The unbelievers ... are the worst of creatures ...).

Let the West take heed of this attitude and its scriptural wellsprings -- and wise up.

Update: Welcome, Jihad Watch readers -- and many thanks to Robert Spencer for the link.

'We all have to watch very carefully what we say'

A follow-up story in the New York Daily News on the by now-infamous Obama New Yorker cover has a couple of particularly egregious quotes. First, Mayor Michael Bloomberg:

"Mayor Bloomberg said he hadn't seen the cover, but remarked, 'I think we all have to watch very carefully what we say, our attempts at humor, our attempts at informing people, because some of what we say can be misinterpreted and do real damage.' "

Yes, best watch those attempts at informing people! Then, of course, the self-pitying, malign Council on American-Islamic Relations weighs in:

"The Council on American-Islamic Relations issued a statement denouncing the cover as an attempt to 'reduce the [Muslim] faith and its 1.5 billion followers into caricatures of themselves.' "

Awww -- poor lambs.

New Yorker editor David Remnick is mystified, as well he might be, by all the pants-wetting on the left. "I published the cover not to 'get attention' gratuitously but because it had something important to say and to provoke a discussion," he said.

Indeed there should be a discussion, and it should focus on Remnick's invidious intent: to characterize Americans' entirely legitimate apprehensions about what an Obama presidency might portend as misguided and silly. John McCain was recently heard to say his opponent was running for Jimmy Carter's second term, but that wasn't quite on the mark. What Barack Obama is running for Lyndon Johnson's second term. When one recalls the lasting damage that LBJ was able to do with his army of congressional lickspittles -- the Immigration Reform Act of 1965, the Gun Control Act of 1968, the concept of affirmative action, etc., etc. ad nauseam -- this is a decidely grim prospect. It is that which we who oppose Obama fear, not a crypto-Muslim chief executive who's a secret admirer of Bin Laden.

Unnatural cover

The Obama campaign is moistening its collective knickers over a cartoon on the New Yorker's cover this week depicting The Great Man and his bitter half as a fist-bumping pair of Third-World revolutionaries. Though its target is obviously Barack Obama's opposition, his minions are not amused. Huffed spokescreature Bill Burton, "most readers will see it as tasteless and offensive. And we agree." New Yorker editor David Remnick argued that this thin-skinned attitude is misplaced, asserting that the cartoon "combines a number of fantastical images about the Obamas and shows them for the obvious distortions they are."

Both sides miss the point. What's really a distortion about this cartoon is the way it mocks the entirely legitimate apprehensions the Obamas engender in most Americans through their own words and proposals.

People don't perceive Michelle Obama as a Black Panther; they perceive her as snappish, bossy, arrogant and resentful because of her statements about Americans being "mean," "cynical," and having "broken souls" inflicted by a country where "folks set the bar, and then you work hard and you reach the bar -- sometimes you surpass the bar -- and then they move the bar!" (That this beastly state of affairs hasn't prevented her from waltzing into a $121,910-a-year job that bestowed upon her a raise to $316,962 in one year is lost upon no one -- except, perhaps, the oh-so-sophisticated editors of the New Yorker.) Her declaration that "Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed" was also, to put it politely, grating.

And they don't worry about Obama putting up a poster of Bin Laden in the Oval Office, they worry about him using the power of that office to compromise their most fundamental rights, including the right to free expression. Consider his recent assertion that "hate crimes against Hispanic people doubled last year" because a "certain segment has basically been feeding a kind of xenophobia" and "Rush Limbaugh and Lou Dobbs" have been "ginning things up." This clearly indicates that Obama views "ginning things up" through criticism of a self-designated victim group as tantamount to inciting hate crimes, and therefore esentially a hate crime in its own right. Accordingly, what might his response be to the demands of Secretary General of the Organization of the Islamic Conference Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu and U.N. Special Rapporteur "on racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related forms of intolerance" Doudou Diène for laws against the "scourge" of "Islamophobia," intended to silence those of us who have the temerity to resist the encroachment of Islamic supremacism through exposure, analysis, criticism and raillery?

At first glance, the New Yorker's snarky send-up seems rather puckish -- but a hard look at the propsect of an Obama presidency brings to mind a line from an old radio show: " 'Tain't funny, McGee!"

A Muhammad cartoon push back

The Dutch cartoonist Gregorius Nekschot, whose government is persecuting him for drawing cartoons making mock of Islam and its adherents, has a Web site on which his drawings appear -- including a caricature of "the prophet" Muhammad. In solidarity with Nekschot, and as a thumb in the eye of Muhammad's present-day followers and a push back against their odious campaign against freedom of expression, I'm posting it here.

A Dutch-speaking commenter at Gates of Vienna kindly provided a translation of the text per my request. The header translates as, "By modern day standards, Allah would be considered extreme-right wing." The word balloon by the image says, "Mister Sybrand van Haersma Buma ... kill the unbelievers wherever you find them -- Sura 2:191, Sura 4:89, Sura 4:91."

"Sybrand van Haersma Buma," the commenter explains, "is a CDA politician who advocates the idea that freedom of speech is OK, but that it should be exercised with 'responsibility,' 'respect,' and so on." "CDA" stands for "Christian Democratic Appeal," the largest and most mainstream political party in the Netherlands. Its leader, Jan Peter Balkenende, is the country's current prime minister.

Verses 2:191, 4:89 and 4:91 of the Qur'an exhort Muslims, respectively, to "slay (the unbelievers) wherever ye catch them," to "seize them and slay them wherever ye find them," and to "seize them and slay them wherever ye get them." (Muhammad, it seems, knew all about "staying on message.")

A Nekschot across our bow

The weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal has a long piece on the persecution of the Dutch cartoonist Gregorius Nekschot by the Netherlands government, a case that Gates of Vienna has been following closely.

Nekschot (a nom de plume) was arrested on May 13 "on suspicion of publishing work which discriminates against Muslims and 'people with dark skins,' " according to the online DutchNews. The arrest, made pursuant to what the Journal termed an "inquiry ... led by an Amsterdam prosecutor unit that specializes in combating neo-Nazis and other hate-mongers," included the confiscation of Nekschot's computer, sketch pads and a hard drive, and the incarceration of the cartoonist overnight. This was the culmination of a three-year investigation of Nekschot "on suspicion that he violated a Dutch law that forbids discrimination on the basis of race, religion or sexual orientation."

That is exactly the kind of law that the likes of Secretary General of the Organization of the Islamic Conference Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu and U.N. Special Rapporteur "on racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related forms of intolerance" Doudou Diène have been pressing Western countries to adopt in order to combat what Ihsanoglu has called the "scourge" of "Islamophobia." That such laws would run roughshod over the fundamental human right to free expression is no concern of theirs; the protection of Islam and its adherents from exposure, analysis, criticism and mockery trumps any such trifles. Speaking to a meeting of OIC foreign ministers in Kampala, Uganda June 18, Ihsanoglu declared "Islamophobia" to be "at the top of our priorities and preoccupations" and bragged that "In confronting the Danish cartoons and the Dutch film 'Fitna', we sent a clear message to the West regarding the red lines that should not be crossed." In a report Diène submitted Feb. 20 to the U.N. Human Rights Council (the report number is A/HRC/7/19; to access it, scroll down to the number and click "E" for the English version), the Senagalese lawyer asserted that "The main challenge is now to define the threshold for legitimately restricting freedom of expression in order to protect the victims." (Emphases mine.)

A Dutch parliamentary inquiry into the Nekschot arrest, the Journal reports, has brought to light something ominous: the existence within the Netherlands government of "a previously secret bureaucratic body, called the Interdepartmental Working Group on Cartoons. ... Headed by a senior bureaucrat from a national agency coordinating counterterrorism, it draws from the intelligence service, the interior minister, the prosecutor's office and various other government bodies." Dutch officials say this group, set up after the Muslim world's tantrum over the Danish Muhammad cartoons in 2006, has "no censorship duties" and "played no part in (Nekschot's) arrest," but such assurances are cold comfort. That a Western government should be so concerned about Ihsanoglu's "red lines" as to have set up such a body is enough to make any freedom-loving person's flesh crawl.

Nor should it be imagined that the United States is all that far away from a European-style designation of certain types of free expression as "hate crimes." Listen to the speeches of presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama as he declares that "hate crimes against Hispanic people doubled last year" because a "certain segment has basically been feeding a kind of xenophobia" and "Rush Limbaugh and Lou Dobbs" have been "ginning things up." It is quite clear that Obama views "ginning things up" through criticism of a self-designated victim group as tantamount to inciting hate crimes, and therefore esentially a hate crime in its own right. What "secret bureaucratic bodies" might his administration, backed by a heavily Democratic Congress, set up to deal with those of us who have the temerity to resist the encroachment of Islamic supremacism through the exercise of our right to free expression?

Abu al-Whipple?

The London-based Arabic-language newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat caught Abu Qatada, a notorious jihadist recently released from a British prison, indulging in a sensual infidel pleasure -- squeezing the Charmin!


Isn't there some Qur'anic injunction against such depravity?

(Hat tip: Weasel Zippers.)

Melanie Phillips nails it

Her excellent piece in the UK Daily Mail on the day after the third anniversary of the London subway and bus attacks includes this succinct summing up of Old Blighty's situation:

Britain still doesn't grasp that it is facing a pincer attack from both terrorism and cultural infiltration and usurpation.

Phillips goes on to explain how this is happening, and so numerous are the parallels to what is afoot in the U.S. -- though at an earlier stage -- that her piece strikes a distinct chill. Examples:

Believing that Islamic terrorism is motivated by an ideology which has 'hijacked' and distorted Islam, (the government) will not acknowledge the extremism within mainstream Islam itself.

No less a personage than the president of the United States has consistently pushed this patently spurious notion. For example, George W. Bush assured all and sundry on Oct. 11, 2002, that "Our enemy doesn't follow the great traditions of Islam. They've hijacked a great religion."

... the universities are steadily being Islamised, with academic objectivity in the teaching of Islam and Middle East studies being set aside in favour of indoctrination and propaganda.

See Martin Kramer's Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Studies in America for details of how this has also been happening in the U.S.

Deeply alarmed sources have furthermore told me that, in the overriding concern by police forces to hire more ethnic minority officers, they have junked vetting criteria -- particularly when it comes to hiring Police Community Support Officers, who after two years can become fully fledged police officers with no further vetting required. The result, say these sources, is that the security of police operations is potentially compromised.

Normal vetting procedures were also junked at the Pentagon in the case of Hesham Islam, a top aide to Deputy Secretary of Defense Gordon England and a Cairo-born Muslim who remains at his post despite a resume that was shown to be shot through with lacunae and falsehoods during the recent controversy over the status of Pentagon analyst Stephen Coughlin, author of a trenchant treatise on Islam and jihad.

Phillips's piece is a must-read, as is her book Londonistan.

(Hat tip to KafirCanada for the image.)

A festive occasion

The UK Daily Mail reports that one of the London suicide bomber's families is marking the third anniversary of his atrocity with a celebration:

"A party is being held at the grave of a 7/7 bomber in what is being seen as an insult to the 52 London commuters murdered three years ago today.

"The family of Shehzad Tanweer and 400 guests will 'celebrate his life' and 'remember him as a martyr' at a village in Pakistan.

"Tanweer, 22, along with Mohammad Sidique Khan, 30, Hasib Hussain, 18, and 19-year-old Jermaine Lindsay, died when they detonated rucksack bombs on three crowded Tube trains and a No.30 bus."

MP Andrew Dismore assured the Mail that "Most Muslims would be absolutely horrified, as I am, that Shehzad Tanweer is being remembered by some people as a martyr."

Wanna bet?

'Let them find in you a harshness'

Islam in Europe and Gates of Vienna both have reports today on a campaign of harassment and intimidation against Greenlanders (Danes of Inuit extraction) by Muslim Arabs and Somalis in the Gjellerup Park district of Århus, Denmark, the intensity of which has now caused several residents to flee the place.

"Greenlanders in Gjellerup are assaulted, humiliated, and have stones thrown at them," the Danish newspaper Århus Stiftstidende reported. "These citizens from the northernmost part of Denmark mostly stay put in their apartments, afraid to go out in the open."


“They are targeting us a group. I’ve tried to tell them that we are Danes, born into Danish citizenship. They don’t understand it,” Johanne Christiansen, 47, a resident of Gjellerup for 16 years, told the paper. “My heart still misses a beat or two when I encounter young Arabs."

Oh, they understand it quite well. Their behavior and its results are, after all, very much in accordance with at least two Qur'anic verses: 48:29, which stipulates that Muslims are "hard against the unbelievers, merciful one to another," and 9:123, which exhorts them to "fight the unbelievers who are near to you, and let them find in you a harshness."

This state of affairs sounds like a matter a UN special rapporteur "on racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia, and related forms of intolerance" might address. But as with the plight of Egypt's Copts, don't expect the man who currently holds that post to get on the case anytime soon. Doudou Diène is far more concerned with building a spurious case against "Islamophobia" than taking a stand against the genuine, scripturally based xenophobia that has put Islam and its adherents in such a bad odor.

Blurring the line

The ever-informative Raymond Ibrahim, translator and editor of The Al-Qaeda Reader, notes in a post at Jihad Watch this morning that Shahid Malik, the British government's first Muslim minister, is "trying to subtly conflate race and religion" in remarks on British TV reported in the UK Telegraph.

Another practitioner of this gambit is UN Special Rapporteur "on racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related forms of intolerance" Doudou Diène in his recent reports to the UN Human Rights Council:

"The Special Rapporteur invites the Council, in measures adopted to combat racism and discrimination, to take fully into account the increasing intertwining of race, ethnicity, culture and religion that characterizes the current political and ideological context ..."

-- Report to the UN Human Rights Council, Aug. 21, 2007, p. 20, Item 75 (The report number is A/HRC/6/6; to access it, scroll down to the number and click "E" for the English version.)

"The growth of incitement to racial and religious hatred and the resurgence of manifestations of anti-Semitism, Christianophobia and, more particularly, Islamophobia ... can be attributed to the following: conflation of race, culture and religion ... and the supervisory and security-based approach to the practice and teaching of Islam."

-- Report to the UN Human Rights Council, Feb. 20, 2008, p. 5, Item 6 (The report number is A/HRC/7/19; to access it, scroll down to the number and click "E" for the English version.)

"Throughout his term of office, the Special Rapporteur has highlighted one of the central causes of the resurgence of racism and its increasing complexity: the conflation of racial, cultural and religious factors."

-- Ibid., p.15, Item 54

It bears noting that Diène just completed a two-week tour of the United States, during which he was shepherded around the country by the ACLU to listen to the complaints of sundry racial activists. His office has announced that his report on the tour will be released next spring -- most likely on the eve of the "Durban II" conference in Geneva at which "Islamophobia" will be the primary bugbear.

This we'll defend

Robert Spencer has a magnificent post up at Jihad Watch for the Fourth of July, laying out "what we must defend" (in America) and "what we must defend it against" (in Islam). His list:

1. Freedom of religion
2. Freedom of speech
3. Equality of rights before the law
4. Governments deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed

To which this correspondent would add the following:

5. The people's right to keep and bear arms

What we must defend:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

-- Amendment II, United States Constitution

What we must defend it against:

We shall not mount on saddles, nor shall we gird swords nor bear any kind of arms nor carry them on our persons.

-- The Pact of Umar, forced upon the conquered Christians of Syria and the template for all subsquent dhimma pacts

Spencer concludes with this stirring exhortation:

Never surrender. Never submit. Never be silenced. Freedom and independence forever.

Nothing whatever to add to that.

Disarmament for thee, but not for me

The New York Times "Campaign Stops" blog has a post this morning noting that

" ... Barack Obama has decided that when it comes to guns, discretion is the better part of victory. ... The Senator’s advisers are clearly not very interested in advertising their candidate’s thinking on this issue. Most of the Democratic Party base is made up of fierce gun-control advocates. But after eight long years in the political wilderness, they want to win, badly. So it’s easy to understand why they’re willing to tolerate a little bit of strategic silence from their standard-bearer, even on an issue so close to their hearts."

In an April 25 interview with the Chicago Sun-Times, the Great One was more candid:

"We've got to tighten up our gun laws. ... local communities, and state governments, as well as the federal government, have a right to common-sense regulations and firearm ownership [rules] ... There has not been any evidence that allowing people to carry a concealed weapon is going to make anybody safer."

Obama's attitude on carrying concealed weapons does not, of course, preclude him from traveling about the country surrounded by a phalanx of people who are doing just that -- to wit, his Secret Service detail.

But what has this to do with the Counterjihad? Simply this: Though not a Muslim himself (his prolonged exposure to the creed in childhood notwithstanding),in his zeal to deny the hoi polloi the protection he himself enjoys, Obama's attitude echoes that of the second of the "rightly guided" caliphs, Umar, who launched the original jihad that spread Islam beyond the Arabian peninsula. Umar it was who originated the dhimma, the pact under which peoples the Muslim horde had conquered could keep the sword of jihad from their necks by paying jizya (protection money) and agreeing to a state of subjugation that included this proviso:

We shall not mount on saddles, nor shall we gird swords nor bear any kind of arms nor carry them on our persons.

Umar's program stemmed directly from Muhammad's dictum in Qur'an 9:29:

Fight those who believe not in Allah, nor in the Last Day, nor forbid that which has been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, and those who acknowledge not the religion of truth among the People of the Scripture, until they pay the Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued.

In his tafsir (commentary) on 9:29, the 14th century commentator Ibn Kathir, whose views yet carry weight in the Muslim world, interpreted “subdued” as

disgraced, humiliated, and belittled. Therefore, Muslims are not allowed to honor the people of Dhimmah or elevate them above Muslims, for they are miserable, disgraced, and humiliated.

Nor is the Islamic imperative to disarm the infidel a thing of the past. As recently as 2002 Ibn Kathir’s proscription was repeated almost verbatim in a sermon at a Mecca mosque by Sheikh Marzouq Salem al-Ghamdi, who specified “conditions” for resident infidels requiring that they “do not ... arm themselves with any kind of weapon ...”

Obama's "strategic silence" on his gun-control plans is of a piece with his efforts to publicly distance himself from Islam, and both have the same intent: to gull Americans into accepting a candidacy inimical to their most fundamental rights.

Special Rapporteur silent on Copts' suffering

Raymond Ibrahim, translator and editor of the indispensable Al-Qaeda Reader, has a report at Dhimmi Watch about a May 31 attack on the Coptic Abu Fana monastery in El-Menya, Egypt, by some 70 armed Bedouins that left numerous monks badly injured. His cogent commentary leaves no doubt that this was a Muslim pogrom:

"Father Antonias, who was there, said that many 'disparaging' words were hurled against Christianity by the Muslim assailants during their rampage, which, incidentally, included the destruction of altars and torching of Bibles. As the Bedouin terrorists were destroying the monastery, for instance, one monk reached for the cross, to which one of the Arab assailants mocked: 'Hah! Let’s see if the cross saves you!' to which the stoic monk replied, 'Truly, you do not know the power of the cross.' "

Hard on the heels of this incident came another assault on Egypt's Copts, this one on June 19 in Al-Nazla. As the site of the Free Copts reports, "The attackers shouted 'Allah Akbar' and 'Kill the infidels' as they hurled stones at their Christian neighbors’ homes." The June 19 pogrom also included the following:

* Stones were hurled at St. Mary’s Church, shattering the windows
* Stones were also hurled at the house of Father Shenouda Moussa
* A hairdresser’s salon was vandalised and the hairdressers beaten. It was however spared from burning because the owner of the building is a local Muslim
* A chemist owned by a Christian local, Dr. Adeed, suffered some damages
* Damages to two phone/internet facilities owned by Christians
* A truck owned by Gamil Hanna was completely destroyed
* A chicken farm owned by Gamil Hanna Farag was looted and burned
* A two-story building owned by Boulos Fouad was burned
* Mr. Ezzat Labib, member of the city council, was beaten and his brother Kamal Labib also seriously injured
* The mob attacked the house of Hanna Melik and beat him and his family
* A wholesale deli owned by Milad Awad was looted
* Mrs. Mimi Awad’s home was broken into and burgled

Will the United Nations, in the person of its Special Rapporteur "on racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related forms of intolerance" Doudou Diène, address the plight of the Copts? That, I take leave to doubt: after all, Mr. Diène has far more pressing duties to attend to -- to wit, laying the propaganda groundwork for next April's "Durban II" conference in Geneva, at which "Islamophobia" will be at the forefront of the agenda.

Mr. Diène's religious affiliation has been carefully omitted from all three of the thumbnail biographies I could find of him on the Web (at the sites of his own UN office, the Organization of American States, and the ACLU), but as he hails from Senegal, a country with a 95 percent Muslim population whose national motto is "Un Peuple, Un But, Une Foi" ("One People, One Goal, One Faith"), it may plausibly be surmised that the Abu Fana monastery's attackers were his co-religionists -- and that his silence in the face of this outrage reflects Muhammad's dictum in Qur'an 48:29:

Muhammad is the Messenger of God, and those with him are hard against the unbelievers, merciful one to another.

Addendum: The Free Copts site notes that a resolution, HR 1303, has been introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives that calls upon the Egyptian Government to respect human rights and freedoms of religion and expression in Egypt. A letter or e-mail to your representative requesting support for it would be time well spent.

Our only 'inherent' responsibility: Resistance

Addressing the Council of Foreign Ministers of his organization in Kampala, Uganda Wednesday, Secretary General of the Organization of the Islamic Conference Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu declared that "Islamophobia" is "at the top of our priorities and preoccupations" and laid out the OIC's "large-scale world-wide effort to confront it" -- an effort that includes having "exhorted the officials in these countries to assume their inherent legal responsibilities in order to stem this illegal trend in conformity with international and domestic laws which prohibit discrimination based on incitement to hatred towards individuals or groups because of their religion, race, or other grounds."

Moreover, Ihsanoglu continued, "In confronting the Danish cartoons and the Dutch film 'Fitna', we sent a clear message to the West regarding the red lines that should not be crossed. As we speak, the official West and its public opinion are all now well-aware of the sensitivities of these issues. They have also started to look seriously into the question of freedom of expression from the perspective of its inherent responsibility, which should not be overlooked." (Emphases mine.)

The OIC chief laid out a four-point plan for dealing with "this scourge," as he called "Islamophobia," and noted that "We have established an OIC Group in Washington D.C., with the aim of playing a more active role in engaging American policy makers." The entire speech may be read here, and Baron Bodissey has a fine post on it at Gates of Vienna.

The only responsibility regarding "Islamophobia" that can legitimately be regarded as "inherent" is the responsibility of free people to resist that spurious concept's use to infringe their right to analyze, criticize and expose the likes of Ihsanoglu and his odious creed. As Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence, affirmed in that deathless document, our right to liberty, of which the right to free expression is so fundamental a part, is unalienable, being an endowment of our Creator. The OIC's vile propaganda jihad against it must accordingly be fought with the utmost determination.

The Great White-Guilt Hope

I want YOU











to stop being mean to me
because I'm black!

Diène and Obama – a perfect storm?

Ominous developments are afoot in the struggle to preserve the right to free expression against Islamic efforts to abrogate it. In Geneva, Switzerland next April, the UN will convene yet another conference "against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance" ("Durban II"), whose focus is going to be on "Islamophobia" -- an event for which UN Special Rapporteur "on racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related forms of intolerance" Doudou Diène has been assiduously laying the intellectual and rhetorical groundwork. Were this to occur three months after the inauguration of Barack Obama and a lopsidedly Democratic Congress, it could create a "perfect storm" of conditions for repression of the Counterjihad through "hate speech" legislation. Consider the following statements by Diène and Obama:

"A certain segment has basically been feeding a kind of xenophobia. There’s a reason why hate crimes against Hispanic people doubled last year. If you have people like Lou Dobbs and Rush Limbaugh ginning things up, it’s not surprising that would happen.”

-- Obama, remarks to gathering of donors at the Westin Hotel, Palm Beach, Florida, May 22, 2008

"There is a consequence to the demagoguery [over immigration]--hate crimes against Latinos have gone way up over the last year. We've also seen over the last several months this epidemic of nooses being hung all across the country since the events down in Jena, Louisiana. ... So, what can we do to strengthen the enforcement of hate crimes legislation? It is something that I will prioritize as president but I don't want to have to wait until I am."

-- Obama, remarks at the Iowa Brown and Black Presidential Forum, Des Moines, Iowa, Dec. 1, 2007

"From the day I take office as President, America will have a Justice Department that is truly dedicated to the work it began in the days after Little Rock. I will rid the department of ideologues and political cronies, and for the first time in eight years, the Civil Rights Division will actually be staffed with civil rights lawyers who prosecute civil rights violations, and employment discrimination, and hate crimes."

-- Obama, speech at Howard University, Washington, D.C., Sept. 28, 2007

"The ideological dimension of Islamophobia is directly connected to its intellectual legitimization as currently reflected in a number of so-called intellectuals and political and social commentators that put forward openly Islamophobic statements, including explicit defamation of Islam. In particular, one may note that a number of Islamophobic statements have been falsely claimed to be scientific or scholarly, in order to give intellectual clout to arguments that link Islam to violence and terrorism. Furthermore, the manipulation and selective quoting of sacred texts, in particular the Koran, as a means to deceptively argue that these texts show the violent nature of Islam has become current practice."

Diène, report to the UN Human Rights Council, Aug. 21, 2007, p. 9, Item 23 (The report number is A/HRC/6/6; to access it, scroll down to the number and click "E" for the English version.)

"The main challenge is now to define the threshold for legitimately restricting freedom of expression in order to protect the victims."

Diène, report to the UN Human Rights Council, Feb. 20, 2008, p. 15, Item 53 (The report number is A/HRC/7/19; to access it, scroll down to the number and click "E" for the English version.)

A big win in Denmark

The Western High Court of Denmark has ruled against Danish Muslims who had sued the newspaper Jyllands-Posten for publishing 12 caricatures of their creed's prophet Muhammad in 2005. The Muslims charged that the paper had defamed their religion and its prophet, but the court, according to an International Herald Tribune report, "ruled that terror acts have been carried out in the name of Islam, and that it was not illegal under Danish law to make satirical drawings to illustrate that."

This is excellent news, and a firm rebuke to those who have sought sanctions against Jyllands-Posten, advancing spurious claims of "hate speech." Among them are self-described "Muslim African-American law professor" Bernard Freamon of of Seton Hall University Law School, who claimed in a Feb. 19, 2006 article in The Jurist that "Muslims are ... very right to vigorously condemn the publication of the cartoons and to seek to punish the editors through the criminal law process" and called Danish prosecutors' refusal to charge Jyllands-Posten's editor under a "hate speech" statute "a patent abuse of their discretion and a blatantly political decision."

"They ought to revisit it," Freamon declared. "The issue should be decided by a Danish court." Now it has, and the ruling is a big win for those of us determined to defend our right to free expression in the face of Islam's worldwide campaign to abrogate it.

Muslim zealots, however, are determined to see their critics silenced. Appallingly, for an American law professor, Freamon in his Jurist article questioned "the continued viability of a liberal and universalist approach to free expression in our rapidly changing and increasingly pluralist world," and the spurious concept of "Islamophobia" is specifically designed to undermine that viability. In his Feb. 20 report to the United Nations Human Rights Council (the report number is A/HRC/7/19; to access it, scroll down to the number and click "E" for the English version), Special Rapporteur "on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance" Doudou Diène decried the "selective and political interpretations of human rights and fundamental freedoms, manifested inter alia by the ideological pre-eminence of freedom of expression" (Item 6, p. 5) and "the growing trend of defamation of religions arising from the following factors: the conflation of race, culture and religion; the growing use of religion for political ends; and the intellectual and ideological questioning of religion" (Item 56, p. 16). To equate "intellectual and ideological questioning" with "defamation" and to assert that the defense of one's right to it is "selective and political" is rhetorical tyranny, the object of which Diène makes clear in his statement that "The main challenge is now to define the threshold for legitimately restricting freedom of expression" (Item 53, p. 15 -- emphases mine).

Let all who cherish their right to say and publish what they think take heed of the words of Thomas Jefferson in his Notes on the State of Virginia in 1782: "The time to guard against corruption and tyranny, is before they shall have gotten hold of us. It is better to keep the wolf out of the fold, than to trust to drawing his teeth and claws after he shall have entered."

The way to avoid trauma

A 92-year-old survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising against the Nazis in 1943, one of the last such, died in Israel over the weekend. According to the Jerusalem Post, when Stephan Grayek was asked, in an interview twenty years, ago, why he had escaped the lasting trauma so common among survivors of the Nazi genocide attempt, he replied, "Perhaps because, like other people in the resistance, I fought back."

The menace to free expression

At his indispensable news site JihadWatch, Robert Spencer has posted a grim warning on the present danger to the right of free expression. Citing an article in today's New York Times noting American exceptionalism in allowing the expression of sentiments that in most other Western nations run afoul of "hate speech" laws, he warns that "We are far closer to restrictions on free speech than most people realize, with even the Times quoting learned analysts in favor of such restrictions." He points out that under laws of this sort, "true statements about Islam and jihad will be suppressed, and precisely as Islamic supremacists are pressing forward as never before with their program of stealth jihad against the West." He notes that United Nations Special Rapporteur "on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance" Doudou Diène "is working on restricting free speech, and American Muslims are helping him."

An indication of Diène's efforts in this regard may be seen in a report the Senegalese lawyer submitted Feb. 20 to the Human Rights Council (the report number is A/HRC/7/19; to access it, scroll down to the number and click "E" for the English version). In this document, he denounces "trivialization of racism and xenophobia, particularly through its use as a political tool." This, he maintains, is creating "ethical, psychological and political conditions that have directly contributed to the increase in incitement to racial and religious hatred."

"Futhermore," he asserts, "the ideological context is characterized by the emergence of rhetoric based on the notion of a conflict of civilizations and religions, as reflected in the discourse of certain political, intellectual and media elites." Therefore, he declares, "The main challenge is now to define the threshold for legitimately restricting freedom of expression in order to protect the victims." (Emphases mine.) Diène attempts to suger-coat this poisonous pill with soothing talk of "strengthening the complementarity of freedom of expression, freedom of religion and belief, and the discouragement of racial, ethnic or religious hatred," but what he is calling for is crystal clear: the repression of any discussion or analysis of a "conflict of civilizations and religions" -- to wit, the global jihad -- that may plainly be seen by anyone unhampered by the willful blindness of the real "political, intellectual and media elites."

Earth to Doudou Diène: The "complementarity" (which Webster's defines as "necessary interrelationship or correspondence") of freedom of expression and the discouragement of hatred needs no strengthening by the likes of you. It already exists, and every day, every hour, it manifests itself when the former is used to accomplish the latter. Under your notion of "legitimately restricting freedom of expression," the discouragement of hatred would in fact be weakened, not strengthened -- becaused those who dare to criticize, analyze or make mock of the hatred, the intolerance, and the tyrannical aspirations at the center of Islam's global jihad would be barred from doing so by the coercive power of the state.

But that will not happen. Restrictions on free expression are not and cannot be legitimate, and we who defend the right thereto will resist them as long as there is breath in our bodies. We are not so few as you might think, and we are resourceful. We are resolved. And we will not submit.