GreensPiece

Not too bad to be true

2010-02-20T07:23:00.000-08:00

This report appeared in the online Washington Times today:

"Apostasy killing of former Muslims could become widespread in the United States if the U.S. government and Americans don't "wake up," a panel of three former Muslims said on Capitol Hill Thursday.

"The talk, hosted by three members of the new civil rights organization Former Muslims United, marked the first public appearance as a self-proclaimed "apostate" of Iranian journalist Amil Imani, president of the group. Imani and the panel's two other speakers, authors Nonie Darwish and Wafa Sultan, told the audience that ingrained American religious and ethnic tolerance and myths about Islam are combining to gravely threaten the West."

A Muslim commenter going by the handle of "mustafakhattab" quibbled that "nowhere in the Qur'an will anyone find a verse say kill the apostates [sic]" and enquired, "Isn't what they say too bad to be true?!" No, it isn't. As "mustafakhattab" doubtless knows very well, Muhammad's mandate to kill apostates is found not in the Qur'an but in a hadith in Sahih Bukhari (Volume 9, Book 84, Number 57):

Narrated 'Ikrima: Some Zanadiqa (atheists) were brought to 'Ali and he burnt them. The news of this event, reached Ibn 'Abbas who said, "If I had been in his place, I would not have burnt them, as Allah's Apostle forbade it, saying, 'Do not punish anybody with Allah's punishment (fire).' I would have killed them according to the statement of Allah's Apostle, 'Whoever changed his Islamic religion, then kill him.' "

A stirring event

2010-02-19T20:54:00.000-08:00

This morning I attended the Freedom Defense Initiative’s inaugural event at the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel in Washington, D.C. Held in tandem with the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, this event was arranged by Jihad Watch director Robert Spencer, Islam’s most trenchant contemporary critic, and Pamela Geller, compiler of the outstanding Atlas Shrugs blog.

This was a stirring event with dynamic speakers, each with a compelling story. Former Defense Department analyst Stephen Coughlin was exceedingly informative, and his point that official American self-censorship regarding Islam and jihad has given the enemy a "decisive victory in the information battlespace" was truly chilling. Coughlin, whose perceptions got him crosswise with Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England’s Muslim sidekick Hesham Islam and later excluded from the DoD, insisted that those entrusted with protecting Americans from Islamic terrorism have a “professional duty to know” about the roots of said terrorism’s doctrine in Islamic scripture and tradition. After all, he pointed out, the murderous rampage at Fort Hood, Texas, by Muslim U.S. Army Major Nidal Hasan had a “doctrinal driver,” as evinced by Hasan’s own presentation to his Army medical colleagues calling for Muslim service personnel to be accorded conscientious objector status lest “adverse events” occur. The enemy, Coughlin observed, has stated his doctrine. Can we, he enquired, be politically correct and threat-focused at the same time? No way – because, he concluded, “You cannot defeat an enemy you will not define.” Coughlin's thesis on jihad doctrine may be accessed here. It is lengthy but gripping, and is a must-read.

Psychiatrist Wafa Sultan, a native of Syria and now an American, gave a ringing indictment of Islam – a creed, she declared, that is “not merely a religion but an extremely dangerous adversary that aspires to world domination.” Sultan, who had the grit to take on a Muslim cleric in his own Arabic tongue on Al-Jazeera TV, pointed out that the Islamic teachings cited by Muslims who demand an exemption for their co-religionists from new airport scanning techniques are the very teachings that motivated 19 Muslims to fly airliners into the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon on 9/11, thus necessitating the scanning in the first place. This she characterized as “absolutely outrageous.” She concluded by quoting Thomas Paine in her exhortation to resist Islam "now - right now!" Sultan has written a book about her experiences, titled “A God Who Hates: The Courageous Woman Who Inflamed the Muslim World Speaks Out Against the Evils of Islam” (St. Martin’s Press).

Simon Deng, African-born and now an American, appeared, he said, as "a voice for those who have no voice," remaining as they do under Islam's yoke in his native Sudan. He told of being captured by Arab bands as a child and enslaved for three years. But today, he declared, “I stand before you as a free man in a free nation.” He warned Americans against complacency in the face of the international jihad. Anders Gravers of Denmark, leader of SIOE (Stop the Islamisation of Europe) and Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff of Austria, who is facing spurious “hate speech” charges in her native country, spoke eloquently about the grim situation regarding Islam and free speech in Europe. And Allen West, a retired U.S. Army light colonel and a candidate for Congress in the 22nd District of Florida, referred in his talk to the Treaty of Hudibayah and Muhammad's letter to the Byzantine Emperor Heraclius, showing that he has read into the history of Islamic imperialism (truly a rarity among politicians). “Sharia (Islamic law) is incompatible with who we are,” he declared, pointedly adding that “I’m not living as a dhimmi (Islamic subject).” He concluded by quoting Ronald Reagan’s succinct policy - “We win, they lose!” – in which the crowd joined in, giving him a thunderous ovation afterwards.

This event was a great lift. Listening to these brave leaders gave me hope and rekindled my own resolve. Kudos to Robert and Pamela for getting them together and ensuring they were heard.

Photo credit: Pamela Geller

A fit over Fitna

2009-03-02T17:11:00.000-08:00

Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch, Pamela Geller of Atlas Shrugs, Baron Bodissey of Gates of Vienna and Andrew Bostom have all covered Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders' triumphal Washington appearance last week far better than I could hope to. Suffice it to note that among the scurrilous Islamic/leftist reactions to Wilders' presentation was a post by Muslim activist Eboo Patel, who slagged the Dutchman as a "foreign element threatening America" in his Washington Post/Newsweek blog. Patel also noted that Muslim congressman and former Nation of Islam activist Keith Ellison (AKA Keith E. Hakim, Keith X Ellison, and Keith Ellison-Muhammad), D-Minn., compared the Capitol screening of Wilders' documentary film Fitna "to screening the horribly racist film The Birth of the Nation in the White House."

Patel went on to rhetorically bleat, "Shouldn't Capitol Hill be amplifying our tradition of pluralism rather than returning to the dark days of racism?" (as though resistance to Muslim aggression has anything whatever to do with race) and "Should we engage one-fifth of the world's population by punching them in the mouth or by reaching our hand out in friendship?" (The question raised by Fitna, of course, is just who has been punching whom.) Patel is the head of something called the Interfaith Youth Core and appears to be a great favorite of the tax-funded "public" media. It is accordingly unlikely that this is the last we'll hear of him.

The Rocky crumbles

2009-02-26T14:33:00.000-08:00

The Rocky Mountain News of Denver, established in 1859, is shutting down as of Friday.

This is very wretched news indeed, for the paper was one of only three major ones in the United States to have run any of the Danish Muhammad cartoons during the international propaganda jihad against them in February 2006. (The other two were the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Austin American-Statesman.) Remarked editor John Temple at the time:

"This whole experience of publishing these cartoons has been enough for me to want to wear a Danish flag pin in solidarity with that country and to regret -- at least during this test of journalism's commitment to free speech -- my membership in the American Society of Newspaper Editors."

However that may have been, at least Temple had the satisfaction of doing the right thing -- of standing in solidarity with his fellow journalists in Denmark, of defending the freedom of the press worldwide, and of pushing back against Islam's odious demands for self-censorship. My own paper, the East Valley Tribune of Mesa, Arizona, faltered in this regard despite my entreaties that it do likewise, prompting my eventual resignation in protest.

Today Temple told his staff, "To me, this is the very sad end of a beautiful thing." Amen to that.

Obama writes Ihsanoglu

2009-02-01T20:50:00.000-08:00

BHO says the United States can work with the Organization of the Islamic Conference and that he will strive to improve relations with the group, according to a letter he has sent to OIC Secretary General Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu.

Really? And how does this promise of comity square with the conflict between our core value of free expression, affirmed by the First Amendment to our Consititution, and Item VII, Clause 3 of the OIC's "Ten-Year Programme of Action: "Endeavor to have the United Nations adopt an international resolution to counter Islamophobia, and call upon all States to enact laws to counter it, including deterrent punishments"? (Emphasis mine.)

On the third anniversary of the outbreak of Muslim rage over the Danish Muhammad cartoons, and at a time when Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders faces prosecution in his homeland for his pointed criticism of Islam and its adherents, this is hardly an academic question. It is all the more acute in view of the OIC's proposal to hold an "anti-Islamophobia" conference in the United States this year, made by Ihsanoglu to the Malaysian government last summer. 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." Moreover, the Malaysian newspaper The Star reported, the Malaysian government pitched the idea of this conference "to the US representative to the OIC during an earlier meeting in Kuala Lumpur."

BHO's letter to the OIC raises the question of how his administration will respond to the group's demand for laws criminalizing criticism, analysis, exposure and mockery of Islam and its followers -- particularly when said demand is being made in his own country. He will be under intense political pressure to accede to it; a pressure that his own truckling efforts at "outreach" will only have exacerbated.

Update: Jihad Watch, The Jawa Report and Atlas Shrugs now have posts on this. Many thanks to all for getting the word out.

An open letter to James Taranto

2009-01-16T14:56:00.000-08:00

In today's edition of "Best of the Web Today" -- always a must-read -- the Wall Street Journal's James Taranto made a proposal that prompted the following:

Dear Mr. Taranto:

Your proposal that the term "Islamic supremacy" be used in preference to "terrorism" is sound. However, it behooves you to note that this term has been in use for at least a couple of years at the Jihad Watch website by Robert Spencer, the eminent scholar and polemicist who, as far as I am aware, was the man who coined it.

Moreover, you speak of "non-supremacist Muslims" -- a term that is quite problematic, in view of the sundry verses of the Qur'an assuring Muslims that they are "the best of peoples" (e.g., verse 3:110) and that unbelievers are "the worst of creatures" (e.g., verse 98:6). Given the status of such characterizations in Islam as the eternal, uncreated word of God, passed down to Muhammad through the angel Gabriel, how many genuinely "non-supremacist" Muslims can there be? Few if any, I venture to suggest.

Sincerely,

Paul Green

At war? Absolutely.

2008-12-18T16:34:00.000-08:00

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.'

2008-11-10T09:24:00.000-08:00

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

2008-10-31T08:47:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-28T21:10:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-01T08:06:00.000-07:00

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

2008-09-28T22:32:00.000-07:00

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

2008-09-26T12:41:00.000-07:00

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

2008-09-23T16:54:00.000-07:00

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?

2008-09-04T08:04:00.000-07:00

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

2008-08-20T20:57:00.000-07:00

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

2008-08-12T10:16:00.000-07:00

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

2008-08-09T10:07:00.000-07:00

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

2008-07-19T04:19:00.000-07:00

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

2008-07-17T00:12:00.000-07:00

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'

2008-07-15T07:40:00.000-07:00

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

2008-07-14T03:48:00.000-07:00

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

2008-07-13T16:20:00.000-07:00

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

2008-07-12T09:31:00.000-07:00

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?

2008-07-11T01:15:00.000-07:00

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

2008-07-07T22:26:00.000-07:00

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

2008-07-07T05:34:00.000-07:00

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'

2008-07-05T23:10:00.000-07:00

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

2008-07-05T06:37:00.000-07:00

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

2008-07-04T09:18:00.000-07:00

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

2008-07-01T06:12:00.000-07:00

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

2008-06-30T16:20:00.000-07:00

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

2008-06-22T23:50:00.000-07:00

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

2008-06-21T09:58:00.000-07:00

I want YOU

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

Diène and Obama – a perfect storm?

2008-06-20T10:07:00.000-07:00

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

2008-06-19T05:47:00.000-07:00

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

2008-06-16T05:00:00.000-07:00

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

2008-06-12T07:29:00.000-07:00

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.

The push to criminalize "Islamophobia"

2008-06-09T23:21:00.000-07:00

Today's edition of the Malaysian newspaper Sin Chew Daily has an AP report on an Organization of the Islamic Conference meeting in Kuala Lumpur, at which the organization's secretary general Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu Monday demanded stronger action by Western governments against "perpetrators of Islamophobia":

"Mere condemnation or distancing from the acts of the perpetrators of Islamophobia will not resolve the issue, as long as they remain free to carry on with their campaign of incitement and provocation on the plea of freedom of expression." (Emphasis mine.)

This echoes an assertion by self-described "Muslim African-American law professor" Bernard Freamon in a February 2006 article in the University of Pittsburgh School of Law journal The Jurist that, in the wake of the furor over the Danish Muhammad caricatures, he and his fellow Muslims were "very right to vigorously condemn the publication of the cartoons and to seek to punish the editors through the criminal law process. (Again, emphasis mine.)

Ihsanoglu's call for repression is only the latest in a steady drumbeat of the same from the Muslim world. It is unpleasant to contemplate how receptive an Obama presidency might be to such demands.

Update: Baron Bodissey at Gates of Vienna has also taken notice. Many thanks for the link.

"Terrorist act"? That is cool.

2008-06-08T03:42:00.000-07:00

Pakistani Ambassador to Norway Rab Nawaz Khan, reacting to a cartoon recently published in the Norwegian newspaper Addresseavisen, has declared to Norway's TV2 that " 'Muslim societies all over the world will be insulted. Therefore it's a terrorist act." (The quote comes from the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten, by way of the blog Islam in Europe.)

The absurdity of Khan's words call to mind Abraham Lincoln's crack about the South's antebellum calumnies in his Cooper Union Address of Feb. 27, 1860:

"That is cool. A highwayman holds a pistol to my ear, and mutters through his teeth, 'Stand and deliver, or I shall kill you, and then you will be a murderer!' "

The analogy is by no means inapt, as an implicit threat Pakistan's government plans to make to the European Union shows. According to that nation's Daily Times, a high- level six-member delegation will soon journey to Brussels to demand that Europeans "amend laws regarding freedom of expression in order to prevent offensive incidents such as the printing of blasphemous caricatures of Prophet Muhammad (Peace Be Upon Him) and the production of an anti-Islam film by a Dutch legislator". They will tell them that "the recent attack on the Danish Embassy in Pakistan could be a reaction against the blasphemous campaign" and warn them that "if such acts against Islam are not controlled, more attacks on the EU diplomatic missions abroad could not be ruled out." (Hat tip to the indispensable JihadWatch, whose director Robert Spencer makes a ringing statement of resolve to defend free expression here.)

Thus does a Muslim government use the acts of Muslim terrorists as leverage against the West's most basic rights -- while denouncing the exercise of those rights as a "terrorist act." In view of such hoodlum diplomacy, the words with which Lincoln concluded his speech are also worth recalling:

"Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it."

Addendum: Here is the cartoon that prompted Khan's asinine comment:

The slogan reads, "I am Muhammad and nobody dares print me!" According to Islam in Europe, both the cartoonist and Adesseavisen's editor deny that this was ever intended to be a caricature of Muhammad himself, but instead "shows a terrorist who commits violence in the prophet's name." It seems the distinction has been lost on "the prophet's" followers.

Addendum 2: Gates of Vienna has an excellent post on this, complete with a translation from the Norwegian of a news story containing another choice quote from Pakistani ambassador Rab Nawaz Khan:

"Don’t forget that there are many Norwegian companies in Pakistan."

Such subtle, nuanced diplomacy. And be it noted that the car bombing at the Danish embassy which Pakistani officials propose to cite in their warning to the European Union (see above) was an attack for which al-Qaeda claimed responsibility, describing it as "only the first drop of rain."

Cocky attitude

2008-05-27T13:21:00.000-07:00

Memorial Day was yesterday, but this picture of Gen. George S. Patton whizzing into Germany in March 1945 seems worth posting withal.

Burying the lede in Seattle

2008-05-23T11:52:00.000-07:00

In the second paragraph from the end of an AP story on closing arguments in the murder trial of Naveed Haq -- in which writer Gene Johnson, like Seattle Times reporter Natalie Singer the day before, completely omits Haq's declarations of Muslim identity and anti-Jewish enmity -- the hollowness of the defense's claims of innocence by reason of insanity stands revealed:

"Haq did not mention to psychiatrists the notion that he was being controlled by voices or by God until many months after the shootings."

During the killings and after his arrest, of course, Haq made the following statements:

"I'm a Muslim American, I'm angry at Israel."

"This is a hostage situation and I want these Jews to get out."

"These are Jews and I'm tired of getting pushed around and our people getting pushed around by the situation in the Middle East."

For her part, Singer mentions neither this central fact nor Haq's statements in her own write-up for today's Seattle Times. So much for the people's right to know, in Seattle and nationwide, as the American mainstream media continue their malign efforts to exculpate and defer to Muslims.

And pray spare a thought for Pamela Waechter, whom Haq killed, and Dayna Klein, Christina Rexroad, Layla Bush, Cheryl Stumbo and Carol Goldman, whom he wounded in his rampage. None of them merited so much as a single mention in either of these MSM news reports.

The Seattle Times memory hole

2008-05-22T18:49:00.000-07:00

It will be recalled that Naveed Haq, who is on trial for killing a woman and wounding five other people at the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle in July of 2006, was heard during the incident and after his arrest to have made the following statements:

"I'm a Muslim American, I'm angry at Israel."

"This is a hostage situation and I want these Jews to get out."

"These are Jews and I'm tired of getting pushed around and our people getting pushed around by the situation in the Middle East."

In a story today headlined "Dueling diagnoses may hold key to Jewish Federation shooter's fate," Seattle Times reporter Natalie Singer not only neglects to report any of Haq's three declarations, she manages to get through a rather long news piece without mentioning Islam, Muslims, Pakistan, the Middle East, or anything else that might hold the slightest hint that jihad ideology could have played a part in this crime -- when it was clearly uppermost in the perpetrator's mind. Whether this was her doing or that of her editors, it is chilling evidence of the lengths to which the contemporary mainstream news media will go to exculpate and defer to Muslims and their invidious creed.

Brit diplomat toadies, Beeb blacks it out

2008-04-22T14:06:00.000-07:00

The Pakistani newspaper Pak Tribune reports today (Hat tip: Weasel Zippers) that following a meeting in Islamabad with Pakistan's foreign minister Monday, British Foreign Secretary David Miliband tried to ingratiate himself with his Muslim hosts with a gratuitous slap at the Counterjihad.

"We strongly denounce the anti Islam propaganda blitz being unleashed in Europe in the name of freedom of expression," he declared. Miliband was doubtless refering to the recent release on the Internet of Dutch MP Geert Wilders' short film "Fitna," which juxtaposes Qur'anic passages exhorting the faithful to "strike terror" into the hearts of unbelievers (8:60) and to "smite at their necks" (47:4) with video clips of contemporary Muslims doing just that in New York on 9/11, in London and Madrid, and with a decapitating knife in Iraq. Wilders, who was thwarted in his efforts to get his production run on Dutch TV, was merely trying to tell the simple, brutal truth: that when militant Muslims attack unbelievers -- even the unarmed and helpless -- they are following the scriptures of their creed, propounded by its founding prophet and held to be the irrefutable command of the almighty. That Miliband, whose countrymen have been repeatedly attacked by such fanatics, should "strongly denounce" such truth-telling should earn him the kind of obloquy Neville Chamberlain received after caving in to Hitler's demands at Munich in 1938.

This is unlikely to happen -- not only because public discourse in Britain has long been hobbled by the dictates of post-colonial political correctness, but because Miliband's toadying may well go unreported by British media. While the Pak Tribune led its story on the Islamabad meeting with the foreign secretary's dhimmi remark, the BBC omitted it from its own report altogether.

Update: A check of sundry British media -- to wit, the Times, Daily Mail, Guardian, Mirror, and Reuters -- reveals not a single mention of Miliband's remark.

Gutsy move

2008-04-13T21:04:00.000-07:00

In tomorrow's edition, the British Daily Telegraph reports that "Serb prisoners had their internal organs removed and sold by ethnic Albanians during the Kosovo war, according to allegations in a new book by the world's best known war crimes prosecutor. Carla Del Ponte, who stepped down in January as chief prosecutor at the Hague tribunal for crimes committed in the Balkan wars of the 1990s, said investigators found a house suspected of being a laboratory for the illegal trade. ...

"Miss Del Ponte reports that the allegations were made by several sources, one of whom 'personally made an organ delivery' to an Albanian airport for transport abroad, and 'confirmed information directly gathered by the tribunal.'

"According to the sources, senior figures in the Kosovo Liberation Army were aware of the scheme, in which hundreds of young Serbs were allegedly taken by truck from Kosovo to northern Albania where their organs were removed. Miss Del Ponte provides grim details of the alleged organ harvesting, and of how some prisoners were sewn up after having kidneys removed."

This story has a familiar ring: in the notorious 2006 Turkish film "Valley of the Wolves," a Jewish-American doctor working in the Abu Ghraib prison was depicted doing this to Iraqi prisoners -- which, of course, was an update on the old "blood libel." In the film, Muslims were the victims of the horror -- but that was mere fiction, a pot-boiler plot cooked up for the entertainment of a Muslim audience in a Muslim country. The Kosovo allegations, however, deal with reality and are far more substantive, coming as they do from a former war-crimes prosecutor writing on the record. And in this instance Muslims were not cast in the role of victims but perpetrators.

This ought to give pause to the Bush administration, which is so determined to send the Muslim world a terrific signal by setting up Kosovo as "a Muslim-majority state inside the European whole."

It ought to -- but given the deferential habits into which the president and his minions have fallen, it won't.

Striving for the right kind of divide

2008-04-13T02:14:00.000-07:00

Keith Ellison, the Muslim congressman from Minnesota, advised a CAIR-hosted "Muslim Youth Leadership Symposium" in the Chicago area last week that "teachings in the Koran could help the racial divide in America."

Could they, now? And what, pray, might said teachings be? Perhaps those such as 3:28, 4:144, 5:51, 48:29, 60:1, 60:4, et al., which exhort the faithful to insularity and hostility toward the kuffar, thus replacing the racial divide with a religious one. Hardly an improvement, it would seem -- unless the latter is a desideratum, which of course it is, if jihad is the objective.

A sinister signal

2008-04-05T12:00:00.000-07:00

This item is a little old -- it's dated March 14 -- but is still of interest. It's an "interview" on a State Dept. Web site with Ambassador Frank G. Wisner, U.S. special envoy for Kosovo, concerning the independence of that Serbian province, that makes clear that the Bush administration's support for the same is a way to make nice with the Muslim world. Excerpt:

"... I believe that for most of the Muslim world, it’s very important that one looks at a matter of justice. What is right: a people sought to practice its faith, the country is largely Muslim, inside a European context. To make certain that happens is in the interest of the entire world, notably in the Muslim world.

"To be able to secure a Muslim-majority state inside the European whole is a terrific signal that the Muslim world and the non-Muslim word can live side by side in peace and cooperation, one with the other." (Emphasis mine.)

Never mind what "a Muslim-majority state inside the European whole" -- to wit, the Ottoman Empire -- has meant historically: the cruel subjugation of non-Muslim "dhimmi" populations, as per the Qur'anic mandate (in verse 9:29) that they be fought until they "feel themselves subdued." And as to "matters of justice," what about the Orthodox Christians of Kosovo, whose shrines and monasteries (such as the one above, guarded by an Italian tank) are under constant Muslim threat, even under KFOR occupation? What kind of "signal" does this send to them?

Into the memory hole

2008-02-23T09:20:00.000-08:00

Little Green Footballs took note yesterday of a preposterous Associated Press cutline attached to one of the wire service’s photos of Muslims raging against Danish newspapers’ reprinting of the Muhammad caricatures that touched off the Cartoon Jihad in 2006:

“Pakistani human rights activists burn a Danish flag at a protest rally to show their anger over the reproduction of Prophet Muhammad cartoons in Denmark, Thursday, Feb. 21, 200, in Gujaranwala, Pakistan. (AP Photo/Aftab Rizvi)”

AP’s characterization of religious zealots demanding the curtailment of the human right to free expression as “human rights activists” elicited incredulity and raillery in the blogosphere – enough so to prompt a lame attempt by AP to cast the gaffe into the memory hole. The cutline now reads:

“Supporters of Al Fareed Welfare Society burn a Danish flag at a protest rally to show their anger over the reproduction of Prophet Muhammad cartoons in Denmark, Thursday, Feb. 21, 2008, in Gujaranwala, Pakistan. (AP Photo/Aftab Rizvi)”

OK, so it’s SOP for news services to provide updated versions of items that prove erroneous. But why didn’t one of AP’s editors catch so egregious a misnomer in the first place?

Perhaps because it's also SOP to defer to the sensitivities of Muslim stringers.

Repost of a riposte

2008-01-25T16:43:00.000-08:00

At Gates of Vienna this morning, an apologist for Islam who hides behind the Internet moniker of "Truth Seeker" posted a comment that included the following passages (errors original):

"I would like to remind you that you would not have had the renaissance if it wasn’t for the Islamic intellectuals whom translated ancient Greek texts into Arabic and Latin. If the crusades didn’t take place then you may have an issue but because of the Vatican thirst for world domination and greed the chickens are coming home to roost. I suggest you look up some text regarding the Vatican in the 15th century and the new worlds – treasure in religion out."

"Before you continue down this path of hatred and ignorance i suggest you look at the issues that unite us which are many instead of the focusing on a small minority of unenlightened and misguided individuals that don’t understand and respect the tenets of Islam."

"I hope for peace and will always look for the better side of an individual without collectively stigmatising or judging religion due to the evil perpetrated by a very small minority of individuals."

This prompted the following response from your correspondent, which it seems apropos to repost here.

“Truth Seeker”:

Your Internet handle is as spurious as the notion that the odious creed of Islam is a “religion of peace.” That notion is refuted by the very tenets of Islam that you take us to task for failing to “understand and respect” – for example, Sura 9, Ayah 29 of the Qur’an:

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.

In case the latter phrase wasn’t clear enough, the “Islamic intellectual” Ibn Kathir explained it in his tasfir on this ayah: “... disgraced, humiliated and belittled. Therefore, Muslims are not allowed to honor the people of the Dhimmah or elevate them above Muslims, for they are miserable, disgraced, and humiliated. ... This is why the leader of the faithful Umar b. Al-Khattab, may Allah be pleased with him, demanded his well-known conditions be met by the Christians, conditions that ensured their continued humiliation, degradation, and disgrace.”

Such is the grim reality your mendacious professions of “peace” conceal. As Ibn Kathir noted in his tasfir on another ayah (3:28 *), “Al-Bukhari recorded that Abu Ad-Darda’ said, ‘We smile in the face of some people although our hearts curse them.’ ”

Be advised that I am well aware of the tenets of Islam and the curse in the hearts of its adherents – and that I will never “feel myself subdued” or submit to “humiliation, degradation, and disgrace.”

* Let not the believers Take for friends or helpers Unbelievers rather than believers: if any do that, in nothing will there be help from Allah: except by way of precaution, that ye may Guard yourselves from them. But Allah cautions you (To remember) Himself; for the final goal is to Allah. (Emphasis added.)

Questions remain in Fuat Deniz killing

2008-01-19T22:30:00.000-08:00

Swedish police made an arrest Thursday in the Dec. 11 murder of Fuat Deniz, an Örebro University professor whose research focused on the genocide carried out by Turkish, Kurdish and Arab Muslims of the Ottoman Empire against that empire’s Assyrian Christian minority during the early years of the last century. The suspect is the 42-year-old first cousin of the slain academic, with whom, according to Swedish police, he had been embroiled in a personal conflict. A police official has repeatedly declared that there was “no political conflict” involved in the crime.

Your correspondent’s suspicions that the opposite is true, based on several indicators set forth here, should ostensibly be allayed. While I am perfectly willing to acknowledge having been misled by said indicators if such should prove to be the case, at this point too many questions remain unanswered for me to do so in good conscience. Among these are:

* What was the nature of the conflict between the two first cousins?

* How is it that Fuat Deniz immigrated in childhood to Sweden from Turkey, while the son of his father’s brother did so 20 years ago from Syria?

* Is Fuat’s cousin an Assyrian Christian as he was, or is he an adherent to some other creed?

* Why are the negotiations that led to the suspect’s arrest being kept from the public?

* Why is the suspect’s attorney under an official gag order?

* Why has the police information manager (nice title, that) repeatedly assured the public that “the political motive is no longer valid” in this case, while offering no basis for this assertion?

* Why, if the suspect “actually wanted to tell the police what he had done, and therefore phoned the police after the knife-cutting,” has it taken more than a month to take him into custody? Didn’t the police consider that there might be a risk of flight?

* Why, if it has been known for a month that “the political motive [was] no longer valid,” have Swedish authorities let Fuat Deniz’s colleagues, several of whom have told of threats related to their work in his field, live in fear for their lives?

* Why has the Assyrian diaspora worldwide been left for a month to dread that Fuat Deniz had been the victim of what a senior Assyrian clergyman called “dark powers that want to hurt our people” – a clear reference to Turkish Islamists of the sort that assassinated newspaper editor Hrant Dink in Istanbul a year ago today?

The conduct of Swedish authorities in this case may be politely be described as rather less than heroic. If they would dispel continuing apprehensions that there is more to the murder of Fuat Deniz than a family feud, let them address the questions raised above.

In the meantime, let us bear in mind the sentiments of General George Patton: Rather than regretting that such a man died, let us rejoice that such a man lived. And let us not only cherish Fuat's memory but advance his important work, and ensure that the true history of the Assyrian genocide is not buried in obscurity, as the "dark powers" of whom Mor Polycarpus Augin spoke at his memorial service in the Netherlands in December so cruelly desire. It is my hope that his books may one day be translated and published in the English-speaking world.

Cry us a river

2008-01-09T20:11:00.000-08:00

More retching about the altered terrain in journalism from erstwhile news icon Dan Rather, quoted in the Boston Herald:

"When it comes to blogging and some things on the Web, there's little or no accountability. This is the new American political coverage media. It's a wilderness, and when you go into the wilderness there's always some danger."

Rather, of course, has it bass-ackwards. What he's really bewailing is the passing of the days when, for media bigwigs like him, there really was "little or no accountability." Once upon a time the purported memo about President Bush's military record that Rather tried to pass off as genuine in a September 2004 CBS 60 Minutes report -- supposedly typed in 1973, but actually printed in a 21st-century Microsoft Word font -- would likely have passed muster and possibly altered the results of the 2004 election. In the new "wilderness," however, bloggers not only exposed the hoax but were able to get the word out -- and it was Rather, not his target, who ended up in disgrace. (Rather is suing his erstwhile employers and it appears that he will get his day in court. Whether he can get the egg off his face remains to be seen.)

Cry the beloved profession, redux

2008-01-05T20:44:00.000-08:00

If there is anything the doyens of the American mass media more fiercely resent than the encroachment of bloggers and Internet news outlets on what has long been their turf, it is the extent to which their status as gatekeepers of the news has been undermined by the same. And from time to time, they get vocal about it -- as did the putative "dean of the White House press corps," Helen Thomas, Jan. 4 at a National Press Club roundtable discussion. "What I really worry about," the 87-year-old columnist for Hearst Newspapers fretted, "is that I think the bloggers and everyone, everyone with a laptop thinks they're journalists. And they certainly don't have our standards. They don't have our ethics, and so forth."

To appreciate how spurious Thomas's tut-tutting really is, recall that in February of 2006, when the Danish Muhammad caricatures were central to the ongoing story of how embassies were being burned, innocents were being killed, and Muslim demonstrators worldwide were bearing signs with slogans like "Free expression is Western terrorism," "Our religion does not allow unconditional freedom of speech" and "A Muslim's faith is above Western values," the editors of only three major American papers (the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Austin American-Statesman and the Rocky Mountain News) had the integrity to push back, assert their rights, and print any of the cartoons along with their coverage of the uproar. The rest demurred, spouting weasel words about "taste," "respect" and "responsibility." Had it not been for the bloggers, few Americans would have seen the cartoons and been able to judge for themselves whether the intense Muslim wrath was justified. "The people's right to know," it's called -- and the mainstream American mass media did their damnedest to abrogate it.

And this garrolous gorgon dares prattle about the loftiness of their "standards" and "ethics"? Give me a break.

Hat tip: Michelle Malkin.

Regarding the murder of Fuat Deniz

2008-01-01T23:59:00.000-08:00

An open letter. (Updated and bumped to the top. Links to come.)

Jonas Hafstrom
Swedish Ambassador to the United States
Washington, D.C.

Dear Mr. Hafstrom:

I am writing to express my great concern over the heinous murder of Professor Fuat Deniz of the University of Örebro on his campus Dec. 11, and the way Swedish authorities have handled the investigation into this crime.

It is extremely unlikely that this was merely a random act of violence. Professor Deniz was a prominent academic authority on the genocidal campaign carried out early in the last century by the Ottoman Empire against its Assyrian minority, which occurred contemporaneously with the better-known massacre of the Armenians. He presented a paper at an international conference in the United States last summer and was to have done likewise at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands mere days after he died of neck wounds inflicted with an edged weapon.

Several factors strongly suggest that Fuat Deniz’s murder was in fact a politically motivated assassination – an act of terrorism intended both to suppress his academic work and to intimidate other researchers in the field. Consider that:

* The goal of Deniz’s scholarship – to bring to light a genocidal atrocity by Ottoman Muslims against rayas (non-Muslim Ottoman subjects) – is strongly resented and fiercely resisted by the current Turkish government, which continues in the face of a mountain of documentary evidence and decades of assiduous scholarship to deny that the campaign to annihilate rayas was either genocidally oriented or centrally directed by Ottoman authorities. That government has repeatedly prosecuted its citizens for pointing out the plain truth under the notorious Article 301 of the Turkish penal code, which prohibits “insulting Turkishness.”

* Candor about the dark history of the Ottoman genocides prompted the Jan. 19 assassination of Hrant Dink, editor of the bilingual Turkish-Armenian newspaper Agos, in front of his office on an Istanbul street. Dink had been prosecuted under Article 301 once and faced yet another such charge at the time of his murder. In his last article, printed the day of his death, he described “Hundreds of threats ... by phone, email and post – increasing all the time ... The memory of my computer is filled with angry, threatening lines ...”

* Dink on several occasions expressed concern that he had been targeted for persecution by Turkey’s “deep state” – according to the Greek English-language newspaper Kathimerini, “a clandestine group within the security and intelligence services” whose existence even Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has acknowledged. Dink’s fears appeared to have been borne out when his confessed killer, a young man with ties to Islamist militants who was heard to shout “I shot the infidel” as he left the scene, was shown on Turkish television after his arrest, posing with the crescent-and-star national flag as his police captors beamed in approval.

* Efforts to bring to light the truth about the Ottoman genocides are not merely a threat to Turkey’s nationalist and religious sensitivities but to its economic aspirations – specifically, its desire to gain admittance to the European Union. At a European Parliament conference held March 26 in Brussels, panelists declared that before Turkey can be admitted, it must acknowledge the genocides and open its archives from the period before being allowed to do so. Speakers included members of the European Parliament from Sweden and Germany – and Fuat Deniz’s colleague, Professor David Gaunt of Södertörn University College.

* Fuat Deniz’s academic associates are now in fear for their own lives – for , according to Gaunt, this was only the latest incident in a campaign of intimidation carried out against academics in his field. In a story in the Dec. 15 edition of Svenska Dagbladet, Gaunt told of being tailed by security police during travels in Turkey and subjected to a smear campaign in the Turkish press. Moreover, Gaunt told the paper, “On several occasions at our seminars people would attend claiming to be journalists, only to then walk around photographing delegates.”

“All those interested in Christian minorities in Turkey are considered a threat,” Gaunt added.

* An Assyrian activist was threatened last summer by Turkish officials, Länstidningen i Södertälje reported Dec. 18. Simon Barmano, the former head of the Assyrian Federation in Sweden, told the paper that on Aug. 31, four Turkish district governors, objecting during their visit to Sweden to a proposed memorial to the Assyrian genocide victims to be erected in Södertälje, warned him to “stop highlighting the genocide or your people will get hurt.”

* Various scholars, including Vahakn Dadrian of the Zoryan Institute, Andrew Bostom of Brown University, Roderic H. Davison of George Washington University, and Hannibal Travis of Florida International University, have documented the Islamic zealotry that fueled the Ottoman genocides. It is accordingly pertinent that Fuat Deniz’s attacker struck at his neck, a manner of killing specifically mandated by Islam’s prophet Muhammad in at least two verses of the Qur’an:

Sura 8, Verse 12 – Remember thy Lord inspired the angels (with the message): “I am with you: give firmness to the Believers: I will instill terror into the hearts of the Unbelievers: Smite ye above their necks ...”

Sura 47, Verse 4 – Therefore, when ye meet the Unbelievers (in fight), Smite at their necks ...

* Örebro, where Fuat Deniz was murdered, is home to one of the most militant and internationally connected Muslim communities in Sweden. During last summer’s furor over the “Muhammad as a rondellhund” caricatures drawn by the artist Lars Vilks, all of the complaints to Sweden from the Muslim world – Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Egypt, Jordan and the Organization of the Islamic Conference – centered around their publication in the Örebro newspaper Nerikes Allehanda, even though they also appeared in several other Swedish papers, including Aftonbladet, Dagans Nyheter, Sydsvendskan and Barometern. Moreover, in addition to the two Muslim demonstrations held in Örebro against Nerikes Allehanda’s publication of Vilks’s drawings, several hundred copies of the newspaper were burnt on the night of Sept. 4 while awaiting delivery.

Well might Mor Polycarpus Augin, Archbishop of the Syriac Orthodox Church in the Netherlands, warn at a Dec. 23 service commemorating Fuat Deniz that “there are still dark powers that want to hurt our people and make an end to its enlightenment,” who “expected to silence Fuat through putting a knife on his throat.” Mor Polycarpus spoke at the Mor Kuryakos Church in Enschede, the Netherlands.

One would think that solving a case of this sort would be a high priority for Swedish law-enforcement agencies. But when the prize-winning Swedish journalist and documentary filmmaker Nuri Kino looked into the matter, he found that it seemed to have been placed on the back burner. After a trip to Örebro, he reported in the Dec. 21 edition of Aftonbladet that:

* No security or “any other form of support” had been offered by Swedish authorities to Deniz’s bereaved family; a “nervous” widow and a three-year-old daughter.

* Deniz’s campus office had not been sealed off to preserve possible evidence.

* Deniz’s academic colleagues, including those who have received threats, expressed “shock” at the “lack of knowledge regarding ethnic, political and religious clashes” on the part of the police.

* Despite declaring on radio news that a security-camera picture of a blood-spattered man taken in a store the day of Deniz's killing is uesless,” Örebro police have ignored an offer of assistance from a technical specialist in cleaning up such pictures.

* When Kino called Örebro police, he was told that their public information officer was on vacation and the lead prosecutor in the investigation was out sick – without anyone acting in his stead. Moreover, “police in Örebro will be reducing the number of police on duty over the coming holiday period.”

* A spokesperson at the National Criminal Police Corps murder commission, from which assistance in the investigation was sought by Örebro police, told Kino that “Those that work at The National Criminal Police Corps murder commission have taken their Christmas holiday and won't return until the second of January. They have their holidays and they definitely deserve it as they are never home.”

After Kino’s report appeared, Örebro police belatedly offered protection to Fuat Deniz’s frightened family, and lead investigator Per Jan Eriksson acknowledged to SVT television that his department had been remiss in failing to seal off the slain professor’s office. But many Örebro police remained on holiday, as did agents of the Swedish national police – and as they took their leisure, the trail of Fuat Deniz’s murderers grew ever colder.

In all candor, Mr. Hafstrom, this does not speak well of either the competence or the motivation of Swedish law enforcement. At best, it bespeaks a police corps so suffused with bureaucratic torpor that its personnel couldn’t be bothered to interrupt their holiday revelries and relaxation with anything so trifling as the assassination of an internationally known genocide researcher. At worst, it suggests that the investigation into the murder of Professor Fuat Deniz has been neglected due to some squalid raison d’état.

I realize that as a diplomat, this police matter is outside your area of responsibility. All the same, I urge you to convey to the relevant organs of your government my outrage over Fuat Deniz’s assassination – and my concern that said organs have not been doing all they should to see justice done. Kindly advise them also that, as an independent journalist, I intend to do what I can to publicize this case in the United States.

Respectfully yours,
Paul Green

Money doesn't talk – it lectures

2008-01-01T13:43:00.000-08:00

At JihadWatch today, Robert Spencer quotes an article by Paul Stenhouse in the Australian magazine Quadrant noting the establishment of a new “Chair of Islamic Studies and Interfaith Dialogue, within a Centre of Inter-Religious Dialogue at the Fitzroy campus of the Australian Catholic University, Melbourne” with a “thoroughgoing commitment to promoting a certain kind of Islam through a Catholic university, and filtering it through all the faculties to ‘future leaders.’ ” For Stenhouse, this brought to mind “a by-now virtually unobtainable book, Moslems in Europe and America by Ali al-Montasser al-Kattani, published in Iraq in 1976 by Dar Idris. It called for the establishment of chairs of Islamic Studies in universities in Europe, America, the West Indies and other countries, and the setting up of committees of Muslims to select other Muslims to occupy these chairs. At the same time it called for an end to any aid, moral or financial, that might already be being given to established chairs of Islamic Studies held by Christians or Jews.”

This prompts Spencer to wonder whether this could be “the smoking gun of MESA Nostra” (JihadWatch commentator Hugh Fitzgerald’s moniker for the Middle East Studies Association) – that is, the blueprint for the steady encroachment on Middle East Studies Departments by Muslims and their academic toadies. A similar idea was also propounded by London University Institute of Education instructor A.L.Tibawi (described in Robert Irwin’s “Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and Its Discontents,” pp. 319-22) in his “Second Critique of English-Speaking Orientalists and Their Approach to Islam and the Arabs” (London: The Islamic Cultural Centre, 1979). In “Appendix IV: Note on Arab Subventions to English universities, Tibawi wrote that:

“Arab financial assistance to Western universities is a very recent development that came in the wake of the accession of hitherto poor countries to considerable wealth as a result of the exploitation of oil resources. It is very difficult to discover when or how the process started or which universities were the first recipients of money from Arab or Muslim countries.”

After bewailing the scholarship of an unnamed professor at subvention recipient Cambridge University (probably William Montgomery Watt – see Irwin, pp. 267-8) who had the temerity to “publish views offensive to Muslim sentiments, namely that the Qur’an is not a divine revelation but Muhammad’s own composition” and discussing grants then being made to institutions in both the U.K. and the U.S., Tibawi proposed that:

“Since Arab financial assistance is likely to continue and may even increase, the situation calls for a simple suggestion to regularise it ... It would be appropriate to channel all financial assistance through a committee in London (and a similar one in Washington) composed of the ambassador of the country concerned, an Arab academic and the director of the Islamic Cultural Centre. This committee should have the power to review existing arrangements with a view toward confirming them, or recommending changes in the terms or termination. All future applications should be submitted through this committee, which, after due consideration, would refer to the government concerned with the appropriate recommendation. In due course the decision in every case should be communicated through the committee. It must be agreed to put an end to all personal patronage and backdoor approaches, especially by persons known to be unfriendly to Arabs and Islam, and to establish the principle of accountability of the recipients.”

Half-stepping on a hit case

2007-12-22T11:02:00.001-08:00

Both Gates of Vienna and the Eastern Star News Agency have translations today of an article in the Swedish press by freelance journalist Nuri Kino taking to task the Swedish authorities for their lassitude in investigating the Dec. 11 murder of Professor Fuat Deniz at his institution's campus in Örebro, Sweden. Deniz, whose research focused on the genocide campaign carried out against Assyrian Christians by Muslims of the Ottoman Empire at the same time as the better-known Armenian genocide, was struck in the neck with an edged weapon; a manner of killing mandated in at least two verses (8:12 and 47:4) of the Qur'an.

Kino, like Deniz a Swedish Assyrian originally from Turkey, went to Örebro to check things out. He found that:

* No security or "any other form of support" had been offered by Swedish authorities to Deniz's family; a "nervous" widow and a three-year-old daughter.

* Deniz's campus office had not been sealed off.

* Deniz's academic colleagues, including those who have received threats, expressed "shock" at the "lack of knowledge regarding ethnic, political and religious clashes" on the part of the police.

* Despite declaring on radio news that a security-camera picture of a blood-spattered man taken in a store the day of Deniz's killing is "uesless," Örebro police have ignored an offer of assistance from a technical specialist in cleaning up such pictures.

* When Kino called Örebro police, he was told that their public information officer was on vacation and the lead prosecutor in the investigation is out sick - without anyone acting in his stead. Moreover, "police in Örebro will be reducing the number of police on duty over the coming holiday period."

* A spokescreature at the National Criminal Police Corps murder commission, from which assistance in the investigation was sought by Örebro police, told Kino that "Those that work at The National Criminal Police Corps murder commission have taken their Christmas holiday and won't return until the second of January. They have their holidays and they definitely deserve it as they are never home."

So as the already-cold trail of Fuat Deniz's killer gets even colder, the so-called defenders of justice in Sweden can't be bothered to pursue it. They're too busy feasting, guzzling and relaxing. What an absolute disgrace!

And speaking of disgrace, the performance of the Anglophone mainstream media on this story has been no less shameful. A search of the following sites for Fuat Deniz's name reveals not so much as a word of coverage:

The Associated Press
Reuters
The BBC
The New York Times
The International Herald Tribune
The Washington Post
The Los Angeles Times
The Times of London
The Telegraph (UK)
The Guardian (UK)

Apparently the assassination of an internationally eminent genocide researcher is just too picayune to garner the attention of the media elite. Had Baron Bodissey at Gates of Vienna not broken this story in the U.S., we would know nothing of it.

'Tis the season ...

2007-12-20T21:46:00.000-08:00

... to cut throats.

The blog Sweetness & Light, which assembled a stomach-turning collection of photos of Muslims around the world celebrating Eid al-Adha (the "festival of sacrifice" with which the holy month of Ramadan concludes) last year, has another assortment of grotesqueries from this year's blessed event.

This is what the president of the United States, in a White House message Wednesday wishing "our Muslim citizens ... a memorable celebration," declared "helps ensure the important values of compassion and devotion are passed on to future generations." (Emphasis mine.) Nor should it be supposed that this sort of thing only goes on overseas, as a story from a North Carolina TV station, telling of Muslim efforts to overturn a judge's ban on a "mass slaughter of lambs" by "hundreds of Muslim families" at a Smithfield, N.C. farm, shows. The ban was imposed not because of the ritual's primitive savagery but because of agricultural officials' concern over the farm's lack of sanitary facilities. The judge pointed out that the ban "doesn't prevent the free exercise of religion because the families are allowed to slaughter their own lambs at a state-licensed facility."

On Eid al-Adha, a greeting and a goof-up

2007-12-19T09:52:00.000-08:00

At Jihad Watch today, Robert Spencer analyzes the implications of a seemingly innocuous White House greeting to Muslims on the occasion of Eid al-Adha, the annual "festival of sacrifice" with which the holy month of Ramadan concludes. He points out that when President Bush praises Muslims for "honor[ing] Abraham's obedience" (in being willing to sacrifice his son at God's command), he is unwittingly praising a faith that, in a Qur'anic verse (60:4), calls Abraham an "excellent example" when he declares his "enmity and hatred forever" for those who do not "believe in Allah and in Him alone" – but not when Abraham pledges to his pagan father to pray for forgiveness for him. The president, he observes, "is thus inadvertently reinforcing a worldview that takes for granted the legitimacy of everlasting enmity and hatred between Muslims and non-Muslims – and doing so precisely in the context of trying to build bridges between Muslims and non-Muslims."

I voted for George W. Bush twice, but I am heartily sick of his ignorance of and deference to Islam. Unhappily, his successor is unlikely to be any better in this regard.

Rejoinder to a Turkish partisan

2007-12-18T18:34:00.000-08:00

(This began as a comment to the foregoing post, but ended up becoming one in itself.)

In view of the calumnies to which my American countrymen have long been subjected by “Turkey and the Turks” – exemplified by the odious film
“Kurtlar Vadisi Irak” (“Valley of the Wolves Iraq”), which depicted an American Jewish doctor harvesting organs from dead Iraqi civilians at Abu Ghraib for sale to rich clients in New York and Tel Aviv – your yelping about a “smear campaign” is ironic, to say the least. However that may be, proof is not needed to advance a suspicion – and if more indicators are needed than the Qur’anically mandated way in which Fuat Deniz was slaughtered and the threats cited by his colleagues, here’s another, reported today by the Swedish paper Länstidningen i Södertälje and noted here: a threat made on Aug. 31 by four Turkish district governors to the former head of the Assyrian Federation in Sweden, Simon Barmano. Objecting during their visit to Sweden to a proposed memorial to the Assyrian genocide victims to be erected in Södertälje, the Turks warned Barmano to “stop highlighting the genocide or your people will get hurt.”

As to what you risibly call the “so-called Armenian and Assyrian genocides,” their existence has been irrefutably established not only by the accounts of contemporaries such as U.S. Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire Henry Morgenthau and the German missionary and historian Johannes Lepsius, but by the scholarship of, among others, Vahakn Dadrian, whose books “Warrant for Genocide” and “The History of the Armenian Genocide” are extensively documented by primary and secondary sources in Turkish, Armenian, English, German and French. That none of this evidence has ever led to Nuremburg-style tribunals is due largely to raisons d’état. In the aftermath of World War I, as the historian Bat Ye’or notes, “Alibis advanced to exonerate the populations which had collaborated in these cruelties resulted from the international context and the will of the colonial powers to follow a policy of appeasement toward their Muslim populations. These powers – Russia, Britain, France, and Italy – ruled over millions of Muslims in the Caucasus, Asia, the Indies, Egypt, the Levant, and the Maghreb; consequently, they tried to minimize this tragedy ... to resume good relations with Turkey and other Muslim populations, particularly those of Syria and Iraq who were hostile to the British and French protectorates.” (Bat Ye’or, “The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam,” p. 198.) In the aftermath of World War II, the U.S. and its allies needed a bulwark on the Soviet Union’s southern flank, hence the exoneration advanced in a Harvard University Press publication in 1951 by Lewis V. Thomas: “By 1918, with the excision of the total Armenian Christian population from Anatolia and the Straits area ... Turkification and Moslemization had been advanced in one great surge by the use of force ... Had Turkification and Moslemization not been advanced there by the use of force, there would certainly not today exist a Turkish Republic, a Republic owing its strength and stability in no small measure to the homogeneity of its population, a state which is now a valued associate of the United States.” (Lewis Thomas and Richard Frye, “The United States and Turkey and Iran,” p. 61. Emphasis mine.) And this year, Turkey’s importance as a transit point for materiel and supplies for the war in Iraq immunized it from even the toothless sanction of a congressional resolution condemning the Armenian genocide. (“U.S. and Turkey Thwart Armenian Genocide Bill,” New York Times, Oct. 26, 2007.)

Lastly, that “Ottoman archives are now wide open for anyone who wish to examine them” is rather less than exculpatory, given that “Major General Seeckt, the last German Chief of Staff at [Ottoman General Headquarters], whisked away substantial parts of these records when departing from Turkey at the end of the war.” Despite a promise by Seeckt “to return only those files which basically concern the Turkish military,” it could not be “ascertained whether those files were in fact returned, and if so, to what extent, when, and to what branch of the Turkish government.” (Dadrian, “The History of the Armenian Genocide,” p. 280.) Moreover, if Ottoman archives are so accessible, why is a panel of the European Parliament requesting that they be opened?

In view of the fact that Fuat Deniz had dedicated his academic career to the kind of “highlighting the genocide” that had elicited a Turkish warning of reprisals, in view of the threats cited by his colleagues, in view of the concordance of the fatal wounds inflicted on him with the commands of at least two verses of the Qur’an, and in view of the assassin’s Islamist motives in the murder of Hrant Dink in Istanbul Jan. 19, suspicions that Deniz’s murder was politically – and Islamically – motivated are unavoidable. My own will stand until a court finds otherwise.

A slaughter in Sweden

2007-12-17T02:13:00.000-08:00

On Tuesday evening, Fuat Deniz, 40, a lecturer in sociology at Örebro University in Örebro, Sweden, was attacked with an edged weapon in a campus building. His assailant inflicted multiple wounds on his neck, from which, despite surgeons’ efforts to save him, he soon died. He left behind a widow, Runa, and a three-year-old daughter.

Deniz was a Christian Assyrian who immigrated to Sweden from Turkey with his family as a child. His forebears were survivors of one of the great historical crimes of the last century: the Ottoman Empire’s jihad genocides against its Christian minorities during World War I and thereafter. That Ottoman Muslims – Turks, Kurds and Arabs – carried out a genocide against the Armenians of that empire has been firmly established (depsite continuing Turkish denials) due to the work of Vahakn Dadrian and others, but their simultaneous butchery of Assyrians, Nestoreans and Greeks is far less well-known.

Fuat Deniz was trying to change that. His academic research focused on the Assyrian genocide, an episode on which he had become an authority. In fact, he was slated to speak Sunday at an international conference on Assyrian identity and the Assyrian genocide held at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands.

He never made it – and his academic colleagues are now in fear for their own lives. For, according to Professor David Gaunt of Sweden’s Södertörn University College, who worked with Deniz, this was only the latest incident in a campaign of intimidation carried out against academics in his field. In a story in Saturday’s edition of the Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet, Gaunt told of being tailed by security police during travels in Turkey and subjected to a smear campaign in the Turkish press. Moreover, Gaunt told the paper, “On several occasions at our seminars people would attend claiming to be journalists, only to then walk around photographing delegates.”

“All those interested in Christian minorities in Turkey are considered a threat,” he added.

And they are a threat to more than just Turkish sensitivities. At a European Parliament conference held Mar. 26 in Brussels, panelists declared that Turkey, which is trying to gain admittance to the European Union, must acknowledge its Ottoman-era genocides and open its archives from the period before being allowed to do so. Speakers included members of the European Parliament from Sweden and Germany – and Professor Gaunt.

Turkey has a great deal to cover up, as an extensively documented article in the Canadian journal Genocide Studies and Prevention reveals. Writing in the journal’s December 2006 issue, Florida International University Law School Professor Hannibal Travis argues that “the hesitation to recognize the Assyrian genocide is unjustified, for the evidence is overwhelming that Turks and their Kurdish allies massacred tens, and more likely hundreds, of thousands of Assyrians in order to exterminate the Christian population.” Citing contemporary American and British press dispatches, the famous British Foreign Office “Blue Book,” eywitness accounts from both victims and German military officers assigned to the Ottoman Empire (a German ally) during World War I, and many other sources, Travis paints an appalling picture of massacre, plunder, rapine and scarcely imaginable suffering. As many as a quarter of a million Assyrians and other Christians perished along with the more than one million Armenians who died.

The evidence also makes clear that, like the attacks on the Armenians, this was emphatically a jihad genocide. As Travis notes, “On November 14 1914, less than two weeks after the Ottoman Empire declared war on the Entente (Great Britain, France, and Russia), the Sultan, still acting as a figurehead for the Young Turk regime, declared a jihad or holy war ‘against the enemies of Islam, who have proven their hostility by their attacks on the Caliphate.’ The next day, a key CUP (Committee of Union and Progress – the ‘Young Turks’) official led a march through Istanbul ‘meant to demonstrate the people’s agreement with the Sultan’s declaration of holy war against the enemies of Islam.’ The sheikh al-Islam, a CUP appointee and the highest religious authority in the Ottoman regime, endorsed the declaration of jihad and proclaimed it in print; violence against Christian Armenians quickly followed. These declarations of jihad ‘incited wrath toward Christian minorities in the Ottoman lands and ... later facilitated the government’s program of Genocide against the Armenians’ – and, as it happened, the Assyrians.”

That Fuat Deniz’s killer, who remains at large, was carrying on the jihad tradition is strongly indicated by the cause of the professor’s death: multiple wounds with an edged weapon to the neck. This is the manner of killing directly mandated by Islam’s prophet Muhammad in two Qur’anic verses:

Sura 8, Verse 12 – Remember thy Lord inspired the angels (with the message): “I am with you: give firmness to the Believers: I will instill terror into the hearts of the Unbelievers: Smite ye above their necks ...”

Sura 47, Verse 4 – Therefore, when ye meet the Unbelievers (in fight), Smite at their necks ...

Should this prove to be the case, Fuat Deniz would not be the first descendant of jihad genocide survivors to pay with his life for resisting Turkish Muslims’ decades-long antagonism toward the truth. On Jan. 19, newspaper editor Hrant Dink was gunned down in front of the Istanbul office of his bilingual Turkish-Armenian weekly newspaper, Agos. With his resolute candor about the Armenian genocide, Dink had long been a thorn in the side of Turkish authorities, who charged him repeatedly with the “crime” of “insulting Turkishness.” His confessed killer, a teenager who was heard to shout “I shot the infidel” as he was leaving the scene, was later shown after his arrest in a video clip on Turkish television, unrepentantly posing with the crescent-emblazoned Turkish flag as his police captors beamed in approval.

Kudos to Baron Bodissey at Gates of Vienna for breaking this story on this side of the pond.

Minarets and bayonets

2007-12-12T19:43:00.000-08:00

Mosques are our barracks,
domes our helmets,
minarets our bayonets,
believers our soldiers.
This holy army guards my religion.

- Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, adding his own lines to a 1912 Turkish poem at a Dec. 12, 1997 public gathering in Siirt, Eastern Anatolia. Erdogan addressed the International Islamophobia Conference in Istanbul described here.

Diktats and dhimmitude

2007-12-11T11:27:00.000-08:00

Robert Spencer has an excellent article at Human Events today on a "media guide" the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) has made available exclusively to "media professionals." Unsurprisingly, it instructs the latter to avoid such "common misperceptions" as "the notion ... that the Qur'an teaches violence." In order to comply, of course, the media professional must disregard verse after verse of Islam's holy book: 9:5, 9:14-15, 9:29, 9:123, 8:12, 47:4, etc., etc., ad nauseam. That being the case, Spencer's accuation that CAIR's objective here is to "marginalize and then end discussion of the dangers inherent in Islam" is spot on.

But Muslim diktats to the media are no innovation of CAIR’s. Hardly had the ashes of 9/11 cooled when the Society of Professional Journalists adopted a set of “diversity guidelines” at the behest of the American Muslim Council that included:

* Seek truth through a variety of voices and perspectives that help audiences understand the complexities of the events in Pennsylvania, New York City and Washington, D.C.

* Seek out people from a variety of ethnic and religious backgrounds when photographing Americans mourning those lost in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.

* When writing about terrorism, remember to include white supremacist, radical anti-abortionists and other groups with a history of such activity.

* Avoid using word combinations such as "Islamic terrorist" or "Muslim extremist" that are misleading because they link whole religions to criminal activity.

* Avoid using terms such as “jihad” unless you are certain of their precise meaning and include the context when they are used in quotations. The basic meaning of “jihad” is to exert oneself for the good of Islam and to better oneself.

* Use spellings preferred by the American Muslim Council, including "Muhammad," "Quran," and "Makkah ," not "Mecca."

* Ask men and women from within targeted communities to review your coverage and make suggestions.

These prescriptions for journalistic dhimmitude were adopted at the organization’s 2001 national convention in Seattle on Oct. 6. They remain in force, and are prominently posted at the group’s Web site (link above).

Criminalizing criticism

2007-12-10T10:44:00.000-08:00

Last weekend's International Islamophobia Conference, held by the Union of NGOs of the Islamic World at the Grand Cevahir Hotel in Instanbul, Turkey and mentioned in the foregoing post, has concluded with a statement urging "national and international law mechanisms" to "enact legislations and take decisions against Islamophobia" so that "Islamophobia should be accepted as a crime, just like anti-semitism." (The supposed status of anti-Semitism "as a crime" is probably a reference to European laws criminalizing Holocaust denial.) The anti-Islamophobia campaign, the statement adds, must be carried out "politically, legally and economically both in the national and international arena and in a systematical and strategical way" and constitutes "a basic duty for ... every institution and every government" - a clear confirmation of participants' intent to push their agenda at the next UN conference against racism and xenophobia ("Durban II") in 2009.

Eye on the UN observes that at "Durban II" the ground will have been well-prepared for them:

One specific inclusion in the resolution reveals the direction that the 2009 conference will take. In inviting different UN bodies to contribute to the new preparatory committee's work, the resolution singles out only two of the many Special Rapporteurs, the Special Rapporteur on Racism, and the Special Rapporteur on freedom of religion or belief. No mention is made, for example, of the rapporteur on promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression. In other words, Islamophobia and its manifestations in Danish cartoons will be on the agenda. Freedom of expression will not.

In a Feb. 12, 2006 East Valley (Mesa, Ariz.) Tribune article (unavailable online) on the "cartoon jihad" prompted by the publication of a dozen caricatures of Islam's prophet Muhammad in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, this correspondent predicted that

If Muslims can suppress such criticism by protesting, threatening and rioting, we can hardly expect them to stop with graphic images. Should the Western world accede to demand that their prophet not be criticized in artwork we will presently find them demanding that he not be criticized in print. We will find that any disparaging of Muhammad's piratical raids against his enemies, his history of warmaking or his practice of polygamy will prompt the appearance of a screaming mob at the offender's door. We will find, as the Qur'an demands in Sura 9:29, that as unbelievers we will be fought until we "feel [our]selves subdued.

and added, in another piece on Feb. 25, 2006, that

[Al-Azhar University Grand Imam Sheikh Muhammad Sayed] Tantawi and his co-religionists, with their demands for laws criticizing religious dogma and for the punishment and the Danish cartoonists and editors, seek to give legal force to radical Islam's chilling effect on free expression outside the Muslim world. Nor are such demands being heard only overseas. ... That chilling effect is already much in evidence among the mainstream American news media, which have made a near-unanimous capitulation to Muslim intimidation in deciding whether to run the Danish cartoons - despite their centrality to what has been one of the most important stories of the year. With their willingless to yield on the bedrock issue of freedom of expression, they have set a dreadful precedent; one certain to haunt us all in the years ahead.

The latter comment got me crosswise with my putative superiors at the Tribune, who did their best to mute my public voice. Upon their refusal to run any of the Danish cartoons with a piece I wrote two months later on Comedy Central TV network's censorship of the "South Park" episode dealing with the issue, I resigned in protest. The Istanbul conference and the groundwork being laid for "Durban II" indicate that both my criticism of their pusallinimity and my prediction of its baleful consequences are being borne out in spades. It is not too late for the world's journalists to blunt this assault on their most fundamental rights, but they had better get cracking.

Hat tip to the indispensable JihadWatch for its posts on this story, about which the mainstream media have been notably - and distressingly - silent.

Update: Baron Bodissey at Gates of Vienna (also an indispensable Counterjihad site) has a fine post on the Istanbul confab and its implications. Well worth a read.

Update II: Charles at LGF reports that the angry-left Web site Daily Kos has a long post today bewailing "Islamophobia" - hard on the heels of this conference's call for a "systematical and strategical" campaign against it.

A confab and a creepo

2007-12-04T14:46:00.001-08:00

In a post at JihadWatch this morning, Robert Spencer describes an International Islamophobia Conference to be held Dec. 8-9 at the Grand Cevahir Hotel in Instanbul, Turkey. The intent of this confab is most likely to gear up for the second UN “Conference on Racism and Xenophobia,” to be held in 2009. At the first “Racism and Xenophobia” conference, held in Durban, South Africa the week before the 9/11 atrocity, Palestinian zealots ran amuck, raging and seething and doing their utmost to turn the event into a condemnation of Israel. Muslim countries and organizations have made clear their intention to force the next such conference to focus on “Islamophobia,” with an eye toward eventually criminalizing criticism, analysis, or mockery of the menacing aspects of Islam as “hate speech.”

Among the attendees to the Istanbul meeting will be such apologists for Islam as Karen Armstrong and John Esposito – and a fellow named William Baker, whom the Turkish text lists as “Chairman of Christians and Muslims for Peace.”

According to an article in the Feb. 14, 2002 issue of Orange County Weekly, Baker has achieved a certain notoriety for anti-Jewish statements and writings, including his 1982 book “Theft of a Nation,” which opines that in the interest of “true justice and real conciliation,” all Jews “who entered Palestine during the British Mandate from 1917 to 1948 and after the establishment of the state of Israel should return to the various countries of their origin” and that the “Zionist state of Israel ... should be dismantled and eventually eliminated.”

(It is noteworthy that the pastor on whose ties to Baker this article reports, Rev. Robert Schuller, founder of the Garden Grove, Calif. megachurch Crystal Cathedral and the Hour of Power religious television program, is a signatory to the “Christian Response to ‘A Common Word Between Us and You,’” an obsequious answer to a recent open letter from Muslim clerics that, citing Qur’an 3:64, essentially calls Christians to Islam. According to the aforementioned Orange County Weekly story, Baker had “introduced Schuller and his family to important Islamic leaders, such as the Grand Mufti of Damascus.” Schuller did, to his credit, cut his church's ties with Baker soon after the story appeared.)

Cry the beloved profession

2007-12-01T11:58:00.000-08:00

On Dec. 13, the notorious Council for American-Islamic Relations will hold a panel on “Islamophobia and the Political Cartoon.” The event will feature Peter Gottschalk, a professor of religion at Wesleyan University, and his former student Gabriel Greenberg, who have authored a book on this subject entitled “Islamophobia: Making Muslims the Enemy” (“in the spirit,” according to Publishers Weekly, “of Edward Said’s “Orientalism”).

“The discussion,” unsurprisingly, “will focus on how political cartoons often stereotype Muslims,” – with an eye, no doubt, toward greater “sensitivity” and “restraint” (read: “self-censorship”) among American newspaper editors. The latter, of course, are already so imbued with these “virtues” that only three major U.S. papers – the Philadelphia Enquirer, the Austin American-Statesman and the Rocky Mountain News of Denver – had the journalistic integrity to print any of the Danish caricatures of Muhammad in February 2006, when the vicious Muslim reaction to them was front-page news.

In and of itself, such an event must be disheartening for defenders of press freedom. But what really strikes a chill is the venue in which it is to be held: the First Amendment Room of the National Press Club, 529 14th Street N.W., Washington, D.C. That no one in the National Press Club should have perceived the ghastly irony of this is a measure of the depths to which American journalism has descended.

UPDATE, Dec. 1:

Asked in a Nov. 19 interview at politicalaffairs.net (“Marxist Thought Online”) whether he thinks there is “a relationship between this negative cartoon imagery and other expressions of Islamophobia, such as religious and racial profiling and violent hate crimes,” Peter Gottschalk replied, “Yes, I do. ... What is happening with these cartoons is that a stereotype is being perpetuated that is not just about the physical appearance of Muslims – they are usually assumed to look like Arabs and dress like Arabs – but also a set of characteristics, that is, that the men are violent, the women oppressed, and that the religion itself is prone to extremes of both violence and oppression. ... There is today a kind of latent Islamophobia that works unconsciously among many Americans.”

In other words, Americans’ apprehension about Muslims’ “characteristics” are not due to the very real violence perpetrated daily worldwide by Muslim men by citing Islamic scripture, dogma and traditions, nor to the very real oppression suffered daily by Muslim women subjected to forced marriages, beatings (mandated by Qur’an 4:34), female genital mutilation and honor killings, but rather to a “stereotype” generated “unconsciously” by “latent Islamophobia.” Such is the quality of the arguments that will increasingly be used in coming years to suppress your right not only to criticize, analyze and satirize Islam, but even to gain true knowledge of it.

Welcome, LGF readers!

Great minds think alike, Part II

2007-12-01T02:46:00.000-08:00

Loo! loo! Lulu! lulu! Loo! loo! Loot! loot! loot!
Ow the loot! Bloomin' loot!
That's the thing to make the boys git up an' shoot!
It's the same with dogs an' men,
If you'd make 'em come again
Clap 'em forward with a Loo! loo! Lulu! Loot!
Whoopee! Tear 'im, puppy! Loo! loo! Lulu! Loot! loot! loot!

– Rudyard Kipling, “Loot”

Allah promiseth you much booty that ye will capture, and hath given you this in advance, and hath withheld men's hands from you, that it may be a token for the believers, and that He may guide you on a right path.

– Muhammad, Qur’an 48:20

Not missed. Passed.

2007-11-06T10:07:00.000-08:00

In an article this morning in Human Events, Robert Spencer comments on a memo by Donald Rumsfeld, quoted in a Washington Post story, in which the former SecDef "lamented that oil wealth has at times detached Muslims 'from the reality of the work, effort and investment that leads to wealth for the rest of the world. Too often Muslims are against physical labor, so they bring in Koreans and Pakistanis while their young people remain unemployed,' he wrote. 'An unemployed population is easy to recruit to radicalism.' "

Now this observation didn't require any particular insight – just eyesight. But the White House, horrified by the prospect of the plain truth roiling "hearts and minds across the Arab and Muslim world," scrambled to pre-emptively placate that world: "I can understand why they would be offended by those comments," said its spokesman Dana Perino (presumably feeling himself subdued).

Spencer regrets that "The release of the Rumsfeld [memo] could have been an occasion for the White House to call the Saudis to account for the double game they have long been playing in regard to jihad terrorism. ... Another opportunity missed."

Not missed. Passed, and quite deliberately. This administration has no intention of calling the Saudis to account for anything – not the hate-filled education their children receive, nor the boatloads of boodle with which they furnish our mortal enemies, nor their harboring of legions of hate-spewing jihadist clerics.

It will just keep clutching their hands – and kissing their asses.

The craven kingdom

2007-11-04T13:44:00.000-08:00

The Times of London has an eye-opening article today on Saudi Arabia’s role as a wellspring of jihad terrorism. It notes that while the Muslim monarchy has taken some steps to reverse this – in a belated recognition that not just foreign infidels but the regime itself were becoming targets –

“... the Saudis’ ambivalence towards terrorism has not gone away. Money for foreign fighters and terror groups still pours out of the kingdom, but it now tends to be carried in cash by couriers rather than sent through the wires, where it can be stopped and identified more easily.

“A National Commission for Relief and Charity Work Abroad, a nongovernmental organisation that was intended to regulate private aid abroad to guard against terrorist financing, has still not been created three years after it was trumpeted by the Saudi embassy in Washington.

“Hundreds of Islamic militants have been arrested but many have been released after undergoing reeducation programmes led by Muslim clerics.”

Well, that ought to straighten them out!

“School textbooks still teach the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a notorious antiSemitic forgery, and preach hatred towards Christians, Jews and other religions, including Shi’ite Muslims, who are considered heretics.”

Nor is “education” of this sort limited to the kingdom itself, as the curriculum of the Islamic Saudi Academy in Alexandria, Va., right across the Potomac from our own national capital, shows. As the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom noted in an Oct. 19 press release,

“The Saudi curriculum continues to be the subject of U.S. concern and the Saudi government and embassy, despite repeated U.S. government requests, have failed to disclose it. Several studies, including by Saudi experts themselves, have pointed to serious concerns that these texts encourage violence toward others, and misguide the pupils into believing that in order to safeguard their own religion, they must violently repress and even physically eliminate the ‘other.’”

The “other,” of course, being infidels such as you and me, who must be either converted to Islam, reduced to dhimmi subjugation, or killed – all in accordance with Islamic scripture, to wit: Qur’an 9:29, Sahih Muslim 4294, et al.

Saudi Arabia's current toxicity is due in large measure to a deal the House of Saud cut with the Wahhabi clerics during the 1979 takeover of the Grand Mosque in Mecca by Juhayman al-Uteybi and several hundred followers of his Muslim fundamentalist sect. Under this accord, as Yaroslav Trofimov writes in his indispensable new book, The Siege of Mecca, the senior ulema (Muslim clergy) decided that

"The House of Saud, despite all its failings, had to be shored up in its hour of need. As King Khalid requested, they would sign a fatwa, reaffirming the regime's Islamic legitimacy. But from now on, the Saudi rulers would have to live up to their Islamic obligations. There should be no more women on TV, no more licentious movies, no more alcohol. The social liberalization that had begun under King Faisal should be halted and, where possible, should be rolled back. And billions of Saudi petrodollars should be put to good use, spreading the rigid Wahhabi Islam around the planet. ... the ulema essentally asked al-Saud to adopt Juhayman's agenda in return for getting rid of Juhayman himself."

Juhayman was accordingly defeated (with an assist by the French) and lost his head – but won his point. The fancy mosque that went up in the early '80s not far from where I live (and at which one of the notorious "Flying Imams" preaches) probably wouldn't be there but for him. The Saudi terror-coddling policies described in the Times piece may also be laid at his door. Few today remember the Grand Mosque takeover – the thumbnail history of Saudi Arabia at the beginning of the movie “The Kingdom” omitted it entirely – but few events have proved more crucial in spawning the skulking menace we now face.

'Orwell! thou shouldst,' redux

2007-10-28T22:21:00.000-07:00

A new blog titled Kafir Canada has put up a graphic on the specious "Islam is Peace" campaign in Britain that's worth a thousand words:

Baron Bodissey at Gates of Vienna opines that this one should go viral. Roger that!

A prideful admission of thuggery

2007-10-27T23:31:00.000-07:00

Gates of Vienna has posted a link to a Danish blog that has translated an admission on an anarchist site to the beat-down described in the foregoing post. The relevant text is worth quoting here:

"Lately there has been a tendency that people believe everything that they read on Nazi-pages, latest SIAD’s lie that knives were used against them last Sunday. Anders Gravers, his wife and their wannabe-bodyguards got their well deserved (and plentiful) beatings, but naturally knives weren’t used! Don’t believe everything that you read on the net, especially not when it is on Nazi-pages!!"

The irony of these vermin calumniating sites that have reported on their thuggery as "Nazi-pages" is rather breathtaking, given that their attitude and tactics exactly replicate those of Ernst Roehm's SA goons during the Nazi party's rise to power. (Roehm and his lieutenants, of course, received a condign comeuppance in the "Blood Purge" of 1934.)

It is a huge pity to see this kind of leftist goon-squad activity emerging in Denmark, a fine little country of which I have fond memories after a visit there in 2000. I very much hope the thing won't raise its ugly head on this side of the Atlantic, but given the vitriol one commonly sees on not just the fringe but the mainstream American left, I hope without hope in my heart.

A shout-down and a beat-down

2007-10-26T12:47:00.000-07:00

On American college campuses, this has been “Islamofascism Awareness Week” – and throughout it, Muslim activists and their hard-left allies have reacted rabidly, even going the length of shouting down the event’s organizer David Horowitz at Emory University in Altanta Wednesday. In a column this week, the much-maligned Ann Coulter nailed it: “If liberals want to face real fascism,” she wrote the next day, they should “try showing up on a college campus and denouncing fascism.”

But in Europe things have gone even further, as the Web site of Stop the Islamisation of Europe reports. On Oct. 21, a goon squad of so-called “autonomists” set upon demonstrators from the Danish chapter of the group in Copenhagen with blunt-force and edged weapons – and drew blood:

That this heinous assault was evidently the work of leftist anarchists rather than Muslims brings to mind a line from a recent review of a book on slave ships, to the effect that "any totalitarian system enlists a lower layer to control those at the very bottom." It seems clear that there is a convergence of interests between leftist radicals and Muslim supremacists, such that the latter will be happy to utilize the former as enforcers. The rabid hard-left reaction to Islamofascism Awareness Week is part and parcel of this.

For Europeans, few of whom have access to proper weaponry, a few practical notes are in order:

* If you elect to carry cutlery, when responding to an attack such as this go for a hand cut – and cut hard. A copiously bleeding hand will not only compromise the assailant's ability to press his attack but may demoralize him enough to end it.

* During the hours of darkness, some of the newer flashlights are bright enough to temporarily blind an attacker and give the operator a chance to get clear. My own choice is a SureFire 6P.

* Safety shoes designed for factory workers protect wearers' toes with caps of steel or even titanium. Such footgear has defensive potential as well. Be safe!

* Don't overlook the power of a shillelagh. A stout length of blackthorn has served many an Irishman well over the centuries, and I carry the same on my nocturnal strolls. (I also carry two switchblades and a pistol, but then I live in the American West.)

I wish the defiant Europeans all success in their resistance to the creeping Islamization to which their wretched governments seem determined to deliver them. (See Bat Ye’or’s “Eurabia” for the squalid history of this process.) And to militant Muslims and their leftist lickspittles in America, a caveat:

That shit won’t flush on this side of the pond.

Candor from Qaradawi

2007-10-20T01:36:00.000-07:00

The Gulf Times of Qatar has a most revealing story about Muslim TV preacher Yusef Al-Qaradawi’s exhortation to the faithful to fight the U.S. in the event that it attacks Iran:

Excerpts:

“In an interview with the IslamOnline radio on Thursday, Qaradawi stressed that all Muslims have the duty of launching jihad (holy war) against any enemy attacking a Muslim country.”

Hey! “Holy war?” Doesn’t “jihad” really mean an inner spiritual struggle to make oneself a better person?

“Iran is a Muslim country which all Muslims should defend while the US is an enemy of Islam that has already declared war on Islam under the disguise of war on terrorism and provides Israel with unlimited support.”

Hey! “... the U.S. is an enemy of Islam?” “... that has already declared war on Islam?” Isn’t Qaradawi a Muslim “reformist”? Didn’t Georgetown University's John Esposito say so?

Guess I must be missing something.

Muhammad's his bitch

2007-10-18T10:24:00.000-07:00

Not content with having enraged Muslim supremacists with his "Muhammad as a traffic-circle dog" sketches, Swedish artist Lars Vilks has acquired a real live pooch - a female, no less - for protection, and named her "Muhammad."

So now Vilks has not just insulted "the Prophet," he has actually made Muhammad his bitch! Could any riposte to Islamic ire be more condign?

An MSM exhortation to cowardice

2007-10-16T12:08:00.000-07:00

CNN has a story this morning on Swedish artist and rondellhund provocateur Lars Vilks, in which reporter Paula Newton opines that “... one could argue Vilks should have known better because of what happened in Denmark in 2005, when a cartoonist's depictions of the prophet sparked violent protests in the Muslim world and prompted death threats against that cartoonist's life” (Hat tip: LGF.

CNN, of course, did “know better” during the Motoon furor. As I wrote in the Feb. 12, 2006 East Valley Tribune, “The response by the American news media to this fundamental challenge has been anything but encouraging. CNN, in every story covering it, has included the line, ‘CNN has chosen not to show the cartoons out of respect for Islam.’ The network showed no such respect for Christianity on March 27, 2000, however, when it showed British artist Chris Ofili’s painting “The Holy Virgin Mary,” which incorporated elephant dung and images of female genitalia, in a story about a Brooklyn museum’s dispute with new York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. Giuliani had complained that the artwork desecrated a figure sacred to millions of Catholics.”

Yes, Vilks should have been intimidated into self-censorship, just as the oh-so-principled CNN was. It was just this kind of thing that prompted my resignation from my MSM job during the Motoon affair. I’ve often wondered if I was right to do so. Incidents such as this indicate that I was.

Orwell! thou should'st be living at this hour

2007-10-01T10:59:00.000-07:00

An invidious "Islam is Peace" propaganda campaign
is being waged in England through signs on the very buses targeted by jihad terrorists in London two years ago (hat tip: JihadWatch):

This is straight out of "1984." The Beeb has a story on it, the last sentence of which notes that "The campaign is launched as a new law banning incitement to religious hatred comes into force." We shall see if certain Islamic materials that incite to religious hatred are to be banned -- specifically, the Qur'an, with its dozens of verses such as 9:29, which enjoins Muslims to fight the People of the Book (Christians and Jews) until they "feel themselves subdued" and 9:123, which exhorts them to "fight the unbelievers who are near to you, and let them find in you a harshness."

In view of the extent to which British officialdom has declined into dhimmitude, I'm not to going to hold my breath waiting.

Spencer scores yet again

2007-09-25T23:51:00.000-07:00

I have praised the work of Robert Spencer before, but I am obliged to take note of his eloquent, erudite and mannerly criticism of the talk-show host Glenn Beck today. Speaking with his guest Zuhdi Jasser, a genuinely moderate Muslim from Phoenix, Beck had brushed off the notion that, in Islam, "lying is not only permissible, but it is encouraged, so long as that lie will further the cause" as a "warped view" of the faith. Citing Qur'an 3:28, the tasfir (commentary) of the classical Muslim scholar Ibn Kathir thereon, and one hadith each from Sahih Bukhari and Sahih Muslim, Spencer conclusively showed that, according to the scripture Muslims live by, lying to infidels damned well is not just encouraged but mandated.

His conclusion to the post is worth quoting here: "... fantasy-based analysis ultimately won't accomplish anything ... peaceful Muslims will never be able to stand up to the jihadists until they have the courage to formulate a radical reinterpretation of the core Islamic sources, acknowledging the violent and supremacist elements within them and explicitly rejecting them. They will never be able to do this, or to do anything but reassure uninformed non-Muslims, by pretending that those elements don't exist and wishing, wishing, wishing they would disappear."

We who would preserve our rights, our liberties and our civilization from the menace of Islamic supremacism owe a very considerable debt to Robert Spencer, whose blogs and books are worthy of assiduous perusal.

Apropos the foregoing ...

2007-09-24T23:49:00.000-07:00

"O believers, fight the unbelievers who are near to you, and let them find in you a harshness ..."

– Qur'an 9:123 (A.J. Arberry translation)

Fantasies and falsehoods

2007-09-24T12:07:00.000-07:00

On Aug. 31, Rabbi Eric Yoffie, president of the Union for Reform Judaism, gave a speech to the Islamic Society of North America. Today IslamOnline ran a report on this speech, the full text of which is here. The fantasies and falsehoods in Yoffie’s discourse would be discomfiting in any context; coming from so prominent a leader of American Jews, they are absolutely appalling.

... there is no shortage of voices prepared to tell us that fanaticism and intolerance are fundamental to Islamic religion, and that violence and even suicide bombing have deep Koranic roots. There is no lack of so-called experts who are eager to seize on any troubling statement by any Muslim thinker and pin it on Islam as a whole.

“No shortage .. no lack” of knowledgeable critics of Islam? What utter nonsense. In fact there are but a handful, who are assiduously excluded by the mainstream media in favor of willful ignoramuses mouthing multiculturalist cant.

... the time has come put aside what the media says is wrong with Islam and to hear from Muslims themselves what is right with Islam.

And what should the media put aside? They already do their utmost not to identify the protagonists in “sudden jihad syndrome” incidents as Muslims, as witness the New York Post’s presposterous assertion that the religion of a young man arrested for making threats after distributing leaflets urging conversion to Islam “was not immediately known.”

Anti-Semitism is not native to Islamic tradition ...

It would take an entire book to catalogue the elements of Islamic tradition that refute this, and just such a book has been compiled by Andrew Bostom. Suffice it here to cite but two Qur’anic verses:

“Why do not the rabbis and doctors of law forbid them from their habit of uttering sinful worlds and eating of things forbidden? Evil indeed are their works.” (5:63)

“The Jews say: ‘Allah’s hand is tied up.’ Be their hands tied up and be they accursed for the blasphemy they utter. Nay, both His hands are widely outstretched: He giveth and spendeth (of His bounty) as He pleaseth. But the revelation that cometh to thee from Allah increaseth in most of them their obstinate rebellion and blasphemy. Amongst them we have placed enmity and hatred till the Day of Judgment. Every time they kindle the fire of war, Allah doth extinguish it; but they (ever) strive to do mischief on earth. And Allah loveth not those who do mischief.” (5:64)

(Abdullah Yusif Ali translations.)

... but a virulent form of it is found today in a number of Islamic societies ...

Can Yoffie identify any such societies in which said virulence is not found today?

... and we urgently require your assistance in mobilizing Muslims here and abroad to delegitimize and combat it.

And how, pray, is this to be done, given the Qur’anic basis for Muslim enmity? How are the many Qur’anic verses that are inimical toward Jews to be “delegitimized,” given that Muslims hold them to be the eternal, uncreated word of God, transmitted to “the Prophet” Muhammad by the angel Gabriel?

Eric Yoffie’s efforts to reach out to Muslims are like the efforts of a dying man in a desert who crawls toward the water that appears just ahead of him. Both are equally hallucinatory, and both have about the same prospect of success.

Nota bene

2007-09-23T22:05:00.000-07:00

“We have seen that Negroes are in general characterized by levity, excitability and great emotionalism. They are found eager to dance whenever they hear a melody. They are everywhere described as stupid.”

– Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406), “The Muqaddimah,” trans. Franz Rosenthal, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), 63

“Jazz is the favorite music [of America]. It is a type of music invented by [American] Blacks to please their primitive tendencies and desire for noise.”

– Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966), cited in John Calvert, “ ‘The World is an Undutiful Boy!’: Sayyid Qutb’s American Experience,” Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations, Vol. 11, No. 1 (2000): 99

“The Negro nations are, as a rule, submissive to slavery, because (Negroes) have little that is (essentially) human and possess attributes that are quite similar to those of the dumb animals.”

– Ibn Khaldun, “The Muqaddimah,” 117

On September 18, Hamas' Al-Aqsa TV labeled U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice a "black snake."

– The MEMRI Blog

Mendacity in the Muslim media

2007-09-23T11:57:00.000-07:00

IslamOnline has a story today about Swedish Muslims' reaction to a judge’s rejection of their lawsuit charging Lars Vilks and the Swedish paper Nerikes Allehanda with “incitement to racial hatred.” The piece contains several blatant falsehoods:

Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt was quick to nip the crisis in the bud. He did not hesitate to condemn the offensive cartoon ...

He did nothing of the sort. He expressed “regret if people have been insulted or feel hurt” but clearly stated that “politics must not be allowed to interfere with freedom of the press and of expression.” Like the Pakistani government, whose press release declaring that the Swedish government “fully shared the views of the Muslim community” was denounced by the Swedish Foreign Ministry as “false,” and Syrian grand mufti Ahmad Badreddin Hassoun, whose claim that Swedish ambassador Catharina Mempel Kipp had “conveyed an apology” to him was also denied by the foreign ministry, IslamOnline is spinning a narrative of official Swedish contrition out of whole cloth.

The cartoon provoked peaceful protests by Muslims in the town of Oerebro, west of Stockholm, where the paper is based.

Peaceful protests, eh? Like the nocturnal burning of several hundred copies of the newspaper Muslims are mad at, and the arson attack on one of Lars Vilks’s artistic constructions?

Swedish Muslims also refused to internationalize the crisis, arguing that it was an internal affair.

Bunk. Protests and remonstrations at the publication of Vilks’s sketches came from Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Egypt, Jordan, and the Muslim World League and the Organization of the Islamic Conference, both in Saudi Arabia – all of which were directed at the Orebro paper Nerikes Allehanda, though several other Swedish papers had printed the drawings as well. Muslims in Orebro, where the most vociferous demonstrations were held, were clearly getting the word out to their co-religionists overseas.

The sheer mendacity of IslamOnline’s reportage neatly accords with “The Prophet” Muhammad’s declaration, affirmed in three hadiths (Volume 4, Book 52, Nos. 267, 268 and 269) of Bukhari, that “War is deceit.”

Grit, gutlessness and gall

2007-09-18T15:31:00.000-07:00

With Cartoon Jihad II, prompted by the “Muhammad as a traffic-circle dog” sketches of Swedish artist Lars Vilks (now in hiding at the behest of Swedish security agencies), well under way, it is instructive to take a look at what sort of cartoonery on Islam-related issues is publishable in sundry regions of the world. First, we have a cartoon that ran Monday in the Danish newspaper Berlingske Tidende, depicting several figures at a negotiation table (hat tip to Gates of Vienna, one of whose correspondents provides a translation):

Suit at left: “Sorry, but what about your treatment of women, if I may ask?”
Turbaned ranter at right: “You little Zionist, Islamophobe racist! This is not a women-conference but a human rights conference!”
Cringer at center: “I’d just like to say ... ‘Allahu Akbar!’”

This is great stuff: edgy, uncompromsing, and accurate. It targets a chink in the victimization armor of Muslim propagandists and shows just how they react when called on such things: with name-calling and rancorous attempts to change the subject. Moreover, it gets in a dig at the lickspittles who reflexively defer to them. And this appeared in a mainstream paper! Imagine such a thing running in a stateside MSM paper. Pretty impossible, when you consider the cowardice nearly all of them showed during Cartoon Jihad I last year – and the Washington Post’s recent pre-emptive deference to Islam in spiking two recent installments of Berkley Breathed’s “Opus” comic strip that showed a flighty female character donning a niqab in a harum-scarum quest to try on one spiritual creed after another. This drew an irate reaction from many readers and a tut-tut from Deborah Howell, the paper’s own ombudsman. But, as Washington Post Writers Group Executive Sales Manager Karisue Wyson told the trade journal Editor and Publisher, many papers “won't publish any Muslim-related humor, whether pro or con,” because “They just don't want to touch that.”

Meanwhile, in the Middle East, the Palestinian Authority paper Al-Hayat al-Jadida ran a cartoon depicting Osama bin Laden making the two-fingered "victory" sign – with the Twin Towers as his two fingers, one belching smoke, the other about to be hit by a plane. That a newspaper in the Muslim world should implicitly gloat over bin Laden’s success in murdering over 3,000 completely innocent people in the 9/11 atrocity comes as no surprise, but that this should come from an organization that receives U.S. tax dollars by the boatload bespeaks a particular gall.

Contract for slaughter

2007-09-15T12:53:00.000-07:00

In an Internet communique entitled "They plotted yet God too was plotting," al-Qaeda in Iraq has posted bounties on the heads of Lars Vilks, the artist whose sketches of "Muhammad as a traffic-circle dog" have roiled the Swedish art scene, and Ulf Johansson, editor of Nerikes Allehanda, a Swedish newspaper that printed one of the drawings to illustrate an editorial criticizing "unacceptable self-censorship" on the part of art exhibitors that refused to show them. The reward for a successful hit on Vilks is $100,000, with a $50,000 bonus if he is "slaughtered like a lamb," and $50,000 for one on Johansson.

Al-Qaeda’s desire that Lars Vilks be "slaughtered like a lamb" and its offer of extra bounty for the same are actually an exhortation to jihadists to slit his throat while speaking the name of Allah, as sheep are slaughtered for Eid al-Adha, the "Festival of Sacrifice" with which Ramadan concludes. There is ample precedence for human sacrifice of this sort: it was also carried out during the massacre of Armenians in Urfa in 1895, as Lord Kinross noted in "The Ottoman Centuries" (New York: Morrow Quill Paperbacks, 1977, p.560):

"When a large group of Armenians were brought before a sheikh, he had them thrown down on their backs and held by their hands and feet. Then, in the words of an observer, he recited verses of the Koran and ‘cut their throats after the Mecca rite of sacrificing sheep.’"

With Ramadan now under way, Eid al-Adha isn’t far off. Lars Vilks would do well to arm himself, lest his person supply the jihad enemy the medium for an artwork in the style of Jackson Pollock.

Nota bene: As Robert Spencer at Jihad Watch has observed, the title of al-Qaeda’s communique is straight from the Qur’an – to wit, Verse 3:54:

"And (the unbelievers) plotted and planned, and God too planned, and the best of planners is God." (Abdullah Yusif Ali translation.)

Update: Gruesome photos from last year's Eid slaughter. Warning: these are not for the faint of heart.

Howler of the day

2007-09-13T13:38:00.000-07:00

Former UN muckety-muck Jan Egeland, now director of the Norwegian Institute to International Affairs, to Reuters:

"If I could have a meeting with al Qaeda where one could impress upon them that they are the biggest anti-Islamic force around, why not?"

I'd certainly like to hear the arguments Mr. Egeland would make in such a meeting to persuade his interlocutors that they're acting against the Qur'an, ahadith, tasfir and sira. Somehow I doubt he'd make much headway.

Jihad in India

2007-09-13T12:58:00.000-07:00

On Aug. 25, jihad bomb attacks on an amusement park laser show and a restaurant in the Indian city of Hyderabad killed 30 people and wounded 60 – just the latest atrocities in a terror campaign that has left India second only to Iraq in the number of terrorism casualties over the past three years, according to the Times of India:

“In fact, India has since 2004 lost more lives to terrorist incidents than all of North America, South America, Central America, Europe and Eurasia put together. All of these vast swathes of the globe lost a total of 3,280 lives in terrorist incidents between January 2004 and March this year. India alone lost 3,674 lives over the same period of three years and three months.”

Other recent stories in the Times of India tell of the arrests of 10 people in connection with the blasts, who are suspected of smuggling the explosive RDX from the predominantly Muslim nation of Bangladesh, in which the Harkat-ul-Jehad Al-Islami jihad group is based, and one detainee’s provision of mobile phone SIM cards (used to detonate IEDs) to a “terror module” in the city. The Times of India Web site and the archives of both Jihad Watch and the Counterterrorism Blog have much information on this oft-overlooked front in the global jihad.

Then, as now ...

2007-09-11T16:34:00.000-07:00

What makes Muslims feel better about unbelievers? The Qur'an (verses (9:14-15) says it:

“Fight them, and God will chastise them at your hands and degrade them, and He will help you against them, and bring healing to the breasts of a people who believe, and He will remove the rage within their hearts; and God turns towards whomsoever He will; God is All-knowing, All-wise.”¹

LGF shows it.

up ¹ A.J. Arberry translation.

Great minds think alike

2007-09-10T11:26:00.000-07:00

“One principle must be absolute for the SS man: we must be honest, decent, loyal and comradely to members of our own blood and to no one else.”

– Heinrich Himmler, Reichsfuhrer SS, in a speech to SS group leaders in Poznan, Poland, Oct. 4, 1943.¹

“ ... ‘kind and generous towards their own people and ruthless against our enemies at home and abroad’.”

– Reinhard Heydrich, Obergruppenfuhrer SS, describing the SS creed in a 1939 letter to his wife.²

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

– Muhammad, prophet of Islam; in Qur’an 48:29.³

up ¹ From records of the Trial of Major War Criminals before International Military Tribunal, Nuremburg, 1947-1949; cited in “The Face of the Third Reich: Portraits of the Nazi Leadership,” by Joachim C. Fest.

up ² Quoted in “Der Spiel ist aus,” Der Spiegel, Feb. 19, 1950; cited in “The Killing of Obergruppenfuhrer Reinhard Heydrich,” by Callum Macdonald.

up ³ A.J. Arberry translation.

Demands, then denial

2007-09-09T13:01:00.000-07:00

According to both Muslim ambassadors and Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt, Friday’s meeting concerning the printing by Swedish newspapers of artist Lars Vilks’s drawings on the theme of “Muhammad as a traffic-circle dog” went off swimmingly. Iran’s ambassador Hassan Ghashghavi told the Swedish news agency TT afterward that “the Swedish government has handled this situation well,” while Reinfeldt spoke of a “very positive dialogue.” Representatives of both sides denied that a list of Muslim demands trumpeted by Egyptian ambassador Mohamed Sotouhi Thursday had ever been presented: Reinfeldt said “There were no demands in that sense,” a denial echoed by Syria’s ambassador Mohammad Bassam Imadi: “We have no list of demands, on the contrary, we are here to bring two sides together where there is a problem.”

But given the stridency of Sotouhi’s Thursday statements to TT and his disclosure that “he and a group of fellow ambassadors had agreed” on a list of “comprehensive measures,” it is hard to see such feel-good characterizations as anything but a mendacious whitewash of what went on an official meeting from which the press was excluded. While a letter presented by the ambassadors to Reinfeldt and “obtained by” (read: “handed on a silver platter to”) the newspaper Expressen contained no demands per se, Sotouhi listed three very specific ones:

* Targeted censorship: "Muslims need legal protection against the desecration of the Prophet Muhammad."

* Sensitivity indoctrination in schools and newsrooms: "The school curriculum has to convince pupils that if they want to express their opinion they should do so in such a way that it doesn't cause offence or hurt. This should also be part of journalism training."

* Political correctness enforcers: “A permanent parliamentary committee also needs to be established to tackle Islamophobia.”

In short, the Swedish press – which didn’t generate the “Muhammad as a roundabout dog” sketches but was only doing its job by printing them with its coverage of the controversy surrounding them – must be censored, indocrinated, and monitored by a parliament whose members, this story indicates, would be only too glad to clip their wings.

If Swedish journalists want to preserve their rights, they had better do some digging to find out what really happened during Friday’s meeting. Is it really to be supposed that, having declared Thursday that “We want to see action, not just nice words,” Sotouhi and his fellow Muslim ambassadors settled the next day for nothing more than “very positive dialogue”? Did Reinfeldt agree to any of the items on Sotouhi’s wish list? Did he pass the buck to a Swedish parliament in which hostility toward freedom of the press has been documented by a professionally conducted survey? Not only the public but journalists themselves urgently need to know.

‘A spirit of appeasement’

2007-09-06T15:20:00.000-07:00

In the wake of official complaints about Swedish newspapers' printing of Lars Vilks's Muhammad sketches from Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Jordan, Egypt and the Organization for the Islamic Conference, Sweden’s Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt has agreed to a meeting tomorrow with ambassadors from 20 Muslim nations. Among the demands for which they will press, as Egyptian ambassador to Sweden Mohamed Sotouhi told the news agency TT, are sensitivity indoctrination for journalists, a “permanent parliamentary committee ... to tackle Islamophobia,” and “a change in [Swedish] law” offering Muslims “protection from the desecration of the Prophet Muhammad.”

In short, complete immunity from criticism for Muslims and their creed. And the Muslim diplomats expect nothing less than abject submission, as Algeria’s ambassador Merzak Bedjaoui made clear in calling the meeting “an excellent initiative taken in a spirit of appeasement.”

All in keeping with Qur’anic scripture, to wit: Verses 48:29, which declares that Muslims are “hard against the unbelievers”; 9:123, which exhorts them to “let them find in you a harshness”; and 9:29, which enjoins them to fight unbelievers until they “feel themselves subdued.”

Judensau – ‘a parody of a caricature’

2007-09-05T19:08:00.000-07:00

Swedish artist Lars Vilks, whose sketches of Muhammad as a rondellhund (traffic-circle dog statue) ignited the reprise of the cartoon jihad chronicled in the foregoing post, has explained his drawing of a "judensau" to the Swedish news agency TT:

Vilks said he had observed how Muslims were treated with greater care than other religious groups. It was with this in mind that he composed the drawing 'Modern Jewish sow, swollen by capitalism', a drawing he published on his own website as a response to a rhetorical question from a Swedish journalist.

"The 'Jew sow' is crystal clear and belongs to a particular situation. It's a parody of a caricature, it's so over-explicit. I understand that the picture itself in another context could be explosive. But I'm no anti-Semite.

"Otherwise I wouldn't have written the accompanying text about how Muslims are able to have a go at Jews in the roughest manner without any reaction because people are afraid to attack Muslims," said Vilks.

Roger that. My second language being Russian rather than Swedish, I didn't catch Vilks's clarification on his blog, but am glad to have it now.

Scrawls of fury

2007-09-05T13:53:00.000-07:00

Swedish artist’s Muhammad sketches rekindle cartoon rage

When a story about the removal of a few sketches of Islam’s prophet Muhammad from an art exhibit in a Swedish town began to show up on an American blog in late July, it seemed a bagatelle – even after last year’s furor over a Danish newspaper’s publication of a dozen such caricatures in 2005. Since then, however, Lars Vilks’s puckish depictions have sparked controversy and been printed in several newspapers in his native country, prompting official protests in the Muslim world and death threats to the artist himself. We appear to be on the verge of “Cartoon Jihad II.”

The affair began on July 20, when Vilks – whom Swedish correspondents at Gates of Vienna, the blog that has done an excellent job of keeping up on this story, have variously referred to as “a well-established Swedish artist,” an “oddball” and “a total whacko” – provided three drawings for an art show in Tallberg, near Karlstad, on the theme of “The Dog in Art.” Vilks’s renditions depicted “rondellhunds” bearing the head of Muhammad. (Rondellhunds – “traffic circle dogs” – are a charmingly whimsical Swedish craze: wooden statues of dogs created and placed in traffic circles by persons anonymous.) When, shortly before opening of the exhibit, its organizers discovered what they had on display, they took Vilks’s drawings down in a panic over the anticipated reaction from thin-skinned Muslims.

“We didn’t understand how serious this was at first,” exhibit organizer Marta Wennerstrom told the newspaper Svenska Dagbladet. “I think that the drawings are good. But there is also a fear here at the homestead museum that it will lead to problems and uproar.” Vilks’s reaction: “So much for freedom of speech.” It is likely, however, that the artist sought just such a response – for, as he states on his Web site: “Only to an entirely insignificant extent is the art located in the drawings. The substantial center of gravity is in the observers’ experience and reaction.”

There it might have ended – a tempest in the minuscule teapot of the Swedish art scene. But the story grew legs in the Scandinavian media, particularly after the Gerlesborgskolan, an art school in Hamburgsund, also barred Vilks’s drawings from a show in mid-August, citing “security considerations.” Beginning with the paper “Barometern” on Aug. 15, the Swedish press began to print Vilks’s drawings with their coverage of the affair. Nerikes Allehanda followed with one on Aug. 18, as did Aftonbladet on Aug. 20 and Dagens Nyheter on Aug. 22, the latter with the cutline, “ ‘Mohammed as a roundabout-dog’ isn’t primarily a caricature of Mohammed or ‘Islam’ — but of the world of art. And judging by everything, it hit the bull’s-eye.” To the drawing Sydsvenskan ran on Aug. 24 it added a sketch of a “Jewish sow” Vilks had inked in response to a dare by Ingmarie Froman of the paper Svenska Dagbladet.

Vociferous reaction to the pictures’ publication from the Muslim world was not long in coming. On Aug. 24, a group of about 60 Muslims in the Swedish city of Orebro held a demonstration at the editorial offices of Nerikes Allehanda to protest the paper’s printing of one of the offending images with an editorial decrying art officials’ refusal to show Vilks’s drawings as “unacceptable self-censorship.” Two days later, the Iranian foreign ministry in Tehran summoned the Swedish charge d’affaires and issued an official protest of its own, as Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad fulminated that the cartoon was the work of “Zionists” who “thrive on conflict and war.” On Aug. 30, Pakistan’s foreign ministry also summoned the Swedish charge d’affaires for a dressing-down, and that same day the secretary-general of the 57-nation Organization of the Islamic Conference, Elkemeddin Ihsaoglu, demanded judicial sanction for the “blasphemous caricature,” blasting its publication as “irresponsible and despicable.” On Sept. 1 Afghanistan’s Ministry of Islamic Guidance in a statement in the Kabul Times echoed the OIC’s demand for punishment, as did Egypt’s Ministry of Religious Endowments the next day. On Sept. 3 a Jordanian government spokesman condemned the publication of the drawings, declaring that it “does not serve inter-faith dialogue and co-existence.” And in the small hours of the morning on Sept. 4, vandals in Orebro torched several hundred copies of Nerikes Allehanda awaiting delivery to readers.

In the face of all this the Swedish government and press establishment have shown a surprising amount of backbone. Newspaper editors have firmly rejected demands for apology, and even Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt was moved to declare his nation “eager to stand up for freedom of expression, which is enshrined in the constitution and comes naturally to us, and which ensures that we do not make political decisions about what gets published in the newspapers.” At a second Muslim demonstration on Aug. 31 against Nerikes Allehanda (around which most of the official condemnations in the Muslim world have centered) in Orebro – this one with some 300 in attendance instead of only 60 – a detachment of the Liberal Party’s youth wing showed up to countervail the protesters, with a spokeswoman who asserted that “Freedom of expression is absolutely central.”

Indeed it is – and it is good to see at least some liberals standing up for what are (or ought to be) quintessentially liberal values. It is also good to see the press in Sweden not only defending its rights but exercising them, which the overwhelming majority of American news media signally failed to do during the Danish cartoon jihad last year. Despite the latter story’s intensity and its direct impact on journalism itself, only three major American papers – the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Austin American-Statesman and the Rocky Mountain News in Denver – had the integrity to print any of the offending caricatures with their coverage and commentary on the issue. The rest offered weasely justifications for their pusillanimity, such as the Feb. 7, 2006 New York Times editorial that called that paper’s reticence “a reasonable choice ... especially since the cartoons are so easy to describe.”

Ease of description, of course, was not the point. The point was to properly practice journalism by printing the Danish cartoons to show readers what the fuss was about and enable them to decide whether it was warranted. “The people’s right to know,” it’s called – and the people certainly had a right to know what was fueling the Islamist fire that would leave at least 139 dead and 823 injured in the cartoon jihad. The point, moreover, was to push back against the malign sentiments expressed on placards and banners borne by Muslim throngs worldwide – which, in addition to calls for the deaths of the cartoonists and their editors, included, in Pakistan, “Our religion does not allow unconditional freedom of speech,” in Nigeria, “Free expression is Western terrorism,” and in Indonesia, “A Muslim’s faith is above Western values.”

Now a Muslim group, Sveriges Muslimska Förbund, is taking legal action to initiate the prosecution of the paper Nerikes Allehanda under a Swedish law prohibiting “agitation against an ethnic group” – never mind that Islam is not an ethnic group at all – and it considers not just the reproduction of Vilks’s drawing but the editorial next to it to be defamatory. “The text is about ridiculing religion,” declared Mahmoud Aldebe, the group’s chairman – though what the text really agitated against was the art world’s timorousness in shunning Vilks’s drawings.

(A stronger defamation case could in fact be made against Vilks, Ingmarie Froman, and the paper Sydsvenskan for the “Jewish sow” cartoon, a slur considerably more vicious than portraying Muhammad as a canine statue in a traffic circle. As the British historian Paul Johnson noted in his 1987 book “History of the Jews,” for centuries in Germany the “judensau” was “the commonest of all motifs for the Jew, and one of the most potent and enduring of abusive stereotypes,” whose “endless repetition helped on a process which in Germany was to become of great and tragic importance: the dehumanization of the Jew.” Likening Jews to animals, specifically monkeys and pigs, is also a common practice among jihad-oriented Muslim clerics, as Robert Spencer points out in his new book “Religion of Peace? Why Christianity Is and Islam Isn’t.”)

The stage is set for an intensification of Islamic ire. Last Friday in Lahore, Pakistan, Muslim demonstrators burned Swedish flags and carried signs reading “Down with Sweden” and “Death to Lars.” A more widespread wave of wrath could come this Friday, when imams preach to the faithful in mosques worldwide. It was after Friday prayers that last year’s cartoon jihad exploded into violence and mass demonstrations throughout the Muslim world.

It is time for the West to teach that world that there are certain things we hold sacred, and are not about to yield to prideful zealots and their ugly tantrums. Paramount among these are the inalienable human right to freedom of expression, and the right of the press to report freely on controversies surrounding its use. Should things get hot this week, let the Swedes hold their ground – and let the American press redeem itself by not shrinking from the graphic depiction of what has prompted the furor.

Cooking up a softer image

2007-08-28T13:04:00.000-07:00

Is this a trend? First, the May 2 Sydney Morning Herald runs a puff piece on the Muslim cleric Sheik Taj el-Din al Hilaly, who gained notoriety by likening rape victims to uncovered meat that gets eaten by cats, with a photo showing him whipping up a dish in his kitchen, where, the cutline notes, “he says he is happiest.” Now, we have an Aug. 28 Agence France-Presse dispatch highlighting the culinary proclivities of Iran’s megalomaniac President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad:

"Before (I became president) I used to do the grocery shopping. Now sometimes I help in the kitchen and I know how to make all the Iranian food," Ahmadinejad said.

Pressed by the interviewer for more details, Ahmadinejad continued in typically defiant fashion.

"Of course what I make is delicious – ask everyone who has eaten it! I can make all the different kinds of soups and Iranian stews."

Infidel readers are apparently supposed to be reassured by these homey depictions, intended to obscure what these pious Muslim leaders are really interested in cooking – to wit, our goose.

Friedman's flummery

2007-08-26T13:01:00.000-07:00

Comfortably ensconced on the editorial pages of the New York Times, pundit Thomas Friedman can always be relied upon to rhetorically deflect from the Western mainstream media the opprobrium their conduct so often merit. His column in Sunday’s edition is a case in point.

In it, he takes to task the Bush administration for having so effectively “swift-boated” the “authentic Vietnam war heroes” Max Cleland and John Kerry in the American media, while failing to do likewise with Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda in those of the Arab-Muslim world. Writing from Doha, Qatar, Friedman bewails the fact that in conversations in that region “it won’t take 30 seconds before the words ‘Abu Ghraib’ and ‘Guantánamo Bay’ are thrown at you” and, the numberless atrocities of the jihadist enemy notwithstanding, “none of their acts have become one-punch global insults like Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo.” As an example of said atrocities he cites the Aug. 14 suicide-bomb massacre of some 500 Kurdish Yazidis in Iraq, decries the Bush administration’s failure to denounce it in loud enough tones, and sternly asserts that “Even if we don’t know the exact perpetrators, we know who is inspiring this sort of genocide — Al Qaeda and bin Laden — and we need to say that every day.”

Excuse us, Mr. Friedman, but just who is this “we” that needs constantly to reiterate this point? I’ll tell you who: not the Bush administration but the Western mainstream media, at the rarified heights of which you toil. But said media can be counted upon to do nothing of the sort, which is why neither the Yazidi massacre – nor the butchery of hostages, the lynching of American contractors in Fallujah, the destruction of the Shi’ite Al-Askari mosque in Samarra, etc., etc., ad nauseam – has become a “one-punch global insult.” And the reason why Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo have become such insults is because the media have harped on them endlessly in precisely the manner you propose.

There are two reasons they do so. One is that in the wake of the traumatic 2000 election overtime slugfest, George W. Bush is perceived as a villain on a much more visceral level by the preponderant majority of American mainstream media reporters and pundits who are partisan Democrats than is Osama bin Laden or any other jihadist. The other is the near-reflexive deference of such people and their editors to Muslim sensitivities that has become almost a daily occurrence – as witness such current examples as the refusal of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer to print pictures of two men photographed while engaged in highly suspicious activity on a Puget Sound ferry that were released for public dissemination Aug. 21 by the FBI, and the decision by 25 mainstream newspapers to withhold the Aug. 26 and Sept. 2 installments of the comic strip “Opus” because a character shows up in a niqab, declaring Islamic radicalism “a hot new fad.” As Washington Post Writers Group Executive Sales Manager Karisue Wyson told the trade journal Editor and Publisher, many papers “won't publish any Muslim-related humor, whether pro or con,” stressing that “They just don't want to touch that.”

Not that the media of the Arab-Muslim world would be likely to parrot anti-jihadist coverage and commentary were it to appear in the Western media, the way they do the latter's current anti-American screeds. This is because the jihadist enemy’s critiques of America in particular and the West in general resonate among populations brought up not only on decades of inimical propaganda but on centuries of Quranic recitations such as Verse 48:29, which stipulates that Muslims are “hard against the disbelievers and merciful amongst themselves,” and verses 3:28, 3:118, 4:138-9, 5:51, 9:23 and 60:1, all of which enjoin the faithful to forbear from friendship or alliance with infidels – even if they are “your fathers or your brothers.”

Far be it from Friedman, of course, to cite the scripture, doctrines, and history of Islam as an obstacle to Arab-Muslim acceptance of anti-jihadist criticism. Instead, it’s all the president’s fault. “Mr. Bush is losing a P.R. war to a mass murderer,” he cavils. “Yes, it is not easy breaking through the innate, anti-American tilt of the Arab media, but we have barely tried.”

Again, that spurious “we.” Not only has the U.S. government, hobbled by its habits of “sensitivity” and deference, “barely tried” to make a case against the jihadist enemy, but the mainstream media establishment has collectively done its absolute damnedest to undermine any such case. Unhappily, it can be relied upon to continue to do so, for humor is not the only “Muslim-related” matter its editors, publishers and producers “just don’t want to touch.”

Many thanks once more ...

2007-08-25T00:00:00.000-07:00

... to Robert Spencer, director of JihadWatch, for linking to the foregoing post.

Spencer, Islam’s most trenchant contemporary critic, has written and edited several books that are worthy of perusal by anyone determined to retain the inalienable rights with which we have been endowed by our Creator – and which the jihadist enemy seeks to abrogate in his quest to reduce us under the absolute despotism of dhimmitude. These include:

“Onward Muslim Soldiers: How Jihad Still Threatens America and the West” (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2003)

“The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam and the Crusades” (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2005)

“The Truth about Muhammad: Founder of the World’s Most Intolerant Religion” (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2006)

“Religion of Peace? Why Christianity Is and Islam Isn’t” (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2007)

“The Myth of Islamic Tolerance: How Islamic Law Treats Non-Muslims” (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2005)

Though the titles of these works bespeak their polemical nature, they are not mere screeds but carefully researched analyses. Spencer has done us the signal service of reading deeply into the scripture and doctrines of Islam – the Qur’an, the ahadith, the tasfir and the sira – to show how the jihadist enemy uses the same in justifying his depredations and exhorting the adherents to this creed to violent action. To read his work is to arm oneself intellectually against that enemy – and in the world that has taken shape over the last several decades few endeavors can be more important.

Not all "John Does" out of imams' sights

2007-08-22T21:53:00.000-07:00

The news that Omar Mohammedi of New York and Frederick Goetz of Minneapolis, attorneys for the notorious “Flying Imams,” have limited the scope of the latter group’s jihad intimidation lawsuit is a positive development – but let no one suppose that this means they have stopped gunning for all of the “John Does” that reported the imams’ suspicious activity on U.S. Airways Flight 300 on Nov. 20, 2006. For their filing only dismisses “possible defendants ‘John Does’ as set forth in paragraphs 21 and 22 of the First Amended Complaint as parties from this action.” Omitted from it is paragraph 20 of said complaint, which reads:

“20. Defendant Flight Attendants and Desk Agents ‘John Does’ were at all times relevant to the events mentioned herein employees and/or agents of Defendant U.S. Airways and were acting within the scope of their employment on U.S. Airways Flight 300 on November 20, 2006 and subsequent U.S. Airways flights on November 20-21, 2006.”

Thus, the imams and their litigious henchmen are still trying to cow into silence individual airline workers who, their humble pay grade notwithstanding, had, if anything, more of a duty to report suspicious activity than did the passengers for whose safety they were responsible. Moreover, the imams’ lawyers have retained in their original filing paragraph 19, which names as a defendant Capt. John Wood for his temerity in deciding their provocations were grounds for their removal from the flight. Neither an upstanding airline captain nor conscientious airline workers have the kind of deep pockets whose contents the plaintiffs bar so covets, so their continued targeting by the imams can have but one object: intimidation, with the goal of rendering any activity by Muslim airline passengers off limits to either scrutiny or sanction.

This is right in line with Verse 8:12 of the Quran, which expresses Allah’s determination to “instill terror into the hearts of the Unbelievers,” and Verse 9:29, which enjoins Muslims to fight unbelievers until they “feel themselves subdued.” Subdued, with a terror of financial ruin in our hearts – that is how these clerics want us the next time a dry run takes place.

Or a wet one.

Of bullets and buncombe

2007-08-15T21:58:00.000-07:00

Beaucoup buzz on the photo of the hijab hag with the unfired rounds she told Agence France-Presse hit her house. AFP has issued a correx to the original cutline, which read:

"An elderly Iraqi woman shows two bullets which she says hit her house following an early coalition forces raid in the predominantly Shiite Baghdad suburb of Sadr City. At least 175 people were slaughtered on Tuesday and more than 200 wounded when four suicide truck bombs targeted people from an ancient religious sect in northern Iraq, officials said.(AFP/Wissam al-Okaili)"

The correx reads:

"CORRECTS BULLETS TO UNSPENT An elderly Iraqi woman holds up two unspent bullets at her house following an early coalition forces raid in the predominantly Shiite Baghdad suburb of Sadr City, 14 August 2007."

As Ace of Spades notes, the correx says nothing about the woman's laughable claim that the rounds hit her house -- which they could hardly have done unless the troops were using a slingshot instead of an M-4.

Other bloggers have commented on peculiarities in the appearance of the rounds. Now maybe things have changed since my own ETS back in the last century, but all the 5.56 ball I ever got issued (and the British surplus stuff that's in my personal stores) has a band of discoloration on the cartridge case neck and shoulder from annealing. Commercial rounds don't show that, as it gets polished off before loading -- just like the ones the "Magic Bullet Lady" is displaying.

Unfired rounds in a long-standing war

2007-08-15T15:44:00.000-07:00

Little Green Footballs has a highly amusing post today on an Agence France-Presse photo showing an Iraqi crone holding up two "bullets" that supposedly hit her house during a Coalition raid in Sadr City. The projectiles in the photo seem to have survived the impact rather well -- which is only to be expected, given that they're still in the cartridge cases of unfired 5.56 mm rounds.

If you do a search on Yahoo’s site for Wissam al-Okaili, the AFP photog who snapped the hilarious shot, you will find that he stages his subjects in a recurring motif: children peering pensively through broken windows. I found four different examples of this. Another shows adults staged in the same way.

Plucks at the heartstrings – just like all those wire-service shots, taken by local stringers, of fresh new toys sitting unbesmirched on rubble in Lebanon during the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict in the summer of 2006. In this context it is worth noting the calls by the second International Conference in Support of the Arab Peoples in 1969 for "all information media [to] be mobilized to enlighten world public opinion" and by Arab League Secretary Shedli Klibi in 1979 for "an Arab information campaign in the widest sense," both of which are cited by Bat Ye'or in Chapter 9 of "Islam and Dhimmitude: Where Civilizations Collide" (Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002).

The Muslim world's propaganda war has been under way for quite some little while.

About those John Does ...

2007-08-14T15:35:00.000-07:00

Michelle Malkin notes today that though the plaintiffs' attorney in the "Flying Imams" intimidation suit stated his intent two weeks ago to drop the "John Doe" passengers from his complaint, he has done no such thing. This has prompted a letter to him from the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, a non-profit group that represents defendants in religious discrimination cases and has blasted the lawsuit as "giving the whole idea of religious freedom a black eye."

" ... and feel themselves subdued."

2007-08-14T14:14:00.000-07:00

Both Baron Bodissey at Gates of Vienna and Charles Johnson at LGF have links this morning to reports of an appalling act of dhimmitude by a Scottish "equality and diversity officer" who has decreed that National Health Service workers and doctors in Glasgow, Lothian and Clyde must not eat lunch at their desks during Ramadan (which this year begins next month) so as not to "upset" Muslim workers. This "guidance," according to the U.K. Daily Express, was generated by "the Glasgow consultancy Meem, which advises on Muslim issues and counts the Scottish Parliament among its clients."

As bad as this is, the attitude evinced by the first comment posted by an Express reader is even worse:

"Unfortunately this latest move did not help enough. It created new problems. Now that meal carts and working lunch is banned Muslims will be left alone in the office while their coworkers go out to eat together. Muslim health care workers will be missing out on important social networking opportunities that their non-Muslim coworkers receive. We need a solution for that. We should instead encourage non-Muslims to try sharing their Muslim coworkers' experience of fasting. It might be difficult the first year or two but eventually it will become familiar."

Right in line with Qu’ran 9:29.

"John Doe" defense proposal

2007-07-27T10:14:00.000-07:00

A self-identified "federal government lawyer" who blogs as "Atilla" here shares my pessimism over the quibble room in the revivified "John Doe" protection provision, and offers the following proposal for countervailing the mischief it will enable:

"Today, I came up with what I think is the best way to handle this situation, given that the language is clearly not going to become any better than it is now.
"It's time to put together an organization that will have a relationship with seasoned litigators willing to work pro bono on behalf of John Does. This organization would be like FIRE, the Center for Individual Rights, and others that I can come up with if I try.
"Having an organization like this will mean that John Does can come forward without fear of having to bankrupt themselves in defending a suit brought by the likes of CAIR just to get to the point where they're entitled to immunity under what's likely to become the law. A ready supply of defense counsel will also force CAIR to watch its step in bringing these actions. The United States has a tremendous interest in encouraging citizens to come forward with information about potential terrorist acts, and it's extremely important to offset the disincentives created by the legislative compromise on immunity.
"I think this is a pretty good idea, but it's not a job for me. I'm going to email a few people to see if I can stir up some interest in it."

This is indeed a pretty good idea -- in fact, it's an excellent one, and it should be spread throughout the Counterjihad corner of the blogosphere.

Many thanks ...

2007-07-25T17:39:00.000-07:00

... to Robert Spencer, director of JihadWatch, for linking to this blog. Spencer's exposure of the malign elements of the creed of Islam is a distinct service to humanity, and his books are worthy of careful study.

Not much here to peruse thus far, but two posts from April on the fate of the Armenian city of Zeitoun will likely be of interest to partisans of the Counterjihad.

A pyrrhic victory?

2007-07-25T12:20:00.000-07:00

My initial euphoria at the revivification of the "John Doe" protection provision in the Homeland Security bill is much tempered by a look at the actual language to which its opponents agreed. It has quite enough wiggle room to enable the sort of mischief at which attorneys and grievance activists have become adept. Moreover, any hopes that this measure, if passed, is going to "nullify, in part" the "flying imams" lawsuit (an outcome predicted by Washington Times reporter Audrey Hudson) are likely to be dashed. The devil is in the details:

"Any person who, in good faith and based on objectively reasonable suspicion, makes or causes to be made, a voluntary report of covered activity to an authorized official shall be immune from civil liability under federal, state, and local law for such report."

The problem, as Allahpundit points out, is the phrase "objectively reasonable suspicion." This differs from Rep. Peter King's stand-alone version of the bill, H.R. 2291, which reads:

"Any person who, in good faith, makes, or causes to be made, a voluntary disclosure of any suspicious transaction, activity, or occurrence … to any employee or agent of the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Transportation, or the Department of Justice, any Federal, State, or local law enforcement officer, any transportation security officer, or any employee or agent of a transportation system shall be immune from civil liability to any person for such disclosure under any Federal, State, or local law."

Requiring a passenger's suspicion to be "objectively reasonable" will enable lawyers such as Omar Mohammedi, the CAIR activist who is representing the "flying imams," to quibble about what is "reasonable" and what is "objective." It will be argued that loudly-voiced professions of Islamic faith at airport gates are entirely reasonable to pious Muslims, and therefore reporting such behavior as "suspicious" is actionable. It will further be argued that any suspicion of Muslims by non-Muslims cannot be objective but only subjective, driven by "Islamophobia." It is not to be supposed that either Mohammedi, his clients, or their backers are going to roll over and play dead if this provision passes.

Update: CAIR spokescreature says suits will continue.

Imagine my surprise.