A slaughter in Sweden

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

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

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

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

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

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

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