Apropos the foregoing ...

"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

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

“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

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

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

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

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.