The push to criminalize "Islamophobia"

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.