Yet another call for repression

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A lie fit for a king

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Awww -- poor lambs.

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

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

Unnatural cover

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

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

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

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

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

A Muhammad cartoon push back

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

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

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

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

A Nekschot across our bow

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

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

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

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

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

Abu al-Whipple?

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


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

(Hat tip: Weasel Zippers.)