An open letter to James Taranto

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.

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.'

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

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

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

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

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.