This happens so rarely, that I was shocked when I read this. An American muslim aknowledging that islam needs reformation. How many muslim bloggers can admit, as he does, the crimes of islam? Not many I suspect...
'Cancer in its midst'
TODAY'S COLUMNIST
By M. Zuhdi Jasser
March 30, 2006
During the dark days of our Revolution, Thomas Paine wrote, "That these are the times, that try men's souls." As an American Muslim, I feel the sentiment of these words like a red-hot brand on my brain.
I have watched horrified as assassins have read out the words from my Holy Koran before slitting the throats of some poor innocent souls. To my non-comprehending eyes, I have seen mothers proudly support their sons' accomplishment of blowing up innocent people as they eat or travel. It shatters some part of me, to see my faith as an instrument for butchery.
It makes me hope and pray for some counter-movement within my faith which will push back all this darkness. And I know that it must start with what is most basic -- the common truth that binds all religions: "Do unto others, as you would have them do onto you." The Golden Rule.
But that is not what I am seeing taught in a great deal of the Muslim world today, and, unfortunately, in America it's just not much better.
Night after night, I see Muslim national organizations like the Council for American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, cry out over and over about anecdotal victimization while saying and doing absolutely nothing about the most vile hate-speak and actions toward Jews and Christians in the Muslim world. It is the most self-serving of outrage.
The question I ask myself in the darkness of my own night is, "How did my beautiful faith become so linked with such ugliness." To me, the answer is both deep and simple. A spiritual path must be only about the spiritual while a worldly path must be about this world. When the two get mixed together, it brings out the very worst in both.
Much of what passes today for religious thought and action is actually political. When I hear a sermon in a mosque about the horrors of Israeli occupation, I know that the political arena has taken over the spiritual one. When I see the actions of suicide bombers praised or excused by religious leaders, I know that this politicization is complete. But the current Muslim leadership in groups like CAIR and others want only to talk of victimization. So, it is now high time for a new movement by Muslims in America and the West.
We in the Muslim community need to develop a new paradigm for our organizations and think tanks which holds Muslims publicly accountable for the separation of the political from the spiritual. Gone should be the day where individuals and their organizations can hide behind the cloak of victimization as a smoke screen for what they really believe.
I do believe that religions have cycles that they go through. Christianity was once a highly intolerant faith. Jews were labeled as "Christ killers" and the colored peoples of the Third World were people whose native faith was like ragged clothes to be torn off their bodies.
Thank God those days are over. Now my faith community must do the same. It should be the true test of a Muslim, not so much how he treats a fellow Muslim but how he treats someone of another faith.
Time is not on our side and the volatile radical minority of Muslims could strike again at any time. But, while true change among Muslims may take generations, our history teaches us that once we start the ideological battle, nothing can counter the power of freedom, pluralism and the desire for human rights.
There are some small signs that my community is finally beginning to wake up to the cancer in its midst. We are learning something that was the central lesson of World War II -- that once aroused, evil never stays self-contained.
For many in my faith, it was all right to blow up innocent Israelis as they sat in their cafes and pizza parlors. Through some tortured act of logic, these suicide bombings were seen as some sort of legitimate religion-sanctioned acts. (All the while, notice how few Muslim organizations like CAIR will denounce Hamas by name). But, as evil always does, it migrates, and soon radical Muslims were blowing up little children in Russia, commuters in Spain and worshippers in one of Iraq's holiest mosques.
Maybe our first true wake-up call was Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's homicide attack on the wedding party in Jordan. Because now, the evil unleashed on the occupying Jews had landed on the doorstep of Muslims as they partook in a joyous wedding day.
That is the lesson that we in the Muslim community are now learning. Do evil to anyone and eventually it will boomerang on you. Perhaps, that's a good place to start. Let the barometer of our faith be how we treat our Jewish friends, because in the end, that is how we will eventually treat ourselves.
M. Zuhdi Jasser is chairman of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy. A former Navy lieutenant commander, he currently is an internist in private practice in Phoenix.
A muslim speaks the truth
Even moderate muslims love death...
I was debating on another blog with well-known jihadi apologist Abu Sinan about why some lone Afghani convert to Christianity needs to die. He amusingly claimed that:
"First of all, death for apostasy is not mandated by The Qur'an, that is obvious by all. Those who claim it is Sunnfh(the sayings and actions of the Prophet) stand on shaky ground." In fact, it does NOT seem obvious to an entire country Abu - and why? For the Shariah principles in question are shared by all four of the Sunni schools of jurisprudence (Maliki, Hanbali, Hanafi, and Shafi'i), plus the Shia school.
And then he admitted (but not directly of course because he is a muslims after all:
"As to homosexuality and adultery, Islam takes the same stand as tradition Christianity and Judaism. So yes, like practicing Jews and Christians who follow a traditional following of their religions, I support the ban and punishment for these crimes."
Yes, our moderate muslim wants death for gays, lesbians and adulterers. Know of any Christian countries where they stone women to death for adultery? How about ONE western nation that executes gay people? No, me either. In fact, the amputations, executions and torturing of adulterers and homosexuals is the almost exclusive monopoly of Muslims. Religion of peace dontchaknow..
Religion Of Peace?
Some good questions about the "Religion of Peace" from Investors Business Daily.
Religion Of Peace?
Posted 3/27/2006
War On Terror: In the wake of the cartoon jihad and mosque-on-mosque violence in Iraq, most Americans now think Islam has more violent believers than any other faith. Yet many still view it as a "peaceful religion."
Psychologists might call this cognitive dissonance — a state of mind where rational people essentially lie to themselves. But in this case, it's understandable. In our politically correct culture, criticizing any religion, even one that plots our destruction, is still taboo. And no one wants to suggest the terrorists are driven by their holy text.
Which explains a Washington Post-ABC News poll showing that Americans are becoming more aware of the broader threat (58% associate terrorists with Islam), but are still convinced terrorists are radicalizing Islam and not the other way around (54% don't think Islam itself encourages violence).
The new poll, however, still doesn't sit well with the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a group dedicated to improving public perceptions of Islam. It has denounced increasingly negative views as "Islamophobic" and vowed to redouble its "education" efforts.
Good. What better time for CAIR and other Muslim leaders to step up, cut through the politically correct fog and provide factual answers to the questions that give so many non-Muslims pause?
Generally speaking, those questions focus on whether the Quran does indeed promote violence against non-Muslims, and how many of the terrorists' ideas — about the violent jihad, the self-immolation, the kidnappings, even the beheadings — come right out of the text? But even more specifically:
Is Islam the only religion with a doctrine, theology and legal system that mandates warfare against unbelievers?
Is it true that 26 chapters of the Quran deal with jihad, a fight able-bodied believers are obligated to join (Surah 2:216), and that the text orders Muslims to "instill terror into the hearts of the unbeliever" and to "smite above their necks" (8:12)?
Is the "test" of loyalty to Allah not good acts or faith in general, but martyrdom that results from fighting unbelievers (47:4) — the only assurance of salvation in Islam (4:74; 9:111)?
Are the sins of any Muslim who becomes a martyr forgiven by the very act of being slain while slaying the unbelievers (4:96)?
And is it really true that martyrs are rewarded with virgins, among other carnal delights, in Paradise (38:51, 55:56; 55:76; 56:22)?
Are those unable to do jihad — such as women or the elderly — required to give "asylum and aid" to those who do fight unbelievers in the cause of Allah (8:74)?
Does Islam advocate expansion by force? And is the final command of jihad, as revealed to Muhammad in the Quran, to conquer the world in the name of Islam (9:29)?
Is Islam the only religion that does not teach the Golden Rule (48:29)? Does the Quran instead teach violence and hatred against non-Muslims, specifically Jews and Christians (5:50)?
There are other questions, but these should do for a start. If the answers are "yes," then at least Americans will know there's no such thing as moderate Islam, even as they trust that there are moderate Muslims who do not act out on its violent commands.
Facing down a culture where they talk like crazies
Facing down a culture where they talk like crazies ... Mark Steyn
Chicago Sun-Times ^ | 26 March 2006 | Mark Steyn
Fate conspires to remind us what this war is really about: civilizational confidence. And so history repeats itself: first the farce of the Danish cartoons, and now the tragedy -- a man on trial for his life in post-Taliban Afghanistan because he has committed the crime of converting to Christianity.
The cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad were deeply offensive to Muslims, and so thousands protested around the world in the usual restrained manner: rioting, torching, killing, etc.
The impending execution of Abdul Rahman for embracing Christianity is, of course, offensive to Westerners, and so around the world we reacted equally violently by issuing blood-curdling threats like that made by State Department spokesman Sean McCormack: "Freedom of worship is an important element of any democracy," he said. "And these are issues as Afghan democracy matures that they are going to have to deal with increasingly."
The immediate problem for Rahman is whether he'll get the chance to "mature" along with Afghan democracy. The president, the Canadian prime minister and the Australian prime minister have all made statements of concern about his fate, and it seems clear that Afghanistan's dapper leader Hamid Karzai would like to resolve this issue before his fledgling democracy gets a reputation as just another barbarous Islamist sewer state. There's talk of various artful compromises, such as Rahman being declared unfit to stand trial by reason of insanity on the grounds that (I'm no Islamic jurist so I'm paraphrasing here) anyone who converts from Islam to Christianity must ipso facto be out of his tree.
On the other hand, this "moderate" compromise solution is being rejected by leading theologians. Let this guy Rahman cop an insanity plea and there goes the neighborhood. "We will not allow God to be humiliated. This man must die," says Abdul Raoulf of the nation's principal Muslim body, the Afghan Ulama Council. "Cut off his head! We will call on the people to pull him into pieces so there's nothing left." Needless to say, Imam Raoulf is one of Afghanistan's leading "moderate" clerics.
For what it's worth, I'm with the Afghan Ulama Council in objecting to the insanity defense. It's not enough for Rahman to get off on a technicality. Afghanistan is supposed to be "the good war," the one even the French supported, albeit notionally and mostly retrospectively. Karzai is kept alive by a bodyguard of foreigners. The fragile Afghan state is protected by American, British, Canadian, Australian, Italian, German and other troops, hundreds of whom have died. You cannot ask Americans or Britons to expend blood and treasure to build a society in which a man can be executed for his choice of religion. You cannot tell a serving member of the Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry in Kandahar that he, as a Christian, must sacrifice his life to create a Muslim state in which his faith is a capital offense.
As always, we come back to the words of Osama bin Laden: ''When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature they will like the strong horse.'' That's really the only issue: the Islamists know our side has tanks and planes, but they have will and faith, and they reckon in a long struggle that's the better bet. Most prominent Western leaders sound way too eager to climb into the weak-horse suit and audition to play the rear end. Consider, for example, the words of the Prince of Wales, speaking a few days ago at al-Azhar University in Cairo. This is "the world's oldest university," though what they learn there makes the average Ivy League nuthouse look like a beacon of sanity. Anyway, this is what His Royal Highness had to say to 800 Islamic "scholars":
"The recent ghastly strife and anger over the Danish cartoons shows the danger that comes of our failure to listen and to respect what is precious and sacred to others. In my view, the true mark of a civilized society is the respect it pays to minorities and to strangers."
That's correct. But the reality is our society pays enormous respect to minorities -- President Bush holds a monthlong Ramadan-a-ding-dong at the White House every year; the immediate reaction to the slaughter of 9/11 by the president, the prince, the prime ministers of Britain, Canada and everywhere else was to visit a mosque to demonstrate their great respect for Islam. One party to this dispute is respectful to a fault: after all, to describe the violence perpetrated by Muslims over the Danish cartoons as the "recent ghastly strife" barely passes muster as effete Brit toff understatement.
Unfortunately, what's "precious and sacred" to Islam is its institutional contempt for others. In his book Islam And The West, Bernard Lewis writes, "The primary duty of the Muslim as set forth not once but many times in the Koran is 'to command good and forbid evil.' It is not enough to do good and refrain from evil as a personal choice. It is incumbent upon Muslims also to command and forbid."
Or as the shrewd Canadian columnist David Warren put it: "We take it for granted that it is wrong to kill someone for his religious beliefs. Whereas Islam holds it is wrong not to kill him." In that sense, those blood-curdling imams are right, and Karzai's attempts to finesse the issue are, sharia-wise, wrong.
I can understand why the president and the secretary of state would rather deal with this through back-channels, private assurances from their Afghan counterparts, etc. But the public rhetoric is critical, too. At some point we have to face down a culture in which not only the mob in the street but the highest judges and academics talk like crazies.
Rahman embodies the question at the heart of this struggle: If Islam is a religion one can only convert to not from, then in the long run it is a threat to every free person on the planet. What can we do? Should governments with troops in Afghanistan pass joint emergency legislation conferring their citizenship on this poor man and declaring him, as much as Karzai, under their protection?
In a more culturally confident age, the British in India were faced with the practice of "suttee" -- the tradition of burning widows on the funeral pyres of their husbands. General Sir Charles Napier was impeccably multicultural:
''You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: When men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows.You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours."
India today is better off without suttee. If we shrink from the logic of that, then in Afghanistan and many places far closer to home the implications are, as the Prince of Wales would say, "ghastly."
Islam - the barbarity continues...
As if any more proof was needed that islam is incompatible with civilization. Makes you wonder if the place is salvageable...
Top Muslim clerics: Convert must die
Religious leaders urge courts to ignore West, hang Christian
Friday, March 24, 2006; Posted: 12:24 a.m. EST (05:24 GMT)
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) -- Senior Muslim clerics are demanding that an Afghan man on trial for converting from Islam to Christianity be executed, warning that if the government caves in to Western pressure and frees him, they will incite people to "pull him into pieces."
In an unusual move, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice telephoned President Hamid Karzai on Thursday seeking a "favorable resolution" of the case of Abdul Rahman. The 41-year-old former medical aid worker faces the death penalty under Afghanistan's Islamic laws for becoming a Christian.
His trial has fired passions in this conservative Muslim nation and highlighted a conflict of values between Afghanistan and its Western backers.
"Rejecting Islam is insulting God. We will not allow God to be humiliated. This man must die," said cleric Abdul Raoulf, who is considered a moderate and was jailed three times for opposing the Taliban before the hard-line regime was ousted in 2001.
"He is not crazy. He went in front of the media and confessed to being a Christian," said Hamidullah, chief cleric at Haji Yacob Mosque. "The government is scared of the international community. But the people will kill him if he is freed."
Raoulf, who is a member of the country's main Islamic organization, the Afghan Ulama Council, concurred. "The government is playing games. The people will not be fooled."
"Cut off his head!" he exclaimed, sitting in a courtyard outside Herati Mosque. "We will call on the people to pull him into pieces so there's nothing left."
He said the only way for Rahman to survive would be for him to go into exile.
But Said Mirhossain Nasri, the top cleric at Hossainia Mosque, one of the largest Shiite places of worship in Kabul, said Rahman must not be allowed to leave the country.
"If he is allowed to live in the West, then others will claim to be Christian so they can, too," he said. "We must set an example. ... He must be hanged."
The clerics said they were angry with the United States and other countries for pushing for Rahman's freedom.
"We are a small country and we welcome the help the outside world is giving us. But please don't interfere in this issue," Nasri said. "We are Muslims and these are our beliefs. This is much more important to us than all the aid the world has given us."
Afghanistan's constitution is based on Sharia law, which is interpreted by many Muslims to require that any Muslim who rejects Islam be sentenced to death.
9/11 Conspiracy kooks ...
There are an amusing bunch of conspiracy-minded folks over at Kook Central who believe that 9/11 was caused by:
George Bush;
The military;
The Illuminatti;
The Zionists;
Masons;
The Lochness Monster; or
Bigfoot...
I guess we should blame David Icke and the rest of the late night talk shows that appeal to the gullible mind...
Iran aims to 'set Israel alight'
People have often asked me why I believe a clash between the civilized world and the islamic world is inevitable. Here's reason 4,678...
By Yossi Verter, Haaretz Correspondent
Former Spanish prime minister Jose Maria Aznar said Tuesday that Iran's Ayatollah Ali Khamenei told him five years ago that "setting Israel on fire" was the first order of business on the Iranian agenda.
Aznar, in Israel as the guest of the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, related the story to Major General (Res.) Professor Yitzhak Ben-Israel, who later confirmed to Haaretz that the remarks had been made.
Aznar's aides refused to give Haaretz the exact quote, but mentioned an article Aznar has written in the past on his meeting with Khamenei.
"He received me politely," Aznar wrote, "and at the beginning of the meeting he explained to me why Iran must declare war on Israel and the United States until they are completely destroyed. I made only one request of him: that he tell me the time of the planned attack."
The Nobel prize
ARAB / ISLAMIC NOBEL WINNERS
Literature
Najib Mahfooz 1988*.
Peace
1978 Anwar El-Sadat
1994 Yasser Arafat... A Joke!!! **
2003 - Shirin Ebadi
2005 - Mohamed ElBaradei
Chemistry
1999 - Ahmed Zewail
Physics
Abdus Salam
* Najib was stabbed in the back by Egyptian Moslem fundamentalists in 1997 because he supported the Peace Process between the Arabs ("Palestinians") and Israelis. Najib was partially paralyzed as a result.
**The Norwegians played an ugly joke on the world by pretending Arafat was a Man of Peace.
Note: Elias James Corey (Chemistry 1990), Peter Brian Medawar (Medicine 1960) and Ferid Mourad (Medicine 1998) are Nobel Prize winners but are Arab-Christians, not Muslims.
Kaare Kristiansen was a member of the Nobel Committee. He resigned in 1994 to protest the awarding of a Nobel "Peace Prize" to Yasser Arafat, whom he correctly labeled a "terrorist."
JEWISH NOBEL WINNERS
Literature
1910 - Paul Heyse
1927 - Henri Bergson
1958 - Boris Pasternak
1966 - Shmuel Yosef Agnon
1966 - Nelly Sachs
1976 - Saul Bellow
1978 - Isaac Bashevis Singer
1981 - Elias Canetti
1987 - Joseph Brodsky
1991 - Nadine Gordimer
2002 - Imre Kertesz
2005 - Harold PinterWorld Peace
1911 - Alfred Fried
1911 - Tobias Asser
1968 - Rene Cassin
1973 - Henry Kissinger
1978 - Menachem Begin
1986 - Elie Wiesel
1994 - Shimon Peres
1994 - Yitzhak Rabin
1995 - Joseph RotblatChemistry
1905 - Adolph Von Baeyer
1906 - Henri Moissan
1910 - Otto Wallach
1915 - Richard Willstaetter
1918 - Fritz Haber
1943 - George Charles de Hevesy
1961 - Melvin Calvin
1962 - Max Ferdinand Perutz
1972 - William Howard Stein
1972 - C.B. Anfinsen
1977 - Ilya Prigogine
1979 - Herbert Charles Brown
1980 - Paul Berg
1980 - Walter Gilbert
1981 - Ronald Hoffmann
1982 - Aaron Klug
1985 - Herbert A. Hauptman
1985 - Jerome Karle
1986 - Dudley R. Herschbach
1988 - Robert Huber
1989 - Sidney Altman
1992 - Rudolph Marcus
1998 - Walter Kohn
2000 - Alan J. Heeger
2004 - Irwin Rose
2004 - Avram Hershko
2004 - Aaron Ciechanover
Economics
1970 - Paul Anthony Samuelson
1971 - Simon Kuznets
1972 - Kenneth Joseph Arrow
1973 - Wassily Leontief
1975 - Leonid Kantorovich
1976 - Milton Friedman
1978 - Herbert A. Simon
1980 - Lawrence Robert Klein
1985 - Franco Modigliani
1987 - Robert M. Solow
1990 - Harry Markowitz
1990 - Merton Miller
1992 - Gary Becker
1993 Rober Fogel
1994 - John Harsanyi
1994 - Reinhard Selten
1997 - Robert Merton
1997 - Myron Scholes
2001 - George Akerlof
2001 - Joseph Stiglitz
2002 - Daniel Kahneman
2005 - Robert J. AumannMedicine
1908 - Elie Metchnikoff
1908 - Paul Erlich
1914 - Robert Barany
1922 - Otto Meyerhof
1930 - Karl Landsteiner
1931 - Otto Warburg
1936 - Otto Loewi
1944 - Joseph Erlanger
1944 - Herbert Spencer Gasser
1945 - Ernst Boris Chain
1946 - Hermann Joseph Muller
1950 - Tadeus Reichstein
1952 - Selman Abraham Waksman
1953 - Hans Krebs
1953 - Fritz Albert Lipmann
1958 - Joshua Lederberg
1959 - Arthur Kornberg
1964 - Konrad Bloch
1965 - Francois Jacob
1965 - Andre Lwoff
1967 - George Wald
1968 - Marshall W. Nirenberg
1969 - Salvador Luria
1970 - Julius Axelrod
1970 - Sir Bernard Katz
1972 - Gerald Maurice Edelman
1975 - David Baltimore
1975 - Howard Martin Temin
1976 - Baruch S. Blumberg
1977 - Rosalyn Sussman Yalow
1977 - Andrew V. Schally
1978 - Daniel Nathans
1980 - Baruj Benacerraf
1984 - Cesar Milstein
1985 - Michael Stuart Brown
1985 - Joseph L. Goldstein
1986 - Stanley Cohen [& Rita Levi-Montalcini]
1988 - Gertrude Elion
1989 - Harold Varmus
1991 - Erwin Neher
1991 - Bert Sakmann
1993 - Richard J. Roberts
1993 - Phillip Sharp
1994 - Alfred Gilman
1994 - Martin Rodbell
1995 - Edward B. Lewis
1997 - Stanley B. Prusiner
1998 - Robert F. Furchgott
2000 - Eric R. Kandel
2002 - Sydney Brenner
2002 - Robert H. Horvitz
Physics
1907 - Albert Abraham Michelson
1908 - Gabriel Lippmann
1921 - Albert Einstein
1922 - Niels Bohr
1925 - James Franck
1925 - Gustav Hertz
1943 - Gustav Stern
1944 - Isidor Issac Rabi
1945 - Wolfgang Pauli
1952 - Felix Bloch
1954 - Max Born
1958 - Igor Tamm
1958 - Il'ja Mikhailovich
1958 - Igor Yevgenyevich
1959 - Emilio Segre
1960 - Donald A. Glaser
1961 - Robert Hofstadter
1962 - Lev Davidovich Landau
1963 - Eugene P. Wigner
1965 - Richard Phillips Feynman
1965 - Julian Schwinger
1967 - Hans Albrecht Bethe
1969 - Murray Gell-Mann
1971 - Dennis Gabor
1972 - Leon N. Cooper
1973 - Brian David Josephson
1975 - Benjamin Mottleson
1976 - Burton Richter
1978 - Arno Allan Penzias
1978 - Peter L Kapitza
1979 - Stephen Weinberg
1979 - Sheldon Glashow
1988 - Leon Lederman
1988 - Melvin Schwartz
1988 - Jack Steinberger
1990 - Jerome Friedman
1992 - Georges Charpak
1995 - Martin Perl
1995 - Frederick Reines
1996 - David M. Lee
1996 - Douglas D. Osheroff
1997 - Claude Cohen-Tannoudji
2000 - Zhores I. Alferov
2003 - Vitaly Ginsburg
2003 - Alexei Abrikosov
2004 - David Gross
2004 - H. David Politzer
2005 - Roy Glauber
There are a mere 12 Million Jews in the entire world, yet they have received 169 Nobel Prizes.The Muslims number 1.4 Billion (with a very big "B")... or 117 times the number of Jews! Based upon this 117:1 Muslim-to-Jewish ratio, one might expect the Muslims to have 22,260 Nobel Laureates.They have SEVEN! and one of them [Arafat] is a murderer (Allahu Akbar, indeed!).
Unless the Swedes and Norwegians start awarding Nobel Prizes for plane hijackings, pizza shop bombings, civilian bus attacks, Jihad suicides/homicides, drive-by shootings, throat-slittings, embassy attacks and other such acts of barbarism, the embarrassingly low level of contributions to the welfare of Civilization and Mankind by the [Arab] Muslim world will continue. The Jewish People, meanwhile, will continue being the Lights Unto All Nations.
Islamic death-lovers arrested...
The appalling nature of islam is on display here:
Muslim scumbags
Five arrested over London cartoons protest
By Times Online
Five men were arrested today over their alleged role in protests outside the Danish Embassy in London last month against cartoons satirising the Prophet Muhammad.
Four of the five were held on suspicion of incitement to murder and all five are suspected of "using threatening words or written material to stir up racial hatred".
During the demonstrations in Central London on February 3 and 4, protesters held placards threatening a repeat of the September 11 or July 7 terror attacks. Among the slogans were "Massacre those who insult Islam" and "Europe you will pay, your 9/11 will come".
The demonstration attracted widespread political condemnation and among those calling for prosecutions was the Muslim Council of Britain.
The Metropolitan Police said today: "A number of specialist evidence gathering officers were deployed who collected video, audio and stills of those within the crowd. A dedicated investigation team, Operation Laverda, was set up that day.
David Warren - on the mark again...
The non-dialogue
A Zogby poll, out this week in the U.S., shows an unprecedented number of Americans now harbour unflattering views of Arabs, Muslims, and Islam. It is still low, compared to similar polls in Europe, but it approaches or just exceeds 50 per cent in each category. The pollster, James Zogby, who is also president of the Arab-American Institute in Washington, attributes the negative numbers -- much worse than what they were just after the terror attacks of Sept. 2001 -- to “demonization of the Arab world” by American politicians, authors, and media. I am unable to find a similar poll for Canada, but on past experience, Canadians tend to poll somewhere in the middle between Europeans and Americans.
I will not speak for the politicians, who tend more to respond to public perceptions than to shape them, but will admit that by having reported many thousand savage and barbaric acts done around the world, explicitly in the name of Allah, the media may have contributed to unfortunate perceptions of Arabs, Muslims, and Islam.
Yet, as I know from inside, the media both here and in Europe go to extraordinary lengths to suppress just the sort of material that could incite ill-feeling that way. This began the morning of 9/11/01, with the non-coverage of street celebrations in Arab ethnic neighbourhoods of Brooklyn and Detroit. As recently as last month, mainstream media were editing out London cartoon protesters carrying signs reading, “Behead Those Who Insult Islam”, “Europe You Will Pay”, etc.
On the other hand, there is patient, exhaustive coverage of anything that might incite anti-Western hysteria in the Islamic world. For even while the largest media outlets were refusing to show those bland Danish cartoons -- and doing so out of a pretended “respect for Islam” -- they were dredging up additional sordid photos from the Abu Ghraib outrage in 2004, and running those prominently.
I have often noted, that editorial decisions in the Western media could not be more useful to fanatical Islam if we were taking instructions directly from some Afghan cave. Ask yourself, when reading or watching, if the consistent message is not: “Fear Islam, but do not dare to criticize it.”
There is no conspiracy, however. The violent audacity of a generation of Muslim neo-jihadis happens to correspond precisely with the self-loathing of a generation of Western post-hippies. Perhaps never before, in the history of interaction between the “Dar al-Islam” (Muslim-ruled world), and the “Dar al-Harb” (the external world with which it is perpetually “at war”), have aspiring Muslim conquerors met such willing candidates for “dhimmitude”.
The definition of a “dhimmi” is one who pays the “jizyah” tax to his Muslim rulers; who, in return for this protection money, enjoys an ambiguous special status. This is, as Islamist propaganda is eager to propagate, exactly what is going on when, for instance, governments of the West send foreign aid to Muslim regimes, in the (vain) belief that this will exempt them from the next round of terror hits, or rioting. More generally, the equation of Western aid and domestic welfare payments with the “jizyah” is common in Arab media. It expresses contempt for the West, and our “so-called freedoms”.
So much of the failing “dialogue” between East and West comes down to misunderstanding each other’s terms. Take “jihad”, for example -- the duty to “struggle against everything that is against Allah”, which has been cited in each Islamic war of conquest, over the last 14 centuries. Contrary to popular belief, traditional Islam does not teach that Muslims have a duty to convert, enslave, or massacre their non-Muslim neighbours. On the contrary, the various Islamic schools agree they have a brotherly duty to “remove impediments” to conversion to Islam, including any worldly power not expressly subject to the will of Allah. The sorting out, afterwards, of who should be massacred and who not, of individual rights to booty, slaves, the enjoyment of captured women, and so forth, are spelt out by the learned jurisprudes in traditional Shariah; but these are secondary considerations.
Perhaps if Americans realized that such jihadis as Osama bin Laden are trying to do them a favour, by removing such impediments to their conversion as the existence of the government of the United States, they would not harbour such unflattering views. And perhaps, if they heard great cries of revulsion from across the Arab and Muslim world, against the innumerable acts of violence done in Allah’s name, they would realize that Islam is a “religion of peace”.
Islamofascist gets spanked!
MEMRI (http://memritv.org/Transcript.asp?P1=1050) features Arab American psychologist Wafa Sultan completely stomping a bearded Islamofascist.
Courtesy of MEMRI TV.
David Warren makes sense...
Clash of whats?
Sometimes I am brought up short by the clarity and courage with which someone else -- with more to lose than I have -- states a truth. I am a Catholic Christian, who often dismisses “secular humanists”. But I’m in awe of people like Canada’s Irshad Manji, the “Muslim refusenik”, who had the courage in her book The Trouble with Islam to directly confront the horrors done in Allah’s name -- in, as she put it, “Pick a country, any Muslim country.”
Another is Wafa Sultan, an Arab woman practising psychology, now living in the States. A self-professed “disbeliever in the supernatural”, she has posted essays on the Internet in Arabic, including research into the fate of women under various Islamic regimes. She has willingly and ably confronted Muslim fanatics on Arab TV, most recently on Feb. 21st, when she debated Dr Ibrahim Al-Khouli on Al-Jazeera. A transcript and video clips with English subtitles were made available this week by the Middle East Media Research Institute (“Memri”) -- an indispensable institution, based in Israel, that distributes hard information and accurate translations of documents from the Arab world. (It is useless to condemn it as “Zionist” -- everything Memri publishes is sourced and checkable.)
With great bravery, Dr Sultan confronts the “tu quoque” (“you too”) arguments of the apologists for Islamic terror -- refusing to let them change the subject from what they have done, said, and approved, to misty rhetoric against Zionists, Yankees, Imperialists, Crusaders. Boldly on Al-Jazeera, last week, she said what our Western politicians, media flaks, and academic celebrities won’t say, from cowardice in its many forms. Excerpt:
“The clash we are witnessing around the world is not a clash of religions, or a clash of civilizations. ... It is a clash between civilization and backwardness, between the civilized and the primitive, between barbarity and rationality. It is a clash between freedom and oppression, between democracy and dictatorship. It is a clash between human rights, on the one hand, and the violation of these rights, on the other. It is a clash between those who treat women like beasts, and those who treat them like human beings. What we see today is not a clash of civilizations. Civilizations do not clash, but compete.”
The sparkling TV host interrupts to ask if Dr Sultan insinuates the clash is, “between the culture of the West, and the backwardness and ignorance of the Muslims”. Dr Sultan replies, “Yes, that is what I mean.”
The host reminds her that this phrase, “clash of civilizations”, came from Samuel Huntington, not Osama bin Laden. Dr Sultan reminds him that Islamic books and curricula, going back to the Koran, are full of calls for “fighting the infidels”.
When her opponent, Dr Khouli, claims he never offends people, Dr Sultan reminds that among other things he calls Westerners “al-Dhimma” (i.e. the Muslims’ natural slaves), that he routinely compares them to apes and pigs, that he calls Christians “those who incur Allah's wrath”, and so forth.
He asks if she is a heretic. Dr Sultan says, he can call her what he likes. He continues, “If you are a heretic, there is no point in rebuking you, since you have blasphemed against Islam, the Prophet, and the Koran!” She replies, “These are personal matters that do not concern you. ... Brother, you can believe in stones, as long as you don't throw them at me.”
And after the usual banter about Zionism, she notes that since the Holocaust, the Jews have made the world respect them by their work and knowledge, not their crying and yelling. “We have not seen a single Jew blow himself up in a German restaurant. We have not seen a single Jew destroy a church.” Likewise, though professing Muslims turned ancient Buddha statues into rubble, “We have not seen a single Buddhist burn down a mosque, kill a Muslim, or torch an embassy.”
Since the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, many thousand other barbaric acts have been reported, around the world, each one performed explicitly in the name of Allah. This is fact, not prejudice, and our refusal to make Islam an issue plays directly into the fanatics’ hands.
It is not our business to “define Islam”, as so many Muslims aver. It is the Muslims’ duty to define it, in such a way that we will not mistake it for a sword held to our own throats. For when it is presented as a sword, it becomes our business.
