Archive for the ‘Censorship’ category

« WarSclerotic home page
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

The Dutch Death Spiral

December 11, 2016

The Dutch Death Spiral, Gatestone Institute, Giulio Meotti, December 11, 2016

“It would have been better if the Dutch state had sent a clear signal [to terrorists] via a Dutch court that we foster a broad notion of the freedom of expression in the Netherlands.” — Paul Cliteur, Professor of Jurisprudence, Leiden University.

The historic dimension of Wilders’s conviction is related not only to the terrible injustice done to this MP, but that it was the Netherlands that, for the first time in Europe, criminalized dissenting opinions about Islam.

“I will never be silent. You will not be able to stop me… And that is what we stand for. For freedom and for our beautiful Netherlands.” — Geert Wilders, Dutch MP and leader of the Party for Freedom (PVV).

“We have a lot of guests who are trying to take over the house.” — Pym Fortuyn, later shot to death to “defend Dutch Muslims from persecution.”

Before being slaughtered, clinging to a basket, Theo van Gogh begged his assassin: “Can we talk about this?” But can we talk?

A country whose most outspoken filmmaker was slaughtered by an Islamist; whose bravest refugee, hunted by a fatwa, fled to the U.S.; whose cartoonists must live under protection, had better should think twice before condemning a Member of Parliament, whose comments about Islam have forced him to live under 24-hour protection for more than a decade, for “hate speech.” Poor Erasmus! The Netherlands is no longer a safe haven for free thinkers. It is the Nightmare for Free Speech.

The most prominent politician in the Netherlands, MP Geert Wilders, has just been convicted of “hate speech,” for asking at a really if there should be fewer Moroccans in the Netherlands. Many newly-arrived Moroccans in the Netherlands seem to have been responsible for a disproportionate amount of crime there.

Paul Cliteur, Professor of Jurisprudence at Leiden University, who was called as an expert witness, summed up the message coming from the court: “It would have been better if the Dutch state had sent a clear signal [to terrorists] via a Dutch court that we foster a broad notion of the freedom of expression in the Netherlands.”

Here are just a few details to help understand what Wilders experiences every day because of his ideas: No visitors are allowed into his office except after a long wait to be checked. The Dutch airline KLM refused to board him on a flight to Moscow for reasons of “security.” His entourage is largely anonymous. When a warning level rises, he does not know where he will spend the night. For months, he was able to see his wife only twice a week, in a secure apartment, and then only when the police allowed it. The Parliament had to place him in the less visible part of the building, in order better to protect him. He often wears a bulletproof vest to speak in public. When he goes to a restaurant, his security detail must first check the place out.

Wilders’s life is a nightmare. “I am in jail,” he has said; “they are walking around free.”

The historic dimension of Wilders’s conviction is related not only to the terrible injustice done to this MP, but that it was the Netherlands that, for the first time in Europe, criminalized dissenting opinions about Islam.

The Netherlands is a very small country; whatever happens to this enclave is seen in the rest of Europe. The Netherlands refused to surrender to the Spanish invasion. It was from Rotterdam, the second-largest Dutch city, that the Founding Fathers left to create the United States of America. It was to the Netherlands that some of the most brave, original European philosophers and writers — Descartes, Rousseau, Locke, Sade, Molière, Hugo, Swift and Spinoza — had to flee to publish their books. It is also the only corner of Europe where there were no pogroms against Jews, and where Rembrandt painted Jesus with the physical traits of Jews.

Take Leiden: “Praesidium Libertatis” (“Bastion of Freedom”) is the motto of the Netherlands’ most ancient university. Leiden was the university of Johan Huizinga, the great historian who opposed the Nazis and died in a concentration camp. Leiden was also the university of Anton Pannekoek, the mentor of Martinus Van der Lubbe, the Dutch hero who torched the Nazi Parliament in 1933.

In Leiden today, you meet brave intellectuals such as Afshin Ellian, an Iranian jurist who fled Khomeini’s Revolution in Iran and who also now lives under police protection for his observations on Islam. Ellian’s office is close to the former office of Rudolph Cleveringa. When the Nazis invaded the Netherlands and called on Dutch public officials to fill out a form in which they had to declare whether they were “Aryans” or “Jews”, everyone but Cleveringa capitulated. He understood the consequences of such commands.

Twelve years ago, the Netherlands was again plunged into fear for the first time since World War II. In Linnaeusstraat, a district of Amsterdam, Mohammed Bouyeri, a Muslim extremist, ambushed the filmmaker Theo van Gogh and slaughtered him, then pinned on his chest a letter threatening the lives of Geert Wilders and Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Before that murder, Pim Fortuyn, a professor who had formed his own party to save the country from Islamization, was shot to death to “defend Dutch Muslims from persecution.”

2117Twelve years ago, Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh (left) was assassinated by an Islamist who pinned on van Gogh’s chest a letter threatening the life of Geert Wilders (right). Today Wilders, the most prominent politician in the Netherlands, lives in hiding under round-the-clock protection.

Fortuyn had said, “We have a lot of guests who are trying to take over the house.”

Since then, many Dutch artists have capitulated to fear.

Sooreh Hera, from Iran, submitted her photos to the Gemeentemuseum Museum in The Hague. One of these works depicted Mohammed and Ali. After many threats, the museum proposed that it would acquire the photos without publishing them and that one day, perhaps, when the situation was calmer, they might show them then. Hera refused: it would have been self-censorship, a sad day for the West. Rants Tjan, director of Museum Gouda, bravely offered to exhibit her censored images, but that event was later cancelled, too. Hera was forced to go into hiding.

Paul Cliteur, a critic of multiculturalism, announced that he would no longer write for Dutch newspapers about Islam, for fear of reprisals: “With the murder of van Gogh, everyone who writes takes a certain risk. That is a scary development. What I am doing do is self-censorship, absolutely….”

Then a columnist, Hasna el Maroudi, from the newspaper NRC Handelsblad, stopped writing, after receiving threats.

The Dutch artist Rachid Ben Ali, irreverent about Islam, no longer satirizes Muslims.

Amsterdam, a city famous for its exuberant cultural life, had already lived through threats to artists: the occupation by the Nazis during World War II.

Several artists still refuse to mention Theo Van Gogh, so as not to “contribute to… divisions”, according to the New York Times. Translation: They are afraid. Who would not be?

In the Oosterpark, a steel sculpture by the artist Jeroen Henneman, dedicated to Van Gogh, is entitled “De Schreeuw” (“The Scream”). But it is a scream you hardly hear in the Dutch society.

What you do hear is the defiant protest after the conviction of a brave MP, Geert Wilders: “I will never be silent. You will not be able to stop me… And that is what we stand for. For freedom and for our beautiful Netherlands.”

Before being slaughtered, clinging to a basket, Theo van Gogh begged his assassin: “Can we talk about this?”

But can we talk?

Ask Geert Wilders, just the latest brave victim of Europe’s Bolshevik thought police.

Categories: Censorship, Europe, Freedom of speech, Geert Wilders, Hate speech, Islam - submission, Islamic integration, Islamic invasion, Islamic supremacy, Islamisation, Multiculturalism, Netherlands, Thought police
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Comments: Be the first to comment

The West’s Politically Correct Dictatorship

December 6, 2016

The West’s Politically Correct Dictatorship, Gatestone Institute, Giulio Meotti, December 6, 2016

The brave work of the artist Mimsy was removed from London’s Mall Galleries after the British police defined it “inflammatory.”

In France, schools teach children that Westerners are Crusaders, colonizers and “bad.” In their efforts to justify the repudiation of France and its Judeo-Christian culture, schools have fertilized the soil in which Islamic extremism develops and flourishes unimpeded.

No one can deny that France is under Islamist siege. Last week, France’s intelligence service discovered another terror plot. But what is the priority of the Socialist government? Restricting freedom of expression for pro-life “militants.”

Under this politically correct dictatorship, Western culture has established two principles. First, freedom of speech can be restricted any time someone claims that an opinion is an “insult.” Second, there is a vicious double standard: minorities, especially Muslims, can freely say whatever they want against Jews and Christians.

There is no better ally of Islamic extremism than this sanctimony of liberal censorship: both, in fact, want to suppress any criticism of Islam, as well as any proud defense of the Western Enlightenment or Judeo-Christian culture.

Twitter, one of the vehicles of this new intolerance, even formed a “Trust and Safety Council.” It brings to mind Saudi Arabia’s “Council for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice.”

Under this political correctness, the only “win-win” is for political Islam.

It might look like a golden age for free speech: more than a billion tweets, Facebook posts and blogs every day. But beneath this surface, freedom of expression is dramatically retreating.

Students at the City University of London, home to one of Britain’s most respected schools of journalism, voted to ban three newspapers from its campus: The Sun, Daily Mail and Express. Their “crime”, according to the approved motion, is to have published stories against migrants, “Islamophobic” articles, and “scapegoating the working classes that they so proudly claim to represent.” City University, supposedly a place dedicated to openness and questioning, became the first Western educational institution to vote for censorship, and ban “right wing newspapers.”

The filmmaker David Cronenberg called this self-censorship, after the massacre at Charlie Hebdo: “a weird, serpentine political correctness.” It is one of the most lethal ideological poisons of the 21st century. It is not only closed-minded and ridiculous, it makes us blind to the radical Islam that is undermining our mental and cultural defenses.

The countless attacks by Muslim extremists testify that the multicultural world to which we have been led is a fiction. Political correctness simply encourages the Islamists to raise the stakes to win the war they are advancing. The resulting tension has been fed by the Western elites with their sense of guilt for “colonialism” in the Third World.

“ISIS Threaten Sylvania” — an art exhibition featuring cute little stuffed animals picnicking on a lawn, and unaware of other cute little stuffed animal terrorists carrying assault rifles on a knoll just behind them — is the work of the artist known as Mimsy (she hides her identity). The protagonists of this series of light box tableaux are a family of stuffed animal dolls that inhabits an enchanted valley. Gunmen, dressed like the Islamic State henchmen, strike the innocent inhabitants of the valley, at school and on the beach, at a picnic or in a gay pride parade. It looks like an updated version of Maus by Art Spiegelman, a graphic novel depicting Nazi cats and Jewish mice during the Holocaust.

Those wishing to see this artistic panel at the Mall Galleries, in London, will now have to console themselves with the work of Jamie McCartney, “The Great Wall Vagina,” nine meters of female genitalia, less important and less provocative.

The brave work of Mimsy, after the British police defined it “inflammatory,” has been eliminated from the program of this London cultural event. Its organizers informed the gallery owners that if they wanted to put it on display, they would have to shell out £36,000 ($46,000) to “secure the venue” for the six days of the exhibition.

2101The brave work of the artist Mimsy, satirizing the brutality of ISIS, was removed from London’s Mall Galleries after the British police defined it “inflammatory.” (Image source: Mimsy)

Under this politically correct dictatorship, Western culture has established two principles. First, freedom of speech can be restricted any time someone claims that an opinion is an “insult.” Second, there is a vicious double standard: minorities, especially Muslims, can freely say whatever they want against Jews and Christians.

And so it came to pass that the most famous Spanish football team, Real Madrid, removed the cross from its crest after a commercial deal with Gulf emirate of Abu Dhabi. The Christian symbol was quickly ditched to please the Islamic Gulf sponsors.

Perhaps soon the West will be soon asked to change the flag of the European Union — twelve yellow stars on a blue background — because it contains a Christian message in code. Arsène Heitz, who designed it in 1955, was inspired by the Christian iconography of the Virgin Mary with a crown and twelve stars on her head: what a heartless “Western Christian supremacist” message!

Political correctness is also having a huge impact on big business: Kellogg’s withdrew advertising from Breitbart for being “not aligned with our values” and Lego dropped advertising with Daily Mail, to mention just two recent cases.

It should not cause alarm if companies want to decide where to advertise their products, but it is very alarming when it happens due to “ideology.” We have never read about companies abandoning a newspaper or website because it was too liberal or “leftist.” If the Arab-Islamic regimes were follow these views, why should they not ask their companies to stop advertising in Western newspapers that publish articles critical of Islam, or which publish pictures of half-naked women?

Libraries on US campuses are now putting “trigger warnings” on works of literature: students are advised, for example, that Ovid’s sublime Metamorphosis “justifies” rape. Stanford University even managed to exclude Dante, Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Shakespeare and other giants of Western culture from the academic curricula in 1988: supposedly many of their masterpieces are “racist, sexist, reactionary, repressive.” This is the vocabulary of Western surrender before totalitarian Islamic fundamentalism.

France has removed great figures, such as Charlemagne, Henry IV, Louis XIV and Napoleon, from schools, to replace them, for instance, with studying the history of Mali and other African kingdoms. At school, children are taught that Westerners are Crusaders, colonizers and “bad.” In purportedly justifying the repudiation of France and its Judeo-Christian culture, schools have fertilized the soil in which Islamic extremism develops and flourishes unimpeded.

It is a question of priorities: no one can deny that France is under Islamist siege. Last week, France’s intelligence service discovered another terror plot. But what is the priority of the Socialist government? Restricting freedom of expression for pro-life “militants.” The Wall Street Journal called it “France’s War on Anti-Abortion Speech.” France already has one of the most permissive and liberal bodies of legislation on abortion. But political correctness makes one blind and ideological. “In four and a half years, the Socialists have reduced our freedom of expression and attacked public freedoms,” commented Riposte Laïque.

In the US, academia is rapidly closing its doors to any debate. At Yale, professors and students these days are very busy with a new cultural emergency: “renaming.” They are changing the name of buildings to erase all traces of slavery and colonialism — a revisionism out of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia.

Everywhere in the US and in the UK, an air of hostility is spreading against opinions and ideas that could cause even a hint of distress in students. The result is the rise of what a writer such as Bret Easton Ellis called “Generation Wuss“.

The jihadists surely grin at this Western political correctness, since the result of this ideology will be the abolition of the Western critical spirit and a surreal reeducation of the masses through the annihilation of our history and a hatred of our truly liberal past.

Bristol University in the UK just came under fire for attempting to “no-platform” Roger Scruton for his views on same-gender marriage. Meanwhile, British universities are giving a platform to radical Islamic preachers. In the politically correct universe, conservative thinkers are more dangerous than ISIS supporters. London’s former mayor, Boris Johnson, called this dystopia “the Boko Haram of political correctness.”

Students and faculty at the Rutgers University in New Jersey cancelled a speech by former US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice. Students and professors at Scripps College in California protested the presence of another former Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, who, according to the protesters, is a “war criminal.”

A New York University professor, Michael Rectenwald, who attacked political correctness and the coddling of students, was recently booted from the classroom after his colleagues complained about his “incivility”. The liberal studies professor was forced to go on paid leave. “It’s an alarming curtailment of free expression to the point where you can’t even pretend to be something without authorities coming down on you in the universities,” Rectenwald told the New York Post.

There is no better ally of Islamic extremism than this sanctimony of liberal censorship: both, in fact, want to suppress any criticism of Islam, as well as any proud defense of the Western Enlightenment or Judeo-Christian culture.

Censorship is happening not only in the liberal enclaves on the coasts of the United States, but also in France. The Eagles of Death Metal — the American band that was performing at Paris’ Bataclan Theater when ISIS terrorists murdered 89 people there on November 13, 2015 — were banned by two music festivals: Rock en Seine and Cabaret Vert. The reason? Jesse Hughes, the band’s frontman, gave a very politically incorrect interview:

“Did your French gun control stop a single f*cking person from dying? I think the only thing that stopped it was some of the bravest men that I’ve ever seen charging head-first into the face of death with their firearms. I think the only way that my mind has been changed is that maybe until nobody has guns everybody has to have them. Because I’ve never seen anyone that’s ever had one dead, and I want everyone to have access to them, and I saw people die that maybe could have lived, I don’t know.”

After the jihadist massacre at Orlando’s Pulse gay nightclub, Facebook enforced the pro-Islamic injunction and banned a page of the magazine Gaystream, after it had published an article critical of Islam in the wake of the bloodbath. Gaystream‘s director, David Berger, had heavily criticized the director of the Gay Museum in Cologne, Birgit Bosold, who had told German media that gays should be more frightened of white bigoted men than of Islamic extremists.

Jim Hoft, a gay journalist who is the creator of the popular Gateway Pundit blog, was suspended from YouTube. Twitter, one of the vehicles of this new intolerance, suspended the account of Milo Yiannopoulos, a prominent gay critic of Islamic fundamentalism — but probably not the accounts of Islamic fundamentalists who criticize gays. Twitter even formed a “Trust and Safety Council.” It brings to mind Saudi Arabia’s “Council for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice.” Could it be an inspiration for the liberal mullahs?

Yes, it might have looked like a golden age for free speech. But under this dictatorship of political correctness, the only “win-win” is for political Islam.

Categories: "Right wing extremists", "Unacceptable rhetoric" about Muslims, Censorship, Europe, Europe and Islam, European "democracy", European left, European Union, Islamism, Media and Islam, Media and Islamist terror, Obama's America, Political correctness, Political Islam, Western civilization
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Comments: 2 Comments

Gulag, Western Style

November 23, 2016

Gulag, Western Style, PJ Media, David Solway, November 22, 2016

newspeak

In the last analysis, this system of subjugation looks to be even more effective than the cruder techniques of its tyrannical counterparts. In the absence of public awareness and concerted pushback, we will have sold our birthright for a mess of political potage.

*****************************

There are various ways of quashing social and political dissent, some more effective than others. The “Soviet method” practiced in stringently repressive regimes—torture, imprisonment, the ever-expanding Gulag, summary execution—works extremely well in the shorter historical timeframe, until a people rise up in revolt or such demonic societies collapse from their own internal contradictions. Of course, the truly Stygian regimes, closed to the world, indifferent to economic pressures, and under the heavy boot of unbroken military control, such as North Korea, may persist indefinitely or until defeated in war. But generally speaking, the tried-and-true methods of political oppression are sufficient to the task of keeping a population in a state of enslavement for a prolonged historical period.

In the sphere of the liberal West, however, there are other means of subjection to the will of increasingly centralized governments. Because they tend to function gradually and under the radar, these tactics are enormously efficient in their deadening effects, going unrecognized until it is often too late to mount significant resistance. They operate through a process of curricular distortions, social pressure and incremental legislation targeting speech habits, facets of normal behavior, assumptions of what counts as morally legitimate, and financial and job security.

A useful technique for anaesthetizing the individual citizen and rendering him compliant is the erasure of authentic historical knowledge. We’ve remarked the success of this approach in the U.S. with the “history from below” or “people’s history” movement, associated with Howard Zinn, and the foregrounding of a bowdlerized version of Islamic history in American schools. Canada is no different. Eric McGeer, author of Words of Valediction and Remembrance: Canadian Epitaphs of the Second World War, writes: “In my last years of high school teaching I was increasingly infuriated and disgusted at the portrayal of Canada in the history textbooks assigned for use in our courses. There was no sense of gratitude in the textbooks, no empathy with the people of the past or an attempt to see them in their own terms, no sense of the effort people made to create one of the few truly liveable societies on earth. You would have thought that this country was nothing more than a racist, bigoted, this or that-phobic hotbed. My first lesson involved taking the book and dropping it into the waste paper basket and advising the students to do the same.” (personal communication). The study of history, McGeer concludes, is nothing now but a progressive morality tale and a mechanism of social engineering. Sounds a lot like Title IX. Pride in one’s nation, its accomplishments and sacrifices, is contra-indicated. There is more than one way of burning the flag.

The center-right consensus that has characterized Western nations has been under attack for some considerable time as nation after nation in the once liberal West gravitates progressively leftward. Robert Conquest’s Second of his Three Laws of Politics states that “any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.” The consequence of Conquest’s Law is, inevitably, what Robert Michels in Political Parties called “The Iron Law of Oligarchy,” which formulates how democratic institutions tend to succumb to the rule of an elite—in our day, a progressivist camarilla that controls government policy and media outlets, and harnesses the energies of dissenting associations and cabals. In many countries, the democratic process has become or is on the road to becoming a mere formality.

The oligarchic agenda can be detected in the disastrous nationalization of the health care system; the decadence of an academy which indoctrinates rather than educates; the rise of destructive feminism and the feminization of the culture; the transgendering of everyday life—in Canada, for example, Bill C-16 has been tabled, making “gender expression” a prohibited ground of discrimination and potentially mandating non-binary pronouns such as zhi or hir, as is already the case in New York City where astronomical fines are levied for contravention; the special status ascribed to the incursions of anti-democratic Islam; the “abolition of the family,” as Marx and Engels urged in The Communist Manifesto; and the regulatory strangling of the free market economy and the conjoint attrition of the middle class. Additionally, the leftist project is materially facilitated by the growing prevalence of kangaroo courts run by committed activists of every conceivable stripe and in which no provision whatsoever is made to assist those too often falsely accused of discrimination or being in violation of some obscure code or policy of sanctioned conduct. The judgments handed down against those who have offended the sensibilities of favored identity groups will often involve harshly punitive forms of retribution that may cost a defendant his employment and his livelihood.

A Romanian friend who suffered through Nicolae Ceaușescu’s dictatorship in his home country tells me that in many ways the situation in the “freedom loving” West is actually worse. In Romania, as in the Soviet Union and the rest of the Eastern Bloc, most people knew that the regime was founded on lies and that the media were corrupt, time-serving institutions. Here, on the contrary, people tend to believe that the government is relatively, if not entirely, trustworthy, that the judiciary is impartial, and that the media actually report the news. Citizens are therefore susceptible to mission creep and are piecemeal deceived into a condition of indenture to socialist governance, an activist judiciary, a disinformative, hireling press corps, and left-wing institutions. People will vote massively for the Liberal Party in Canada and the Democrats in the U.S., not realizing they are voting themselves into bondage, penury and stagnation. The process operates insensibly and takes longer to embed itself into the cultural mainstream, but the result is alarmingly effective and durable. My friend has never read F.A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom or George Orwell’s 1984, but his layman’s insights and practical experience bear out Hayek’s scholarly analysis and Orwell’s dire warnings.

A totalitarian regime will control its citizens through propaganda, censorship, and outright violence, modes of oppression that are at least publicly demonstrable, evident to most. But knowing that the enchainment of the spirit is ultimately more reliable than the enchainment of the flesh, a democratic polity veering towards oligarchy will focus on propaganda and censorship as well, but in a far more subtle form. It will function mainly through public shaming rituals, social ostracism, rigid speech codes, Orwellian disinformation, and legal or quasi-legal assault. It does not need to depend on physical violence.

Fear of social rejection, the lure of groupthink, the pestilence of political correctness controlling what one may say and think, public apathy, historical ignorance, and especially the Damoclean sword of selective hiring, job dismissal, and financial reprisal go a long way to subdue a people to the will of its masters and consign them to a Gulag that may be less observable a such, but one that is nonetheless socially and economically crippling to individuals, families and businesses.

In the last analysis, this system of subjugation looks to be even more effective than the cruder techniques of its tyrannical counterparts. In the absence of public awareness and concerted pushback, we will have sold our birthright for a mess of political potage.

Categories: Academia, Censorship, Control of the people, Democracy, Dissent, Freedom, Gulags, Media, Multiculturalism, Political correctness, Serfdom, social media
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Comments: Be the first to comment

Transfer of Internet control could lead to silencing of criticism of jihad terror; Soros-funded group says relax, all will be well

September 30, 2016

Transfer of Internet control could lead to silencing of criticism of jihad terror; Soros-funded group says relax, all will be well, Jihad Watch, , September 30, 2016

“Texas Senators Ted Cruz and John Cornyn have warned that transfer of U.S. control of ICANN will give China, Russia and Iran, whose governments censor websites and online commentary critical of their policies, more control over the internet.”

Iran, and Saudi Arabia, and other entities who believe, in the words of Barack Obama (who has initiated this transfer), that “the future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.” That means that transfer of Internet control could help the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) advance a long way toward achieving its cherished and long-pursued goal: the silencing of criticism of jihad terror

But “New America is a Washington, D.C. think tank. Its fellow Danielle Kehl wrote in a New York Times column this week that the U.S. government’s ceding of power will actually bolster internet freedom by bringing businesses and civil society groups to the table.” New America is funded by George Soros, who has never shown himself to be a friend of the freedom of speech or free society.

So this could be it, friends. I’ve been updating Jihad Watch day in and day out since October 2003, and if the Internet passes into the hands of those who are committed to destroying the freedom of speech (and there are many of those, and they are powerful; I’m just finishing up my next book,The Complete Infidel’s Guide to Free Speech (and Its Enemies), which tells the whole appalling story), before too long I could have quite a bit of time on my hands.

The thing is, if we lose the Internet as a platform for the truth amid the mainstream media lies and distortions, it will be a terrific blow, but the struggle for freedom will not be over. We will find other platforms, we will organize in different ways. The political and media elites are increasingly fearful of losing their grip, and are becoming increasingly authoritarian as a result. They may succeed in driving us underground. They will never succeed in silencing us.

icann

“Four States Sue USA to Try to Stop Transfer of Internet Manager,” by Cameron Langford,Courthouse News Service, September 30, 2016:

GALVESTON (CN) – With the U.S. government set to cede control at midnight Friday over the nonprofit that manages the internet, Texas and three other states sued, seeking to stop a move they claim will expose them to meddling from foreign governments hostile to free speech.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, of ICANN, manages domain names and assignment of internet service provider numbers under a contract with the U.S. Department of Commerce that’s set to expire Sept. 30.

The California-based nonprofit was formed in 1998 with help from the federal government.

Texas Senators Ted Cruz and John Cornyn have warned that transfer of U.S. control of ICANN will give China, Russia and Iran, whose governments censor websites and online commentary critical of their policies, more control over the internet.

Texas, Arizona, Oklahoma and Nevada share the Republican senators’ fears. Their attorneys general sued the United States, the Department of Commerce and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration on Wednesday night in Galveston Federal Court….

Texas claims that without U.S. government oversight ICANN and Verisign will have “unbridled discretion” to change the “authoritative root zone file,” known as the internet’s “address book” or “master directory,” thereby imperiling its license to use the .gov domain.”In doing so, the U.S. Government is handing over control of the ‘vast democratic forums of the Internet’ to private parties, and giving those parties free reign [to] employ prior restraints,” the states say.

“Alternatively, ICANN could simply shut down ‘.gov,’ preventing public access to state websites.”…

New America is a Washington, D.C. think tank. Its fellow Danielle Kehl wrote in a New York Times column this week that the U.S. government’s ceding of power will actually bolster internet freedom by bringing businesses and civil society groups to the table. “Completing the transition will actually prevent foreign governments from expanding their role in internet governance. This plan explicitly rejects any formal government role in ICANN,” she wrote.

“Moreover, ICANN’s multistakeholder model is an alternative to the intergovernmental solution that some foreign countries — especially Russia and China — have championed for years. They would prefer to see the domain name system managed by a multilateral organization in which governments are the only stakeholders who can meaningfully participate.”

Categories: Censorship, George Soros, ICANN, Internet, Islamic nations and the internet, Obama and internet, Oil
Tags: , , , , , ,

Comments: Be the first to comment

Western Publishers Submit to Islam

September 11, 2016

Western Publishers Submit to Islam, Gatestone Institute, Giulio Meotti, September 11, 2016

♦ For criticizing Islam, Hamed Abdel-Samad lives under police protection in Germany and, as with Rushdie, a fatwa hangs over him. After the fatwa come the insults: being censored by a free publishing house. This is what the Soviets did to destroy writers: destroy their books.

♦ At a time when dozens of novelists, journalists and scholars are facing Islamists’ threats, it is unforgivable that Western publishers not only agree to bow down, but are often the first to capitulate.

♦ A Paris court convicted Renaud Camus for “Islamophobia” (a fine of 4,000 euros) for a speech he gave in 2010, in which he spoke of the replacement of the French people under the Trojan horse of multiculturalism. Another writer, Richard Millet, was fired last March by Gallimard publishing house for his ideas on multiculturalism.

♦ Not only did Rushdie’s publishers capitulate; other publishers also decided to break rank and return to do business with Tehran. Oxford University Press decided to take part in the Tehran Book Fair along with two American publishers, McGraw-Hill and John Wiley. Those publishers chose to respond to murderous censorship with surrender.

♦ It is as if at the time of the Nazis’ book-burnings, Western publishers had not only stood silent, but had also invited a German delegation to Paris and New York.

When Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses came out in 1989, Viking Penguin, the British and American publisher of the novel, was subjected to daily Islamist harassment. As Daniel Pipes wrote, the London office resembled “an armed camp,” with police protection, metal detectors and escorts for visitors. In Viking’s New York offices, dogs sniffed packages and the place was designated a “sensitive location”. Many bookshops were attacked and many even refused to sell the book. Viking spent about $3 million on security measures in 1989, the fatal year for Western freedom of expression.

Nonetheless, Viking never flinched. It was a miracle that the novel finally came out. Other publishers, however, faltered. Since then, the situation has only gotten worse. Most Western publishers are now faltering. That is the meaning of the new Hamed Abdel-Samad affair.

The Muslim Brotherhood gave Abdel-Samad all that an Egyptian boy could wish for: spirituality, camaraderie, companionship, a purpose. In Giza, Hamed Samad became part of the Brotherhood. His father had taught him the Koran; the Brotherhood explained him how to translate these teachings into practice.

Abdel-Samad repudiated them after one day in the desert. The Brothers had given all the new militants an orange after they had walked under the sun for hours. They were ordered to peel it. Then the Brotherhood asked them to bury the fruit in the sand, and to eat the peel. The next day, Abdel-Samad left the organization. It was the humiliation needed to turn a human being into a terrorist.

Abdel-Samad today is 46 years old and lives in Munich, Germany, where he married a Danish girl and works for the Institute of Jewish History and Culture at the University of Munich. In his native Egyptian village, his first book caused an uproar. Some Muslims wanted to burn it.

Abdel-Samad’s recent book, Der Islamische Faschismus: Eine Analyse, has just been burned at the stake not in Cairo by Islamists, but in France by some of the self-righteous French.

The book is a bestseller in Germany, where it has been published by the well-known publisher, Droemer Knaur. An English translation has been published in the U.S. by Prometheus Books, under the title Islamic Fascism. Two years ago, the French publisher, Piranha, acquired the rights to translate Abdel-Samad’s book about “Islamic Fascism” into French. A publication date was even posted on Amazon: September 16. But at the last moment, the publisher stopped its release. Jean-Marc Loubet, head of the publishing house, announced to Abdel-Samad’s agent that the publication of his book is now unthinkable in France, not only for security reasons, but also because it would reinforce the “extreme right”.

For criticizing Islam, Abdel-Samad lives under police protection in Germany and, as with Rushdie, a fatwa hangs over him. After the fatwa come the insults: being censored by a free publishing house. This is what the Soviets did to destroy writers: destroy his books.

Mr. Abdel-Samad’s case is not new. At a time when dozens of novelists, journalists and scholars are facing Islamists’ threats, it is unforgivable that Western publishers not only agree to bow down, but are often the first to capitulate.

1856For criticizing Islam, Hamed Abdel-Samad lives under police protection in Germany and, as with Rushdie, a fatwa hangs over him. After the fatwa come the insults: being censored by a free publishing house.

In France, for criticizing Islam in a column titled “We refuse to change civilization” for the daily newspaper, Le Monde, the famous writer, Renaud Camus, lost his publisher, Fayard.

Before he suddenly became “unpopular” in the Paris’s literary establishment, Renaud Camus had been friends with Louis Aragon, the famous Communist poet and founder of surrealism, and was close joining “the immortals” of the French Academy. Roland Barthes, the star of the Collège de France, had written the preface to Renaud Camus’ most famous novel, Tricks, the cult-classic book of gay culture.

Then a Paris court convicted Camus for “Islamophobia” (a fine of 4,000 euros), for a speech he gave on December 18, 2010, in which he spoke of “Grand Replacement“, the replacement of the French people under the Trojan horse of multiculturalism. It was then that Camus became persona non grata in France.

The Jewel of Medina, a novel by the American writer Sherry Jones about the life of the third wife of Muhammad, was first purchased and then scrapped by the powerful publisher Random House, which had already paid her an advance and launched an ambitious promotional campaign. Sherry Jones’s new publisher, Gibson Square, was then firebombed by Islamists in London.

Then there was Yale University Press, which published a book by Jytte Klausen, “The Cartoons That Shook the World“, on the history of the controversial “Mohammad cartoons” that were published by the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten in 2005, and crisis that followed. But Yale University Press published the book without the cartoons, and without any other images of the Muslim prophet Mohammad that were to be included.

“The capitulation of Yale University Press to threats that hadn’t even been made yet is the latest and perhaps the worst episode in the steady surrender to religious extremism — particularly Muslim religious extremism — that is spreading across our culture,” commented the late Christopher Hitchens. Yale was possibly hoping to get in line for the same $20 million donation from Saudi Arabia’s Prince Al-Wwaleed bin Talal that he had just bestowed upon George Washington University and Harvard.

In Germany, Gabriele Brinkmann, a popular novelist, was also suddenly left without a publisher. According to her publisher, Droste, the novel Wem Ehre Geburt (“To Whom Honor Gives Birth“) could be judged as “insulting to Muslims” and expose the publisher to intimidation. Brinkmann was asked to censor some passages; she refused and lost the publishing house.

This same cowardice and capitulation now pervades the entire publishing industry. Last year, Italy’s most prestigious book fair in Turin chose (then shelved) Saudi Arabia as its guest of honor, despite the many writers and bloggers who are imprisoned in the Islamic kingdom. Raif Badawi was sentenced to 1,000 lashes and a 10-year sentence, and a $260,000 fine.

Many Western publishers are now also “rejecting works by Israeli authors“, according Time.com, despite their political views.

It was after Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses that many Western publishing houses first bowed to intimidation. Christian Bourgois, a French publishing house, refused to publish The Satanic Verses after having bought the rights, as did the German publisher, Kiepenheuer, who apparently said he regretted having acquired the rights to the book and chose to sell them to a consortium of fifty publishers from Germany, Austria and Switzerland, gathered under the name “UN-Charta Artikel 19.”

Not only did Rushdie’s publishers capitulate; other publishers also decided to break ranks and return to do business with Tehran. Oxford University Press decided to take part in the Tehran Book Fair, along with two American publishers, McGraw-Hill and John Wiley, despite the request of Rushdie’s publisher, Viking Penguin, to boycott the Iranian event. Those publishers chose to respond to murderous censorship with surrender, willing to sacrifice freedom of expression on the altar of business as usual: selling books was more important than solidarity with threatened colleagues.

It is as if at the time of the Nazis’ book-burnings, Western publishers had not only stood silent, but had also invited a German delegation to Paris and New York. Is it so unimaginable today?

Categories: Censorship, Islam - submission, Islamic supremacy, Islamisation, Islamist freedom, Publishers, Western civilization
Tags: , , , , , ,

Comments: Be the first to comment

Fearing reprisal from Muslims, French publisher reverses decision to publish book critical of Islam

July 31, 2016

Fearing reprisal from Muslims, French publisher reverses decision to publish book critical of Islam, Jihad Watch, , July 31, 2016

This is the way the West dies
This is the way the West dies
This is the way the West dies
Not with a bang but a whimper.

This is nothing new, however. Way back in 2002, a French edition of my book Islam Unveiled was canceled for fear of offending Muslims.

Hamed-Abdel-Samad

“Fearing Islamist reprisal, French publisher revises decision to publish book critical of Islam,” by Vijeta Uniyal, Legal Insurrection, July 28, 2016 (thanks to The Religion of Peace):

A Paris-based publishing house has revised its decision to publish a French version of the German bestseller “Der Islamische Faschismus” (The Islamic Fascism). Written by German-Egyptian author Hamed Abdel-Samad, the book was due to hit the French bookstores in September. Piranha Edition reportedly changed its mind after this month’s ISIS-inspired terror attack in Nice that killed 84 people and injured more than 300.

If the objective of Islamist violence in Europe had been to force the continent into submission, it is well on its way to achieving them.

Piranha Edition justified the decision of not going ahead with the publication by citing the threat of Radical Islam as well its desire of not wanting to strengthen the right-wing French groups critical of Islam. Interestingly, the head office of the Piranha Edition is just within a few minutes of walk from Bataclan, the theatre where 89 people were murdered by Islamic terrorists in November 2016.

Earlier this week, Hamed Abdel-Samad revealed the details of the failed book deal in a German-language blog Die Achse des Guten:

First the publisher changed the title from “The Islamic Fascism” to “Is Islam a form of Fascism?” — in order to avoid unnecessary polarisation. But after the attack in Nice, the publishing house decided not to publish the book at all, as it fearful of the consequence — as stated in [their] email — which could have been deadly. There could be another attack like the one at Charlie Hebdo.

Had the publisher ended the email just there, I could understand, as it is a matter of life and death, and I cannot ask everyone to take the risk that I take with my book.

But then came the second argument why the publication was not possible at this point. The book could benefit the right wing [parties]. [Author’s translation]

Whenever Islamic terrorism strikes somewhere in the West, media commentators and politicians always love to talk about the ‘moderate Muslims’ living among us. We are endlessly reminded of the “voices” of moderation, reason and peace within Islam. Hamed Abdel-Samad is just such one such genuine voice being stifled in the West. And he is not alone; Somali-born women’s rights advocate Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Pakistani writer Ibn Warraq, Bangladeshi novelist Taslima Nasrin are just some of the true Muslim voices of reason and sanity of our times.

These few, but brave women and men are not only forced to live like hunted fugitives in the West by Islamists determined to enforce Fatwa placed on their heads, but driven into silence by leftists enforcing accepted speech codes on college campuses and public arena.

Given the almost omnipresent threat of violence inside the Muslim majority countries, we can give up on our hopes of hearing any substantial criticism of Islamist theology from within the Muslim World. But what is happening to Muslim dissenters in the West is no less sinister. The violent campaign to shut down any opposition in the Muslim World is complimented in the West by the activism of the Left.

On the other hand, the mainstream media is more interested in talking to the representatives of Islam who are eager to talk about ‘Islamophobia’, or the Western guilt, but not about the theology behind the ongoing worldwide Jihad….

Categories: Censorship, Europe, Islam - submission, Islamic integration, Islamic invasion, Islamic supremacy, Islamisation, Islamophobia
Tags: , , , , , , ,

Comments: Be the first to comment

Will Europe Refuse to Kneel like the Heroic French Priest?

July 30, 2016

Will Europe Refuse to Kneel like the Heroic French Priest? Gatestone Institute, Giulio Meotti, July 30, 2016

♦ Go around Europe these days: you will find not a single rally to protest the murder of Father Jacques Hamel. The day an 85-year-old priest was killed in a French church, nobody said “We are all Catholics”.

♦ Even Pope Francis, in front of the most important anti-Christian event on Europe’s soil since the Second World War, stood silent and said that Islamists look “for money”. The entire Vatican clergy refused to say the word “Islam”.

♦ Ritually, after each massacre, Europe’s media and politicians repeat the story of “intelligence failures” — a fig leaf to avoid mentioning Islam and its project of the conquest of Europe. It is the conventional code of conduct after any Islamist attack.

♦ Europe looks condemned to a permanent state of siege. But what if, one day, after more bloodshed and attacks in Europe, Europe’s governments begin negotiating, with the mainstream Islamic organizations, the terms of submission of democracies to Islamic sharia law? Cartoons about Mohammed have already disappeared from the European media, and the scapegoating of Israel and the Jews started long time ago. After the attack at the church, the French media decided even to stop publishing photos of the terrorists. This is the brave response to jihad by our mainstream media

Imagine the scene: the morning Catholic mass in the northern French town of Etienne du Rouvray, an almost empty church, three parishioners, two nuns and a very old priest. Knife-wielding ISIS terrorists interrupt the service and slit the throat of Father Jacques Hamel. This heartbreaking scene illuminates the state of Christianity in Europe.

1734Father Jacques Hamel was murdered this week, in the church of St. Étienne-du-Rouvray, by Islamic jihadists.

It happened before. In 1996 seven French monks were slaughtered in Algeria. In 2006, a priest was beheaded in Iraq. In 2016, this horrible Islamic ritual took place in the heart of European Christianity: the Normandy town where Father Hamel was murdered is the location of the trial of Joan of Arc, the heroine of French Christianity.

France had been repeatedly warned: Europe’s Christians will meet the same fate of their Eastern brethren. But France refused to protect either Europe’s Christians or Eastern ones. When, a year ago, the rector of the Great Mosque of Paris, Dalil Boubakeur, suggested transforming empty French churches (like that one in Etienne du Rouvray) into mosques, only a few French intellectuals, led by Alain Finkielkraut and Pascal Bruckner, signed the appeal entitled, “Do not touch my church” (“Touche pas à mon église“) in defense of France’s Christian heritage. Laurent Joffrin, director of the daily newspaper Libération, led a left-wing campaign against the appeal, describing the signers as “decrepit and fascist“.

For years, French socialist mayors have approved, in fact, the demolition of churches or their conversion into mosques (the same goal as ISIS but by different, “peaceful” means). Except in the Saint-Germain-des-Prés quarter of Paris, and in some beautiful areas such as the Avignon Festival, France is experiencing a dramatic crisis of identity.

While the appeal to save France’s churches was being demonized or ignored, the same fate was suffered by endangered Eastern Christian being exterminated by ISIS. “It is no longer possible to ignore this ethnic and cultural cleansing”, reads an appeal signed by the usual combative “Islamophobic” intellectuals, such as Elisabeth Badinter, Jacques Julliard and Michel Onfray. In March, the newspaper Le Figaro accused the government of Manuel Valls of abandoning the Christians threatened with death by ISIS by refusing to grant them visas.

Go around Europe these days: you will find not a single rally to protest the killing of Father Hamel. In January 2015, after the murderous attack on Charlie Hebdo, the French took to the streets to say “Je suis Charlie”. After July 26, 2016, the day an 85-year-old priest was murdered in a church, nobody said “We are all Catholics”. Even Pope Francis, in the face of the most important anti-Christian event on Europe’s soil since the Second World War, stood silent and said that Islamists look “for money“. The entire Vatican clergy refused to write or say the word “Islam”.

Truth is coming from very few writers. “Religions overcome other religions; police can help little if one is not afraid of death.” With these words, six months after the massacre at the magazine Charlie Hebdo, the writer Michel Houellebecq spoke with the Revue des Deux Mondes. Our elite should read it after every massacre before filling up pages on “intelligence failures.”

It is not as if one more French gendarmerie vehicle could have stopped the Islamist who slaughtered 84 people in Nice. Perhaps. Maybe. But that is not the point. Ritually, after each massacre, Europe’s media and politicians repeat the story of “intelligence failures”. In the case of the attack in Etienne du Rouvray, the story is about a terrorist who was placed under surveillance.

The “intelligence failure” theory is a fig leaf to avoid mentioning Islam and its project of the conquest of Europe. It is the conventional code of conduct after any Islamist attack. Then they add: “Retaliation” creates a spiral of violence; you have to work for peace and show good intentions. Then, in two or three weeks, comes the fatal “we deserve it”. For what? For having a religion different from them?

We always hear the same voices, as in some great game of dissimulation and collective disorientation in which no one even knows which enemy to beat. But, after all, is it not much more comforting to talk about “intelligence” instead of the Islamists who try, by terror and sharia, to force the submission of us poor Europeans?

Europe looks condemned to a permanent state of siege. But what if, one day, after more bloodshed and attacks in Europe, Europe’s governments begin negotiating, with the mainstream Islamic organizations, the terms of submission of democracies to Islamic sharia law? Cartoons about Mohammed and the “crime” of blasphemy have already disappeared from the European media, and the scapegoating of Israel and the Jews started long time ago.

After the attack at the church, the French media decided even to stop publishing photos of the terrorists. This is the brave response to jihad by our mainstream media, who also showed lethal signs of cowardice during the Charlie Hebdo crisis.

The only hope today comes from an 85-year-old French priest, who was murdered by Islamists after a simple, noble gesture: he refused to kneel in front of them. Will humiliated and indolent Europe do the same?

Categories: Censorship, Christians, Clash of civilizations, Cover-up, Europe, France, Islam - submission, Islam and Christianity, Islam and terrorism, Islam in Europe, Islamic integration, Islamic invasion, Islamic supremacy, Islamisation, Jews, Sharia law
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Comments: Be the first to comment

YouTube bans video on Muslim Brotherhood, Sharia and Civilization Jihad as “hate speech”

July 6, 2016

YouTube bans video on Muslim Brotherhood, Sharia and Civilization Jihad as “hate speech” Jihad Watch, , July 6, 2016

Here is a full transcript of the video. Where is the “hate speech”? Where is there even any factual inaccuracy?

For the Left, truth is no defense. What they want to do is silence their ideological foes. That’s all. The problem with the increasingly mainstream concept that “hate speech is not free speech” is that what exactly constitutes “hate speech” is a subjective judgment, often based on the political proclivities of the person doing the judging. If a Leftist analyst who subscribes to the fantasy that the Muslim Brotherhood is a “firewall against extremism” is doing the judging, he may think that the information below is “hate speech,” while if someone who is aware of the true nature and magnitude of the jihad threat is the judge, he would more likely consider Hamas-linked CAIR’s “Islamophobia” reports to be genuine “hate speech.”

The concept of “hate speech” is, in reality, a tool of the powerful to silence and demonize their critics. It has no place in a free society. This action by YouTube is ominous in the extreme, and is almost certainly the harbinger of much worse to come.

hate-speech-YouTube

You can still see the video on Facebook here, and here is the full transcript: “Killing for a Cause: Sharia Law & Civilization Jihad,” Counter Jihad, June 29, 2016:

What is Civilization Jihad? This video explains in three minutes.

We have a new video aimed at non-experts as an introduction to the basic ideas behind the Counterjihad. Please watch it, and share it with those whom you think need to see it. The text of the video is as follows:

Terrorism seems to be everywhere, and it’s getting worse. The bad guys have lots of names—ISIS, al Qaeda, Boko Haram—but they have one thing in common. They are all killing for a cause: Islamic Law known as Sharia.

Sharia is a return to medieval Islam. Sharia demands a Holy War called Jihad. The most widely available book of Islamic Law in English says: “Jihad means to war against non-Muslims.”

There are two kinds of Jihad. Violent Jihad is horribly simple, slaughtering innocents and forcing submission. Violent Jihadists want to conquer land for their Caliphate – essentially an Islamic State where Sharia Law is supreme.

But there is another kind of Jihad. In their Explanatory Memorandum, theMuslim Brotherhood, calls this, “civilization jihad,” saying, “The [Muslim Brotherhood] must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers…”

Civilization Jihad has the same goal as the Violent Jihad—to conquer land for their Caliphate—but instead of waging war or staging terror attacks like their brothers in the violent jihad, these Civilization Jihadists wear suits and ties, and their work is much more subtle.

So what do they do? They file lawsuits for Muslim truck drivers who don’t want to drive beer. They convince schools to hold Muslim Day, where the girls wear head scarves and the kids say Muslim prayers. They complain when our government watches to see if their violent buddies are hanging out with them.

They call anyone critical of Islamic Law an “Islamophobe,” a term they invented to make people scared to speak out—like the neighbors of the terrorists in San Bernardino who knew something was wrong, but didn’t want to say anything because they’d be accused of profiling.

These bad guys have lots of names, too: the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR); the Muslim Student Association (MSA); Islamic Society of North America (ISNA). The Justice Department found that these groups were, in fact, started by the Muslim Brotherhood.

These groups like to say that terrorism has no religion, but only Islam has Sharia and Jihad.

Not all Muslims practice Sharia or support it, but an awful lot do. They believe that anyone who insults Islam can be killed; they believe thatwomen are property; that gays should be killed; and that little girls should be mutilated and forced to marry old men they’ve never men. These things are simply not allowed in our free society and are against the Constitution.

There are plenty of Modern Muslims who want to “live and let live,” but unfortunately the groups that speak most often for the Muslim community follow the medieval version based on Sharia.

They are working to make the US more like the Caliphate. They have to go.

Categories: Censorship, Civilization jihad, Hate speech, You Tube
Tags: , , ,

Comments: 1 Comment

Op-Ed: The American Gulag

June 26, 2016

Op-Ed: The American Gulag, Israel National News, Phyllis Chester, June 26, 2016

For years, beginning in 2003, I have personally faced both censorship and demonization. When I began publishing pieces about anti-Semitism, anti-Zionism, and Islamic gender and religious apartheid at conservative sites, I was seen as having “gone over to the dark side,” as having joined the legion of enemies against all that was right and good.

My former easy and frequent access to left-liberal venues was over. I learned, early on, about the soft censorship of the Left, the American version of the Soviet Gulag. One could think, write, and even publish but it would be as if one had not spoken–although one would still be constantly attacked for where one published as much as for what one published.

Since then, Left censorship has only gotten worse. (There is also censorship on the Right–but not quite as much.)

A week ago, a colleague of mine was thrilled that a mainstream newspaper had reached out to him for a piece about the violent customs of many male Muslim immigrants to Europe. He discovered, to his shock, that his piece had been edited in a way that turned his argument upside down and ended up sounding like American Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s view, namely, that home-grown terrorists need “love and compassion,” not profiling or detention.

I told him: One more left-liberal newspaper has just bitten the Orwellian dust. He could expose this use of his reasoned view for propaganda purposes–or wear out his welcome at this distinguished venue.

“But,” I said, “on the other hand, what kind of welcome is it if they change your words and the main thrust of your argument?”

That same week, right after the Jihad massacre in Orlando, another colleague, long used to being published–and published frequently at gay websites–wrote about the male Muslim immigrant/refugee physical and sexual violence against girls and women (their own and infidel women); against homosexuals–and paradoxically, also against young boys. He counseled gays to understand that the issues of gun control and “hate,” while important, were also quite beside the point, that “homosexuality is a capital crime in Islam.”

His piece was rejected by every gay site he approached. One venue threatened him:  If he published his piece “anywhere,” that his work would no longer be welcome in their pages.

I welcomed him to the American Gulag.

He told me that he finally “had” to publish the piece at a conservative site.

Gently, I told him that what he wrote was the kind of piece that was long familiar only at conservative sites and that he should expect considerable flack for where he’s published as well as for what he’s published.

Another gay right activist told me that when he described Orlando as a Jihad attack, he was castigated as a “right-wing hater.” He, too, had to publish what he wanted to say at a conservative site.

I published two pieces about Orlando. I said similar kinds of things and I privately emailed both articles to about 30 gay activists whom I know.

The silence thereafter was, as they say, deafening. I was not attacked but I was given the Silent Treatment.

For a moment, I felt like gay activist Larry Kramer might have felt when, in the 1980s, he tried to persuade gay men to stop going to the baths and engaging in promiscuous sex, that their lust was literally killing them. Kramer was attacked as a spoilsport and as the homophobic enemy of the gay lifestyle. Alas, Kramer had been right and many gay male lives were lost to AIDS.

Thus, gay activists see their collective interests as best served by marching, lock-step, with politically correct politicians who view “mental illness,” “gun control,” and “American right-wing hatred of gays”–not Jihad–as the major problems. Such gay activists also prefer “Palestine” to Israel. It makes absolutely no difference that Israel does not murder its homosexual citizens and that in fact, Israel grants asylum to Muslim Arab men in flight from being torture-murdered by other Muslim Arab men.

A number of European activists have recently visited me.  They described what has been happening to women who undertake the journey from Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Turkey;  along the way, the girls and women are continually groped and sexually assaulted, even penetrated in every possible orifice, by gangs of male Muslim immigrants. If they want to live, their husbands and fathers can do nothing.

So much for Muslim immigrant women on the move.

And now, European women are being told to “dye their hair black,” stay home “after 8pm,” “always have a male escort at night;” a group of German nudists, whose tradition goes back 100 years, have just been told to “cover up” because refugees are being moved into the rural lake community.

Where will this all end? In Europe becoming a Muslim Caliphate dominated by Sharia law and by all its myriad misogynist interpretations? In Muslim immigrants assimilating to Western ways? In Europeans voluntarily converting to Arab and Muslim ways? In non-violent but parallel Muslim lives?

Bravo to England which has just taken its first, high risk steps to control its borders and its immigrant population.

Categories: Antisemitism, BREXIT, Censorship, Extremism, Freedom of speech, Homosexuals, Islam and homosexuals, Islamists, Leftists, Media, Multiculturalism, Political correctness, Right wing haters
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Comments: Be the first to comment

How Much of our Culture Are We Surrendering to Islam?

June 21, 2016

How Much of our Culture Are We Surrendering to Islam? Gatestone Institute, Giulio Meotti, June 21, 2016

♦ The same hatred as from Nazis is coming from Islamists and their politically correct allies. We do not even have a vague idea of how much Western culture we have surrendered to Islam.

♦ Democracies are, or at least should be, custodians of a perishable treasury: freedom of expression. This is the biggest difference between Paris and Havana, London and Riyadh, Berlin and Tehran, Rome and Beirut. Freedom of expression is what gives us the best of the Western culture.

♦ It is self-defeating to quibble about the beauty of cartoons, poems or paintings. In the West, we have paid a high price for the freedom to do so. We should all therefore protest when a German judge bans “offensive” verses of a poem, when a French publisher fires an “Islamophobic” editor or when a music festival bans a politically incorrect band.

It all occurred in the same week. A German judge banned a comedian, Jan Böhmermann, from repeating “obscene” verses of his famous poem about Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. A Danish theater apparently cancelled “The Satanic Verses” from its season, due to fear of “reprisals.” Two French music festivals dropped Eagles of Death Metal — the U.S. band that was performing at the Bataclan theater in Paris when the attack by ISIS terrorists (89 people murdered), took place there — because of “Islamophobic” comments by Jesse Hughes, its lead singer. Hughes suggested that Muslims be subjected to greater scrutiny, saying “It’s okay to be discerning when it comes to Muslims in this day and age,” later adding:

“They know there’s a whole group of white kids out there who are stupid and blind. You have these affluent white kids who have grown up in a liberal curriculum from the time they were in kindergarten, inundated with these lofty notions that are just hot air.”

As Brendan O’Neill wrote, “Western liberals are doing their dirty work for them; they’re silencing the people Isis judged to be blasphemous; they’re completing Isis’s act of terror.”

A few weeks earlier, France’s most important publishing house, Gallimard, fired its most famous editor, Richard Millet, who had penned an essay in which he wrote:

“the decline of literature and the deep changes wrought in France and Europe by continuous and extensive immigration from outside Europe, with its intimidating elements of militant Salafism and of the political correctness at the heart of global capitalism; that is to say, the risk of the destruction of the Europe and its cultural humanism, or Christian humanism, in the name of ‘humanism’ in its ‘multicultural’ version.”

Kenneth Baker just published a new book, On the Burning of Books: How Flames Fail to Destroy the Written Word. It is a compendium of so called “bibliocaust,” the burning of books from Caliph Omar to Hitler, and includes the fatwa on Salman Rushdie. When Nazis incinerated books in Berlin they declared that from the ashes of these novels would “arise the phoenix of a new spirit.” The same hatred is coming from Islamists and their politically correct allies. We do not even have a vague idea of how much Western culture we have surrendered to Islam.

Theo Van Gogh’s movie, “Submission,” for which he was murdered, disappeared from many film festivals. Charlie Hebdo‘s drawings of the Islamic prophet Mohammed are concealed from the public sphere: after the massacre, very few media reprinted these cartoons. Raif Badawi’s blog posts, which cost him 1,000 lashes and ten years in prison in Saudi Arabia, have been deleted by the Saudi authorities and now circulate like forbidden Samizdat literature was in the Soviet Union.

871 (1)After the massacre of Charlie Hebdo’s staff, very few media reprinted their Mohammed cartoons. Pictured above, Stéphane Charbonnier, the editor and publisher of Charlie Hebdo, who was murdered on January 7, 2015 along with many of his colleagues, is shown in front of the magazine’s former offices, just after they were firebombed in November 2011.

Molly Norris, the American cartoonist who in 2010 drew Mohammed and proclaimed “Everyone Draw Muhammad Day,” is still in hiding and had to change her name and life. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York pulled images of Mohammed from an exhibition, while Yale Press banned images of Mohammed from a book about the cartoons. The Jewel of Medina, a novel about Mohammed’s wife, was also pulled.

In the Netherlands, an opera about Aisha, one of Mohammed’s wives, was cancelled in Rotterdam after the work was boycotted by the theater company’s Muslim actors, after it became evident that they would be a target for Islamists. The newspaper NRC Handelsblad headlined its coverage “Tehran on the Meuse,” the river that passes through the Dutch city.

In England, the Victoria and Albert Museum took down Mohammed’s image. “British museums and libraries hold dozens of these images, mostly miniatures in manuscripts several centuries old, but they have been kept largely out of public view,” The Guardian explained. In Germany, the Deutsche Opera cancelled Mozart’s opera Idomeneo in Berlin, because it depicted the severed head of Mohammed.

Christopher Marlowe’s “Tamburlaine the Great,” which includes a reference to Mohammed being “not worthy to be worshipped,” was rewritten at London’s Barbican theater, while Cologne’s Carnival cancelled Charlie Hebdo‘s float.

In the Dutch town of Huizen, two nude paintings were removed from an exhibition after Muslims criticized them. The work of a Dutch Iranian artist, Sooreh Hera, was yanked from several Dutch museums because some of the photographs included the depictions of Mohammed and his son-in-law, Ali. According to this disposition, one day London’s National Gallery, Florence’s Uffizi, Paris’ Louvre or Madrid’s Prado might decide to censor Michelangelo, Raffaello, Bosch and Balthus because they offend the “sensibility” of Muslims.

The English playwright Richard Bean has been forced to censor an adaptation of Aristophanes’s comedy, “Lysistrata“, in which the Greek women hold a “sex strike” to stop their men from going to war (in Bean’s script, Muslim virgins go on strike to stop suicide bombers). Several Spanish villages stopped burning effigies of Mohammed in the commemoration ceremony celebrating the reconquest of the country in the Middle Ages.

There is a video filmed in 2006, when the death threats against Charlie Hebdo became worrisome. Journalists and cartoonists are gathered around a table to decide on the next cover for magazine. They speak about Islam. Jean Cabu, one of the cartoonists later murdered by Islamists, puts the issue this way: “No one in the Soviet Union had the right to do satire about Brezhnev.”

Then another future victim, Georges Wolinski, says, “Cuba is full of cartoonists, but they don’t make caricatures about Castro. So we are lucky. Yes, we are lucky, France is a paradise.”

Cabu and Wolinski were right. Democracies are, or at least should be, custodians of a perishable treasury: freedom of expression. This is the biggest difference between Paris and Havana, London and Riyadh, Berlin and Tehran, Rome and Beirut. Freedom of expression is what gives us the best of the Western culture.

Thanks to the Islamists’ campaign, and the fact that now only some “crazies” still venture in the exercise of freedom, are we now going to be just fearful? “Islamophobic” cartoonists, journalists and writers are the first Europeans since 1945 who have withdrawn from public life to protect their own lives. For the first time in Europe since Hitler ordered the burning of books in Berlin’s Bebelplatz, movies, paintings, poems, novels, cartoons, articles and plays are literally and figuratively being burned at stake.

The young French mathematician Jean Cavailles, to explain his fateful involvement in anti-Nazi Resistance, used to say: “We fight to read ‘Paris Soir’ rather than ‘Völkischer Beobachter’.” For this reason alone, it is self-defeating to quibble about the beauty of cartoons, poems or paintings. In the West, we have paid a high price for the freedom to do so. We should all therefore protest when a German judge bans “offensive” verses, when a French publisher fires an “Islamophobic” editor or when a music festival bans a politically incorrect band.

Or is it already too late?

Categories: Britain, Censorship, Europe, Freedom of speech, Islam - submission, Islamic invasion, Islamic supremacy, Islamisation, Islamists, Obama's America
Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Comments: Be the first to comment

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »