Free speech on campus, Pat Condell via You Tube, March 2, 2015
(Many “highly educated” leftists believe that they should vent their views freely but that others not only should not but should be prevented from doing so. Might the objections of Obama and his cohorts to PM Netanyahu’s address to the Congress have been motivated by substantially the same sort of nonsense Mr. Condell ascribes to academia: If you don’t agree with Obama, know your place, sit down and shut up?– DM)
Muslims Trump All Other Minorities Because of the Victim Value Index, Front Page Magazine, Daniel Greenfield, February 27, 2015
(The Islamic State is not valued like Hamas because, as all good Obamabots know, the Islamic State is “not Islamic” and merely engages in random, senseless violence. Perhaps if “real” Jews, Christians and other victims of “real” Islamic and other violence (the Holocaust, for example) were, and had in the past been, more violent they would have higher rankings on the Victim Value Index. Much of the world is insane.– DM)
SJW code assumes that the angrier you are, the more oppressed you are. (Unless you’re a straight white male who isn’t pretending to be a woman and isn’t angry on behalf of an oppressed minority group.) But your anger is only useful if it serves the left.
The angriest groups, the ones with the newest rawest edge make the cut. A propensity for violence helps.
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James Kirchick has written an extensive piece on the Victimhood Olympics replete with examples and references. He notes that…
Trans beats gay and Muslim beats black. As someone who writes frequently on the topic of homosexuality, I have learned the hard way what happens to those who challenge the orthodoxy of transgender activists…
This is because in the progressive imagination, the perceived plight of Muslims now trumps the sufferings of all other groups. It is this conceit that goes the furthest in explaining President Obama’s remark to Vox earlier this month that the murder of four Jews at a kosher supermarket in Paris last month was “random,”…
But he fails to explain what the basis for this hierarchy is. Why do Muslims trump Jews and why do trannies trump gay men?
There is a clear Victim Value Index. It’s not random. It has a definitive basis. That basis is the value of a victim identity to the left.
The first thing to understand is the dirty little secret of the Victim Value Index. While loud vocal assertions of suffering are very important, the substance of such suffering is unimportant when moving up the ladder of the Victim Value Index…
Actual suffering doesn’t matter. Neither does historical justice. Both of those are easy to make up, and in a dogma-ridden environment no one will look past the politically correct line anyway.
The Victim Value Index is calculated based on one overriding factor: Disruptiveness. Those who are most disruptive go to the head of the line.
This is the most obvious thing that people have noted about the Social Justice Warrior twitter mobs. They’re angry. They’re disruptive. This is also their virtue.
SJW code assumes that the angrier you are, the more oppressed you are. (Unless you’re a straight white male who isn’t pretending to be a woman and isn’t angry on behalf of an oppressed minority group.) But your anger is only useful if it serves the left.
The angriest groups, the ones with the newest rawest edge make the cut. A propensity for violence helps. Ergo, Muslims win.
Progressivism is a revolution in slow motion, and revolutions need revolutionaries. Disruption is more than just grievance, it’s violence. Those who are willing to ruthlessly attack the status quo clearing the ground for revolution are the ones who go to the head of the line and the dais of honor on top. A little murder and mayhem, and progressives will trot out “moderate” versions of the murderers and mayhemists, usually linked to them, and offer to represent them and tamp down the violence in exchange for meeting their demands.
September 11 and its aftermath is why Muslims have gone to the top of the Victim Value Index. The left may swear up and down that they are interested in Muslim civil rights, but if the Muslims were Sikhs, they would merit a place somewhere in the back. Before Muslims began prominently blowing things up in the United States, the left barely paid any attention to them. Once they did, they began outweighing every other group in the country because killing 3,000 people is the gold standard of revolutionary mayhem.
The Victim Value Index places the most disruptive groups at the front, the somewhat disruptive groups in the middle and the least disruptive groups at the back. The status of groups within the Index can change with their behavior. Muslims used to be shelved in the back with Asians, Indians and Jews. The War on Terror dramatically upgraded their status. The other groups are stuck there because they are relatively successful and aren’t rioting or blowing things up.
Latinos are still somewhere in the middle. Native Americans are in the back along with most unclassified minorities. Homosexuals are somewhere near the front, but behind African-Americans. Their status tends to drift wildly depending on current events, but they cannot overtake African-Americans or fall behind Latinos. Not unless some drastic events take place that change their status. Women are, and have always been, in the back.
The hierarchy can and does change. If Muslim violence were to suddenly disappear, the left’s interest in them in the US would go away. That’s a simple fact. The left values violent groups over non-violent ones. In the social media era, that can be virtual violence, cyberbullying and social media mobs. All that counts as activism and the left is keen to recruit activists for its cause.
Obama kept reform Muslims out of summit on extremism, Washington Examiner, Charles Hoskinson, February 21, 2015
Some of the most prominent reformers have argued for years that the ideological and theological roots of Islamist extremism must be addressed, but administration officials carefully avoided exactly that subject during Obama’s three-day summit.
The White House is also undermining its own efforts by working with people who sympathize with the goals of violent extremist groups, if not their methods, the reformers say.
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The White House excluded members of a prominent group of reformist Muslims from its terror summit this week, apparently because President Obama rejects their argument that such groups as Islamic State of Iraq and Syria are actually motivated by Islam.
A group of 23 prominent Muslim reformers signed a full-page ad in the Sunday New York Times on Jan. 11 asking “What can Muslims do to reclaim their ‘beautiful religion’?”
But Obama and officials throughout his administration deny any connection between Islam and the terrorists beheading and burning their victims in a reign of terror in the Middle East.
Muslim reformers say the administration is ignoring them because they disagree with Obama’s refusal to acknowledge the Islamic roots of the extremists’ ideology.
Some of the most prominent reformers have argued for years that the ideological and theological roots of Islamist extremism must be addressed, but administration officials carefully avoided exactly that subject during Obama’s three-day summit.
The White House is also undermining its own efforts by working with people who sympathize with the goals of violent extremist groups, if not their methods, the reformers say.
“We have to own the issue of extremist Islamic theology in order to defeat it and remove it from our world. We have to name it to tame it,” Muslim journalists Asra Nomani and Hala Arafa wrote in an essay published Friday by the Daily Beast.
“Among Muslims, stuck in face-saving, shame-based cultures, we need to own up to our extremist theology instead of always reverting to a strategy of denial, deflection and demonization.”
Nomani, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, was close friends with her colleague Daniel Pearl, who was kidnapped and beheaded by Islamist extremists in Pakistan in 2002.
At the summit, Obama and other officials insisted there is no link between Islam and the Islamist extremist groups that have been at the forefront of a dramatic spike in terrorist violence worldwide.
“Al Qaeda and [the Islamic State] and groups like it are desperate for legitimacy. They try to portray themselves as religious leaders — holy warriors in defense of Islam,” Obama said Wednesday.
“We must never accept the premise that they put forward, because it is a lie. Nor should we grant these terrorists the religious legitimacy that they seek. They are not religious leaders — they’re terrorists. And we are not at war with Islam. We are at war with people who have perverted Islam.”
The summit aimed at empowering community leaders to help Muslims resist the extremists’ message and improved strategies to communicate a more moderate message. But the administration’s refusal to identify the threat — and the exclusion of those who do from the conversation — works against meeting those goals, reformers said.
Maajid Nawaz, a former Islamist radical andone of those who signed the Times advertisement, is co-founder of the Quilliam Foundation, an anti-extremist British think-tank. The refusal of Obama and his officials to name their real enemy is referred to among reformers as the “Voldemort effect,” after the villain in the Harry Potter books whose name could not be mentioned.
Nawaz told CNN on Wednesday that refusing to address the Islamist ideology directly puts all Muslims at risk of being blamed for the actions of a tiny minority — the exact opposite effect of what Obama intended by his approach.
“When the president said there’s a poisonous ideology that needs to be refuted by Muslim clerics, the average everyday non-Muslim, the only word they know for that is the religion of Islam and they will think that the ideology we are referring to is the faith of Islam itself and thereby they would end up blaming all Muslims,” Nawaz said.
“Islam is a religion like any other with all the various sects and denominations. Islamism is a desire to impose Islam over society. And that is a very theocratic extremist desire. It can manifest itself violently. When it does, I call it jihadism. But it can also manifest itself politically. It’s still a problematic ideology because any desire to impose anyone’s faith over anyone else is inherently flawed and must be challenged,” he said.
“Al Qaeda didn’t inspire extremism. It was this extremist Islamist ideology that inspired al Qaeda. And unless and until we recognize the problem isn’t these Mafiosi-style groups that we can just take out by taking out their leaderships, but it’s the ideology that inspires them, we’ll have a new [Islamic State] tomorrow.”
The ad, by the Gatestone Institute, states, “If Islam is a religion that stands for justice and peaceful coexistence, then the quest for an Islamic state cannot be justified as sanctioned by a just and merciful creator. It is the duty of us Muslims to actively and vigorously affirm and promote universal human rights, including gender equality and freedom of conscience.”
One of the 23 signatories, Tarek Fatah, is a columnist for the Toronto Sun in Canada, and has noted the lack of response from administration officials and journalists.
“Instead of engaging with these progressive Muslims and supporting their call for reform, not only did the White House ignore them, but every media outlet I saw other than Fox News did as well,” he wrote on Feb. 3.
Instead, the White House and many in the mainstream media work with Muslim leaders who sympathize with the extremists, says Zuhdi Jasser, a doctor and former Navy officer who leads the American Islamic Foundation for Democracy.
“This is a Muslim problem that needs a Muslim solution,” he told the Washington Examiner in November. “You can’t just say it’s about violence. You need sermons that call upon America as the leading force for goodness in the world.”
Jasser’s activism against Islamist theocracy recently landed him a prominent role in what the left-wing Center for American Progress calls the “Islamophobia network.” In a report released Feb. 11, the group said Jasser “promotes conspiratorial claims that America is infiltrated by radical Muslims.”
But many so-called mainstream Muslim groups that Jasser has criticized have documented extremist ties. Sympathies with the Muslim Brotherhood, an Egypt-based Islamist movement, landed two U.S. groups, the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the Muslim American Society, on the list of terrorist organizations banned by the United Arab Emirates.
Though both groups vigorously deny extremist sympathies or ties, there is ample evidence that CAIR was founded by supporters of Hamas, the Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch and a banned terrorist organization in the United States, and that the Muslim American Society is the Brotherhood’s U.S. branch.
Organizing for Action will help lead Obama’s war on violent extremism, Dan Miller’s Blog, Senator Ima Librul, imaginary guest author, and Dan Miller, February 19,2015
(The views expressed in this article are mine and those of my (imaginary) guest author, Senator Ima Librul. They do not necessarily reflect the views of Warsclerotic or any of its other editors. — DM)
Editor’s note: This is another post by my (imaginary) guest author, the Very Honorable Ima Librul, Senator from the great State of Confusion Utopia. He is a founding member of CCCEB (Climate Change Causes Everything Bad), a charter member of President Obama’s Go For it Team, a senior member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and Chairman of the Meretricious Relations Subcommittee.
Senator Librul is also justly proud of his expertise in interfaith dialogue, on the basis of which he has explained to the entire world that Islam is the religion of peace, grossly distorted by the non-Islamic Islamic State and other textual deviants. He was recently awarded the Obama Foundation’s cherished award for exemplary political correctness on the basis of his interfaith outreach. We are humiliated honored to have a post of this caliber by a quintessential Librul such as the Senator. Without further delay, here is the Senator’s article.
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The Non-Islamic Islamic State and its equally non-Islamic cohorts can be defeated only through the heroic efforts of community organizers: they are needed to help members and potential recruits find jobs and happiness. Our Dear Leader Obama cannot do everything Himself, even with His pen and His phone.
A spokesperson for the State Department recently announced that murdering affiliates of the non-Islamic State and other violent non-Islamic organizations will not end violent extremism. Instead compassion, particularly in providing suitable jobs and pathways to happiness and ultimately to true enlightenment, are needed.
Our Dear Leader is working tirelessly on just that, but even He needs help.
CAIR and Muslim Brotherhood
Many violent right wing terrorists — substantial numbers of them extremist Christians and Jews — have complained that our Dear Leader has sought help from benign Islamic organizations, such as the Council on American-Islam Relations (CAIR) and Muslim Brotherhood affiliates, to help win His war on violent extremism. Those organizations, and their members, have been among the victims of violent Islamophobia for years. Along with their successful efforts to organize Muslim communities, they have begun to emulate our Dear Leader in dealing with the curse of Islamophobia.
Islamophobia is the worst threat (other than climate change) now facing humanity and can cause even peaceful but depressed Muslims to become violent; even to become extremists. It can also enrage others, who also claim to be Islamic but are not, to intensify their violent extremism. Similarly, falsely characterizing violent extremists as Islamic gives them a false patina of legitimacy and encourages poor, ignorant savages Muslims to accept them as truly Islamic and hence to join them. That is among the reasons why our Dear Leader has steadfastly refused to do so.
CAIR, various Muslim Brotherhood affiliates and Organizing for Action are joining with our Dear Leader to fight on our behalf. We already know that CAIR is dedicated to thwarting Islamophobes who falsely accuse Islam of being violent and that the Muslim Brotherhood is dedicated only to promoting true brotherhood for all. Hence, the focus of this article will be on Organizing for Action.
Organizing for Action
The membership of this highly valued organization is diverse, but many members have been involved since early childhood. The following video is so inspiring that I find myself in tears every morning when I watch it to give me the strength I need to continue my fight against all evil forces.
As they and other kindred spirits have matured, their devotion to our Dear Leader has increased. They are now, and will continue to be, at the forefront of Organizing for Action. They applaud His righteous stand against Islamophobia and will now extend their efforts beyond what little is left of the Obama Nation’s borders to bring peace and understanding to those most in need.
The Non-Islamic State and its non-Islamic cohorts have mistakenly taken refuge in grossly distorted perceptions of Islam to justify their senseless, random violence. Only by awakening their adherents to the need to promote social justice, social progress and community service will they be led to the proper understanding of the Religion of Peace. The best way to accomplish this is by teaching them useful skills — vegan cookery, nursing, barbering, knife sharpening, business management, computer programming and Islamic sign language, for example. As they become increasingly aware of the benefits these skills will provide to them and to others, they will support their own governments in providing freedom, security, prosperity and health care for all. Free, or at least affordable, government mandated health care for all will come to be seen as their most urgent need. They will also gain the skills needed to implement their own versions of health care. No longer poor, sick and depressed they will become our friends.
Although fluency in the use of Islamic sign language will be very important, most Organizing for Action volunteers have not learned much Arabic. Sign language is easier, and our Dear Leader Himself will provide much of the necessary instruction. Here is a recent photo of Him expressing His vision of true Islamic peace to other Islamic leaders.
Here is a close up of His beautiful gesture:
Here is a photo of random Muslims returning His gesture of peace that passeth all understanding:
Although our Dear Leader has tried to use similar but different sign language in dealing with His disloyal opposition — violent right wing tea party terrorists all — they have rejected His conciliatory efforts.
We are truly blessed to have Dear Leader Obama in charge of our national destiny; all patriotic Americans must give Him their unstinting support. He is the way, the truth and the light unto all ages; all who oppose Him must convert or be silenced.
Editor’s comments:
Senator Librul has done a masterful job of presenting his and Obama’s views of Islam and how best to deal with it. Absurd, but that’s their custom.
In the following video, Pat Condell explains a big factor in Muslim unemployment:
Would better job skills ameliorate any of these problems?
As observed in a February 18th Wall Street Journal article titled The radicals are waging a war of ideas the West refuses to fight,
Above all, we need to recognize that the strength of radical Islamists is directly correlated to their battlefield success, and the growing perception that they are the strong horse against moderate Muslim leaders. Communist ideology lost its appeal when it was seen to fail against the prosperity and freedom of the West. Islamic State will lose its allure when it is defeated and humiliated in the arena it cares about most, which is the battlefield. Mr. Obama and other Western leaders must summon the will to win the war on the ground, or they will find themselves in permanent retreat in the war of ideas. [Emphasis added.]
After we and our allies had defeated Nazi Germany and Japan militarily, we tried to rebuild them substantially in our own image. Recognizing that Russia had been, at best, a temporary ally of convenience, and that our real allies lacked the necessary resources, we alone rebuilt Japan. The decision to exclude Russia — which wanted to “help” — from Japan was General MacArthur’s baby. Our reconstruction of Japan was far more successful than the reconstruction of Germany, which became Communist East and democratic West Germany. The points are, (1) first defeat them militarily and only then help them to recover and prosper; (2) don’t allow our enemies to “help.”
Islam is itself “extreme.” It is based on the Hadith, Sharia law and the Koran as Allah “dictated” it to Mohamed as he became a powerful warlord. Since Muslims believe that the Koran is the word of Allah, only Allah can change or interpret it. Not even Obama can do it. Hence, under the doctrine of abrogation, Allah’s later words rejected and displaced earlier conciliatory and contradictory passages, which therefore warrant no Muslim adherence. Nor is Islamic violence “random” or “senseless.” It is directed, purposefully, against those viewed as its enemies — non-Islamists and other Islamists of different brands. Until those in control of western governments realize at least these three points — and behave accordingly — we will continue to lose the battle against Islam.
Truly secular Muslims are not a significant part of the root problem; religious Muslims are. Yet Obama’s convocation of Muslim leaders includes few if any secular Muslims. By proclaiming that the Islamic State and its cohorts in their war against what’s left of Western civilization are not Islamic, Obama will not precipitate an Islamic reformation. Similarly, no matter how often I may state that my stallion is a mare, I will not succeed in milking it; at best, I will only irritate it. More likely it will try to kill me; if I persist, it may well succeed. On balance, I need to reject any notion that I can milk my stallion and recognize it for what it is.
Senator Librul maintains that Islam is the religion of peace. It is, in its own way. Islamic peace comes through submission to whatever brand of Islam is in power; without submission there is no peace. Leaving aside the problems this presents for Christians, Jews, and other non-Muslims, the various brands of Islam are hostile to each other and seek submission of those others through violence. Until, if ever, non-secular Muslims become secular or cease to exist that problem will persist. Nothing in Obama’s “war on violent extremism” is calculated, or likely, to achieve that end– even assuming that that is what He wants to happen.
UPDATE, with a hat tip to Iburt at Counter Jihad Report.
Airborne Girl’s Guide to Islam & Its Abuse of Women, Blackfive, February 18, 2015
Right in time for President Obama’s extremist-riddled Countering Violent Extremism Summit comes an honest report on the horrific treatment of women in Islamic states. It starts with the abuse she suffered personally at the hands, and gun barrels, of our supposed allies the Saudis during the First Gulf War. But the real issue is the infiltration of this oppressive and backwards culture into free western society. For every “strong” woman telling the press how wearing a veil empowers her, there are dozens in the shadows being beaten, forced into arranged marriages and dying in “honor” killings.
How to deal with enemies, foreign and domestic, Dan Miller’s Blog, Sen. Ima Librul, February 2, 2015
(The views expressed this article are mine and those of my imaginary guest author. They do not necessarily represent the views of Warsclerotic or its other editors. — DM)
Editor’s note: This is a post by my (imaginary) guest author, the Very Honorable Ima Librul, Senator from the great State of Confusion Utopia. He is a founding member of CCCEB (Climate Change Causes Everything Bad), a charter member of President Obama’s Go For it Team, a senior member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and Chairman of the Meretricious Relations Subcommittee. He is also justly proud of his expertise in the care and breeding of unicorns, for which his Save the Unicorns Foundation has received substantial Federal grants. We are honored to have a post of this caliber by a quintessential Librul such as the Senator. Without further delay, here is the Senator’s article.
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As the anointed leader of my Librul kingdom, countless methods for dealing with “enemies” are at my disposal. I, along with my loyal Secretary of Slyness (SOS) Sir Ketchup, bring happiness to all. Many “enemies” of my kingdom have yielded to my wisdom without even knowing that they have. I owe everything to my dear leader Obama, my rock of ages in the past and hope for years to come.
Example One
When my kingdom was threatened by wolves and foxes, which intended to eat all of my free range chickens, I bravely sent Sir Ketchup to deal with the problem. At my direction, he immediately put half of my chickens into secure coops and invited the invaders to do as they desired with the rest. That satisfied them only briefly, so he dispatched half of my remaining chickens to be eaten. The process continued until I had only one chicken left.
Here’s why I can humbly wear the label “The Won,” along with my dear leader Obama. The invaders, stuffed pleasantly full of chicken and amazed at my brilliance, resolved not to attack my kingdom again until my chicken population had been restored and it was once again worthwhile to invade. Unfortunately for them, a single chicken cannot reproduce, so they will never again have any reason to return.
Example Two
A few weeks later, my kingdom was again invaded by “wild and vicious” packs of wolves and foxes. They divided their attentions between slaughtering each other and slaughtering and eating my sheep. I solved the problem by giving ample sheep to both packs and explaining to them that they were neither wild nor vicious, but simply misguided in attacking each other. Their mistake lay in believing that the traditions of their ancestors mandated such activities, even though it is not true. As a widely acknowledged expert on the traditions of wolves and foxes, I understand these matters far better than they do. Hence, I was able to convince them that with reality-based understanding such as I possess, they too would seek the beauties and benefits of unity permitting them to slaughter and eat my sheep peacefully and together.
Some who do not fully understand the inherent beauty and fairness of multiculturalism might contend that my actions were unfair to the sheep. They would be wrong. Sheep are gentle creatures and have been good to me; I have always ensured that they have plenty to eat and I have fleeced them only to provide for their well-being. We are as one and, to the extent that I am able, these benign practices will continue.
However, it is far more important to bring happiness and unity to creatures which have suffered for ages because of their erroneous but stereotypical characterization as evil. There is no evil and there is no good; all is relative. Who are we to declare that sheep are good and that wolves and foxes are evil? Don’t we also kill sheep and eat mutton? Wolves and foxes are neither better nor worse than human carnivores and it is prudent to act only on the basis of what is best for all.
My plan was successful. Happy with their full bellies, the wolves and foxes departed my kingdom in peace, promising to return together and in harmony only when they need my sheep. In the interim, they will devote their attentions to visiting neighboring farms in hopes that the owners will see the justice in my methods and adopt them. I promised to help my neighbors to adopt my enlightened multicultural views and to accord wolves and foxes every courtesy. As wolves and foxes come to understand the beauty and benefits of true multiculturalism, they will cease to be significant threats to anyone. That is a hope for change we can — and must — believe in.
In fairness, I must acknowledge that my dear leader Obama demonstrated the efficacy of this solution several years ago when, with remarkable success, He persuaded diverse groups of Muslims to unite against America to force her to reject her old ways of dealing with what she wrongly characterized, not only as enemies, but even as evil enemies. Since then, we have made great progress in defeating the Non Islamic Islamic State (NIIS) and others allegedly intent upon endangering our national security. The world be a far better place now if President Roosevelt had fully accepted Nazi Germany, not as an evil enemy or even as an enemy, but as a friend and a humanitarian force for peace and enlightenment of civilization. Had my dear leader then been our President, that would have happened and there would have been no more war.
Example Three
This year, representatives of the Non-Islamic Taliban (NIT) sought to use several acres of my kingdom for an insurgent training camp. They explained that since my dear leader Obama has declared that they are not foreign terrorists, I should have no objection. On that basis, I saw no problem in dealing with them. They offered to pay me $5,000 per acre per week and I accepted, subject to the requirement that they wear Girl Scout costumes rather than their traditional attire so that none of my Islamophobic neighbors would be offended irrationally. The deal was struck.
Since they had not stated which part of my kingdom they wanted to use, I provided land on which my free range unicorns frolic. I assumed that they would not notice, and they didn’t. Only truly superior beings, like our own glorious dear leader Obama, myself and unicorns can communicate with unicorns; the NIT members couldn’t even see them.
I promptly advised my dear leader of my findings, and He stated that He will soon dispatch brigades of well trained unicorns, under the command of Brevet General Bowe Bergdahl, to do battle with both NIT insurgents and NIIS terrorists. When the unicorn brigades triumph, dear leader Obama will be able to proclaim yet another grand mission accomplished and demonstrate, once again, that we stand firmly, shoulder to shoulder, behind our gallant friends and allies who have been harmed by our dastardly non-Islamic enemies. No longer will we be viewed as impotent.
It may be true that, until now,
Nothing in all that standing together has been potent enough to stop these barbaric, brutal, heinous beheadings of American and British and Japanese citizens.
Brevet General Bergdahl and his brigades of unicorns will change that!
I have many more inspiring stories to tell, but must leave immediately to chair a meeting of my Meretricious Relations Subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Former President Clinton, the principal speaker on “How to lie with impunity,” will be accompanied by his lovely wife and confidant, Saint Hillarion, also a long recognized expert on that topic as well as concerning infamous right-wing conspiracy theories.
Their talents, like those of our current dear leader Obama, are much needed in dealing with our domestic enemies, evil right-wing terrorists all!
I look forward to serving under Saint Hillarion when she becomes our next dear leader, just as I have served under dear leader Obama.
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Editor’s comments
Senator Librul words of wisdom will be of great assistance to Obama in His war on non-Islamic terror and insurgency. Ideas such as the Senator’s are badly needed because in the aggregate they are far better, and hence far more likely to bring success, than what Obama has tried thus far.
If the spirits shine brightly and in copious quantities upon us, we may be able to believe that even before Obama’s son Trayvon II becomes our President, our enemies will have ceased to be our enemies and unicorns will again be able to frolic in peace throughout the entire world, Insha’Allah.
Defining The Taliban as the Enemy, Fox News via You Tube, January 31, 2015
The New Antisemitism: Chesler, You Tube, January 23, 2015
(Phyllis Chester is — gasp — a Zionist! She even fails to understand that Islam is the religion of peace and claims that it is a danger to Western civilization which — as all right left-thinking people know — is the cause of all evil in the world. I’m with her.– DM)
What Bobby Jindal Gets about Islam — and Most People Still Don’t, National Review on line,
(This is the best post I have read thus far on “no go zones” and their significance to civilized societies. — DM)
With Western Europe still reeling from the jihadist mass-murders in Paris at Charlie Hebdo magazine and the Hyper Kacher Jewish market, Governor Jindal outlined a bold, Reaganesque vision of American foreign policy guided by three imperatives — freedom, security, and truth. It is on the last one, truth, that our capacity to ensure freedom and security hinges. “You cannot remedy a problem,” Jindal explained, “if you will not name it and define it.”
The world’s most influential Islamic supremacists have told us in no uncertain terms that they see Muslim immigration in the West as part of a conquest strategy.
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Footballs are deflating, the president is detached from reality, the Saudi king is deceased, and the sharia state next door, Yemen, is descending into bloody chaos. With mere anarchy loosed upon the world, it would be easy to miss the fact that, in England this week, Bobby Jindal gave as important and compelling a speech as has been delivered in years about America — our leadership role on the world stage, our preservation as a beacon of liberty.
In the birthplace of the Magna Carta, it has nonetheless become legally risky to speak with candor (even when quoting Churchill). Yet Louisiana’s Republican governor became that rarest of modern Anglo or American statesmen. Bobby Jindal told the truth about Islam, specifically about its large radical subset that attacks the West by violent jihad from without and sharia-supremacist subversion from within.
With Western Europe still reeling from the jihadist mass-murders in Paris at Charlie Hebdo magazine and the Hyper Kacher Jewish market, Governor Jindal outlined a bold, Reaganesque vision of American foreign policy guided by three imperatives — freedom, security, and truth. It is on the last one, truth, that our capacity to ensure freedom and security hinges. “You cannot remedy a problem,” Jindal explained, “if you will not name it and define it.”
And so he did: Our immediate security problem today “is ISIS and all forms of radical Islam.” That is, the challenge is not limited to violent jihadists who commit barbaric atrocities. Jindal elaborated: “In the West, non-assimilationist Muslims establish enclaves and carry out as much of sharia law as they can without regard for the laws of the democratic countries which provided them a new home.”
The campaign to implement and spread sharia is antithetical to Western liberty. Freedom, Jindal said, means “the ability to conduct commerce both inside and outside your borders; it means the right to speak freely, to publish any cartoons you want. It means the right to worship freely. It means the right to self-determination.” By contrast, “radical Islamists do not believe in freedom or common decency, nor are they willing to accommodate them in any way and anywhere.” Moreover, the version of sharia law to which they adhere
is not just different than our law, it’s not just a cultural difference, it is oppression and it is wrong. It subjugates women and treats them as property, and it is antithetical to valuing all of human life equally. It is the very definition of oppression. We must stop pretending otherwise.
It cannot credibly be denied that this is so, as I have documented — using not only notorious examples of how sharia is applied in countries like Saudi Arabia (where it is the law of the land), but also Reliance of the Traveller, a classic sharia manual certified as accurate by prominent Islamic scholars, including at both al-AzharUniversity (the seat of Sunni jurisprudence since the tenth century) and at the International Institute of Islamic Thought (an influential Muslim Brotherhood think tank).
Still, Governor Jindal has been pilloried since his courageous speech by tendentious critics across the spectrum, from the usual Islamist grievance chorus to Fox News commentators and British prime minister David Cameron.
Why? Because he dared notice what ought to be an inarguable fact: The non-assimilationist Muslim campaign has resulted in the rise throughout Western Europe of what Jindal described as “unofficial” “so-called” “no-go zones.”
Jindal was clearly right about this. His timing, however, was wrong: He had the misfortune to dilate on “no-go zones” at the same time that Steven Emerson, the usually astute terrorism analyst, made a no-go gaffe. Steve erroneously claimed that the entire British city of Birmingham is “totally Muslim” and has become a “no-go zone” where “non-Muslims simply don’t go in.”
Emerson has since apologized profusely. The damage, however, was done. Fox News is evidently so embarrassed at having been the forum for his faux pas (and at having been threatened with legal action by the city of Paris, which was the main target of Steve’s commentary), that the network is over-correcting. This helps stoke the Islamist meme that no-go zones are a hysterical figment of the “Islamophobic” imagination.
That is absurd, but follows naturally from two things: a common misunderstanding about sharia, and a misrepresentation that describing the incontestable fact that sharia is being applied de facto in Europe is the same as falsely claiming that sharia is now the de jure writ of Europe.
Dreamy Islamophiles like Mr. Cameron and many of his like-minded progressives in bipartisan Beltway circles have a sputtering snit anytime a commentator associates Islam with anything other than “peace.” Consequently, the doctrine of Islam (which actually means submission) remains taboo and poorly understood in the West. One major misconception is that Islamists (i.e., Islamic supremacists or Muslims who want sharia implemented) demand that all non-Muslims convert to Islam. A no-go zone is thus incorrectly assumed by many to be a place that Muslims forbid non-Muslims to enter.
In reality, sharia explicitly invites the presence of non-Muslims provided that they submit to the authority of Islamic rule. Indeed historically, as I related in The Grand Jihad, my book about the Muslim Brotherhood and its Islamist ideology, because sharia calls on these submissive non-Muslims (dhimmis) to pay a poll tax (jizya), their continued presence was of economic importance in lands conquered by Islamic rulers.
It is therefore easy for Islamists and their apologists to knock down their strawman depiction of no-go zones as places where non-Muslims are not allowed. That is not what no-go zones are — neither as they exist in fact nor as they are contemplated by sharia. The point of imposing sharia — the reason it is the necessary precondition for building an Islamic society — is to make Islam the dominant social system, not the exclusive faith. The idea is that once sharia’s systematic discrimination against non-Muslims is in place, non-Muslims will see the good sense of becoming Muslims. Over time, every one will convert “without coercion.” The game is to set up an extortionate incentive for conversion while maintaining the smiley-face assurance that no one is being forced to convert at the point of a sword.
So radical Muslims will be welcoming to any ordinary non-Muslims who are willing to defer to their mores. What they are hostile to are officials of the host state: police, firefighters, building inspectors, emergency medical personnel, and anything associated with the armed forces. That is because the presence of those forces symbolizes the authority — the non-submission — of the state.
Notice, however, that no sensible person is saying that state authorities are prohibited from entering no-go zones as a matter of law. The point is that they are severely discouraged from entering as a matter of fact — and the degree of discouragement varies directly with the density of the Muslim population and its radical component. Ditto for non-Muslim lay people: It is not that they are not permitted to enter these enclaves; it is that they avoid entering because doing so is dangerous if they are flaunting Western modes of dress and conduct.
There is a reason that Governor Jindal qualified his invocation of the term no-go zones, modifying it with “so-called” and noting that the term is used “unofficially.” His speech was about reality, particularly where it stressed the need for truthfulness in forming policy. If our premise is reality, it is not no-go zones that are imaginary; it is the suggestion that no-go zones do not exist simply because non-Muslim entry is not literally prohibited by law. As the Gatestone Institute’s Soeren Kern painstakingly demonstrates, “Muslim no-go zones are a well-known fact of life in many parts of Europe.” It has been amply acknowledged not only in press reports and academic analyses but by governments that must deal with them.
Have a look, for example, at the French government’s official listing of 750 Zones Urbaines Sensibiles — “sensitive urban zones.” France’s “ZUS” designation is significant. As the estimable scholar Daniel Pipes recounted in a column at NRO this week, when he coined the term “no-go zone” in 2006 it was intended as “a non-euphemistic equivalent” of ZUS. If that is how the term “no-go zone” is understood — as an enclave deferential to Islamic sensibilities rather than exclusionary of non-Muslims — the contention that no-go zones do not exist is plainly frivolous. This is so even if, as Pipes maintains, the term “no-go zone” itself was an overstatement. The term “semi-autonomous sectors,” he says, would more accurately convey the historical anomaly the West has created: “a majority population [that] accepts the customs and even the criminality or a poorer and weaker community,” and in a manner that involves far more than control over physical territory.
Nevertheless, the problem with all this semantic nattering is its intimation that we can only infer the existence of no-go zones, and of the Islamist subversion they signal, by drawing inferences from what we see happening on the ground.
Nonsense. The world’s most influential Islamic supremacists have told us in no uncertain terms that they see Muslim immigration in the West as part of a conquest strategy.
As I recounted in The Grand Jihad, the strategy is often referred to as “voluntary apartheid.” One of its leading advocates is Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Muslim Brotherhood icon who is probably the world’s most revered sharia jurist. SheikhQaradawi, who vows that Islam will conquer America and Europe, and who has been crystal clear on the incompatibility of sharia and Western democracy, elaborates:
Were we to convince Western leaders and decision-makers of our right to live according to our faith — ideologically, legislatively, and ethically — without imposing our views or inflicting harm upon them, we would have traversed an immense barrier in our quest for an Islamic state.
Translation: To establish Islamic domination in the West, we do not need to resort to terrorism or to force non-Muslims to convert; we need merely a recognized right to resist assimilation, to regard sharia as superseding Western law and custom when the two conflict, as they do in fundamental ways.
This is precisely why the Organization of Islamic Cooperation — the bloc of 56 Muslim countries (plus the Palestinian Authority) — warned in a 2010 report on “Islamophobia” that “Muslims should not be marginalized or attempted to be assimilated, but should be accommodated.” (Here, at p. 30.) It is why Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Islamist president of Turkey who has systematically dismantled that country’s secular, pro-Western system, pronounces that pressuring Muslims to assimilate “is a crime against humanity.”
At Oxford, Bobby Jindal bluntly asserted that the ideology of our enemy, radical Islam,
holds the view that it is wrong to expect assimilation, that assimilation is colonialist, assimilation is backward, and assimilation is in fact evidence of cultural bigotry and insensitivity. They think it is wrong to expect that people who chose to immigrate to your country should be expected to endorse and abide by your laws. They think it is unenlightened, discriminatory, and even racist to expect immigrants to endorse and assimilate into the culture in their new country. This is complete rubbish.
That is the truth. The United States will not get national-security policy right, nor reestablish our credentials as leader of the free world, until we accept that truth. Accept it and resolve, as Governor Jindal has resolved, to tell it boldly.
“Unity”? About What Exactly? The Gatestone Institute, Jeremy Havardi, January 22, 2015
Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia tried to fool the world by joining France’s “Unity March” for free speech just two days after a young Saudi blogger, Raif Badawi, received the first installment of 50 lashes — out of the 1000 he is to get — “very severely,” the lashing order says. Badawi still has 950 lashes to complete.
Mahmoud Abbas, whose genocidal, jihadi partner, Hamas, was just declared not a terrorist group by the European Union, joined the forefront of the “Unity March” at the same time as a Palestinian human rights groups published a report accusing the Palestinian Authority of “waging war” against university students in the West Bank.
What “Islamophobia” motivated the killing of Jewish customers in a kosher supermarket? What had those victims done to deserve that?
We may like to imagine that this is not Islam, and that the faith promotes peace and nothing else. But the murderers say it is Islam, and they act accordingly.
Much of the media has offered up a context for these killings that is false.
The real story is that despite a few sporadic incidents, there has been no backlash against the Muslim community.
The recent rally for free speech and against the terrorism in Paris initially appeared to have generated a surge of defiance and resolve, not just in France but around the world. People were actually talking about a turning point in the battle against terrorism and radical Islam.
If only it were true.
The reality is that much of the political class and media remain in denial about the events in Paris.
Ban Ki Moon explained that the tragic events had nothing to do with religion. Signing a condolence book for the victims of the attacks, he said: “This is not a country, a war against religion or between religions… This is a purely unacceptable terrorist attack – criminality.”
France’s President François Hollande said that the Charlie Hebdo fanatics had “nothing to do with Islam,” and he was joined in this view by commentators on France24, as well as the German Interior Minister, Thomas de Maizière.
The Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland condemned the actions of a “handful of wicked fanatics against the rest of us.” The implication was that they merely acted in the name of Islam — purely coincidentally, as it were.
In the Daily Mail, Piers Morgan wrote that the perpetrators were “not ‘real’ Muslims” and that this was “not a religious war.” Why he thought he could act as the arbiter on that question is still unclear.
As for President Obama, he has effectively outlawed the term “Islamic terror.”
The United States, in what was widely seen as a snub, was only represented at the rally by the U.S. Ambassador to France, Jane Hartley. Since the President had declared in 2012 that “[t]he future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam” — the implication was that they were not acting purely coincidentally.
There is in those comments a mixture of political correctness, wishful thinking and staggering ignorance. It is understandable and commendable not to lump a majority of law-abiding, patriotic and peaceful Muslims together with their violent counterparts. But calling for “unity” in a march leaves one asking: Unity about what exactly?
To pretend that there is a complete disconnect between Islam and terror is to ignore reality. Jihadis are gaining ideological succour from the tenets of their faith, drawing upon teachings promulgated by imams, including the late Anwar al Awlaki. We may like to imagine that this is not Islam, and that the faith promotes peace and nothing else. But the murderers say it is Islam, and they act accordingly.
To confront this problem properly, the ideological underpinnings of jihad need to be tackled comprehensively at source.
It is not enough to unite against terrorism, as every community must. We need to know what we are uniting for — free speech. And we need to know what we are uniting against — namely the militant war of extremist Islamism.
It is equally inaccurate to describe these jihadis as “lone wolves.” They will have spent time gaining combat experience abroad, perhaps in Yemen, Syria or Iraq, and will have received ideological indoctrination and funding from a network of other jihadis. They are recruits in a theocratic, totalitarian death-cult spread across the planet. It comes in different forms: Boko Haram, which slaughtered 2,000 people in Nigeria the weekend before last; the Taliban, which murdered schoolchildren in Pakistan; Hamas with its genocidal doctrine and many years of bombings, and the Islamic State, which seems busy ethnically cleansing nearly everyone in Syria and Iraq.
The murders in Paris, therefore, were merely the latest salvo in a global confrontation between jihadist Islam and its declared enemies, this time in the West.
Much of the media has offered up a context for these killings that is false. Within hours of the massacre at Charlie Hebdo, the Telegraph led with a feature on the growing problem of “Islamophobia” in France. The Guardian, too, weighed in; one story headlined: “Muslims fear backlash after Charlie Hebdo deaths as Islamic sites attacked”. The Spectator spoke of the killings as an “attack on Islam;” and Robert Fisk in the UK Independent referred to the legacy of the Algerian war as a motive for the attackers. Other news outlets voiced fears of a “backlash” against Muslims in France and elsewhere.
But the real story is that while there have been some sporadic incidents against mosques and Muslim owned businesses in France following the Charlie Hebdo attacks, there has been no backlash against the Muslim community. Muslims across France even joined in the unity rally, an act that would have been impossible were there a climate of widespread public hostility.
The majority of hate crimes in France, as in a number of other countries, affects the Jewish community. It was a Jewish supermarket that was attacked. This does not mean that there will not be attacks — all of them naturally deplorable — against Muslim innocents, only that fears of a major widespread assault seem highly exaggerated. The same fears of widespread attacks against the Muslim community also proved unfounded after the 7/7 London bomb attacks.
Lumping terrorism and “Islamophobia” together ignores the real motivation of the latest killers in France. One of them, Amedy Coulibaly, pledged allegiance to the Islamic State in a video address prior to the supermarket attack. This hardly suggests a rant against perceived intolerance or racism. Invoking racism here also suggests, in a shifting of blame, that we in the West are somehow at fault for the violent behaviour of these Islamist terrorists. What “Islamophobia” motivated the killing of Jewish customers in a kosher supermarket? What had those victims done to deserve that?
Another reason this is no turning point is that the press continues to engage in self-righteous self-censorship. Not one broadcaster — including the BBC, Fox, NBC and CNN — showed any of the Charlie Hebdo images that had been deemed provocative. Those outlets were joined by the Associated Press, which deliberately cropped a photograph of the magazine’s now-dead editor to avoid showing an image of the Prophet Muhammad. In a cringe replicated across almost all of Europe, not one major British newspaper published any of Charlie Hebdo’s satirical images of Islam, and only The Guardian showed the full front cover of the edition that the survivors published after the attack.
Big mistake. These newspapers and broadcasters are denying the public a dispassionate view of what the killers themselves say is causing them to kill. Worse again, by drawing a line against possibly offending Muslims — many of whom seem to have no problem offending Jews and Christians, among others, if not killing them — the media have acted as if there is already in place an unofficial blasphemy law: the terrorists’ key demand.
A violent mob, disastrously undermining Western values, is effectively dictating the boundaries of free speech.
It is all very well to praise Charlie Hebdo as an icon of free speech, but after the riots that followed the publishing of Muhammad cartoons in Denmark’s Jyllands Posten in 2006, Charlie Hebdo was virtually alone in reprinting them, and it was condemned widely for doing so.[1]
Time magazine, in 2011, likened Charlie Hebdo’s reprinting the cartoons as “the right to scream ‘fire’ in an increasingly over-heated theater.” In other words, the “Islamophobic” cartoonists were to blame for their own misfortune. There is a notion permeating Europe, that if you speak out, not only can you can be put on trial — as is the Dutch MP, Geert Wilders[2] — but that it will also, in an Orwellian twist, be your own fault; if you had just kept quiet, nothing unpleasant would be happening to you. Try telling that to the four Jews lying murdered on the floor of the French supermarket. What did they ever say?
Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia tried to fool the world by joining France’s “Unity March” for free speech just two days after a young Saudi blogger, Raif Badawi, received the first installment of 50 lashes — out of the 1000 he is to get — “very severely,” the lashing order says. He was taken after Friday prayers to a public square outside a mosque in Jeddah. His declared “crime” is “insulting Islam,” for writing thoughts such as, “My commitment is to reject any repression in the name of religion… a goal we will reach in a peaceful and law-abiding way.” Badawi still has 950 lashes to complete. If he lives. There is no medical help.
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas — whose genocidal, jihadi partner, Hamas, was, in a burst of surrealism, declared not a terrorist group by the European Union — joined the forefront of the Unity March in Paris at the same time as a report was published by a Palestinian human rights group, accusing the Palestinian Authority of “waging war” against university students in the West Bank.
World leaders link arms at the Paris anti-terror rally on January 11, 2014. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas stands at the far right of the front row. (Image source: RT video screenshot)
Turkey, “named the world’s biggest jailor of journalists in 2012 and 2013” according to theWashington Post, was also there. Turkey “ended 2014 by detaining a number of journalists … including Ekrem Dumanli, editor in chief of Zaman, a leading newspaper” with links to an opposition movement.
Meanwhile, between January 8 and January 14, as over three million copies of Charlie Hebdowere selling out and four million more being printed, there was already talk in France of hardening its laws against free speech. So this may not be a turning point either for free speech or against radical Islam. So it may be a while before we can truly say, “Nous sommes Charlie.”
Jeremy Havardi is a historian and journalist based in London. His books include The Greatest Briton, analytical essays on Churchill.
[1] Ezra Levant, who reprinted the cartoons in Canada, was then compelled to appear before the Alberta Human Rights Commission to defend their publication, because of a complaint lodged by Syed Soharwardy of the Islamic Supreme Council of Canada and the Edmonton Council of Muslim Communities.
[2] As also was Lars Hedegaard (for speaking in his own drawing room), Suzanne Winters, Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff, or at the very east need round-the-clock-bodyguards, such asFrench journalist Eric Zemmour, for saying that France might be facing a virtual civil war.
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