Sharia law | WarSclerotic | Page 20

Archive for the ‘Sharia law’ category

Are Liberals Actually Admitting Islamic Terrorists Exist?!?

January 30, 2015

Are Liberals Actually Admitting Islamic Terrorists Exist?!? PJ Media Trifecta via You Tube, January 29, 2015

(The phrase “literal Islam” is an excellent substitute for “radical Islam.” Literal readings of the Koran and other Islamic “holy” texts support and demand what so called “radical Islamic extremists” do. Perhaps Obama and others who claim that Islam is “the religion of peace” should be labeled “extremist” and/or “radical” because they — rather than the Islamic State, et al — pervert the basic teachings of Islam. They apparently want us to believe, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, that Islam is just another peaceful religion much like others and is therefore not a problem for secular societies. — DM)

Categories: Caliphate, Executions, Foreign policy, Freedom, Iraq, Islam, Islamic slaughter, Islamic State, Media, Mosul, Obama, Sharia law, Syria, Torture
Tags: Caliphate, Executions, Foreign Policy, Freedom, Iraq, Islam, Islamic extremists, Islamic slaughter, Islamic State, literal Islam, Media, Mosul, radical Islam, Sharia law, Syria, Torture

Comments: 1 Comment

The Imaginary Islamic Radical

January 28, 2015

The Imaginary Islamic Radical, Front Page Magazine, Daniel Greenfield, January 28,2015

(Ask Secretary Kerry.

Please see also Muslim Brotherhood-Aligned Leaders Hosted at State Department. — DM)

iraqstill-450x281

Our problem is not the Islamic radical, but the inherent radicalism of Islam. Islam is a radical religion. It radicalizes those who follow it. Every atrocity we associate with Islamic radicals is already in Islam. The Koran is not the solution to Islamic radicalism, it is the cause.

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

The debate over Islamic terrorism has shifted so far from reality that it has now become an argument between the administration, which insists that there is nothing Islamic about ISIS, and critics who contend that a minority of Islamic extremists are the ones causing all the problems.

But what makes an Islamic radical, extremist? Where is the line between ordinary Muslim practice and its extremist dark side?

It can’t be beheading people in public.

Saudi Arabia just did that and was praised for its progressiveness by the UN Secretary General, had flags flown at half-staff in the honor of its deceased tyrant in the UK and that same tyrant was honored by Obama, in preference to such minor events as the Paris Unity March and the Auschwitz commemoration.

It can’t be terrorism either. Not when the US funds the PLO and three successive administrations invested massive amounts of political capital into turning the terrorist group into a state. While the US and the EU fund the Palestinian Authority’s homicidal kleptocracy; its media urges stabbing Jews.

Clearly that’s not Islamic extremism either. At least it’s not too extreme for Obama.

If blowing up civilians in Allah’s name isn’t extreme, what do our radicals have to do to get really radical?

Sex slavery? The Saudis only abolished it in 1962; officially. Unofficially it continues. Every few years a Saudi bigwig gets busted for it abroad. The third in line for the Saudi throne was the son of a “slave girl”.

Ethnic cleansing? Genocide? The “moderate” Islamists we backed in Syria, Libya and Egypt have been busy doing it with the weapons and support that we gave them. So that can’t be extreme either.

If terrorism, ethnic cleansing, sex slavery and beheading are just the behavior of moderate Muslims, what does a Jihadist have to do to be officially extreme? What is it that makes ISIS extreme?

Our government’s definition of moderate often hinges on a willingness to negotiate regardless of the results. The moderate Taliban were the ones willing to talk us. They just weren’t willing to make a deal. Iran’s new government is moderate because it engages in aimless negotiations while pushing its nuclear program forward and issuing violent threats, instead of just pushing and threatening without the negotiations. Nothing has come of the negotiations, but the very willingness to negotiate is moderate.

The Saudis would talk to us all day long while they continued sponsoring terrorists and setting up terror mosques in the West. That made them moderates. Qatar keeps talking to us while arming terrorists and propping up the Muslim Brotherhood. So they too are moderate. The Muslim Brotherhood talked to us even while its thugs burned churches, tortured protesters and worked with terrorist groups in the Sinai.

A radical terrorist will kill you. A moderate terrorist will talk to you and then kill someone else. And you’ll ignore it because the conversation is a sign that they’re willing to pretend to be reasonable.

From a Muslim perspective, ISIS is radical because it declared a Caliphate and is casual about declaring other Muslims infidels. That’s a serious issue for Muslims and when we distinguish between radicals and moderates based not on their treatment of people, but their treatment of Muslims, we define radicalism from the perspective of Islamic supremacism, rather than our own American values.

The position that the Muslim Brotherhood is moderate and Al Qaeda is extreme because the Brotherhood kills Christians and Jews while Al Qaeda kills Muslims is Islamic Supremacism. The idea of the moderate Muslim places the lives of Muslims over those of every other human being on earth.

Our Countering Violent Extremism program emphasizes the centrality of Islamic legal authority as the best means of fighting Islamic terrorists. Our ideological warfare slams terrorists for not accepting the proper Islamic chain of command. Our solution to Islamic terrorism is a call for Sharia submission.

That’s not an American position. It’s an Islamic position and it puts us in the strange position of arguing Islamic legalism with Islamic terrorists. Our politicians, generals and cops insist that the Islamic terrorists we’re dealing with know nothing about Islam because that is what their Saudi liaisons told them to say.

It’s as if we were fighting Marxist terrorist groups by reproving them for not accepting the authority of the USSR or the Fourth International. It’s not only stupid of us to nitpick another ideology’s fine points, especially when our leaders don’t know what they’re talking about, but our path to victory involves uniting our enemies behind one central theocracy. That’s even worse than arming and training them, which we’re also doing (but only for the moderate genocidal terrorists, not the extremists).

Secretary of State Kerry insists that ISIS are nihilists and anarchists. Nihilism is the exact opposite of the highly structured Islamic system of the Caliphate. It might be a more accurate description of Kerry. But the Saudis and the Muslim Brotherhood successfully sold the Western security establishment on the idea that the only way to defeat Islamic terrorism was by denying any Islamic links to its actions.

This was like an arsonist convincing the fire department that the best way to fight fires was to pretend that they happened randomly on their own through spontaneous combustion.

Victory through denial demands that we pretend that Islamic terrorism has nothing to do with Islam. It’s a wholly irrational position, but the alternative of a tiny minority of extremists is nearly as irrational.

If ISIS is extreme and Islam is moderate, what did ISIS do that Mohammed did not?

The answers usually have a whole lot to do with the internal structures of Islam and very little to do with such pragmatic things as not raping women or not killing non-Muslims.

Early on we decided to take sides between Islamic tyrants and Islamic terrorists, deeming the former moderate and the latter extremists. But the tyrants were backing their own terrorists. And when it came to human rights and their view of us, there wasn’t all that much of a difference between the two.

It made sense for us to put down Islamic terrorists because they often represented a more direct threat, but allowing the Islamic tyrants to convince us that they and the terrorists followed two different brands of Islam and that the only solution to Islamic terrorism lay in their theocracy was foolish of us.

We can’t win the War on Terror through their theocracy. That way lies a real Caliphate.

Our problem is not the Islamic radical, but the inherent radicalism of Islam. Islam is a radical religion. It radicalizes those who follow it. Every atrocity we associate with Islamic radicals is already in Islam. The Koran is not the solution to Islamic radicalism, it is the cause.

Our enemy is not radicalism, but a hostile civilization bearing grudges and ambitions.

We aren’t fighting nihilists or radicals. We are at war with the inheritors of an old empire seeking to reestablish its supremacy not only in the hinterlands of the east, but in the megalopolises of the west.

Categories: Al Qaeda, Caliphate, Charlie Hedbo, Cognitive dissonance, Foreign policy, Freedom, Funding terrorism, Gaza, Hamas, Hezbollah, Human rights, Ideology, Iran, Iran scam, Islam, Islamic slaughter, Islamic State, Israel, Kerry, Koran, Middle East, Moderate rebels, Muslim Brotherhood, Obama, P5+1, Palestinian Authority, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Sharia law, Terrorism, Turkey
Tags: Al Qaeda, Caliphate, Charlie Hedbo, Cognitive dissonance, Foreign Policy, Freedom, Funding terrorism, Gaza, Hamas, Hezbollah, human rights, Ideology, Iran, Iran Scam, Islam, Islamic extremists, Islamic slaughter, Islamic State, Israel, Koran, Middle East, Moderate rebels, Muslim Brotherhood, Palestinian Authority, Qatar, Sharia law, Terrorism, Turkey

Comments: 1 Comment

What Bobby Jindal Gets about Islam — and Most People Still Don’t

January 24, 2015

What Bobby Jindal Gets about Islam — and Most People Still Don’t, National Review on line, Andrew C. McCarthy, January 24, 2015

(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.

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

pic_giant_012415_SM_Muslims-France

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.

Categories: Bobby Jindal, Caliphate, Europe, Foreign policy, France, Freedom, Human rights, Islam, Islamophobia, Multiculturalism, No go zones, Obama, Political correctness, Sharia law
Tags: Bobby Jindal, Caliphate, Europe, France, Freedom, human rights, Islam, Islamophobia, Multiculturalism, Muslim Brotherhood, No go zones, Political correctness, Sharia law

Comments: 3 Comments

Video: Steve Coughlin Counterterror Training Education and Analysis

January 24, 2015

Video: Steve Coughlin Counterterror Training Education and Analysis, Counter Jihad Report, January 24, 2015

(Long videos, well worth watching at leisure. — DM)

622022286

Center for Security Policy, September 13, 2012

Over more than a decade following 9/11, MAJ Stephen Coughlin was one of the US government’s most astute and objective analysts, and an expert in the connections between Islamic law, terrorism and the jihadist movement around the globe.

Through knowledge of published Islamic law, MAJ Coughlin had a demonstrated ability to forecast events both in the Middle East and domestically and to accurately assess the future threat posture of jihadist entities before they happen.

He has briefed at the Pentagon, for national and state law enforcement and intelligence agencies, and on Capitol Hill for Members of Congress. Today, he is a Senior Fellow at the Center for Security Policy. His book, Catastrophic Failure, will be released in late 2012.

With this series of presentations, the general public has access to a professional standard of intelligence training in order to better understand the jihadist threat.

Part 1: Lectures on National Security & Counterterror Analysis (Introduction)

Part 2: Understanding the War on Terror Through Islamic Law:

Part 3: Abrogation and the ‘Milestones’ Process:

Part 4: Muslim Brotherhood, Arab Spring & the ‘Milestones’ Process:

Part 5: The Role of the OIC in Enforcing Islamic Law:

Categories: Center for Security Policy, Foreign policy, Intelligence, Islam, Islamic jihad, Muslim Brotherhood, Rules of war, Sharia law, Stephen Coughlin, Terrorism
Tags: Center for Security Policy, Foreign Policy, Intelligence, Islam, Islamic Jihad, Islamic law, Muslim Brotherhood, Rules of war, Sharia law, Stephen Coughlin, Terrorism

Comments: 1 Comment

European ‘No-Go’ Zones: Fact or Fiction? Part 1: France

January 20, 2015

European ‘No-Go’ Zones: Fact or Fiction? Part 1: France, The Gatestone Institute, Soeren Kern, January 20, 2015

(Please see also Fox News “Apologizes” to Radical Islam — DM)

A 120-page research paper entitled “No-Go Zones in the French Republic: Myth or Reality?” documented dozens of French neighborhoods “where police and gendarmerie cannot enforce the Republican order or even enter without risking confrontation, projectiles, or even fatal shootings.”

In October 2011, a 2,200-page report, “Banlieue de la République” (Suburbs of the Republic) found that Seine-Saint-Denis and other Parisian suburbs are becoming “separate Islamic societies” cut off from the French state and where Islamic Sharia law is rapidly displacing French civil law.

The report also showed how the problem is being exacerbated by radical Muslim preachers who are promoting the social marginalization of Muslim immigrants in order to create a parallel Muslim society in France that is ruled by Sharia law.

The television presenter asks: “What if we went to the suburbs?” Obertone replies: “I do not recommend this. Not even we French dare go there anymore. But nobody talks about this in public, of course. Nor do those who claim, ‘long live multiculturalism,’ and ‘Paris is wonderful!’ dare enter the suburbs.”

The jihadist attack on the Paris offices of Charlie Hebdo, a French magazine known for lampooning Islam, has cast a spotlight on so-called no-go zones in France and other European countries.

No-go zones are Muslim-dominated neighborhoods that are largely off limits to non-Muslims due to a variety of factors, including the lawlessness and insecurity that pervades a great number of these areas. Host-country authorities have effectively lost control over many no-go zones and are often unable or unwilling to provide even basic public aid, such as police, fire fighting and ambulance services, out of fear of being attacked by Muslim youth.

Muslim enclaves in European cities are also breeding grounds for Islamic radicalism and pose a significant threat to Western security.

Europe’s no-go zones are the by-product of decades of multicultural policies that have encouraged Muslim immigrants to create parallel societies and remain segregated from — rather than become integrated into — their European host nations.

The problem of no-go zones is well documented, but multiculturalists and their politically correct supporters vehemently deny that they exist. Some are now engaged in a concerted campaign to discredit and even silence those who draw attention to the issue.

Consider Carol Matlack, an American writer for Bloomberg Businessweek, who recently penned a story — entitled “Debunking the Myth of Muslim-Only Zones in Major European Cities” — in which she claims that no-go zones are nothing more than an “urban legend” that is “demonstrably untrue.” She then goes on to ridicule those who disagree with her.

The American cable television channel Fox News has also issued at least four apologies for referring to Muslim no-go zones in Europe, after one commentator erroneously claimed that the entire city of Birmingham, England, was Muslim. Had he simply said that “parts” of Birmingham are Muslim, he would have been correct.

Despite such politically correct denials, Muslim no-go zones are a well-known fact of life in many parts of Europe.

What follows is the first in a multi-part series that will document the reality of Europe’s no-go zones. The series begins by focusing on France and provides a brief compilation of just a few of the literally thousands of references to French no-go zones from academic, police, media and government sources that can easily be found on the Internet by doing a simple search on Google.

Fabrice Balanche, a well-known French Islam scholar who teaches at the University of Lyon, recently told Radio Télévision Suisse: “You have territories in France such as Roubaix, such as northern Marseille, where police will not step foot, where the authority of state is completely absent, where mini Islamic states have been formed.”

French writer and political journalist Éric Zemmour recently told BFM TV: “There are places in France today, especially in the suburbs, where it is not really in France. Salafi Islamists are Islamizing some neighborhoods and some suburbs. In these neighborhoods, it’s not France, it’s an Islamic republic.” In a separate interview, Zemmour — whose latest book is entitled, “The French Suicide” — says multiculturalism and the reign of politically correct speech is destroying the country.

French politician Franck Guiot wrote that parts of Évry, a township in the southern suburbs of Paris, are no-go zones where police forces cannot go for fear of being attacked. He said that politicians seeking to maintain “social peace” were prohibiting the police from using their weapons to defend themselves.

The Socialist mayor of Amiens, Gilles Demailly, has referred to the Fafet-Brossolette district of the city as a “no-go zone” where “you can no longer order a pizza or get a doctor to come to the house.” Europe 1, one of the leading broadcasters in France, has referred to Marseille as a “no-go zone” after the government was forced to deploy riot police, known as CRS, to confront warring Muslim gangs in the city. The French Interior Ministry said it was trying to “reconquer” 184 square kilometers (71 square miles) of Marseille that have come under the control of Muslim gangs.

The French newspaper Le Figaro has referred to downtown Perpignan as a “veritable no-go zone” where “aggression, antisocial behavior, drug trafficking, Muslim communalism, racial tensions and tribal violence” are forcing non-Muslims to move out. Le Figaro also reported that the Les Izards district of Toulouse was a no-go zone, where Arab drug trafficking gangs rule the streets in a climate of fear.

Separately, Le Figaro reported that large quantities of assault rifles are circulating in French no-go zones. “For a few hundred dollars you can buy Kalashnikovs,” political scientist Sebastian Roché said. “The price of an iPhone!”

The newspaper France Soir published poll results showing that nearly 60% of French citizens are in favor of sending the army into troubled suburbs to restore order.

The newspaper Le Parisien has called parts of Grigny, a township in the southern suburbs of Paris, a “lawless zone” plagued by well-organized Muslim gangs, whose members believe they are “masters of the world.” The weekly newsmagazine Le Point reported on the spiraling Muslim lawlessness in the French city of Grenoble.

The French magazine L’Obs (formerly known as Le Nouvel Observateur) has reported on the deteriorating security situation in Roubaix, a city in northern France that is located close to the Belgian border. The magazine reported that local citizens are “exiled within their own country” and want to create their own militia to restore order because police are afraid to confront Muslim gangs.

In August 2014, the French magazine Valeurs Actuelles (Contemporary Values) reported that “France has more than 750 areas of lawlessness” where the law of the French Republic no longer applies. Under the headline “Hell in France,” the magazine said that many parts of France are experiencing a “dictatorship of riffraff” where police are “greeted by mortar fire” and are “forced to retreat by projectiles.”

Separately, Valeurs Actuelles reported on the lawlessness in Trappes, a township located in the western suburbs of Paris, where radical Islam and endemic crime go hand in hand. “Criminals are pursued by Islamic fundamentalists to impose an alternative society, breaking links with the French Republic,” according to local police commander Mohammed Duhan. It is not advisable to go there, he says, adding, “You will be spotted by so-called chauffeurs (lookouts for drug traffickers) and be stripped and smashed.”

Valeurs Actuelles has also reported on no-go zones in Nantes, Tours and Orléans, which have turned into “battlefields” where the few remaining native French holdouts are confronted with “Muslim communalism, the disappearance of their cultural references and rampant crime.”

A graphic 20-minute documentary (in French) about the no-go zone in Clichy Montfermeil, a suburb of Paris, can be viewed here. At around the 3-minute mark, the video shows what happens when French police enter the area.

891

A policeman uses a shotgun to try to keep an attacking gang at bay, in the Parisian suburb of Clichy Montfermeil. (Image source: Dailymotion video screenshot)

A 1.5 hour documentary (in French) produced by France’s TF1 about Muslim gangs in Parisian no-go zones can be viewed here. A 50-minute documentary (in French) produced by France’s TV3 about the no-go zones of Clos Saint-Lazare in northern Paris can be viewed here. A 45-minute documentary (in English) about the no-go zones of Marseilles can be viewed here.

A four-minute video of the most dangerous neighborhoods of France in 2014 can be viewed here. A three-and-a-half-minute video of the most dangerous neighborhoods in Greater Paris Metropolitan Area can be viewed here. A two-minute video of a no-go zone in Lille can be viewedhere. A five-minute video about life in the suburbs of Lyon can be viewed here.

A Russian television (Russia-1) documentary about no-go zones in Paris can be viewed here. The presenter says: “We are in Paris, the Barbès quarter, a few minutes from the famous Montmartre. Finding a European here is almost a mission impossible. Certain Paris streets remind one of an oriental bazaar.” He continues: “The Paris banlieues have become criminal ghettoes where even the police dare not enter.” Hidden cameras record widespread lawlessness and drug dealing in the area.

A 120-page research paper entitled “No-Go Zones in the French Republic: Myth or Reality?”documented dozens of French neighborhoods “where police and gendarmerie cannot enforce the Republican order or even enter without risking confrontation, projectiles, or even fatal shootings.”

Some of the most notorious no-go zone areas in France are situated in the department of Seine-Saint-Denis, a northeastern suburb (banlieue) of Paris that has one of the highest concentrations of Muslims in France. The department is home to an estimated 600,000 Muslims (primarily from North and West Africa) out of a total population of 1.4 million.

Seine-Saint-Denis is divided into 40 administrative districts called communes (townships), 36 of which are on the French government’s official list of “sensitive urban zones” or ZUS.

Seine-Saint-Denis — also known locally as “ninety-three” or “nine three” after the first two digits of the postal code for this suburb — has one of the highest unemployment rates in France; more than 40% of those under the age of 25 are jobless. The area is plagued with drug dealing and suffers from some of the highest rates of violent crime in France.

In October 2011, a landmark 2,200-page report, “Banlieue de la République” (Suburbs of the Republic) found that Seine-Saint-Denis and other Parisian suburbs are becoming “separate Islamic societies” cut off from the French state, and where Islamic Sharia law is rapidly displacing French civil law. The report said that Muslim immigrants are increasingly rejecting French values and instead are immersing themselves in radical Islam.

The report — which was commissioned by the influential French think tank, L’Institut Montaigne — was directed by Gilles Kepel, a highly respected political scientist and specialist in Islam, together with five other French researchers.

The authors of the report showed that France — which now has 6.5 million Muslims (the largest Muslim population in European Union) — is on the brink of a major social explosion because of the failure of Muslims to integrate into French society.

The report also showed how the problem is being exacerbated by radical Muslim preachers, who are promoting the social marginalization of Muslim immigrants in order to create a parallel Muslim society in France that is ruled by Sharia law.

The research was primarily carried out in the Seine-Saint-Denis townships of Clichy-sous-Bois and Montfermeil, two suburbs that were ground zero for Muslim riots in the fall of 2005, when Muslim mobs torched more than 9,000 cars.

The report described Seine-Saint-Denis as a “wasteland of de-industrialization” and said that in some areas, “a third of the population of the town does not hold French nationality, and many residents are drawn to an Islamic identity.”

Another township of Seine-Saint-Denis is Aubervilliers. Sometimes referred to as one of the “lost territories of the French Republic,” it is effectively a Muslim city: more than 70% of the population is Muslim. Three quarters of young people under 18 in the township are foreign or French of foreign origin, mainly from the Maghreb and sub-Saharan Africa. French police are said to rarely venture into some of the most dangerous parts of the township.

The southern part of Aubervilliers is well known for its vibrant Chinese immigrant community along with their wholesale clothing and textile warehouses and import-export shopping malls. In August 2013, the weekly newsmagazine Marianne reported that Muslim immigrants felt humiliated by the economic dynamism of the Chinese, and were harassing and attacking Chinese traders, who were increasingly subject to robberies and extortion. The situation got so bad that the Chinese ambassador to France was forced to pay a visit to the area.

In response, the Socialist mayor of Aubervilliers, Jacques Salvator, suggested that the violence could be halted if Chinese companies would agree to hire more Arabs and Africans. The Chinese countered that Muslims do not work as hard as the Chinese, that they are more demanding, and that they complain too much, according to Marianne.

After local officials refused to act in the face of increasing Muslim violence, the Chinese threatened to “call on the Chinese mafia” for protection. Muslims responded by launching a petition to have the Chinese expelled from the area.

Also in Aubervilliers, the magazine Charlie Hebdo reported in 2012 that the town hall was obligating non-Muslim men who want to marry Muslim women to convert to Islam first, even though France is ostensibly a secular republic. One such man, Frédéric Gilbert, a journalist, was told:

“You can convert in any mosque in three minutes. All you need do is to repeat ‘with conviction and sincerity’ this sentence: ‘I recognize that there is no god but Allah and that Mohammed is his prophet,’ and the Imam will agree that you have converted to Islam.'”

In a story entitled, “When Town Hall Mayors become Imams,” Charlie Hebdo wrote:

“In other words, Moroccan law prevails over French law in cases of mixed marriages and the same situation pertains with regard to other former French colonies such as Tunisia and Algeria as well as with Egypt.”

According to the newspaper Le Parisien, the practice of “false conversions” to Islam is widespread because most non-Muslim grooms prefer fake conversions rather than to suffer “administrative complications.”

In 2014, Le Figaro published the contents of a leaked intelligence document that warns about the imposition of Islamic Sharia law in French schools in Muslim ghettoes. The 15-page document provides 70 specific examples of how Muslim radicals are taking over ostensibly secular schools throughout the country. These include: veiling in playgrounds, halal meals in the canteen, chronic absenteeism (bordering 90% in some parts of Nîmes and Toulouse) during religious festivals, clandestine prayer in gyms or hallways. The report details how “self-proclaimed young guardians of orthodoxy” are circumventing the March 2004 law banning religious symbols in French schools. In Marseille, a high school principal testified that some of her students pray with such fervor that they have “blue foreheads.”

A video showing a radical Islamic rally in Saint-Denis can be viewed here. A video showing radical Muslims commandeering a French bus amid screams of “Allahu Akbar!” (Allah is greater!) can be viewed here. A series of eight videos documenting Muslim street prayers in Paris can be viewed here. (Street prayers have now been outlawed.) A series of 25 videos documenting the Islamization of France can be viewed here.

In July 2012, the French government announced a plan to reassert state control over 15 of the most notorious no-go zones. The crime-infested districts, which the French Interior Ministry has designated as Priority Security Zones (Zones de Sécurité Prioritaires, or ZSP), include heavily Muslim parts of Amiens, Aubervilliers, Avignon, Béziers, Bordeaux, Clermont-Ferrand, Grenoble, Lille, Lyon, Marseilles, Montpellier, Mulhouse, Nantes, Nice, Paris, Perpignan, Strasbourg, Toulouse and many others. The number of ZSPs now stands at 64; a complete list of ZSPs can be found here.

Meanwhile, a 13-minute Hungarian television documentary (with English subtitles) about no-go zones in Paris can be viewed here. The presenter interviews a French crime reporter named Laurent Obertone, who is the author of a bestselling new book entitled, “La France Orange Méchanique” (France: A Clockwork Orange).

In his book, Obertone writes that France is descending into a state of savagery and that the true magnitude of crime and violence across the country is being deliberately under-reported by politically correct media, government and police.

In the documentary, Obertone states: “The French elite became outraged when [former French President Nicolas] Sarkozy referred to [Muslim] immigrants attacking police as ‘mobs’.”

The Hungarian presenter then asks: “What if we went to the suburbs?” Obertone replies: “I do not recommend this. Not even we French dare go there anymore. But nobody talks about this in public, of course. Nor do those who claim, ‘long live multiculturalism,’ and ‘Paris is wonderful!’ dare enter the suburbs.”

Categories: Diversity, France, Islam, No go zones, Political correctness, Sharia law
Tags: DIversity, France, Islam, Muslim immigrants, No go zones, Political correctness, Sharia law

Comments: 1 Comment

Op-Ed: The West Cannot Win this War

January 19, 2015

Op-Ed: The West Cannot Win this War, Israel National News, Giulio Meotti, January 19, 2015

(Can’t win, or refuses to win? — DM)

Take another look at the video filmed under the Charlie Hebdo’s building, the black car of the terrorists who had no fear of death and are advancing by shooting, while the white car of the policemen is forced to retreat.

We are capitulating.

The West cannot win this war. Take the last French mass rally with dozens of heads of states from around the world: it was a silent march, a mute show where nobody took the podium. As if these people didn’t know what to say. As if these Western leaders didn’t really believe in what they were doing in Paris.

A few days ago, Martin Wolf in the British daily Financial Times gave voice to the deep estrangement of Europe’s élite. He suggested using massive doses of multicultural recognition of equality between different cultures in order to combat Islamism. Mr. Wolf is implicitly saying that we must surrender, that we cannot win, that we have to contain terror and finally find a way to coexist with it.

The French horror doesn’t lie in the killings per se. A few hours later, in Nigeria, Boko Haram destroyed many villages and burned hundreds of people to death. Europe’s horror lies in the fact that the terrorists came from the heart of the continent. The Chouaci’s brothers, the British bombers and Theo Van Gogh’s killer didn’t came from Raqqa, in Syria, or Al Qaeda in Yemen. No, they were born and raised in European democracies.

Europe gave everything to these terrorists: schools, education, entartainment, sexual pleasures, salaries and freedom. The French terrorists rejected the French values of liberté, egalité and fraternité; the British suicide bombers rejected British multiculturalism, while Dutch terrorist Mohammed Bouyeri, who slaughtered the film maker in Amsterdam, rejected the Dutch mute values of moral indifference.

A few days ago, I was talking with Flemming Rose, the Danish journalist who first published the cartoons in 2006 and now lives protected by the police. He told me the shocking truth nobody wants to hear:

“I am pretty pessimistic about the future of free speech, though I am delighted that so many people came out to support Charlie Hebdo”, Rose told me. “I knew several of the cartoonists who were killed, and I was a witness in a criminal case against CH in 2007. My fear is that this support will not translate into real decisions and changed behavior when we get back to our day-to-day life. We have seen that before. Madrid 2004, Theo van Gogh 2004, London 2005, Kurt Westergaard 2008 and 2010 (one planned attack and another real attack in which he was nearly killed). Every time lots of support and solidarity with the victims, but very little has changed in reality, quite to the contrary, apart from CH no European newspapers have dared to publish Mohammed cartoons since 2008”.

Charlie Hebdo’s journalists were brave people, defiant, but if they are the Western heroes, we have already lost. “Charb” and the other cartoonists didn’t believe in anything.

A few years ago, at my newspaper in Italy. I suggested we publish a letter that Mohammed Bouyeri released from his Dutch prison. Bouyeri says he does not feel remorse for what he did. The tone of the letter is marked by a kind of puerile candor. Bouyeri never mentions Van Gogh, but he makes it clear that he has fulfilled a religious duty by killing him.

The West cannot win this war. The price it would have to pay is the loss of European values: reducing the civil rights of many people, deporting them, declaring a war of values, sending boots on the ground in the Middle East, imposing Western civilization on them. Europe will never do that. Europe itself doesn’t believe in these values anymore. This is also one of the reason why Europe hates Israeli Jews who daily confront evil and fight it, so deeply.

The terrorists of Charlie Hebdo talk a religious language and use terms like honor, faith, prophet and loyalty, while the West replies to them with words such as freedom, democracy, rights, respect and tolerance. They speak theology, we reply with logic. They use bullets, we march in the streets.

It is a sad joke. The truth is that people in the West are relieved that they don’t have to fight, that we are surrendering, that life goes on as usual. Hurray, we are capitulating!

Categories: Diversity, Europe, Foreign policy, Freedom, Ideology, Islam, Islamic slaughter, Israel, Middle East, Multiculturalism, Political correctness, Sharia law
Tags: Charlie Hebdo, DIversity, Europe, Foreign Policy, Freedom, Ideology, Islam, Islamic slaughter, Israel, Middle East, Multiculturalism, Political correctness, Sharia law

Comments: 5 Comments

No Room for Parody

January 18, 2015

No Room for Parody, American Thinker, Clarice Feldman, January 18, 2015

I was sound asleep when the phone rang and so I cannot be absolutely sure the conversation was not a dream, but it seemed real enough.

“Hello,” the caller began. “My name is Mr. Mensch, I am president of the Parodists of the World, professional comedy writers, and we want to engage you in a suit against the administration for tortious interference with our livelihood.”

“What exactly are you alleging, I mean specifics?” I responded.

He then launched into a litany of grievances against the administration which the Parodists claimed had made it impossible for them to continue making a living.

“First, our country sent no one to the important anti-terrorism demonstration in Paris, and then there’s Valerie Jarrett calling the march against the slaughter of innocents in Paris a ‘Parade’, as if this were some sort of celebration.‘ Certainly We Would Have Loved To Participate In The Parade,” But We “Got The Substance Right”’.” She said and then proceeded to claim that Holder couldn’t attend because he was in a very important terrorism conference at the time, forgetting that we knew everyone else at the conference made it to the march except Holder. So at the time of the march he was meeting with himself, it seems.”

“Well, that was silly, “I agreed. “And?” I waited for the next item.

“Then our secretary of state, John Kerry, whose entire life has been fashioned around his self-imagined superior diplomatic skills and international affairs expertise, shows up speaking execrable high school level French, accompanied by an aging ex-druggie who sings to the grieving French ‘You’ve Got a Friend’”

“I have to agree that was preposterous and really embarrassing. One wag suggested the French ought to respond by having Carly Simon sing, ‘You’re so Vain’ to the President and his Secretary of State. ‘Send in the Clowns’ comes to mind.”

“It’s all of a piece you know. It’s cutting substantially into our employment prospects. Let me read this to you,” Mensch said:

“ ‘A scandal has erupted in the American Consulate in Jerusalem, as three Israeli security guards have quit following a plan to hire 35 armed Palestinian guards from East Jerusalem. The Palestinians have been undergoing weapons training in Jericho in recent days. The decision to hire and arm the Palestinian security personnel was made by the consulate’s chief security officer, Dan Cronin. The plan is to employ them mostly as escorts to American diplomats’ convoys in the West Bank. Their operating base will be at the consulate in the city’s west, as well as six other facilities around the city belonging to the consulate, of which five are in western Jerusalem.

The plan is a breach of a 2011 agreement between the consulate and the Israeli government, which determined that only former IDF combat soldiers hired by the consulate would be allowed to carry weapons. That year, Israel gave the consulate approval to keep about 100 guns for its security guards, but only if they’re American diplomats or Israelis who served in the army. While the consulate employs scores of guards from East Jerusalem, they have not been armed up until now.’”

“Sounds like a bad joke to me,” I replied. “With the world’s attention focused on Moslem extremists. New jihadi groups showing up all through Europe, and Palestinians continuing to attack our ally Israel and we train and arm Palestinian guards to protect us in Jerusalem in violation of our agreement with Israel?”

“Even the liberal foreign policy pundit Leslie Gelb is concerned that the administration is absolutely clueless,” sputtered Mensch.

“And he keeps releasing men from Gitmo who then return to fight against us. He released Mullah Abdul Rauf and immediately on his return he’s recruiting for the Taliban in Afghanistan.”

By this time Mensch was on a roll.

“The White House spokesman, Josh Earnest is tripping over his own tongue trying not to say the magic words ’Moslem extremist’. Listen to this circumlocution of his: ‘We want to describe exactly what happened. These are individuals who carried out an act of terrorism. And they later tried to justify that act of terrorism by invoking the religion of Islam and their own deviant view of it.’”

“Then there’s the nonsensical negotiations with Iran,” I interjected.

Mensch sputtered, “Thursday Obama announced he would not tighten sanctions on Iran which is violating the sanctions already in place because if we tighten the reins it will only drive them to war. Think about that! If we impose stricter sanctions on them, they’ll go to war, and if we don’t, they’ll go to war with nuclear weapons.”

“That’s nothing to joke about,” I said.

“Precisely! Obama‘s leaving us nothing to parody. We can’t make a living in comedy. He and his administration are themselves the joke. We might as well just send in news clippings to our editors as try to dream up anything wackier than what they’re doing. And, look, it’s not just foreign affairs. Take the Keystone Pipeline — I mean it should be clear to everyone that we are hurting Iran and Russia financially each time we and others increase the supply of gas and oil on the world market and we need jobs badly, so why is he still sitting on this? George Will captured this bit of nuttiness,” he added and I heard the rustle of newspaper as he read this to me.

Actually, there no longer is any reason to think he has ever reasoned about this. He said he would not make up his mind until the Nebraska Supreme Court ruled. It ruled to permit construction, so he promptly vowed to veto authorization of construction.

The more Obama has talked about Keystone, the less economic understanding he has demonstrated. On Nov. 14, he said Keystone is merely about “providing the ability of Canada to pump their oil, send it through our land, down to the gulf, where it will be sold everywhere else. That doesn’t have an impact on U.S. gas prices.” By Dec. 19, someone with remarkable patience had explained to him that there is a world market price for oil, so he said, correctly, that Keystone would have a “nominal” impact on oil prices but then went on to disparage job creation by Keystone. He said it would create “a couple thousand” jobs (the State Department study says approximately 42,100 “direct, indirect, and induced”) and said, unintelligibly, “Those are temporary jobs until the construction actually happens.” Well.

“I understand your distress,” I sympathized, “but to make your case you have to prove that Obama intended to harm your business, and as Will notes it’s just that he isn’t that smart.”

“C’mon,” the parodist, countered, “Almost every professor in America supported and voted for him. Are you calling them all stupid?”

Categories: Caliphate, Foreign policy, Humor, Insanity, Iran scam, Islam, Islamic slaughter, Islamic State, Israel, Jihad, Kerry, Leftists, Multiculturalism, Obama, Obama administration, Sharia law, Terrorism
Tags: Caliphate, Foreign Policy, Humor, Insanity, Iran Scam, Islam, Islamic slaughter, Islamic State, Israel, Jihad, Leftists, Multiculturalism, Obama Administration, Sharia law, Terrorism

Comments: 1 Comment

Meet the honor brigade, an organized campaign to silence debate on Islam

January 17, 2015

Meet the honor brigade, an organized campaign to silence debate on Islam, Washington Post, Asra Q. Nomani, January 16, 2015

(It’s encouraging to read that a few actually moderate Muslims are slowly bringing modest changes to a few who practice the Religion of the Perpetually Offended and Violent. However, much more and a long time will be needed before significant numbers of “moderate” and “non-extremist” Muslims begin to accept freedoms for themselves and for others and to reject Sharia law in its present and historic form. Until then?– DM)

[W]e need a new interpretation of Islamic law in order to change the culture. This would require rejecting the eight schools of religious thought that dominate the Sunni and Shiite Muslim world. I propose naming a new one after ijtihad, the concept of critical thinking, and elevating self-examination over toxic shame-based discourse, laws and rules.

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

“You have shamed the community,” a fellow Muslim in Morgantown, W.Va., said to me as we sat in a Panera Bread in 2004. “Stop writing.”

Then 38, I had just written an essay for The Washington Post’s Outlook section arguing that women should be allowed to pray in the main halls of mosques, rather than in segregated spaces, as most mosques in America are arranged. An American Muslim born in India, I grew up in a tolerant but conservative family. In my hometown mosque, I had disobeyed the rules and prayed in the men’s area, about 20 feet behind the men gathered for Ramadan prayers.

Later, an all-male tribunal tried to ban me. An elder suggested having men surround me at the mosque so that I would be “scared off.” Now the man across the table was telling me to shut up.

“I won’t stop writing,” I said.

It was the first time a fellow Muslim had pressed me to refrain from criticizing the way our faith was practiced. But in the past decade, such attempts at censorship have become more common. This is largely because of the rising power and influence of the “ghairat brigade,” an honor corps that tries to silence debate on extremist ideology in order to protect the image of Islam. It meets even sound critiques with hideous, disproportionate responses.

The campaign began, at least in its modern form, 10 years ago in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, when the Organization of Islamic Cooperation — a mini-United Nations comprising the world’s 56 countries with large Muslim populations, plus the Palestinian Authority — tasked then-Secretary General Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu with combating Islamophobia and projecting the “true values of Islam.” During the past decade, a loose honor brigade has sprung up, in part funded and supported by the OIC through annual conferences, reports and communiques. It’s made up of politicians, diplomats, writers, academics, bloggers and activists.

In 2007, as part of this playbook, the OIC launched the Islamophobia Observatory, a watchdog group based in Jiddah, Saudi Arabia, with the goal of documenting slights against the faith. Its first report, released the following year, complained that the artists and publishers of controversial Danish cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad were defiling “sacred symbols of Islam . . . in an insulting, offensive and contemptuous manner.” The honor brigade began calling out academics, writers and others, including former New York police commissioner Ray Kelly and administrators at a Catholic school in Britain that turned away a mother who wouldn’t remove her face veil.

“The OIC invented the anti-‘Islamophobia’ movement,” says Zuhdi Jasser, president of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy and a frequent target of the honor brigade. “These countries . . . think they own the Muslim community and all interpretations of Islam.”

Alongside the honor brigade’s official channel, a community of self-styled blasphemy police — from anonymous blogs such as LoonWatch.com and Ikhras.com to a large and disparate cast of social-media activists — arose and began trying to control the debate on Islam. This wider corps throws the label of “Islamophobe” on pundits, journalists and others who dare to talk about extremist ideology in the religion. Their targets are as large as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and as small as me.

The official and unofficial channels work in tandem, harassing, threatening and battling introspective Muslims and non-Muslims everywhere. They bank on an important truth: Islam, as practiced from Malaysia to Morocco, is a shame-based, patriarchal culture that values honor and face-saving from the family to the public square. Which is why the bullying often works to silence critics of Islamic extremism.

“Honor brigades are wound collectors. They are couch jihadis,” Joe Navarro, a former supervisory special agent in the FBI’s behavioral analysis unit, tells me. “They sit around and collect the wounds and injustices inflicted against them to justify what they are doing. Tragedy unites for the moment, but hatred unites for longer.”

In an e-mail exchange, the OIC’s ambassador to the United Nations denied that the organization tries to silence discussion of problems in Muslim communities.

The attacks are everywhere. Soon after the Islamophobia Observatory took shape, Sheik Sabah Ahmed al-Sabah, the emir of Kuwait, grumbled about “defamatory caricatures of our Master and Prophet Muhammad” and films that smear Islam, according to the OIC’s first Islamophobia report.

The OIC helped give birth to a culture of victimization. In speeches, blogs, articles and interviews widely broadcast in the Muslim press, its honor brigade has targeted pundits, political leaders and writers — from TV host Bill Maher to atheist author Richard Dawkins — for insulting Islam. Writer Glenn Greenwald has supported the campaign to brand writers and thinkers, such as neuroscientist and atheist Sam Harris, as having “anti-Muslim animus” just for criticizing Islam.

“These fellow travelers have made it increasingly unpleasant — and even dangerous — to discuss the link between Muslim violence and specific religious ideas, like jihad, martyrdom and blasphemy,” Harris tells me.

Noticing the beginnings of this trend in December 2007, a U.S. diplomat in Istanbul dispatched a cable to the National Security Council, the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency and various State Department offices. The cable said the OIC’s chief called supporters of the Danish cartoons of Muhammad “extremists of freedom of expression” and equated them with al-Qaeda.

Most of the criticism takes place online, with anonymous bloggers targeting supposed Islamophobes. Not long after the cable, a network of bloggers launched LoonWatch, which goes after Christians, Jews, Hindus, atheists and other Muslims. The bloggers have labeled Somali author Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a born Muslim but now an atheist opponent of Islamic extremism, an “anti-Muslim crusader.” Robert Spencer, a critic of extremist Islam, has been called a “vicious hate preacher” and an “Internet sociopath.” The insults may look similar to Internet trolling and vitriolic comments you can find on any blog or news site. But they’re more coordinated, frightening and persistent.

One prominent target of the honor brigade’s attacks was Charlie Hebdo, the French newspaper where several staffers were recently killed by Islamic extremists. According to some accounts, as the killers massacred cartoonists, they shouted: “We have avenged the prophet Muhammad.” The OIC denounced the killings, but in a 2012 report, it also condemned the magazine’s “Islamophobic satires.” Its then-secretary general, Ihsanoglu, said the magazine’s “history of attacking Muslim sentiments” was “an outrageous act of incitement and hatred and abuse of freedom of expression.”

Charlie Hebdo is not the only evidence that, to self-appointed defenders of the faith, a call to kill the message can very easily become a plan to kill the messenger. In January 2011, a security officer for the governor of Pakistan’s Punjab province, Salman Taseer, assassinated him after Taseer defended a Christian woman accused of blasphemy. In court, supporters laid flowers on the shoulders of the assassin in approval.

Murderers like him would be much harder to radicalize in a climate that welcomed debate about Islam rather than seeking revenge on its critics. But in so many Muslim communities now, saving face trumps critical thinking and truth-telling. This is why reform from within Islam is so difficult. In my experience, if you try to hold the community accountable, you’re more likely to be bullied and intimidated than taken seriously.

When Rupert Murdoch recently tweeted, “Maybe most Moslems peaceful, but until they recognize and destroy their growing jihadist cancer they must be held responsible,” he was criticized for indelicately saying all Muslims were responsible for the acts of a few. But I do believe we bear collective responsibility for the problems in our communities.

After my threatening meeting at Panera, I kept advocating for women’s rights in the mosque and in the bedroom. Among other things, I argued that Muslim women have the right to orgasm, an intimacy too often denied in societies with a tradition of female genital mutilation.

Then came the death threats. In the fall of 2004, my parents and my son picked me up after I spoke at a conference. “Somebody wants to kill you,” my father said from behind the wheel of our gold Dodge Caravan, his voice trembling. The death threat was posted on Muslim WakeUp!, a now-defunct progressive Web site. The offender told the FBI that he would stop harassing me, and he did. More prosaic taunts in the past decade have called me a “Zionist media whore,” a “House Muslim” and many other unprintable insults.

Two years ago, Zainab Al-Suwaij, executive director of the American Islamic Congress, was so battered by online attacks aimed at silencing her that she experienced a physical response to the stress and anxiety, and ended up in an emergency room. When I met her in her office near the White House, she pulled up her sleeves to show me the marks left by IV injections that the hospital staff had administered to get her necessary fluids.

“The attacks just killed me,” Al-Suwaij said, wearily.

Bullying this intense really works. Observant members of the flock are culturally conditioned to avoid shaming Islam, so publicly citing them for that sin often has the desired effect. Non-Muslims, meanwhile, are wary of being labeled “Islamophobic” bigots. So attacks against both groups succeed in quashing civil discourse. They cause governments, writers and experts to walk on eggshells, avoiding important discussion.

For my part, I have continued to write, calling on American Muslims to root out extremism in our communities and arguing that certain passages of the Koran are too antiquated for our times. As I see it, the injunction to “stand out firmly for justice even against . . . your kin” is our divine “See something, say something” mandate. But too often, this passage is misused as a justification for attacking our own.

While we still have a long way to go, I have seen progress since I started calling for women’s rights in mosques and challenging the extremism I saw in American Muslim communities. Our mosque in Morgantown, a mostly male congregation, elected its first female president a few years ago, and she was largely accepted as a leader. But most women still shuffle through the back door and pray in a separate balcony.

Four years ago, the Muslim Public Affairs Council, an advocacy group, announced programs to discuss “taboo topics” such as homosexuality, interfaith marriage and extremism. Recently, young Muslim leaders in Northern Virginia started an initiative to create mosques that promote assimilation, interfaith harmony and women’s rights. Later this month, a new group, the Women’s Mosque of America, will hold a female-led prayer service in Los Angeles, a rare event in Muslim communities.

Next month, the Obama administration will hold a conference on challenging violent extremism, and President Obama last year called on Muslim communities to “explicitly, forcefully and consistently reject the ideology of al-Qaeda and ISIL.” But his administration isn’t framing extremism as a problem directly tied to Islam. Last month, by contrast, Egyptian President Abdel Fatah al-Sissi acknowledged that there was an ideology problem in Islam and said, “We need to revolutionize our religion.”

When I heard Sissi’s words, I thought: Finally.

Beyond these statements, though, we need a new interpretation of Islamic law in order to change the culture. This would require rejecting the eight schools of religious thought that dominate the Sunni and Shiite Muslim world. I propose naming a new one after ijtihad, the concept of critical thinking, and elevating self-examination over toxic shame-based discourse, laws and rules. Such a project could take the power out of the hands of the status quo clerics, politicians and experts and replace it with a progressive interpretation of faith motivated not by defending honor but acting honorably.

Categories: Charlie Hedbo, Foreign policy, Freedom, Islam, Islamic slaughter, Islamic State, Islamophobia, Moral equivalence, Multiculturalism, Muslim Brotherhood, Obama, Political correctness, Sharia law, Sisi, Terrorism
Tags: Charlie Hedbo, Foreign Policy, Freedom, Islam, Islamic slaughter, Islamic State, Islamophobia, Moral equivalence, Multiculturalism, Muslim Brotherhood, Political correctness, Sharia law, Sisi, Terrorism

Comments: Be the first to comment

Isolated incidents or global war?

January 16, 2015

Isolated incidents or global war? Israel Hayom, Dore Gold, January 16, 2015

[V]irtually all these radical Islamic leaders see themselves as in no less than a civilizational battle with the West. There have been those who do not want to depict this struggle in this way, including those in the West who, out of political correctness, refuse to discuss the threat of radical Islam.

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

In response to the first attack in Paris on the offices of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, a member of a jihadi forum, affiliated with ISIS, wrote a very striking explanation as to why France in particular was targeted. As is usual in the jihadi world, which seeks to return to the early days of Islam centuries ago, history played an important role in his thinking: “France was one part of the Islamic land and it will be Islamic again.“

What was he talking about? For years, global jihadi organizations have issued calls to retake al-Andalus, the Arabic name for Spain and those parts of the Iberian peninsula when they were held by the Muslims from 711 until 1492. This last summer ISIS members produced a video calling for the liberation of al-Andalus. But, it is often forgotten that shortly after the conquest of Spain, an Arab army crossed the Pyrenees and occupied territories that today are part of France. Having captured Bordeaux, it was met and defeated in 732 by a Frankish army led by Charles Martel at the Battle of Tours — some 200 miles from Paris. Even after this historical battle, Arab armies did not halt their efforts to seize French territory. They in fact reached Lyons and threatened to occupy all of Provence. In fact, parts of France remained under Islamic rule until 759, when Narbonne, the main base of the invading Arab armies, fell.

Whether or not the attack in France was motivated by such historical memories, the passion to recover lost territories that were once under Islamic rule is a theme running through most of the organizations associated with the global jihadist network. It was no less than Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, who first articulated this theme: “Andalusia, Sicily, the Balkans, South Italy and Roman Sea Islands were all Islamic lands that had to be restored to the homeland of Islam; the Mediterranean and Red Sea should equally be part of the Islamic Empire as they were before.” Al-Banna’s writings, which are to this day still revered by most of the radical Islamic movements, are available on the internet today in Arabic and even in English.

In recent times, this ideological orientation of the Muslim Brotherhood has been best represented by Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, who is based in Qatar. Regarded by many as the highest spiritual authority in the Muslim Brotherhood, Qaradawi appeared on Qatari television in 2007 and declared: “I expect that Islam will conquer Europe without resorting to the sword or fighting. It will do so by means of da’wa (proselytizing) and ideology.” The only geographic points he mentioned in relationship to this expansion of the Islamic realm were as follows: “The conquest of Rome — the conquest of Italy, and Europe — means that Islam will return to Europe once again.”

Qaradawi, who appeared weekly on Al Jazeera, gave his patronage to a Muslim Brotherhood facility in a French chateau where Islamists used to train European Imams. Thousand of young Muslims were bussed into this retreat center. In short, Qaradawi’s ideas had multiple platforms through which they could spread.

There were other organizations that took Qardawi’s declarations a step further. Hamas, which is after all the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, has also made similar statements. Sheikh Younus al-Astal, who has had a leading role within the supreme religious body of Hamas (the Association of the Religious Scholars of Palestine) gave the following sermon in 2008 that was broadcast on Hamas television: “Very soon, Allah willing, Rome will be conquered, just like Constantinople was, as was prophesied by our Prophet Muhammad.” He then spoke about how the “Islamic conquests … will spread through Europe in its entirety” and beyond.

Dabiq, a journal published by ISIS, also deals with the conquest of Rome. The journal recently put on its cover a picture of Saint Peter’s Square in Rome; the editors manipulated the photograph and put the flag of ISIS on the obelisk in the center. The journal also quotes the founder of al-Qaida in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, as saying: “We fight here while our goal is Rome.” Before he led the insurgency in Iraq against the U.S. and its allies, Zarqawi actually set up a terrorist network for operations on European soil.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey, under the ruling AKP Party, has also taken up the cause of recovering lost Islamic lands. In 2004, a U.S. State Department official sent a cable to Washington warning that at an event held at the AKP’s main think tank, he heard the idea voiced that Turkey’s role is to spread Islam in Europe, and “avenge the defeat at the siege of Vienna in 1683.” The cable linked a high level Turkish official with this view. It was made public by WikiLeaks.

What all these statements teach us is that virtually all these radical Islamic leaders see themselves as in no less than a civilizational battle with the West. There have been those who do not want to depict this struggle in this way, including those in the West who, out of political correctness, refuse to discuss the threat of radical Islam. They also cling to the mistaken idea that the Muslim Brotherhood can become an ally against al-Qaida and its affiliates.

Last week, on January 9, the American journal National Review published emails, leaked from an Al Jazeera producer, about the attacks in France. He sought to play down the significance of the terror in Paris, rejecting the notion that this was a “civilizational attack on European values.” He insisted that no one knows the motivation behind the attacks, suggesting perhaps that it was a reaction to France’s military actions against ISIS, or its operations in Libya and Mali.

In other words, the Al Jazeera producer did not want his network to admit that the attack in Paris was motivated by an aggressive Islamist ideology, but rather preferred to blame Western policies, which if it became widely accepted would cripple its leaders and deny them the self-confidence to take any effective action. That is what has largely happened until now. It is no wonder that Al Jazeera, whose headquarters is located in Qatar, has been correctly described as the satellite channel of the Muslim Brotherhood.

In contrast, Ghassan Charbel, the editor-in-chief of Al Hayat, the leading newspaper in the Arab world, on Monday refused to play down the Paris attacks as a unique, one-time event: “No one can disregard the scale of the problem and the extent of the threat any more.” Defying the political correctness of many of the world’s capitals, he bravely told the truth about what was happening: “What is clear is that the Paris attack is just the opening shot of a global war that the Islamist extremists will be waging in the West and the rest of the world.” He had no qualms about saying that the problem was the threat of radical Islam. Until the West internalizes his warning of what it is facing, unfortunately a new wave of attacks in the West will only be a matter of time.

Categories: Caliphate, Europe, Foreign policy, France, Free world, Freedom, Hamas, Human rights, Islam, Islamic slaughter, Islamic State, Muslim Brotherhood, Sharia law, Spain, Terrorism
Tags: Caliphate, Europe, Foreign Policy, France, Freedom, Hamas, human rights, Islam, Islamic slaughter, Muslim Brotherhood, Political correctness, Sharia law, Spain, Terrorism

Comments: Be the first to comment

The Free World Under Siege

January 16, 2015

The Free World Under Siege, Front Page Magazine, Robert Spencer, January 16, 2015

(As “radical” Islam becomes stronger and more assertive, the collective we become weaker and more compliant. — DM)

belgium

The free world is under siege. And its appointed guardians are swinging wide the gates.

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

Twelve cartoonists are dead in Paris for violating Islam’s blasphemy law. Four Jews are dead for being among the people that the Qur’an claims are “the most intense of the people in animosity toward the believers” (5:82). Muslims have recently attacked and killed police officers in New York City, Canada, and France. And Thursday, Muslims fired on police who were raiding their terror operations, and two of the jihadis were killed. Europe is under siege. As is the free world.

Murderous jihad attacks are coming more frequently than ever, and there is no reason to think they’re going to slow down. In a new Islamic State video, a jihadi declares: “I say to all French people who think that the Islamic State won’t arrive in Europe, with God’s help, we will arrive in Europe. We will expand across all of Europe, to France, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland and also the USA. I say to all my brothers that cannot immigrate and join the Islamic caliphate, try to resist with all means, kill them, slaughter them, burn their cars and homes. I say to my brothers, if you see a police officer—kill him. Kill them all. Kill all infidels that you see in the streets.”

Regarding Belgium in particular, “three Islamic State militants threatened attacks on Belgium in a video broadcast on Wednesday, the Belga news agency reported.” And the next day jihadis carried through on their threats. “I heard a sort of explosion, followed by several gunshots,” said a witness. Another added that “machine guns were firing for about 10 minutes.” A third said he saw two North African men “dressed all in black carrying a bag of the same color.” Still another said: “I heard two explosions. I left, then I saw two young people run — Arab types between 25 and 30 — who hurtled down in the dark with woolly hats on their heads.”

Said Thierry Werts of the Belgian federal prosecutor’s office: “This operational cell of about ten people, some of whom had returned from Syria, was on the point of launching significant terrorist attacks in Belgium. During the search, certain suspects immediately opened fire at special forces of the police with automatic weapons. They opened fire for several minutes. Two suspects were killed and a third was arrested.” He added that “even after one of the suspects was lying on the ground injured, he continued to fire.”

They were, in other words, what Western authorities have shown no indication of being: determined and tenacious, even to the point of death. In the wake of the Charlie Hebdo jihad murders, there have been very few Western media outlets with the courage to stand up to the jihadis’ violent Sharia intimidation and demonstrate their commitment to defending the freedom of speech by republishing the Muhammad cartoons. Instead, most have given the jihadis exactly what they killed for: submission to Islamic laws forbidding criticism of Muhammad.

This submission heralds the death of free society. Once an idea – any idea — is established as beyond criticism, its adherents are free to exert their will on the larger population unchallenged. If that idea is Islam, it involves the imperative to kill or subjugate unbelievers that jihadis worldwide are acting upon. The shared objective of groups like the Organization of Islamic Cooperation and of jihadis who kill cartoonists is to intimidate the West into criminalizing criticism of Islam, which will hinder or obliterate altogether the ability of Western officials to understand the motives and goals of the jihadis. Then the jihad can proceed unopposed.

That’s why it isn’t just ill-judged, it is nothing short of disastrous that so many Western media outlets declined to reprint the cartoons, and that so many Western leaders have made statements assuring us that they believe in free expression, but of course within proper limits, and one should not offend people’s religious sensibilities. The free world is under siege. And its appointed guardians are swinging wide the gates.

Categories: Europe, Foreign policy, Free world, Freedom, Human rights, International Community, Islam, Islamic State, Islamophobia, Moral equivalence, Obama, Sharia law, Terrorism
Tags: Europe, Foreign Policy, Free world, Freedom, human rights, International Community, Islam, Islamic State, Islamophobia, Moral equivalence, Sharia law, Terrorism

Comments: 1 Comment

Archives