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Austrian Press Council: Don’t Report Anything that Could ‘Stir Up Prejudices’

December 12, 2016

Austrian Press Council: Don’t Report Anything that Could ‘Stir Up Prejudices’, Breitbart, Virginia Hale, December 12, 2016

germany-reinstates-border-controls-to-stem-migrant-influx-640x480Sean Gallup/Getty Images

In a checklist on “responsible” reporting on migrants, Austria’s Press Council instructs journalists to omit any information that could “stir up prejudices”.

The checklist by the self-regulatory institution, which enforces a “code of ethics” for the country’s media, the Press Council, also advises journalists to leave out names if they’re foreign sounding and asks them to consider whether stories could be left open for comments “without having to fear the discussion getting out of hand”, before publishing them.

Warning that the topic of “refugees” is discussed “emotionally and controversially” not just among the general public but also by the media in Austria, the Press Council proclaims the list gives reporters a chance of “self-reflection”, and provides them with “practical guidelines”.

The first points in the checklist ask reporters to consider whether they would report the wrongful behaviour if it had not been committed by a migrant, whether the topic has been “adequately researched”, and to reflect on whether they have “presented the facts that are required for a comprehensive and balanced reporting of [their] topic”.

Following on, most of the subsequent Press Council directives appear to make self-censorship of stories so as to avoid causing “prejudice” – the primary focus of “responsible journalism in refugee reporting”.

Journalists are asked to think about “whether [their] reporting, choice of words or selection of photos could strengthen prejudices”, and “whether information that could stir up prejudices could be left out, without changing the meaning and true content of the story, or impairing readers’ understanding of the subject”.

 The list also warns reporters to check whether a piece contains any other information in a piece that might “thwart their intentions” not to inflame prejudice. “E.g. not mentioning a person’s origin, but mentioning a foreign first name”, the Press Council suggests.

It adds: “Note: the mere naming of the origin of a [suspected criminal] foreigner/asylum seeker/migrant is not an ethical infringement according to the current practice of the Press Council senate. However, journalists should weigh up whether it’s required for the reader’s understanding.”

Before publishing a story regarding migrants, the Press Council also asks reporters and people working in the media to consider whether they can “open an internet forum on the topic without having to fear that the discussion gets out of hand”.

Comments under the checklist are largely sceptical of the points, with one reader declaring: “This is a checklist for self-censorship. Do not be surprised if you are less and less believed… “

The Press Council “sees itself as a modern self-regulatory institution in the press sector, which serves editorial quality assurance as well as ensuring freedom of the press”.

In November, a comment piece in the Business Special supplement of NEWS magazine, which argued that Angela Merkel’s decision to open Europe’s borders will have disastrous consequences, fell foul of the council.

According to its ruling, the Press Council’s senate found “particularly problematic” the article’s assertion that Muslim migrants “have not come to integrate”, a statement which they say “fosters prejudices and fears”.

The judgement also condemned as unethical that the piece “attributed very negative attitudes and characteristics” to Muslim migrants, and said the article “gives the reader the impression that these immigrants are backward”.

Categories: Austria, Censorship, Islam - submission, Islamisation, Media and Islam, Prejudice
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The Dutch Death Spiral

December 11, 2016

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Since then, many Dutch artists have capitulated to fear.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But can we talk?

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

Categories: Censorship, Europe, Freedom of speech, Geert Wilders, Hate speech, Islam - submission, Islamic integration, Islamic invasion, Islamic supremacy, Islamisation, Multiculturalism, Netherlands, Thought police
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The West’s Politically Correct Dictatorship

December 6, 2016

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

November 23, 2016

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

newspeak

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Categories: Academia, Censorship, Control of the people, Democracy, Dissent, Freedom, Gulags, Media, Multiculturalism, Political correctness, Serfdom, social media
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Transfer of Internet control could lead to silencing of criticism of jihad terror; Soros-funded group says relax, all will be well

September 30, 2016

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

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

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

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

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

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

icann

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Categories: Censorship, George Soros, ICANN, Internet, Islamic nations and the internet, Obama and internet, Oil
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Meet the New Authoritarian Masters of the Internet

September 29, 2016

Meet the New Authoritarian Masters of the Internet

by John Hayward

29 Sep 2016

Source: Meet the New Authoritarian Masters of the Internet – Breitbart

Getty Images

President Barack Obama’s drive to hand off control of Internet domains to a foreign multi-national operation will give some very unpleasant regimes equal say over the future of online speech and commerce.

In fact, they are likely to have much more influence than America, because they will collectively push hard for a more tightly controlled Internet, and they are known for aggressively using political and economic pressure to get what they want.

Here’s a look at some of the regimes that will begin shaping the future of the Internet in just a few days, if President Obama gets his way.

China

China wrote the book on authoritarian control of online speech. The legendary “Great Firewall of China” prevents citizens of the communist state from accessing global content the Politburo disapproves of. Chinese technology companies are required by law to provide the regime with backdoor access to just about everything.

The Chinese government outright banned online news reporting in July, granting the government even tighter control over the spread of information. Websites are only permitted to post news from official government sources. Chinese online news wasn’t exactly a bastion of freedom before that, of course, but at least the government censors had to track down news stories they disliked and demand the site administrators take them down.

Unsurprisingly, the Chinese Communists aren’t big fans of independent news analysis or blogging, either. Bloggers who criticize the government are liable to be charged with “inciting subversion,” even when the writer in question is a Nobel Peace Prize winner.

Chinese citizens know better than to get cheeky on social media accounts, as well. Before online news websites were totally banned, they were forbidden from reporting news gathered from social media, without government approval. Spreading anything the government decides is “fake news” is a crime.

In a report labeling China one of the worst countries for Internet freedom in the world, Freedom House noted they’ve already been playing games with Internet registration and security verification:

The China Internet Network Information Center was found to be issuing false digital security certificates for a number of websites, including Google, exposing the sites’ users to “man in the middle” attacks.

The government strengthened its real-name registration laws for blogs, instant-messaging services, discussion forums, and comment sections of websites.

A key feature of China’s online censorship is that frightened citizens are not entirely certain what the rules are. Huge ministries work tirelessly to pump out content regulations and punish infractions. Not all of the rules are actually written down. As Foreign Policy explained:

Before posting, a Chinese web user is likely to consider basic questions about how likely a post is to travel, whether it runs counter to government priorities, and whether it calls for action or is likely to engender it. Those answers help determine whether a post can be published without incident — as it is somewhere around 84 percent or 87 percent of the time — or is instead likely to lead to a spectrum of negative consequences varying from censorship, to the deletion of a user’s account, to his or her detention, even arrest and conviction.

This was accompanied by a flowchart demonstrating “what gets you censored on the Chinese Internet.” It is not a simple flowchart.

Beijing is not even slightly self-conscious about its authoritarian control of the Internet. On the contrary, their censorship policies are trumpeted as “Internet sovereignty,” and they aggressively believe the entire world should follow their model, as the Washington Post reported in a May 2016 article entitled “China’s Scary Lesson to the World: Censoring the Internet Works.”

China already has a quarter of the planet’s Internet users locked up behind the Great Firewall. How can anyone doubt they won’t use the opportunity Obama is giving them, to pursue their openly stated desire to lock down the rest of the world?

Russia

Russia and China are already working together for a more heavily-censored Internet. Foreign Policy reported one of Russia’s main goals at an April forum was to “harness Chinese expertise in Internet management to gain further control over Russia’s internet, including foreign sites accessible there.”

Russia’s “top cop,” Alexander Bastrykin, explicitly stated Russia needs to stop “playing false democracy” and abandon “pseudo-liberal values” by following China’s lead on Internet censorship, instead of emulating the U.S. example. Like China’s censors, Russian authoritarians think “Internet freedom” is just coded language for the West imposing “cultural hegemony” on the rest of the world.

Just think what Russia and China will be able to do about troublesome foreign websites, once Obama surrenders American control of Internet domains!

Russian President Vladimir Putin has “chipped away at Internet freedom in Russia since he returned to the Kremlin in 2012,” as International Business Times put it in a 2014 article.

One of Putin’s new laws requires bloggers with over 3,000 readers to register with the government, providing their names and home addresses. As with China, Russia punishes online writers for “spreading false information,” and once the charge is leveled, it’s basically guilty-until-proven-innocent. For example, one of the “crimes” that can get a blogger prosecuted in Russia is alleging the corruption of a public official, without ironclad proof.

Human-rights group Agora estimates that Russian Internet censorship grew by 900% in 2015 alone, including both court orders and edicts from government agencies that don’t require court approval. Censorship was expected to intensify even further throughout 2016. Penalties include prison time, even for the crime of liking or sharing banned content on social media.

Putin, incidentally, has described the entire Internet as a CIA plot designed to subvert regimes like his. There will be quite a few people involved in the new multi-national Internet control agency who think purging the Web of American influence is a top priority.

The Russian government has prevailed upon Internet Service Providers to block opposition websites during times of political unrest, in addition to thousands of bans ostensibly issued for security, crime-fighting, and anti-pornography purposes.

Many governments follow the lead of Russia and China in asserting the right to shut down “extremist” or “subversive” websites. In the United States, we worry about law enforcement abusing its authority while battling outright terrorism online, arguing that privacy and freedom of speech must always be measured against security, no matter how dire the threat. In Russia, a rough majority of the population has no problem with the notion of censoring the Internet in the name of political stability, and will countenance absolutely draconian controls against perceived national security threats. This is a distressingly common view in other nations as well: stability justifies censorship and monitoring, not just physical security.

Turkey

Turkey’s crackdown on the Internet was alarming even before the aborted July coup attempt against authoritarian President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Turkey has banned social media sites, including temporary bans against even giants like Facebook and YouTube, for political reasons. Turkish dissidents are accustomed to such bans coming down on the eve of elections. The Turkish telecom authority can impose such bans without a court order, or a warning to offending websites.

Turkey is often seen as the world leader in blocking Twitter accounts, in addition to occasionally shutting the social media service down completely, and has over a 100,000 websites blacklisted. Criticizing the government online can result in anything from lost employment to criminal charges. And if you think social-media harassment from loyal supporters of the government in power can get pretty bad in the U.S., Turks sometimes discover that hassles from pro-regime trolls online are followed by visits from the police.

Turkish law infamously makes it a crime to insult the president, a law Erdogan has already attempted to impose beyond Turkey’s borders. One offender found himself hauled into court for creating a viral meme – the sort of thing manufactured by the thousands every hour in America – that noted Erdogan bore a certain resemblance to Gollum from Lord of the Rings. The judge in his case ordered expert testimony on whether Gollum was evil to conclusively determine whether the meme was an illegal insult to the president.

The Turkish example introduces another idea common to far too many of the countries Obama wants to give equal say over the future of the Internet: intimidation is a valid purpose for law enforcement. Many of Turkey’s censorship laws are understood to be mechanisms for intimidating dissidents, raising the cost of free speech enough to make people watch their words very carefully. “Think twice before you Tweet” might be good advice for some users, but regimes like Erdogan’s seek to impose that philosophy on everyone. This runs strongly contrary to the American understanding of the Internet as a powerful instrument that lowers the cost of speech to near-zero, the biggest quantum leap for free expression in human history. Zero-cost speech is seen as a big problem by many of the governments that will now place strong hands upon the global Internet rudder.

Turkey is very worried about “back doors” that allow citizens to circumvent official censorship, a concern they will likely bring to Internet control, along with like-minded authoritarian regimes. These governments will make the case that a free and open Internet is a direct threat to their “sovereign right” to control what their citizens read. As long as any part of the Internet remains completely free, no sector can be completely controlled.

Saudi Arabia

The Saudis aren’t too far behind China in the Internet rankings by Freedom House. Dissident online activity can bring jail sentences, plus the occasional public flogging.

This is particularly lamentable because Saudi Arabia is keenly interested in modernization, and sees the Internet as a valuable economic resource, along with a thriving social media presence. Freedom House notes the Internet “remains the least repressive space for expression in the country,” but “it is by no means free.”

“While the state focuses on combatting violent extremism and disrupting terrorist networks, it has clamped down on nonviolent liberal activists and human rights defenders with the same zeal, branding them a threat to the national order and prosecuting them in special terrorism tribunals,” Freedom House notes.

USA Today noted that as of 2014, Saudi Arabia had about 400,000 websites blocked, “including any that discuss political, social or religious topics incompatible with the Islamic beliefs of the monarchy.”

At one point the blacklist included the Huffington Post, which was banned for having the temerity to run an article suggesting the Saudi system might “implode” because of oil dependency and political repression. The best response to criticism that your government is too repressive is a blacklist!

The Saudis have a penchant for blocking messaging apps and voice-over-IP services, like Skype and Facetime. App blocking got so bad that Saudi users have been known to ask, “What’s the point of having the Internet?”

While some Saudis grumble about censorship, many others are active, enthusiastic participants in enforcement, filing hundreds of requests each day to have websites blocked. Religious figures supply many of these requests, and the government defends much of its censorship as the defense of Islamic values.

As with other censorious regimes, the Saudi monarchy worries about citizens using web services beyond its control to evade censorship, a concern that will surely be expressed loudly once America surrenders its command of Internet domains.

For the record, the Saudis’ rivals in Iran are heavy Internet censors too, with Stratfor listing them as one of the countries seeking Chinese assistance for “solutions on how best to monitor the Iranian population.”

North Korea

You can’t make a list of authoritarian nightmares without including the psychotic regime in Pyongyang, the most secretive government in the world.

North Korea is so repressive the BBC justly puts the word “Internet” in scare quotes, to describe the online environment. It doesn’t really interconnect with anything, except government propaganda and surveillance. Computers in the lone Internet cafe in Pyongyang actually boot up to a customized Linux operating system called “Red Star,” instead of Windows or Mac OS. The calendar software in Red Star measures the date from the birth of Communist founder Kim Il-sung, rather than the birth of Christ.

The “Internet” itself is a closed system called Kwangmyong, and citizens can only access it through a single state-run provider, with the exception of a few dozen privileged families that can punch into the real Internet.

Kwangmyong is often compared to the closed “intranet” system in a corporate office, with perhaps 5,000 websites available at most. Unsurprisingly, the content is mostly State-monitored messaging and State-supplied media. Contributors to these online services have reportedly been sent to re-education camps for typos. The North Koreans are so worried about outside contamination of their closed network that they banned wi-fi hotspots at foreign embassies, having noticed information-starved North Korean citizens clustering within range of those beautiful, uncensored wireless networks.

This doesn’t stop South Koreans from attempting cultural penetration of their squalid neighbor’s dismal little online network. Lately they’ve been doing it by loading banned information onto cheap memory sticks, tying them to balloons, and floating them across the border.

Sure, North Korea is the ultimate totalitarian nightmare, and since they have less than two thousand IP addresses registered in the entire country, the outlaw regime won’t be a big influence on Obama’s multi-national Internet authority, right?

Not so fast. As North Korea expert Scott Thomas Bruce told the BBC, authoritarian governments who are “looking at what is happening in the Middle East” see North Korea as a model to be emulated.

“They’re saying rather than let in Facebook, and rather than let in Twitter, what if the government created a Facebook that we could monitor and control?” Bruce explained.

Also, North Korea has expressed some interest in using the Internet as a tool for economic development, which means there would be more penetration of the actual global network into their society. They’ll be very interested in censoring and controlling that access, and they’ll need a lot more registered domains and IP addresses… the very resource Obama wants America to surrender control over.

Bottom line: contrary to left-wing cant, there is such a thing as American exceptionalism – areas in which the United States is demonstrably superior to every other nation, a leader to which the entire world should look for examples. Sadly, our society is losing its fervor for free expression, and growing more comfortable with suppressing “unacceptable” speech, but we’re still far better than anyone else in this regard.

The rest of the world, taken in total, is very interested in suppressing various forms of expression, for reasons ranging from security to political stability and religion. Those governments will never be comfortable, so long as parts of the Internet remain outside of their control. They have censorship demands they consider very reasonable, and absolutely vital. The website you are reading right now violates every single one of them, on a regular basis.

There may come a day we can safely remand control of Internet domains to an international body, but that day is most certainly not October 1, 2016.

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Western Publishers Submit to Islam

September 11, 2016

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Categories: Censorship, Islam - submission, Islamic supremacy, Islamisation, Islamist freedom, Publishers, Western civilization
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Fearing reprisal from Muslims, French publisher reverses decision to publish book critical of Islam

July 31, 2016

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

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

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

Hamed-Abdel-Samad

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Categories: Censorship, Europe, Islam - submission, Islamic integration, Islamic invasion, Islamic supremacy, Islamisation, Islamophobia
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Will Europe Refuse to Kneel like the Heroic French Priest?

July 30, 2016

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Categories: Censorship, Christians, Clash of civilizations, Cover-up, Europe, France, Islam - submission, Islam and Christianity, Islam and terrorism, Islam in Europe, Islamic integration, Islamic invasion, Islamic supremacy, Islamisation, Jews, Sharia law
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Judge: Instant Jail Term if you Criticise Migrants Again

July 16, 2016

Judge: Instant Jail Term if you Criticise Migrants Again

by Virginia Hale

16 Jul 2016

Source: Judge: Instant Jail Term if you Criticise Migrants Again – Breitbart

Alexander Scheuber/Getty Images

( Happened in Germany )

A couple appeared before a court to answer to charges of incitement because the man had established a Facebook group that was “hostile to refugees”.

Peter M. founded a secret group called AFB (Anti Refugee Movement) about a year ago on Facebook. As a secret group, people who are not members of it would have been unable to see its content. He and his wife Melanie were administrators of the Facebook group, so both had to attend the court on charges of sedition.

The offending Facebook page’s founding statement was read out in the courtroom. Written by Peter M. it read: “The war and economic refugees are flooding our country. They bring terror, fear, sorrow. They rape our women and put our children at risk. Bring an end to it!”.

Judge Lukas Neubeck, presiding over the case, said the fact the group had a picture of a German flag on its Facebook page confirmed for him that AFB is a right wing group.

In the two months following its creation, 900 members had joined the group. Merkur disclosed that soon after, others had stumbled upon the group and reported it to Facebook administrators.

Facebook examined activity posted within the group and could find no problems with it. Unhappy with the fact that Facebook would take no further action, anonymous users turned to a police station in Lübeck. There, officers traced the internet activity to a computer in Vierkirchen in the Dachau district of Bavaria.

Raiding the couple’s flat, their computing items and digital storage were seized by the criminal investigation department in Furstenfeldbruck.

In court, Peter M. and Melanie’s 10-month-old son sat on his mother’s lap and the pair had no one legally defending them. The barrister had resigned before the trial.

Within the Dachau courtroom Peter M. said:

“You cannot even express a little bit of criticism about refugees without getting called a Nazi.

“I just wanted to create a discussion forum where people can speak their minds about the refugees.”

Peter M. added that he had repeatedly checked members of the group and, if any had made radical posts, Peter M. had ensured they were deleted.

Scolding the pair, Judge Neubeck said: “The description of the group is a series of generalisations with a clear right-wing background.”

The Judge sentenced Peter M. to serve a nine month suspended prison sentence, on probation. Melanie was ordered to pay a fine of €1,200.

“I hope you are clear on the seriousness of the situation. If you sit again in front of me on the dock, you will go to jail,” Judge Neubeck warned.

The trial came amid a nationwide crackdown on “verbal radicalisation” by the German Federal Police (BKA). This week police launched a nationwide raid on the homes of people suspected of posting xenophobic and anti-mass migration posts on the internet.

Explaining why “hate” posts are a priority for the police, BKA President Holger Münch said attacks on migrant shelters were the result of “radicalisation” on social media.

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