Posted tagged ‘Censorship’

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

July 6, 2016

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

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

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

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

hate-speech-YouTube

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Op-Ed: The American Gulag

June 26, 2016

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I welcomed him to the American Gulag.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So much for Muslim immigrant women on the move.

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

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

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

How Much of our Culture Are We Surrendering to Islam?

June 21, 2016

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or is it already too late?

Andrew McCarthy: Obama Administration ‘Becoming Sharia-Adherent’ in Scrubbing ‘Islam’ and ‘ISIS’ from Orlando Jihadi’s 911 Call

June 20, 2016

Andrew McCarthy: Obama Administration ‘Becoming Sharia-Adherent’ in Scrubbing ‘Islam’ and ‘ISIS’ from Orlando Jihadi’s 911 Call, BreitbartJohn Hayward, June 20, 2016

I think the Republican Congress has been derelict in that duty – but at the same time, I think it’s self-perpetuating in a way because I guess their ostensible reason for being derelict in their duty is that the President is popular. But perhaps the President is popular because they’re derelict in their duty.”

What they’re trying to do is purge any alternative explanation. So the administration has the position that “violent extremism,” which is what they call it, is disconnected from any credible interpretation of Islam – that Islam is singularly a “religion of peace,” and there is to be no other interpretation of it. And, therefore, anything that shows the direct nexus between Islamic doctrine and jihadist terror is to be suppressed.

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

Former prosecutor and National Review contributing editor Andrew McCarthy appeared on Monday’s Breitbart News Daily to discuss his latest column, “Obama: Anti-Anti-Terrorist” with SiriusXM host Stephen K. Bannon.

When Bannon welcomed McCarthy by noting that “you basically imply there are Islamic supremacists inside the national security apparatus of the United States government,” McCarthy replied, “I hope I did more than imply it.”

McCarthy said:

I stated it outright, and think that’s pretty clear, just from some reporting that’s recently come out about Laila Alawa, a 25-year-old Syrian immigrant who’s somehow on the Homeland Security advisory council, that gives the President advice on counter-terrorism policy – a woman who said that basically 9/11 was a good thing and changed the world for good, which is just about as stunning as anything I’ve ever seen from someone who has a quasi-official government position.

“I think it should be underscored that she’s hardly singular,” McCarthy continued. “The President has been turning for advice – policy advice that has been implemented from the beginning of his administration – to leaders of Islamist organizations that are tied to the Muslim Brotherhood.”

McCarthy said his book The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America chronicles how the Muslim Brotherhood has “very explicitly stated – and this has been proved in federal court, this is not just Andy’s speculation here – that their mission in the United States, and basically the West, but particularly the United States, is the elimination and destruction of Western civilization from within by sabotage.”

McCarthy said there was little congressional oversight of the Obama administration’s alternately clumsy and outrageous handling of the Islamist threat because “people in Congress, particularly Republicans in Congress, believe that the country has changed.”

He argued:

We always like to assume, on our side, that it’s a center-right country. In fact, it’s hard to square that with the fact that there are public opinion polls that tell us with all the abusive things that have happened, all the lawlessness that has happened – and it’s not really disputable, or credibly contestable, that there’s been lawlessness – nevertheless, President Obama has an approval rating of something in the area of 52 or 53 percent.”

He said that “political cases against abuse of power don’t just spontaneously appear,” so it is “incumbent on the people in Congress to make those cases because unlike the rest of us who don’t have political authority, it’s a responsibility of the legislative branch to rein in executive abuse.”

If Congress won’t exercise that authority, McCarthy charged, they’re “as derelict as the Executive Branch officials who are causing the lawlessness, and who are conducting themselves in a rogue way.”

“When I was a prosecutor, can you imagine how successful would I have been in prosecuting a case if I just sat at the government’s table and did nothing, while the defense lawyer did all the work?” he asked. “It’s one thing to say crimes have been committed. It’s another thing to say you have the duty to get up and prove it to the jury.”

He suggested:

I think the Republican Congress has been derelict in that duty – but at the same time, I think it’s self-perpetuating in a way because I guess their ostensible reason for being derelict in their duty is that the President is popular. But perhaps the President is popular because they’re derelict in their duty.”

McCarthy said the announcement by Attorney General Loretta Lynch that references to Islam and ISIS will be scrubbed from transcripts of jihadi Omar Mateen’s call to 911 during the Orlando attack was clear evidence that “the government is becoming sharia-adherent, and the Left is using the same tactic with respect to law enforcement against radical Islamic extremism that it uses in the area of what they call ‘climate change.’”

“That is, they have an official version of events, which may be part of a counter-universe, but it’s their story and they’re sticking to it,” he elaborated, adding:

What they’re trying to do is purge any alternative explanation. So the administration has the position that “violent extremism,” which is what they call it, is disconnected from any credible interpretation of Islam – that Islam is singularly a “religion of peace,” and there is to be no other interpretation of it. And, therefore, anything that shows the direct nexus between Islamic doctrine and jihadist terror is to be suppressed.

McCarthy noted the absurdity of the situation by looking back to his time as a prosecutor in the 1990s, when he proved “exactly that connection” in court: “that is, that there are these commands to violence in the Koran, they’re mediated by these influential jihadist sharia jurists, and then acts of terrorism get carried out.”

“For doing that, the Justice Department gave me the highest award that the Justice Department gives out,” he recalled, adding:

Now, what I proved in court is deemed to be something that’s so improper that it can’t go in the Justice Department’s official account of what happened, in what was obviously a jihadist attack. So we’ve gone from rewarding people who demonstrate what the truth is to suppressing the truth and making the people who would expose it persona non grata.

U.S. Attorney General Scrubs Orlando 911 Transcripts

June 20, 2016

U.S. Attorney General Scrubs Orlando 911 Transcripts, Clarion Project, Meira Svirsky, June 20, 2016

Orlando-Attack-HP_3

In an interview with NBC, we learned from the U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch that only a partial transcript of the 911 calls made by the Orlando shooter will be released by the FBI to the public.

Reminiscent of other administration scrubbings, what will be omitted from the transcripts will be references to the motive of the shooter – namely, his pledge of allegiance to the Islamic State as well as his Islamist grievances about American foreign policy vis-à-vis Muslim countries.

“What we’re not going to do is further proclaim this man’s pledges of allegiance to terrorist groups, and further his propaganda,” Lynch said. “We are not going to hear him make his assertions of allegiance [to the Islamic State].”

Yet earlier when announcing the release of the transcripts, Lynch told CNN, “It’s been our goal to get as much information into the public domain as possible, so people can understand, as we do, possibly what motivated this killer, what led him to this place, and also provide us with information.”

When pressed by CNN what those transcripts will tell us about his motivation, Lynch calmly answers, “He talked about his pledges of allegiance to a terrorist group. He talked about his motivations for why he was claiming at that time he was committing this horrific act. He talked about American policy…”

Yet, those passages will be the very ones that will be redacted, as Lynch explained in an Orwellian fashion on CNN, “The reason why we’re going to limit these transcripts is to avoid re-victimizing those who went through this horror.”

To the contrary.

The immediate victims of this attack as well as the larger American public deserve to know and be able to discuss the motivations of this attack.

It is hard to imagine how speaking openly about the motive – so that steps can be made to prevent such an attack from happening again – can “re-victimize” the victims. Loved ones have been lost. Nothing will bring them back. Others have been injured – most likely maimed for life both physically and psychologically.

Nothing will make that horror go away.

What will help both the victims and the public at large is trying knowing that proper steps have been taken to prevent such a horror from happening again, and that justice will ultimately prevail.

As pointed out by Daniel Greenfield in an article titled, “Islamophobia Kills,” a culture has been created by the Obama administration along with organizations like the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) that has made Americans afraid to call out potential killers for fear of being labeled anti-Muslim racists — Islamophobes.

In the case of the Orlando shooter, when Mateen was reported by a fellow employee for his homophobic and racist comments while working for at G4S Security, the company refused to take action because Mateen was Muslim and did not want to be accused of being Islamophobic.  The employee, Daniel Gilroy, a former police officer who described Mateen as “unhinged and untable,” ended up quitting his own job to avoid Mateen after Mateen began stalking him.

Gilroy said the attack by Maten did not come as a surprise to him.

Later, when he was being investigated by the FBI, Mateen claimed he was reacting to Islamophobic comments by his co-workers. The FBI later concluded that Mateen’s professed Al Qaeda ties and terrorist threats were reactions to “being marginalized because of his Muslim faith.”

We saw a similar refusal to report suspicious activity with the San Bernadino killers. Neighbors noticed suspicious activity but didn’t report it for fear of being labeled anti-Muslim racists — Islamophobes.

The Fort Hood killer, Nidal Hasan, was also on the FBI’s radar. As Greenfield notes, “Nidal Hasan handed out business cards announcing that he was a Jihadist. He delivered a presentation justifying suicide bombings, but no action was taken. Like Omar [Mateen], the FBI was aware of Hasan. It knew that he was talking to Al Qaeda bigwig Anwar Al-Awlaki, yet nothing was done. Instead of worrying about his future victims, the FBI was concerned that investigating him and interviewing him would ‘harm Hasan’s career’.”

Greenfield adds, “One of his classmates later said that the military authorities ‘don’t want to say anything because it would be considered questioning somebody’s religious belief, or they’re afraid of an equal opportunity lawsuit.’”

An interesting poll taken in the wake of the Orlando attack shows just how far this “see something, say nothing” mentality has taken hold in America. When asked if the Orlando incident was more a function of Islamic terrorism or gun violence, 60 percent of Democratic voters answered gun violence, while only 20 percent said Islamic terrorism. (Of Republican voters, 79 percent answered Islamic terrorism.)

While it is true that a man with Mateen’s history should never have been able to have bought a gun (and this in itself is a travesty of the intent of the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution), the gun he used was the physical facilitator of his Islamist ideology.

“Re-victimization,” in the words of U.S. Attorney General Lynch, will apply to all of us if the Islamist ideology and motivations of these killers are not openly addressed, taken seriously and made as the basis of a plan of action to counteract them.

In addition to creating an open season for Islamist attacks, ultimately the strategy of the administration will backfire. As noted by former Islamist radical Maajid Nawaz, If we refuse to isolate, name and shame Islamist extremism, from fear of increasing anti-Muslim bigotry, we only increase anti-Muslim bigotry.

All Your Social Media Belong to the EU

June 10, 2016

All Your Social Media Belong to the EU, Front Page Magazine, Daniel Greenfield, June 10, 2016

Social media

For a decade, the top search result for “EU referendum” on Google was the political blog EU Referendum. Then it was abruptly displaced by solidly pro-EU media outlets. It appeared that someone at Google had decided that search traffic should be driven to pro-EU sites. Ingrid Carlqvist, a Swedish columnist who covers, among other things, migrant violence, at Gatestone, had her Facebook account deleted after posting a video detailing migrant rapes in Sweden.

These seemingly isolated incidents fit into a larger pattern as Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Twitter helped create and signed a “code of conduct” banning hate speech. Facebook had already become notorious for its political agenda while Twitter had created a Trust and Safety Council filled with extremist left-wing groups like Feminist Frequency to censor the politically incorrect.

Google has historically been a pro-free speech outlier. Its politics have never been ambiguous, but it has eschewed the overt censorship of some of its new partners working to keep the EU free of political dissent. But the code of conduct goes well beyond censorship. The companies will be working to strengthen their “ongoing partnerships with civil society organisations who will help flag content that promotes incitement to violence and hateful conduct”. That amounts to empowering left-wing advocacy groups to dictate content removal to major companies. It means that not only Twitter, but Facebook, Google and Microsoft will get their own Trust and Safety Council. It may be called something else. It may not even have a name. But it will have power. That’s what this really means.

And it’s only a starting point in a larger propaganda initiative.

“The IT Companies and the European Commission, recognising the value of independent counter speech against hateful rhetoric and prejudice, aim to continue their work in identifying and promoting independent counter-narratives,” the press release reads.

Even more than the censorship, the counter-narratives push represents a troubling development.

Left-wing groups won’t just be embedded as censors, but major tech firms will be expected to promote their agendas. And the biggest resource that companies with massive social media platforms have at their disposal isn’t mere money. It’s the ability to decide what is trending and what isn’t.

If a story about Islamic terrorism trends, will Facebook or Twitter be expected to promote a counter-narrative from an Islamic group? How exactly is this any different than traditional propaganda?

“The IT Companies to intensify their work with CSOs to deliver best practice training on countering hateful rhetoric and prejudice and increase the scale of their proactive outreach to CSOs to help them deliver effective counter speech campaigns. The European Commission, in cooperation with Member States, to contribute to this endeavour by taking steps to map CSOs’ specific needs and demands in this respect,” the release tells us.

CSO stands for Civil Society Organization. It’s used more often now that NGO carries with it an air of contempt. That last sentence informs us that the CSOs will have “demands.” The European Commission will help leverage and assemble these demands. Meanwhile major tech firms will be working to aid these CSOs in pushing their agenda.

What will this look like? We got a preview of it with Facebook’s “Initiative for Civil Courage Online”. Facebook had been facing pressure from Germany’s Merkel who was worried over public outrage at crimes committed by her Muslim migrant arrivals. Censorship was obviously the order of the day.

The Initiative promoted Klick It Out which, in properly Orwellian fashion, urged people to “See It. Report It.” The “It” being “Social Media Discrimination.” And then users were expected to “Klick It Out”. It was a failure. But Facebook and friends are doubling down.

Tech companies love the idea of creating “counter-narratives” because it’s cheaper to throw some money at an NGO or CSO, or to boost their profile, than to invest still more money in censorship. It’s not because they have a bias for free speech, but because active censorship, even when outsourced to poorer countries, which it often is, demands more resources. Pushing an agenda is cheap.

And the goal of companies like Facebook is to increase usage, rather than reduce it, which is why COO Sheryl Sandberg championed “like attacks” in which users flood the pages of bigots with their own speech. But the code of conduct is a thorough rejection of any of that self-interested libertarianism. Censorship is packaged together with agenda pushing. There might be like attacks, but what the EU really wanted was deletion and promotion for the groups that its leaders support. And they got it.

Some fraction of these efforts may be directed at ISIS supporters, but there is no particular reason to be optimistic about that. By putting CSOs first, the message is that this isn’t about counter-terrorism, but about promoting one set of political agendas at the expense of another. Much like Twitter’s Trust and Safety Council, this is about selecting who should speak and who should be silenced.

Programs like these operate under the umbrella of fighting extremism. And extremism, unlike blowing up buses or beheading hostages, is in the eye of the beholder. And the beholder is a tech company standing on the left while looking to the right. The obsession with radicalization treats lawful speech as the precursor to violence. It also assumes that Muslim terrorism emerges from a cycle of extremism between Muslims and critics of Islam. Silence the critics and you stop the terrorism.

European governments, like those of Angela Merkel, are far less worried about Salafists than they are about domestic political dissent. When Merkel berated Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg over insufficient censorship, it wasn’t because she objected to the pipeline that feeds Muslims from Germany into ISIS. Muslim terrorism is inconvenient, but political dissent is politically explosive. Social media comprise an alternative organizing force that counters the dominance of media narratives. That makes it a threat.

Attempts to silence more prominent voices like Richard North and Ingrid Carlqvist have run into a backlash, but it’s impossible to rally in support of each ordinary person who has their account shut down or their blog pushed down in the rankings for having politically incorrect views. Social media at their best bring people together. This initiative is about disrupting social organizations that are disapproved of.

It is about preserving the dominance of a government-media narrative while promoting astroturf organizations that try to appear independent, but really echo that very same narrative.

Private companies have the right to determine what content appears on their platforms. But Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Twitter have become part of an alliance with governments and advocacy groups to maintain a particular narrative. They will not simply be removing hateful content. Instead they have undertaken to play a role in putting forward a particular set of ideas by particular governments.

That’s propaganda and it is the opposite of how the internet was meant to be used.

The deal puts a series of private organizations, backed by EU government power, in charge of determining the content of social media, both positive and negative. Social media were meant to be centered around the user. Instead this deal displaces the user and replaces him or her with the EU.

Muslim Police Chief Says ‘Offending Culture, Religion And Tradition’ Not Protected As Free Speech

May 9, 2016

Muslim Police Chief Says ‘Offending Culture, Religion And Tradition’ Not Protected As Free Speech

by Liam Deacon

9 May 2016

Source: Muslim Police Chief Says ‘Offending Culture, Religion And Tradition’ Not Protected As Free Speech – Breitbart

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A Muslim Police Chief Inspector for Greater Manchester has indicated that, according to his understanding, “Freedom of speech does not mean freedom of offending culture, religion or tradition”.

Chief Inspector Umer Khan made the statement on social media this weekend, and was immediately questioned by alarmed secular, and free speech campaigners.

He then apologised to those defending the right to be offensive for any “offence cause”, and argued that, “free speech should be used to promote tolerance & respect all.”

“[The statement regarding free speech] was a thought after a moving visit to Auschwitz”, he added.

When asked if Mr. Khan and the police force generally support the right to offend religious beliefs, the Greater Manchester Police press office told Breitbart London: “I don’t think we support anyone who would want to say anything offence[sic]”.

“It’s a storm in a tea cup… It’s about promoting tolerance, freedom of speech, that’s all he meant with it. He didn’t mean for it to be taken in an offensive way at all… it’s ironic, freedom of speech is what he’s now getting in trouble for”, the press office added.

A Greater Manchester Police Spokesperson added in an official statement: “A GMP Chief Inspector made a post on a personal Twitter account which has been taken out of context.

“He has apologised for any concern caused, which wasn’t the intention and has deleted the post.”

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Speaking at the Jewish representative council of Greater Manchester last year, the senior Muslim police officer warned that religious tension was increasing in the city, and said police would tackle perceived “hate speech”.

“I am proud to be a police officer working in Greater Manchester and proud to be a Muslim. We all need to respect each other’s religions”, he said.

Continuing: “Sadly, what is happening in other parts of the world is now coming to impact on the streets of our local communities where we like to think there is supposed to be peace, harmony, respect and tolerance.

“Over the last few years I have seen an increase in tensions between different communities and there have been massive increases in hate crime [against both Muslims and Jews]”, he said.

To tackle the perceived “hate speech”, Mr. Kahn explained how Greater Manchester Police have launch a ‘We Stand Together’ campaign, which has been promoted alongside a phone app to make reporting perceived “hate crimes” easier.

However, a writer at the Godless Spell Checker blog, which first reported Mr. Khan’s Tweet, gave a well rehearsed argument for why “offending’” religion is important, and not always a “hate crime”.

“Of course, any thinking person knows that [offending dogma is] exactly what freedom of speech means. Speech can never truly be ‘free’ unless it includes the right to say things some people may not enjoy hearing.

“Indeed, the right to ‘blaspheme’, mock sacred cows and challenge taboos is what has led to progress in any civil society. The price for this has always been ‘offense’. And the great thing about ‘offense’ is that it’s cheap.

“By Umer Khan’s understanding, we are not free to offend people who endorse FGM, denigrate gay people as ‘sinners’ or think the appropriate punishment for adultery is death by stoning. It’s their ‘culture’, ‘tradition’ and ‘religion’ after all.”

Mr. Khan has been a police officer for more than twenty years, yet this re-interpretation of free speech comes at a time when British police are increasing their efforts to prosecute any “offensive” posts made on social media.

Just this week, a man from North Lanarkshire was arrested and detained for making a comedy video of his dog acting like a Nazi. According to the Daily Mail, police said the arrest should be a warning that videos which cause offence will not be tolerated.

In April this year, Glasgow Police threatened social media users, ordering them to be “kind” and not “hurtful” unless they wanted to “receive a visit… this weekend”.

The force also investigated the provocative conservative commentator Katie Hopkins for an “offensive” joke about a Scottish nurse being treated for Ebola.

In February this year, Scottish Police arrested a 41-year-old man under the Communications Act after receiving a report of a supposedly “offensive” comment made on Facebook regarding Syrian migrants.