Video: The Ongoing War Between Islam and Europe, Front Page Magazine, , May 25, 2015
In the following video, Hanne Nabintu Herland, a Norwegian historian of religions, author, and public debater, interviews Raymond Ibrahim on the history of Islam and the West. Topics include the original (but forgotten) Arab conquests, the (demonized) Crusades, and why the modern West’s notion of “history” is immensely skewed:
The Pope and the Palestinians, Front Page Magazine,
(The article also deal with Islam in general, as to which the Pope’s fantasies reflect those of the Obama Administration and others. — DM)
Perhaps the ultimate expression of this faith in Islam was Pope Francis’ assertion in Evangelii Gaudium that “authentic Islam and the proper reading of the Koran are opposed to every form of violence.”
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Contrary to reports in the mainstream press, Pope Francis did not call Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas “an angel of peace.” The correct translation of the pope’s words is “I have thought of you: that you could be an angel of peace.”
Why, then, was it so easy to believe the initial reports? Perhaps because the initial reports seemed to align with previous papal overtures to Palestinian leaders. Pope Francis had previously called Abbas a “man of peace,” he has shown sympathy for Palestinian grievances, and other popes have given the appearance of lending legitimacy to the Palestinian cause. For example, Pope John Paul II is reported to have received PLO leader Yasser Arafat on twelve different occasions.
Arafat was a terrorist. One would think that the Vatican would have wanted to limit its contacts with him. The same goes for Abbas. He has repeatedly honored and praised Palestinian “martyrs” who have slaughtered innocent Jews. There is evidence that he helped fund the 1972 operation that killed eleven Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympic Games. Why is he accorded such a cordial reception at the Vatican?
Although the Church has often declared its spiritual bond with Jews, it has had a less harmonious relationship with the nation where approximately half the world’s Jews now reside. The Vatican was the last Western government to accord diplomatic recognition to the State of Israel (in 1993). In addition, on several occasions, prominent prelates have likened Israel to King Herod, the murderer of innocents; and others have accused Israel of being an apartheid state. Meanwhile, Catholic NGOs such as Pax Christi and Trocaire have been major players in the boycott, divest, and sanctions campaign against Israel.
Of course, the BDS campaign directly impinges on Israeli security. So do the calls by numerous Christian leaders to tear down the security barrier that divides Israel from the West Bank. On his trip to the Holy Land a year ago, Pope Francis allowed himself to be photographed in prayer at a section of the wall where a large graffiti message compared Bethlehem to the Warsaw Ghetto. In a naïve gesture of solidarity with Palestinians, the pope was unwittingly lending credence to the idea that the Israelis could be compared to the Nazi occupiers of Poland.
The wall was constructed to prevent suicide attacks against Israeli citizens. It’s estimated that its construction has saved thousands of lives. To suggest that the wall is offensive, as many Christians have done, is to suggest that Jewish lives don’t matter. Moreover, such judgments betray an entirely lopsided view of the situation. Take the Gaza conflict. The Catholic hierarchy typically had little to say about the daily rocket barrages launched against Israeli citizens from Gaza, but it was quick to condemn Israel on those occasions when it finally retaliated. In a similar vein, Fouad Twal, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, blamed last year’s Gaza war on the Israeli embargo which, he said, had turned Gaza into “a factory of desperate people, designed to easily turn into extremists.”
In short, many Catholic leaders have shown a tendency to blame Israel for defending itself. The implication, of course, is that there would be no need for defense if Israel would only go to the peace table and make the concessions demanded of it by the Palestinians. The Vatican’s recent recognition of the “State of Palestine” reflects this naïve view of the situation. The supposition is that the Palestinians only want to be left in peace, whereas there is abundant evidence that the deepest desire of Palestinian leaders is for the extermination of Israel. Have Vatican officials never seen the photos of Abbas holding up a map of Palestine that encompasses all of the territory currently known as Israel? Are they unaware that he has personally called for a Palestine that is Judenrein? Didn’t they notice that when Israel gambled on disengaging from the Gaza Strip in 2005, Gaza soon turned into a terrorist state governed by an obsession to destroy Israel?
From the Israeli point of view, the call to cooperate with the Palestinian “peace” agenda is a call to cooperate in its own demise. Whenever I hear a UN representative or a Vatican spokesman call for peace talks between Israel and Palestine, I think of that scene from Goldfinger in which James Bond is about to be sliced in two by a laser beam. “Do you expect me to talk?” he asks. “No, Mr. Bond,” replies Goldfinger, “I expect you to die.” The Vatican hasn’t yet grasped the point that the Palestinian leadership doesn’t want the Israelis to talk, it wants them to die.
By words and by actions, the Vatican continues to suggest that there is a moral equivalence between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. This policy not only does a disservice to Jews, it also does a disservice to Catholics and other Christians. The main effect of the moral equivalence stance is to sow confusion among Catholics at a time when they need to be clear and unconfused—clear about Islam, that is. The Vatican policy toward Palestine reflects it overall stance toward the Islamic world. In other words, let’s overlook the dark side—the terrorism, the anti-Semitism, the oppression of Christians and other minorities—and let’s put the best face on the Mohammedan faith. For the sake of peace. And also for the sake of maintaining the threadbare narrative that Islam is a close cousin of Catholicism and, therefore, a religion of peace. Perhaps the ultimate expression of this faith in Islam was Pope Francis’ assertion in Evangelii Gaudium that “authentic Islam and the proper reading of the Koran are opposed to every form of violence.”
How well has this policy worked? Not very. Catholics and other Christians who lived in Muslim lands and who took seriously the Catholic version of “this has nothing to do with Islam” soon found that the tiny minority of misunderstanders were legion and had murder on their minds. Many found out too late. Years of indoctrination in the myth of Islam’s pacific nature had left them unprepared for the violence. Not that the Church was the only culprit. The secular opinion-makers had been preaching the same gospel. The irony is that the Church wants Israel to adopt the same policy of make-believe about Islam that has contributed to the death and displacement of millions of Christians.
The policy requires an almost total denial of facts. In the case of the Arab-Israeli crisis it means ignoring the terrorist ties of the Palestinian government, its unity coalition with Hamas, the massive state-sponsored indoctrination of Palestinian children, and the oft-stated goal of eliminating Israel. Ironically, it also necessitates that one ignore the ongoing persecution of Christians in the Palestinian territories.
The Palestinian leaders do a good job of hijacking Christian themes and imagery in order to gull Christians into thinking that they are, indeed, brothers in Christ. Thus, Palestinians have milked the massacre-of-the-innocents meme for all its worth. They also like to claim that Jesus was the first Palestinian. Another favorite theme is that the Palestinian people are the “new Jesus” who is being crucified by the Israelis.
Many in the Catholic hierarchy seem to fall for the ruse, but the steady exodus of Christians from the Palestinian territories tells a different story. The overall population of Christians in the Palestinian areas has declined from 15 percent in 1950 to 2 percent today. After the Palestinian Authority took control over Bethlehem in 1995, the Christian population there declined by half. In the Gaza Strip, only a few hundred Christians remain. That’s because Christians in Palestine, like Christians in most Muslim-majority societies, are treated as second-class citizens—subject to rape, intimidation, and legalized theft.
Meanwhile, the Christian population of Israel continues to grow. Palestinian Christians want to live there and so do persecuted Christians in other parts of the Middle East. Despite years of propaganda to the contrary, they have come to realize that Israel is a safe haven in a world of Islamic chaos.
Do Christians who migrate to Israel know something that the Vatican doesn’t know? The facts are there for everyone to see, but not everyone sees them. Why do Catholic leaders persist in assigning moral equivalence when there is no moral equivalence? Normally, a belief in moral equivalence grows out of a relativistic outlook. But presumably we can rule that out in the case of Catholic prelates. A more likely cause of their moral neutrality is a misapplication of the principle of “judge not.” Christians today are highly conscious of the sins of Western civilization and are therefore reluctant to judge those who lie outside it—in this case, Muslims. However, the principle is meant to apply to judgments about the state of an individual’s soul, not his behavior. And it was never meant to apply to withholding judgments about ideologies and belief systems.
The reluctance to see the mote in the other’s eye can eventually slide over into willful blindness. There are numerous warnings in the New Testament about spiritual blindness and they apply to those within the Church as well as to those without. The big danger for Church leaders is not that they will be seen as judgmental in the eyes of the world, but that they will be seen as foolishly naïve in the eyes of history.
“First comes Saturday, then comes Sunday” is a well-known slogan in the Middle East. It means that after the Islamists finish with the Jews, they will come after the Christians. The fate of the Saturday people and the Sunday people is intertwined. And the fate of both is put in jeopardy when Christian leaders insist on holding on to a fantasy-based picture of Islam.
Saudi Rapist in Colorado Says Sex Offender Program is Against His Religion, Front Page Magazine, Daniel Greenfield, May 17, 2015
Rape however isn’t against his religion.
Homaidan al-Turki’s entire defense strategy from the beginning was Islam. The member of a prominent Saudi family claimed that the prosecution was Islamophobic.
“We are Muslim. We are different. The state has criminalized these basic Muslim behaviors. Attacking traditional Muslim behaviors is a focal point of the prosecution.”
He had a point, because the behavior he was charged with was commonplace back in Saudi Arabia.
The victim slept on a mattress on the basement floor, was paid less than $2 a day, and Al-Turki eventually intimidated her into sex acts that culminated in her rape in late 2004, according to prosecutors.
Once in prison, the Saudis tried to get him transferred/released back home, but public outrage stopped that at least temporarily.
Now we’re apparently back to Al-Turki’s insistence that he shouldn’t have to undergo sex offender treatment.
Al-Turki told prison officials in 2013 that the sex offender treatment programme “conflicts with [his] Islamic faith”, according to a letter by the then executive director of the Colorado Department of Corrections, Tom Clements.
His lawyers told the court in the same year that the program: “would require [him] to look at photos that included women in bathing suits or undergarments as part of the evaluation process”, AP reported.
That would be the Abel Screening which is supposed to test for assorted deviancies. Undergoing it would be an important prerequisite to parole or transferring Al-Turki to a Saudi prison/resort.
Al-Turki’s people have rejected it because it would mean admitting that he did something wrong, also the group would be run by a woman and there are the photos of men, women and children in swimsuits.
Obviously Saudi mores and Islamic law say that Homaidan Al-Turki did nothing wrong. ISIS’ rapes and sex slaves show us how that works, but Saudi Arabia runs a low key version of the same thing.
The entire premise of the program is incompatible with Islam. It’s Islamophobic since it rejects the Islamic idea that Muslim men can rape non-Muslim women within the context of a hostile environment, especially in a non-Muslim country.
So we just have to decide between Saudi ISIS law and American law. It’s that simple.
Muslim Rape Gangs, Terrorists as ‘Pop-Idols,’ and the Trafficking of Children, Gatestone Institute, Soeren Kern, May 17, 2015
(What is an “extremist?” — DM)
What follows is a summary of some of Islam and Islam-related issues in Britain during April 2015, categorized into four broad themes: 1) Islamic extremism; 2) British multiculturalism; 3) Muslim integration; and 4) Muslims and the British general elections.
British police believe that about 600 Britons have travelled to Syria and Iraq since the conflict began in early 2011. About half of those are believed to have returned to the UK.
On April 1, police in Turkey detained nine British nationals from Rochdale, Greater Manchester, who were allegedly seeking to join the Islamic State in Syria. The nine — five adults and four children, including a one-year-old baby — were arrested in the Turkish city of Hatay.
One of those arrested was Waheed Ahmed, a student of politics at Manchester University. His father Shakil, a Labour Party councilor in Rochdale, said he thought his son was doing an internship in Birmingham. He said:
“It’s a total mystery to me why he’s there, as I was under the impression he was on a work placement in Birmingham. My son is a good Muslim and his loyalties belong to Britain, so I don’t understand what he’s doing there. If I thought for a second that he was in danger of being radicalized I would have reported him to the authorities.”
Also on April 1, Erol Incedal, 27, a British national of Turkish origin, was jailed for 42 months for possessing a bomb-making manual. His friend, Mounir Rarmoul-Bouhadjar, 26, a British national of Algerian origin, who admitted to having the same manual, was given three years. Both men had been to the Syrian-Turkish border and mixed with jihadists, who taught them about weaponry and explosives.
Meanwhile, it emerged that the father of one of the three teenagers from Brent, northwest London, who were arrested in Turkey in March on suspicion of trying to join the Islamic State in Syria, works for the British Ministry of Defense. The father, who may have had access to the names and addresses of British military personnel at home and overseas, was placed on “compassionate leave.”
On April 2, Yahya Rashid, of Willesden, also in northwest London, was charged with “engaging in conduct in preparation for committing an act of terrorism, and engaging in conduct with the intention of assisting others to commit acts of terrorism, between November 2014 and March 2015.” Rashid, 19, was arrested at Luton Airport after arriving on a flight from Istanbul. The Middlesex University electronics student was allegedly returning from Syria after travelling there via Morocco and Turkey.
On April 3, six Muslims were arrested at the Port of Dover in Kent on suspicion of attempting to leave England to join the Islamic State. The Crown Prosecution Service said that three of the individuals were found in the back of a truck in an apparent attempt to smuggle themselves out of Britain. They were charged with “preparing acts of terrorism.”
On April 5, Abase Hussen, the father of runaway British jihadi schoolgirl Amira Hussen, conceded that his daughter may have become radicalized after he took her to an extremist rally organized by the banned Islamist group Al-Muhajiroun, run by Anjem Choudary, the British-born Muslim hate preacher.
Amira, 15, was one of three girls from Bethnal Green Academy in East London who flew to Turkey in February to become “jihadi brides” in Syria. During a hearing at the Home Affairs Select Committee in March, Abase blamed British authorities for failing to stop his daughter from running off to Syria. Asked by Chairman Keith Vaz if Amira had been exposed to any extremism, Hussen replied: “Not at all. Nothing.” The police eventually issued an apology.
Abase, however, changed his story after a video emerged which unmasked him as an Islamic radical who had marched at an Islamist hate rally alongside Choudary and Michael Adebolajo, the killer of Lee Rigby. Abase, originally from Ethiopia, said he had come to Britain in 1999 “for democracy, for the freedom, for a better life for children, so they could learn English.”
On April 8, Alaa Abdullah Esayed of South London admitted to posting 45,600 tweets in support of the Islamic State in just one year. The tweets included pictures of dead bodies and encouraged children to arm themselves with weapons. Esayed’s tweets also included a poem, “Mother of the Martyr,” which advises parents on how to teach children about jihad. Esayed, 22, faces up to 14 years in prison for encouraging terrorism and disseminating terrorist publications.
On April 9, the families of two teenage boys from Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, who are believed to have traveled to join the Islamic State, said that they were “in a state of profound shock” and deeply worried about the safety of their “ordinary Yorkshire lads.” The 17-year-old boys, Hassan Munshi and Talha Asmal, are believed to have gone to Syria after heading to Turkey on March 31. The boys reportedly told their relatives that they were going on a school trip, but instead used the Easter holidays as a “window of opportunity” to flee Britain.
On April 20, a 14-year-old schoolboy from Blackburn, Lancashire, became Britain’s youngest terror suspect. He was arrested in connection with an Islamic State-inspired terror plot in Melbourne, Australia. Police said messages found on his computer and mobile phone indicated a plan to attack the centenary celebrations of the Anzac landings at Gallipoli during the First World War. (Anzac Day — April 25 — marks the anniversary of the first major military action fought by Australian and New Zealand forces during the First World War.)
Also on April 20, police in Turkey arrested a British couple and their four young children on suspicion of seeking to travel to a part of Syria controlled by the Islamic State. Asif Malik, his wife Sara, and the four children — aged between 11 months and 7 years — were detained at a hotel in Ankara. Turkish officials said the family had crossed into Turkey from Greece on April 16 and that they had been detained after a tip-off from the British police.
On April 24, Hassan Munir of Bradford was jailed for 18 months for posting links to Dabiq, an Islamic State propaganda magazine, on his Facebook page. The court heard that Munir, 27, had ignored repeated warnings by Facebook and by police after he posted jihadist material, including items about beheadings. The judge said magazine posed a serious danger because it incited people to take up arms for the Islamic State.
On April 27, Mohammed Kahar of Sunderland was arrested after being caught disseminating extremist material, including documents such as “The Explosive Course,” “44 Ways To Serve And Participate In Jihad,” “The Book Of Jihad,” and “This Is The Province Of Allah.” Kahar, 37, was also accused of plotting Syria-related terrorism acts, supporting a proscribed organization and financing terrorism — in all, 10 offenses stretching back 18 months.
On April 28, an 18-year-old jihadist, Kazi Jawad Islam, was convicted of “terror grooming” for trying to “brainwash” his friend, Harry Thomas, “a vulnerable young man with learning difficulties,” into attacking British soldiers with a meat cleaver.
The Central Criminal Court of England and Wales (aka Old Bailey) was told that Kazi Islam — allegedly inspired by the beheading of serviceman Lee Rigby in 2013 — befriended the then-19-year-old Thomas in October 2013 after meeting him at college. The court heard how Islam also “ruthlessly exploited” his autistic friend into preparing to make a bomb.
In an interview with the Guardian, Nazir Afzal, Britain’s leading Muslim prosecutor, warned that more British children are at risk of “jihadimania” than previously thought because they see Islamic terrorists as “pop idols.” He said:
“The boys want to be like them and the girls want to be with them. That’s what they used to say about the Beatles and more recently One Direction and Justin Bieber. The propaganda the terrorists put out is akin to marketing, and too many of our teenagers are falling for the image.
“They see their own lives as poor by comparison, and don’t realize they are being used. The extremists treat them in a similar way to sexual groomers — they manipulate them, distance them from their friends and families, and then take them.
“Each one of them, if they go to Syria, is going to be more radicalised when they come back. And if they don’t go, they become a problem — a ticking time bomb — waiting to happen.”
In April, officials at the Lostwithiel School in Cornwall publicly humiliated nearly a dozen pupils between the ages of eight and 11 whose parents had refused to allow them to participate in a school trip to a mosque in Exeter. Some parents said they were concerned about the safety of their children, while others said they were opposed to the teaching of Islam in school. But school officials forced the non-compliant pupils individually to give an explanation in the student assembly.
On April 5, Victoria Wasteney, 38, a Christian healthcare worker, launched an appeal against an employment tribunal that found she had “bullied” a Muslim colleague by praying for her and inviting her to church. Wasteney was suspended from her job as a senior occupational therapist at the John Howard Centre, a mental health facility in east London, after her colleague, Enya Nawaz, 25, accused her of trying to convert her to Christianity. Wasteney’s lawyers say that the tribunal broke the law by restricting her freedom of conscience and religion, which is enshrined in Article 9 of the European Convention of Human Rights.
On April 8, the Guardian reported that there has been a 60% increase in child sexual abuse reported to the police over the past four years, according to official figures obtained through a Freedom of Information request that make public for the first time the scale of the problem in England and Wales.
The number of offenses of child sexual abuse reported to the police soared from 5,557 cases in 2011 to 8,892 in 2014. At the same time, the number of arrests for child sexual abuse offenses in England and Wales fell from 3,511 in 2011 to 3,208 — a drop of 9%.
The biggest increase in reported cases in a single police force over the past four years took place in South Yorkshire. The force saw an increase of 577% in cases from 74 in 2011 to 501 in 2014, apparently reflecting the exposure of the Muslim sexual abuse scandal in Rotherham.
On April 14, the president of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom, Lord Neuberger, said in a speech that Muslim women should be allowed to wear veils in court. He added that in order to show fairness to those involved in trials, judges must have “an understanding of different cultural and social habits.” He said:
“Well known examples include how some religions consider it inappropriate to take the oath, how some people consider it rude to look other people in the eye, how some women find it inappropriate to appear in public with their face uncovered, and how some people deem it inappropriate to confront others or to be confronted — for instance with an outright denial.”
Neuberger’s comments came after a judge upheld a ruling allowing Rebekah Dawson, a 22-year-old convert to Islam, to stand trial wearing a niqab, a veil that only leaves the eyes visible.
On April 15, Newsweek magazine reported that the “extreme views of a ‘racist, homophobe and anti-Semite’ who supports killing non-Muslims and ‘stoning adulterers’ are being made available to prison imams and prisoners throughout England and Wales, with the blessing of [prison] authorities.”
The magazine interviewed Haras Rafiq, managing director of the Quilliam Foundation, a counter-extremism think tank, who warned that British prisons have become “incubators for Islamic extremism” because inmates are being allowed to read the works of controversial South Asian cleric Abul Ala Maududi. Rafiq described Maududi, who died in 1979, as the “grandfather of Islamism.”
Newsweek discovered that hundreds of copies of Maududi’s analyses of the Koran were distributed in March at a training event for prison imams and chaplains held at the prison service college in Rugby. The books came from the Markfield Institute for Higher Education, part of the Islamic Foundation, a UK-based organization that is “inspired by the Muslim Brotherhood.”
On April 22, the Daily Mail published excerpts of a new book, Girl for Sale, which describes the shocking ordeal of Lara McDonnell, who became the victim of a Muslim paedophile gang when she was only 13 years old. She wrote:
“Mohammed was selling me for £250 to paedophiles from all over the country. They came in, sat down and started touching me. If I recoiled, Mohammed would feed me more crack so I could close my eyes and drift away. I was a husk, dead on the inside.
“Sometimes, I would be passed from one pervert to another. In Oxford, many of my abusers were of Asian origin; [in London] these men were Mediterranean, black or Arab.
“Then, at the start of 2012 [some five years after the abuse began], Thames Valley Police asked to see me. They had been conducting a long-overdue investigation into sexual exploitation of young girls and wanted a chat. I told them everything, and by the end of March, Mohammed and his gang were in custody. Unbeknown to me, five other girls were telling police the same story.
“Mohammed’s defense was laughable: he claimed I’d forced him to take drugs and have sex with me. His barrister, a woman, implied I was a racist because all the defendants were Muslim.
“Because the defendants were Muslim, the case had opened sensitive issues about race and religion. My view is clear: they behaved that way because of differences in how they viewed women.”
On April 25, the Telegraph reported that British taxpayers are paying the monthly rent for Hani al-Sibai, the Islamist preacher who “mentored” Mohammed Emwazi (aka Jihadi John, the Islamic State executioner). Al-Sibai, 54, a father of five, lives in a £1 million home in Hammersmith, a district in West London. According to the Telegraph:
“The public purse has also paid for a number of legal actions brought by al-Sibai against the British government in his battle to prevent his deportation to Egypt and also attempts to have his name removed from terror sanctions lists.
“From his home, al-Sibai, also known as Hani Youssef, runs an effective al-Qaeda propaganda machine that includes the al-Maqreze Centre for Historical Studies. In recent months he has used various Internet sites to praise bin Laden and glorify al-Qaeda for waging war against ‘the Crusader-Zionists.'”
Also in April, the Reverend David Robertson, who will soon take over as Moderator of the Free Church of Scotland, wrote a hard-hitting essay on the Christian Today website in which he argued that “fear of Islamophobia is blinding many of our politicians to the threat we face from Islam.” Robertson wrote:
“Christianity is the bedrock and foundation of our secular society. Islam is different. Islam has no doctrine of separation of the spiritual from the political. Islam is, and has always been, a political movement. There can be no such thing as secular Islam. In the Islamic view the world is divided into two houses, Darus Salma, the house of Islam, and Darul Har, the house of war. The former is the actual area controlled by Islam, full political and religious control; the latter is those areas of the world still unsubdued by Islam. Islam means ‘submission,’ not peace.”
Robertson added:
“I recently attended a Monday night meeting at a mosque in my city. … I was impressed by what I observed. There were 150 mostly young men on a Monday night at a prayer meeting. This was not Friday prayers. This was only one of five mosques in the city. And there was a community, social and political aspect which was very impressive. But I was also depressed. Because I knew that there was no church in the city that would have 150 men coming to pray. Because I knew that there was no political or social organization in the city that could come remotely near matching what I observed. And this in a city where only 2 per cent of the population are Muslim. Imagine what power they can hold in a town or city where 25 per cent are Muslim?
“It’s not so much the numbers — government is not done by opinion poll. It’s the organization, social cohesion, wealth and internal discipline that brings the political power; if you want it. And Islam does. A survey was released this week which shows that in the UK as a whole Islam will be 11 per cent of the population within a couple of decades.”
On April 8, the Leicester Crown Court jailed Jafar Adeli, an Afghan asylum seeker, for 27 months after he admitted to attempting to meet “Amy,” an underage girl, after grooming her online. Adeli, 32, who is married, arranged to meet the girl after engaging in sexual conversations online and sending an indecent image of himself. But he was duped by a paedophile vigilante group called Letzgo Hunting. “Amy” was in fact a vigilante named John who was pretending to be a young girl.
Adeli, who has filed an appeal to remain in Britain, was placed on a ten-year sexual offenses prevention order. Judge Philip Head said: “It was your intention to have full sexual activity with someone you believed to be 14 and something you know to be a crime in this country. You were grooming this person for sexual activity.”
Jafar Adeli (left), a 32-year-old Afghan asylum seeker, was jailed in April for 27 months, convicted of arranging to meet an underage girl for sexual relations. Pakistani-born Mohammed Khubaib (right), 43 was convicted in April of sexually grooming girls as young as 12 with food, cash, cigarettes and alcohol.
On April 10, Abukar Jimale, a 46-year-old father of four who sought asylum in the UK after fleeing war-torn Somalia, walked free after sexually assaulting a female passenger as he drove her across Bristol in his taxi. Although Jimale was found guilty of sexual assault and causing a person to engage in sexual activity without her consent, he had his two-year sentence suspended. The defending counsel said that Jimale, who left Somalia in 2001 because he was being persecuted, was a hard-working father who had lost his job and good name as a result of the offenses.
On April 13, Mohammed Khubaib, a Pakistani-born father of five, was convicted of grooming girls as young as 12 with food, cash, cigarettes and alcohol. The 43-year-old married businessman, who lived in Peterborough with his wife and children, befriended girls in his restaurant and then “hooked” them with alcohol — normally vodka — in an attempt to make them “compliant” to sexual advances.
After a trial at the Old Bailey, Khubaib was found guilty of forcing a 14-year-old girl to perform a sex act on him and nine counts of trafficking for sexual exploitation involving girls aged from 12 to 15 between November 2010 and January 2013.
On April 14, Mohammed Ali Sultan, 28, of Wellington, Telford, was sentenced to five years in prison after having been found guilty of two counts of rape and one count of attempted rape. The sentence is in addition to a seven-year sentence after he pled guilty to two counts of sexual activity with a child and one count of controlling child prostitution in 2012.
On April 22, four Muslim men were charged with sex crimes against children in Rochdale. Hadi Jamel, 33, of Rochdale, Abid Khan, 38, of Liverpool, Mohammed Zahid, 54, of Rochdale, and Raja Abid Khan, 38, of Rochdale, were each been charged with one count of sexual activity with a child. The charges relate to alleged offenses against one girl who was under 16 at the time.
The charges are the latest to be brought following Operation Doublet, a probe by the Major Incident Team of the Greater Manchester Police into allegations of child sexual exploitation in Rochdale. In March 2015, ten men were charged with sex offenses alleged to have been committed against the girl and six others.
On April 23, Britain’s Electoral Court found Lutfur Rahman, the mayor of the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, guilty of election fraud and ordered him to vacate his post immediately. The Bangladesh-born Rahman and his supporters were found to have used religious intimidation through local imams, vote-rigging and wrongly branding his Labour rival as a racist to secure his re-election for a second term on May 24, 2014.
Rahman, who has been banned from seeking office again, was also found to have allocated local grants to buy votes. He was ordered to pay immediate costs of £250,000 ($390,000) from a bill expected to reach £1 million.
On April 23, the Birmingham Crown Court sentenced Imran Uddin, 25, a student at the University of Birmingham, to four months in jail for hacking into the university computer system to improve his grades. Uddin used keyboard spying devices to steal staff passwords and then increased his grades on five exams. Uddin is believed to be the first ever British student to be jailed for cheating.
On April 23, a jury at Chester Crown Court heard how Masood Mansouri, 33, from Saltney, Flintshire allegedly kidnapped and raped a 20-year-old woman, from Mochdre, near Colwyn Bay, after pretending to be a taxi driver to a woman trying to hail a cab. Five days later, the woman took a fatal overdose, the court heard. Mansouri denied all the charges.
On April 28, Aftab Ahmed, 44, of Winchcombe Place, Heaton, was charged with threatening to behead David Robinson-Young, a candidate for the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) in Newcastle East.
On April 4, the Telegraph reported that a front group for Muslim extremists boasted that it would act as “kingmaker” in the May 7 general election, and that it was “negotiating with the Tory and Labour leadership” to secure its demands.
According to the paper, Muslim Engagement and Development (MEND) built links with both parties after claiming to promote “democratic engagement” by Muslims. However, it was actually “a façade to win political access and influence for individuals holding extreme, bigoted and anti-democratic views.”
During a MEND event on April 3, a man named Abu Eesa Niamatullah, who has called British people “animals,” demanded that women should not work, attacked democracy and said that “the Creator is the one who should decide what the laws should be.”
Meanwhile, Ed Miliband, the Labour Party’s candidate for prime minister, vowed to ban “Islamophobia” if he emerged victorious in the elections. In an interview with The Muslim News, Miliband said:
“We are going to make it [Islamophobia] an aggravated crime. We are going to make sure it is marked on people’s records with the police to make sure they root out Islamophobia as a hate crime.
“We are going to change the law on this so we make it absolutely clear of our abhorrence of hate crime and Islamophobia. It will be the first time that the police will record Islamophobic attacks right across the country.”
The move — which one observer called “utterly frightening” because of its implications for free speech in Britain — was widely viewed as part of an effort by Miliband to pander to Muslim voters.
Previously, Home Secretary Theresa May pledged that if the Conservatives win the elections, every police force in England and Wales would be required to record anti-Muslim hate crimes as a separate category, as is already the case with anti-Semitic crimes.
In Derby, Gulzabeen Afsar, a Muslim candidate for the town council, sparked outrage after she referred to Ed Miliband as “the Jew,” in comments made in Arabic.
Meanwhile, the British-born Islamist Anjem Choudary actively discouraged Muslims from voting. In a stream of Twitter messages using the #StayMuslimDontVote hashtag, Choudary argued that voting is a “sin” against Islam because Allah is “the only legislator.” He has also said that Muslims who vote or run for public office are “apostates.”
Other British Islamists followed Choudary’s lead. Bright yellow posters claiming that democracy “violates the right of Allah” were spotted in Cardiff, the capital of Wales, and Leicester, as part of a grassroots campaign called #DontVote4ManMadeLaw.
One such poster stated:
“Democracy is a system whereby man violates the right of Allah and decides what is permissible or impermissible for mankind, based solely on their whims and desires.
“Islam is the only real, working solution for the UK. It is a comprehensive system of governance where the laws of Allah are implemented and justice is observed.”
Islamic Supremacism: The True Source of Muslim ‘Grievances’, Front Page Magazine,
In the ongoing debate (or debacle) concerning free speech/expression and Muslim grievance—most recently on exhibition in Garland, where two “jihadis” opened fire on a “Prophet Muhammad” art contest organized by Pamela Geller—one thing has become clear: the things non-Muslims can do to provoke Islamic violence is limitless—and far exceeds cartoons.
Writes Victor Davis Hanson for example:
[Pamela] Geller, and not the jihadists who sought to kill those with whom they disagreed, was supposedly at fault. Her critics could not figure out that radical Muslims object not just to caricatures and cartoons, but to any iconographic representation of Mohammed. Had Geller offered invitations to artists to compete for the most majestic statue of the Prophet, jihadists might still have tried to use violence to stop it. Had she held a beauty pageant for gay Muslims or a public wedding for gay Muslim couples, jihadists would certainly have shown up. Had she offered a contest for the bravest Islamic apostates, jihadists would have galvanized to kill the non-believers. Had she organized a support rally for Israel, jihadists might well have tried to kill the innocent, as they did in Paris when they murderously attacked a kosher market.
But it’s even worse than that. The list of things that non-Muslims can do to provoke Islamic violence grows by the day and accords with the list of things subjugated “infidels” must never do, lest they provoke their Islamic overlords as laid out by Islamic law, or Sharia.
As such, the West needs finally to come to terms with the root source of these ubiquitous, easily sparked “Muslim grievances.”
Enter Muslim supremacism.
Islamic doctrine—which teaches that Muslims are superior to non-Muslims, who are further compared to dogs and cattle—imbues Muslims with this sense of supremacism over the rest of mankind. And a good portion of Islamic history—when Muslims were for centuries on the warpath, subjugating large swathes of the Old Word—further enforced it.
This sense of Islamic supremacism was dramatically humbled after European powers defeated and colonized much of the Muslim world. Bred on the notion that “might makes right,” Muslims, for a time, even began emulating the unapologetic and triumphant West. Turkey, for example, went from being the epitome of Islamic supremacy and jihad against Christian Europe for five centuries to desperately emulating Europe in all ways. By the mid-1900s, Turkey became perhaps the most Westernized/secularized “Muslim” nation.
Today, however, as Western peoples willingly capitulate to Islamic mores—in the name of tolerance, multiculturalism, political correctness, or just plain cowardice—Muslims are becoming more emboldened, making more demands and threats, as they realize they need not militarily defeat the West in order to resuscitate their supremacist birthright. (More appeasement from the bullied always brings about more demands from the bully.)
To understand all this, one need only look to Muslim behavior where it is dominant and not in need of pretense, that is, in the Muslim world. There, non-Muslim minorities are habitually treated as inferiors. But unlike the many Western appeasers who willingly accept a subservient role to Islam, these religious minorities have no choice in the matter.
Thus in Pakistan, as Christian children were singing carols inside their church, Muslim men from a nearby mosque barged in with an axe, destroyed the furniture and altar, and beat the children. Their justification for such violence? “You are disturbing our prayers…. How dare you use the mike and speakers?”
And when a Muslim slapped a Christian and the latter reciprocated, the Muslim exclaimed “How dare a Christian slap me?!” Anti-Christian violence immediately ensued.
All of this revolves around what I call the “How Dare You?!” phenomenon. Remember it next time “progressive” media, politicians, and other talking heads tell you that Muslim mayhem and outbursts are products of grievances against the West. Missing from their rationale is the supremacist base of these grievances.
The Conditions of Omar, a foundational medieval Muslim text dealing with how subjugated “infidels” must behave, spells out their inferiority vis-à-vis Muslims. Among other stipulations, it commands conquered Christians not to raise their “voices during prayer or readings in churches anywhere near Muslims” (hence the axe-attack in Pakistan). It also commands them not to display any signs of Christianity—specifically Bibles and crosses—not to build churches, and not to criticize the prophet. (See Crucified Again:Exposing Islam’s New War on Christians for my translation of “The Conditions of Omar.”)
If the supremacist nature of Islamic law is still not clear enough, the Conditions literally commands Christians to give up their seats to Muslims as a show of respect.
By way of analogy, consider when Rosa Parks, a black woman, refused to give up her bus seat to white passengers. Any white supremacist at the time had sincere grievances: how dare she think herself equal?
But were such grievances legitimate? Should they have been accommodated? Are the endless “grievances” of Muslims legitimate and should they be accommodated? These are the questions missing from the debate about easily bruised Muslim sensitivities.
One can go on and on with examples from all around the Islamic world:
In Turkey, a Bible publishing house was once stormed and three of its Christian employees tortured, disemboweled, and finally murdered. One suspect later said: “We didn’t do this for ourselves, but for our religion [Islam]…. Our religion is being destroyed.”
In Egypt, after a 17-year-old Christian student refused to obey his Muslim teacher’s orders to cover up his cross, the teacher and some Muslim students attacked, beat, and ultimately murdered the teenager.
These Turkish and Egyptian Muslims were truly aggrieved: Islamic law makes clear that Christians must not “produce a cross or Bible” around Muslims. How dare the Egyptian student and Turkish Bible publishers refuse to comply—thus grieving their Muslim murderers?
In Indonesia, where it is becoming next to impossible for Christians to build churches, Christians often congregate outside to celebrate Christmas—only to be attacked by Muslims hurling cow dung and bags of urine at the Christians as they pray.
These Muslims are also sincerely aggrieved: how dare these Christians think they can be a church when the Conditions forbid it?
In short, anytime non-Muslims dare to overstep their Sharia-designated “inferior” status—which far exceeds drawing cartoons—supremacist Muslims will become violently aggrieved.
From here, one can begin to understand the ultimate Muslim grievance: Israel.
For if “infidel” Christian minorities are deemed inferior and attacked by aggrieved Muslims for exercising their basic human rights, like freedom of worship, how must Muslims feel about Jews—the descendants of pigs and apes, according to the Koran—exercising power and authority over fellow Muslims in what is perceived to be Muslim land?
How dare they?!
Of course, if grievances against Israel were really about justice and displaced Palestinians, Muslims—and their Western appeasers—would be aggrieved by the fact that millions of Christians are currently being displaced by Muslim invaders.
Needless to say, they are not.
So the next time you hear that Muslim rage and terrorism are products of grievance—from cartoons to territorial disputes and everything in between—remember that this is absolutely true. But these “grievances” are not predicated on any human standards of equality or justice, only a supremacist worldview.
Schrödinger’s Jihad, Sultan Knish Blog, Daniel Greenfield, May 13, 2015
( A MUST read… Thank you, Dan. – JW )
Obama insists that talking about Islamic terrorism ‘summons’ them into being. By admitting the existence of Islamic terrorists, we ‘radicalize’ Muslims. Even the words ‘Islamic terrorism’ creates Islamic terrorists who otherwise wouldn’t exist.
The real threat is not from the terrorists, it’s from the truth.
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The great paradox of the War on Terror is that we are fighting an enemy that doesn’t exist. We are told incessantly that there is no such thing as a Muslim terrorist.
There may be a tiny minority of violent extremists, but they are only a tiny minority of no importance whatsoever. And yet we’ve been at war with this same infinitesimally tiny minority for decades.
This tiny minority has killed thousands of Americans. It has the support of entire governments in tiny countries like Pakistan (182 million), Iran (77 million) and Syria (22 million). We are told that this tiny minority is no way representative of the world’s billion Muslims, and yet it’s hard to find a Muslim country that doesn’t support or harbor a terrorist group.
We were told that the problems was their governments, but the Arab Spring showed us that democratic elections lead to governments that are even more supportive of tiny minority of extremists who are somehow taking over entire countries.
Everything we’ve been told is obviously a lie. And the best evidence comes from the liars themselves.
The media is howling that a bunch of cartoonists in Texas were irresponsible for sketching Islam’s dead warlord because they should have known that Muslim terrorists would come to kill them for it. But if the media is right and Islam is a religion of peace, then why should they have anticipated a terrorist attack?
And if Islam isn’t a religion of peace, then the media has been irresponsibly lying to us and the cartoonists have been risking their lives to warn us of that lie.
The talking heads on the television insist that the cartoon contest was irresponsible because there were bound to be “some crazies” who would “take the bait”. But if Islam is no more violent than any other religion, shouldn’t it be just as statistically likely that some Christian or Jewish crazies would attack one of the art exhibits, plays or musicals ridiculing and blaspheming against their religions?
Weren’t museums and galleries exhibiting “works of art” like Piss Christ or Shekhina provoking and baiting those Jewish and Christian crazies? And since there are more Christians than Muslims in America, isn’t it statistically far more likely that there should have been far more Christian terror attacks targeting blasphemous exhibits?
We can only conclude that there is a much higher proportion of “crazies” among Muslims than among Christians. How much higher? 78 percent of Americans identify as Christians. 0.6 percent claim to be Muslims. Only 0.3 percent appear to be Sunnis, who are responsible for ISIS and Al Qaeda attacks.
There is indeed a tiny minority of extremists in America. It’s known as Islam.
What keeps the lie alive is another paradox. Call it Schrödinger’s Jihad. The more famous Schrödinger’s Cat is a paradox in which a cat in a sealed box with poison that has a 50 percent chance of being released is in an indeterminate state. It is neither dead nor alive until someone opens the box.
In Schrödinger’s Jihad, the Muslim terrorist is in an indeterminate state until some Western observer opens the box, collapses his wave function and radicalizes him. The two Muslim Jihadists were in an indeterminate state until Pamela Geller and Bosch Fawstin and the other “provocateurs” suddenly turned them into terrorists in a matter of days or weeks. It didn’t matter that Elton Simpson, one of the Garland terrorists, had already been dragged into court for trying to link up with Jihadists in Africa.
Every Muslim is and isn’t a terrorist. He is both a peaceful spiritual person who is eager to embrace our way of life and a violent killer who can be set off by the slightest offense. Like the cat in the box that is neither dead nor alive, he is both violent and peaceful, moderate and extremist, a solid citizen and a terrorist. He does not choose which of these to be or to become; we decide what he will be.
The Jihadist paradox is that the Muslim terrorist is always defined by what we do, not by what he does.
Islamic terrorism does not exist independently of the Western observer. It is not a Jihad with deep historical and theological roots within Islam, but a reaction to our interactions with Muslims.
Obama insists that talking about Islamic terrorism ‘summons’ them into being. By admitting the existence of Islamic terrorists, we ‘radicalize’ Muslims. Even the words ‘Islamic terrorism’ creates Islamic terrorists who otherwise wouldn’t exist.
The real threat is not from the terrorists, it’s from the truth.
When we tell the truth, people die. The truth turns Muslims into terrorists while the lies soothe them back into non-existence. Underneath all the academic terminology is the dream logic of wishful thinking. If we believe that Islam is a religion of peace, it will be a peaceful religion, and if we accept the reality that it’s violent, then it will become violent. Islam does not define itself. We define it however we want. Our entire counterterrorism policy is based around the perverse ostrich belief that Islamic terrorism is a problem that we create by recognizing its existence. If we ignore it, it will go away.
The lies about Islam are sustained by a deep conviction among liberals that the “Other” minorities are not real people with real beliefs and cultures, but victims in a game of power played out in the West. Islamic terrorism, like gay marriage or Global Warming, is just another step in the progressive pilgrim’s progress. It’s a problem that we caused and need to atone for in our cosmic karmic journey.
Westerners are privileged observers who have power while those minorities they observe do not. The duel between the Western left and right is taking place outside the box to determine what will be in the box once it’s forced open, while the oppressed minorities are in a state of indeterminacy in the box.
The Schrödinger’s Jihad paradox has many other adjoining boxes. Some are filled with dictators and criminals. If the progressive observer can open the box and find the root cause, out comes a good person; if the right opens the box, then out will march the terrorists, drug dealers and warlords.
The other side of the rhetoric about oppression and colonization, of punching up and punching down is the conviction that those at the bottom do not have free will or agency. If the mugger chooses to mug, rather than being driven to it by poverty, if Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union gleefully chose conquest instead of being forced to it by Western imperialism, and if the Muslim terrorist is not a helpless victim, but an abuser, then the moral imperative of the left’s worldview collapses in a heap.
If Muslims are real people who are at least as capable of imperialism, racism, slavery and destroying the planet as any Westerner, and who have been doing all of these things a lot longer, then leftists would have to accept that they are tearing down the most progressive civilization on the planet on behalf of ridiculously reactionary civilizations. Not only would they no longer be the privileged observers in control of the future, but they would have to see themselves as destroyers of what is left of the future.
The left refuses to blame Islam or Muslims because that would mean admitting that they are people.
Schrödinger’s Jihad is a child’s toy box for overgrown children who view Muslims as social justice dolls and terrorist action figures instead of people as flawed and complicated as they are. The left refuses to take Islamic theology seriously because it is incapable of understanding different points of view.
It approaches Islam as a race, rather than a religion, because it refuses to delve into what its beliefs are. Instead it chooses to see Muslims as blank slates to be filled with its ideology, as indeterminate patterns that can be reshaped into whatever they want them to be. It does not want to know what it says in the Koran, because that ruins its wonderful fantasy of Muslims as an oppressed race, rather than a creed.
Lies that are based on what we want to be true are the hardest to disprove. A lie that is tied into identity cannot be touched without destroying the entire identity of an individual or a movement.
The lies about Islam run into the heart of what the left is. To the left, everything is indeterminate and everything can be reshaped. Existence flows from power and power is pitted against progress. By destroying that which exists, they can bring their dreams to life. The dream is stronger than reality.
The left doesn’t really believe that Muslim terrorists exist except when we bring them to life. The real animating force behind Al Qaeda was George W. Bush or Dick Cheney. The true power behind ISIS is Pamela Geller or the Pentagon. The Westerner opens the box and the Muslim terrorist comes out. When Western civilization as we know it is destroyed, then the left believes Muslim terrorism will end. Kill the observer and the cat never existed. Destroy the dreamer and the nightmare dies with him.
The truth is more dangerous than the terrorists. Terrorists can kill the body, but truth can kill the dream.
U.S. State Dept. Invites Muslim Leaders, Denies Christians, Gatestone Institute, Raymond Ibrahim, May 10, 2015
Late on the evening of May 8, Newsmax TV announced that pressure from Americans acquainted with Sister Diana Momeka’s visa rejection has just caused the State Department to reverse its decision and permit her entry into the United States. Until then, however, she and others were barred
After inviting a number of foreign religious leaders, mostly Muslim, the U.S. State Department, for the second time in a row, denied the sole Christian representative a visa — despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that Christians are the ones being persecuted by Muslims.
Sister Diana, an influential Iraqi Christian leader and spokeswoman who was scheduled to visit the U.S. to advocate for persecuted Christians in the Mideast, earlier this month was denied a visa by the U.S. State Department, even though she had visited the U.S. before, most recently in 2012.
Sister Diana was to be one of a delegation of religious leaders from Iraq — including Shia and Yazidi — to visit Washington, D.C., to describe the situation of their people. Every single religious leader from this delegation was granted a visa — except for the only Christian representative, Sister Diana.
Similarly, in March 2014, after the United States Institute for Peace (USIP) brought together the governors of Nigeria’s mostly Muslim northern states for a conference in the U.S., the State Department had also blocked the visa of the region’s only Christian governor, Jonah David Jang, an ordained minister, citing “administrative” problems. The USIP confirmed that all 19 northern governors were invited, but the organization did not respond to requests for comments on why they would hold talks without the region’s only Christian governor.
According to Emmanuel Ogebe, a Nigerian human rights lawyer based in Washington D.C., the Christian governor’s “visa problems” are due to anti-Christian bias in the U.S. government:
The U.S. insists that Muslims are the primary victims of Boko Haram. It also claims that Christians discriminate against Muslims in Plateau, which is one of the few Christian majority states in the north. After the [Christian governor] told them [U.S. authorities] that they were ignoring the 12 Shariah states who (sic) institutionalized persecution … he suddenly developed visa problems. … The question remains — why is the U.S. downplaying or denying the attacks against Christians?
Regarding Sister Diana, determined Christian and human rights activists in the U.S. called on the State Department to reverse its decision. According to Johnnie Moore, an activist who met her in Iraq: “Sister Momeka is a gift to the world and a humanitarian whose work reminded me — when I met her in Iraq — of Mother Teresa. It is incomprehensible to me that the State Department would not be inviting Momeka on an official visit to the United States, as opposed to barring her from entry.”
The Iraqi Christian nun, Sister Diana Momeka (left), this month received a visa to visit the U.S. as part of a delegation of foreign religious leaders. The State Dept. had originally denied her visa request, only allowing in non-Christian delegates. Last year, the United States Institute for Peace invited to the U.S. the Muslim governors of Nigeria’s northern states, but the sole Christian governor, Plateau State Gov. Jonah David Jang (right), was denied a visa.
Chris Seiple, President of the Institute for Global Engagement, wrote in a post, “In the same week that the State Dept says it will take the engagement of religious leaders seriously (as announced in its quadrennial review two days ago), it refuses a visa to a persecuted Christian nun who has fled ISIS, Sister Diana.”
Similarly, discussing the nun’s visa denial, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said: “This is an administration which never seems to find a good enough excuse to help Christians, but always finds an excuse to apologize for terrorists … I hope that as it gets attention that Secretary [of State John] Kerry will reverse it. If he doesn’t, Congress has to investigate, and the person who made this decision ought to be fired.”
In an interview on Newsmax TV with host J.D. Hayworth, Johnnie Moore credited Newsmax TV viewers with helping to put enormous pressure on the Obama administration to allow Sister Diana Momeka to come to Washington to talk about the persecution of Christians in her war-torn nation: “It worked — people raised their voices. They wrote their congressmen and senators, they put pressure on everybody, everywhere. … She has been approved. … It’s exhibit A of what happens when people in this country start raising their voices.”
But Ogebe’s question remains: Why is the U.S. downplaying or denying attacks against Christians?
Cartoonists are Controversial and Murderers are Moderate, Front Page Magazine, Daniel Greenfield, May 5, 2015
[I]f you believe the media, cartoonists are more controversial than killers. A former Muslim sketching a cartoon of Mohammed is bigoted, but justifying attacks on Jews is moderate. Plotting to overthrow the United States and replace it with an Islamic theocracy is right up the alley of your local civil rights group, but a cartoon contest threatens the nation and all of creation by bringing down the wrath of men who spent their time at moderate and Muslim organizations which only occasionally support terrorism.
****************
Controversial, intolerant and provocative. Mainstream media outlets broke out these three words to describe the “Draw the Prophet” contest, the American Freedom Defense Initiative and Pamela Geller.
While the police were still checking cars for explosives and attendees waited to be released, CNN called AFDI, rather than the terrorists who attacked a cartoon contest, “intolerant.” Time dubbed the group “controversial.” The Washington Post called the contest, “provocative.”
Many media outlets relied on the expert opinion of the Southern Poverty Law Center, a multi-million dollar mail order scam disguised as a civil rights group, which had listed AFDI as a hate group. Also listed as hate groups were a number of single author blogs, including mine, a brand of gun oil and a bar sign.
The bar sign, which hangs outside a bar seven miles outside Pittsburgh, appears to be made out of metal and plastic. It is reportedly unaware that it is a hate group and has made no plans to take over America.
The SPLC’s inability to conduct even the most elementary fact checking did not stop news networks from inviting its talking head on to suggest that AFDI got “the response that they — in a sense — they are seeking.” Neither CNN nor MSNBC were impolitic enough to mention that no AFDI supporter had used its materials to plan a killing spree, while at least one of SPLC’s supporters had done just that.
But being “controversial” and “provocative” has nothing to do with who is doing the shooting. It’s a media signal that the target shouldn’t be sympathized with. The Family Research Council, which was shot up by a killer using the SPLC’s hate map, is invariably dubbed “intolerant.” The SPLC, which targeted it, is however a “respected civil rights group” which provides maps to respected civil rights gunmen.
A contest in which Bosch Fawstin, an ex-Muslim, drew a cartoon of a genocidal warlord is “controversial” and “provocative,” while the MSA, which has invited Sheikh Khalid Yasin, who has inspired a number of terrorists, including apparently one of the Mohammed contest attackers, is a legitimate organization that is only criticized by controversial, intolerant and provocative Islamophobes.
Khalid Yasin has held such controversial and provocative views as claiming that the US created AIDS, that gays should be stoned to death and that women should be beaten. But the mosques and MSAs that he has appeared at have not been described as controversial, intolerant and provocative for inviting him.
Elton Simpson, the first gunman, attended the Islamic Community Center of Phoenix. The mosque was listed as being controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood’s North American Islamic Trust front group.
The Muslim Brotherhood holds such controversial and provocative views as “waging Jihad” against American infidels, “raising a Jihadi generation that pursues death” and “destroying the Western civilization from within.” Despite these extremely provocative and intolerant views, the Muslim Brotherhood is usually described by the media as a “moderate” group.
The Brotherhood’s American arm believes in launching a “Grand Jihad” to Islamize America. Its final phase calls for “Seizing power to establish their Islamic Nation” in the United State.
Some might say this is a slightly more controversial activity than drawing cartoons of a dead warlord.
The Islamic Community Center of Phoenix featured an appearance by Lauren Booth, a convert to Islam employed by Iran, who has been photographed with the leader of Hamas, and holds such controversial and provocative views, as the Boston Marathon bombing being faked and attacks on Jews being justified as “a frustrated backlash.”
Some might say Booth’s views are controversial, provocative and intolerant. And that the gunman’s mosque was intolerant for inviting her. But don’t expect the media to call out terrorist intolerance.
Booth came as part of a fundraising effort for the Muslim Legal Fund of America, which funded the defense for Islamic Jihad boss Sami al-Arian and aided some of the terrorists involved in the provocative and controversial Fort Dix terror plot to “kill as many soldiers as possible.”
If the two Mohammed cartoon gunmen had survived, the Muslim Legal Fund of America might be having Lauren Booth spout Jewish conspiracies to fundraise on their behalf.
But if you believe the media, cartoonists are more controversial than killers. A former Muslim sketching a cartoon of Mohammed is bigoted, but justifying attacks on Jews is moderate. Plotting to overthrow the United States and replace it with an Islamic theocracy is right up the alley of your local civil rights group, but a cartoon contest threatens the nation and all of creation by bringing down the wrath of men who spent their time at moderate and Muslim organizations which only occasionally support terrorism.
Cartoons can be provocative, but the only people inspired to kill over them, are killers. No one took a shot at Gary “Punching Up” Trudeau, despite decades of mocking conservatives. None of the assorted arts projects that involve defiling and mocking the sacred symbols of Christianity and Judaism resulted in gunmen in body armor trying to storm a cartoon competition. And yet it keeps happening with Islam.
Satire exposes sociopaths and sociopathic ideologies. And it’s the very attack on the “controversial” and “provocative” contest that shows why exposing them is so important.
Elton Simpson had already been on the radar of the FBI. He should have been in jail, but Judge Mary H. Murguia, a Clinton appointee who has been bandied about as a possible Obama Supreme Court nominee, chose to believe a claim by his public defender that when he was taped talking about Jihad, it might have meant “an internal struggle to maintain faith,” instead of killing non-Muslims.
Simpson had said that Allah loves those who fight non-Muslims, that Jihadists go to paradise and stated, “I’m tellin’ you man. We gonna make it to the battlefield… it’s time to roll.”
But that was just too ambiguous for Judge Murguia, who wrote, “It is true that the Defendant had expressed sympathy and admiration for individuals who “fight” non-Muslims as well as his belief in the establishment of Shariah law, all over the world including in Somalia. What precisely was meant by “fighting” whenever he discussed it, however, was not clear.”
“Neither was what the Defendant meant when he stated he wanted to get to the ‘battlefield’ in Somalia,” she added.
If nothing else, events like these help clarify the question of just what “fighting” non-Muslims involves, and whether it’s an internal struggle to maintain faith or an external struggle waged with assault rifles.
Satire helps expose the idiocy and absurdity of our betters, whether it’s Gary Trudeau or Judge Murguia. Every act of Islamic terror discredits them and their dishonest worldview even further. And they know it.
We cannot fight Islamic terrorism until we deal with it and we cannot deal with it as long as we are burdened by a political establishment that frantically censors any mention of its existence or its agenda.
The two gunmen did not attack the cartoon event simply because they were offended, but because they believed that their religion gave them a mandate to impose Islamic law on Americans. Until we deal with this supremacist reality, any effort to fight Islamic terrorists will be futile and will ultimately fail.
The Mohammed cartoons are so vital because they expose the theocracy at the heart of Islamic terrorism. When Muslim terrorists attack cartoonists, they’re not fighting our foreign policy; they are killing and dying to impose the foreign policy of the Muslim Brotherhood and its numerous daughter groups, such as Al Qaeda, Hamas and ISIS, on us.
The controversial and provocative cartoonists go into battle with pencils in their hands. The terrorists come with body armor and assault rifles. This clash is what real political dissent looks like.
The cartoonists believe in the controversial, intolerant and provocative idea that America should not be a theocracy. But the only people who should be provoked by that provocative idea are the Jihadists who want to impose a theocracy on America and the useful idiots lying and denying on their behalf.
The Erosion of Free Speech, Gatestone Institute, Denis MacEoin, May 3, 2015
(Free speech includes the right to offend the easily offended, even if they are sub-human savages.
— DM)
Anyone who has had much to do with publishing, or anyone who cares about books and free speech, will be familiar with the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, an enduring champion of the First Amendment and the public’s right to read whatever they please — without the interference and censorship of self-appointed guardians of inoffensiveness and sexual purity.
Every year, the ALA mounts Banned Books Week, a nationwide celebration of our freedom to read. And every year it issues an unnerving list of Frequently Challenged Books. Unnerving because of the pettiness and obsession betrayed by the people who try to have books banned in local libraries, school boards, and even bookshops. For years, most of the attempts to ban books have come from fundamentalist Christian groups; the reasons have mainly been sex, offensive language, or “controversial issues,” whatever they are. God forbid that anyone in the United States be exposed to “controversial issues.”
This year a new note has entered Banned Books Week. Elizabeth McKinstry, a graduate student at Georgia’s Valdosta State University (which earlier in April witnessed students trampling on the American flag) launched a petition about ALA’s anti-censorship poster, calling it “Islamophobic.” There is nothing on the poster, however, that relates in the slightest way to Islam. The poster shows the top of a woman’s head, then her clothed chest and arms. She is not wearing Islamic dress on her head, and her arms and hands are bare. In front of her face, she holds what looks like a book bearing the text “Readstricted.” Her eyes can be seen looking through the cover where it bears the universal symbol for “Restricted” (a red circle with a white bar). That is all.
In her petition, McKinstry writes, “This poster uses undeniably Islamophobic imagery of a woman in a niqab, appears to equate Islam with censorship, and muslim (sic) women as victims.” She goes on to demand that the poster be “removed immediately from the ALA Graphics store, and the ALA Graphics Store and Office of Intellectual Freedom should apologize and explain how they will prevent using discriminatory imagery in the future.” To make matters worse, she goes on to write: “Whether the poster was intentionally or accidentally a racist design, it is still racist and alienating.”
Not only is this possibly an example of political correctness in overdrive, but the greater irony lies in that McKinstry is studying for an MA in library and information science; works as a library associate, and is a member of the ALA. Here we see a distortion of thinking that is grotesque: a person claiming to be “progressive,” trying to ban an anti-censorship poster in an organization that works to end censorship.
* * *
PEN International is known worldwide as an association of writers. Together they work tirelessly for the freedom of authors from imprisonment, torture, or other restrictions on their freedom to write honestly and controversially. This year, PEN’s American Center plans to present its annual Freedom of Expression Award during its May 5 gala to the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. The award will be handed to Gerard Biart, the publication’s editor-in-chief, and to Jean-Baptiste Thorat, a staff member who arrived late on the day when Muslim radicals slaughtered twelve of his colleagues. This is the sort of thing PEN does well: upholding everyone’s right to speak out even when offence is taken.
This year, however, six PEN members, almost predictably, have already condemned the decision to give the award to Charlie Hebdo, and have refused to attend the gala. Peter Carey, Michael Ondaatje, Francine Prose, Teju Cole, Rachel Kushner and Taiye Selasi have exercised their right to double standards by blaming Charlie Hebdo for its offensiveness. Kushner expressed her discomfort with the magazine’s “cultural intolerance.” Does that mean that PEN should never have supported Salman Rushdie for having offended millions of Muslims just to express his feelings about Islam?
Peter Carey expressed his support, not for the satirists, but for the Muslim minority in France, speaking of “PEN’s seeming blindness to the cultural arrogance of the French nation, which does not recognize its moral obligation to a large and disempowered segment of their population.” We never heard him speaking out when Ilan Halimi was tortured to death for weeks, or when Jews in Toulouse were shot. He seems to be saying that the French government should shut up any writer or artist who offends the extreme sensitivities of a small percent of its population.
Teju Cole remarked, in the wake of the killings, that Charlie Hebdo claimed to offend all parties but had recently “gone specifically for racist and Islamophobic provocations.” But Islam is not a race, and the magazine has never been racist, so why charge that in response to the sort of free speech PEN has always worked hard to advance?
A sensible and nuanced rebuttal of these charges came from Salman Rushdie himself, a former president of PEN: “If PEN as a free speech organization can’t defend and celebrate people who have been murdered for drawing pictures, then frankly the organization is not worth the name. What I would say to both Peter and Michael and the others is, I hope nobody ever comes after them.”
Those six have now morphed into something like 145. By April 30, Carey and they were joined by another 139 members who signed a protest petition. Writers, some distinguished, some obscure, have taken up their pens to defy the principle of free speech in an organization dedicated to free speech, and many of whom live in a land that protects it precisely for their benefit with a First Amendment.
Another irony, at least as distasteful as the one just described, took place on April 22, when Northern Ireland’s leading academic institution, Queen’s University in Belfast, cancelled a conference planned for June. The conference, organized by the university’s Institute for Collaborative Research in the Humanities, was about free speech after the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris. You could not make this up. The reason given was that the institute had not prepared a proper risk assessment. Risk? Risk to what? To free speech? What a silly thought! No, it turned out to be risk of an Islamist attack in Belfast, a city long weary from terrorism.
The following day, the University of Maryland, many miles to the west, banned a showing of the film American Sniper after complaints from Muslim students. Whether the film was good or bad, free speech was snuffed.[1]
The oddity is that today, newspaper headlines, news websites, radio and television news bulletins are packed every day with stories about the chaos in the Middle East, the threat of Iranian access to nuclear weapons, the march of ISIS, Jabhat al-Nusra, Hezbollah, Hamas, the Taliban, al-Shabaab, and dozens of other terrorist groups across the region. This year’s Charlie Hebdo and kosher supermarket slayings, the rise of anti-Semitism across Europe (closely linked to Islamism), demonstrations filling the streets with chants such as “Hamas, Hamas Jews to the Gas,” and all the other atrocities and social disjunctions that arise from the revival of fundamentalist Islam.
America and Britain have fought, with allies, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and as of this writing, the United States is carrying out air strikes against ISIS in Syria.
Such news stories are not occasional, they are everyday. Stories of this kind are seldom crowded out by anything but the most important news items, such as a major airline crash or significant domestic political events. Such stories are even more visible than Cold War geopolitical new ever was, due to the immense proliferation of news outlets since the 1990s. The citizens of the U.S., Europe, Canada, Australia and (above all) Israel do not face a remote threat from a distant country, but daily threats of being blown up in their own streets almost every day. The British security services announce almost daily the likelihood of a terrorist event.
But where are the novels? Where are the Le Carrés and Ludlums, the Flemings and Clancys? The number of novels dealing with Islamist, terrorist, or state-sponsored threats to the world’s stability (and hence to our own stability and safety) are so few in number, I cannot remember even one. Back to the comfort zone.[2]
This bears thinking about. Is it just a matter of fashion, or are there deeper reasons for this apparent neglect of the most important political and military issues of the present day? Is the literary issue a canary in a coal mine of much greater extent?
The answer is yes. Western culture, once built in part on the principle of free speech — a principle enshrined in the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment and promoted in all liberal democracies — has been weakened by attacks on the right of everyone to right to speak openly about politics, religion, sexuality, and a host of other things.
The first blow to free speech came in 1989 with demonstrations and riots over British author Salman Rushdie’s controversial 1988 novel, The Satanic Verses; and fears grew when Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, issued a fatwa calling on Muslims to kill Rushdie.
Many people died in riots or were murdered because of association with the book. Bookshops were firebombed in the U.S. and UK; publishers were attacked; booksellers often refused to stock the novel; editors wrote to authors like myself, asking us to decide whether some forthcoming publications dealing with Islam could be safely published, and free speech was under attack.
The most harmful blow, however, came when some Western so-called intellectuals and religious leaders condemned Rushdie and supported a ban on his novel. Immanuel Jakobovits, Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth, opposed the book’s publication.[3] The Archbishop of Canterbury called for a law of blasphemy that would cover other religions than just Christianity, opening up the spectre that religions, even violent ones such as Islam, could be privileged above other societal actors in a democracy.[4] Sadly, this pattern of betrayal by Western thinkers has been repeated ever since.
What impact has this had? Here is a simple example: Early in 2012, a controversy stormed up in church circles in the United States. Three well-known Christian publishers, Wycliffe Bible Translators, the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) and Frontiers were accused of having pandered to Muslims in their new Arabic and Turkish translations of the New Testament. The translators had replaced terms such as Father (for God) and Son to conform to the Koranic doctrine that God did not have a son and was not a father of anyone. In the Frontiers and SIL translation into Turkish, “guardian” replaces “Father” and “representative” or “proxy” is used for “Son.” Such considerations did not deter earlier Bible translators into Islamic language from an honest statement of a fundamental Christian doctrine. But today, a genuine fear of retribution for a “blasphemous” statement has subdued the will to stand up for one’s own beliefs, values and the right to speak out. This fear has made much of the West submissive, just as Islam — in both its name [Islam means “submission”] and declarations — openly wants.
Since then, the attacks from Islamists on this most basic of Western principles — the central plank in the platform of true democracy and the feature that most distinguishes it from totalitarianism of all forms — have multiplied, culminating in the slaughter carried out by Muslims extremists at the offices of Charlie Hebdo in Paris on January 7, 2015.
Beneath the sporadic physical assaults lies a deeper layer of coercion: the fear lest anyone commit that apparently most unforgiveable crime of all, “Islamophobia!” It now seems that almost anything non-Muslims do may result in such accusations — a bigotry that has also become conflated with racism. The mere criticism of a religious belief shared by people mainly in the Third World has been linked, with no justification, to their genuine prejudice against the inhabitants of the developed world. But since it is Muslims who have been allowed to define “Islamophobia,” often at whim, even the mildest remarks can lead to serious accusations, lawsuits, and criminal attacks.[5]
In the case of Sherry Jones’s novel The Jewel of Medina, historically “revised” to be sympathetic to Islam, Random House in 1988 cancelled the novel’s publication. Its spokesperson stated that the publishing house had been given “cautionary advice not only that the publication of this book might be offensive to some in the Muslim community, but also that it could incite acts of violence by a small, radical segment.”[6]
This time, the condemnation had not come in a fatwa from Iran’s Supreme Leader, but from a Western academic, whose identity is not known to me. On September 28, 2008, British extremist Ali Beheshti and two accomplices set fire to the house of the owner of the UK publishing company that had bought The Jewel of Medina. Fortunately, nobody was killed. But the vise of subjugation to Islamic dictats was tightening round the neck of the free world.
* * *
Rushdie knew he was being controversial; for those who protested, the attacks on him, however reprehensible, had a bizarre justification. Condemnation from Western academics, journalists, interfaith clerics, and politicians shows not how successful intimidation has become, but how timid and craven we have become. To surrender with such spinelessness can only mean that we have entered the first stages of the decline of the Enlightenment values that made the modern West the greatest upholder of human rights and freedoms in history.
Criticism of Islam and everything else will — and should — continue, produced by courageous writers and journalists. Certainly, we know how many times politicians in the United States and Europe have delusionally tried to persuade us that Islamist violence “has nothing to do with Islam.”
There have been many attacks and murders already. Perhaps the best known of these — until theCharlie Hebdo murders — was the murder of Dutch film-maker, Theo van Gogh, on November 2, 2004. Van Gogh had directed a short film called Submission, written by Muslim dissident Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who had worked extensively in women’s shelters in the Netherlands, where she had observed that most of the women were Muslim. Van Gogh’s killer, a 26-year-old Dutch-Moroccan named Mohammed Bouyeri, now serving a life sentence, has described democracy as utterly abhorrent to Islam. (This view, for anyone who cares about the continuation of the West, is held by many Muslims. For them, democracy, made by man, is illegitimate, compared to shari’a law, made by Allah, and therefore the only form of government that is legitimate.) In court, Bouyeri said that ‘the law [shari’a law] compels me to chop off the head of anyone who insults Allah and the prophet.”
The threat of murder has become ever more real. It is no longer possible to dismiss death threats from Muslims as the work of “lone wolves,” “deviant personalities,” or attention seekers. It is the use of death threats that has given radical Muslims the power to deter most writers, film-makers, TV producers, and politicians from tackling Islamic issues. The threat of calling people “racist” as a tool for suppressing critical voices has cast a dark shadow over normal democratic life. Some have died for free speech about Islam; others have faced ostracism, imprisonment, flogging and the loss of a normal life. [7]
Salman Rushdie lives under constant guard. Molly Norris, an American artist who drew a cartoon of Mohammed and proposed an “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day,” has lived in hiding since 2010. On advice from the FBI, she changed her identity and cut off all links with family and friends. The Dutch politician Geert Wilders has been tried for “hate speech,” barely acquitted, and is now being tried for “hate speech” again.
These are just a few of the casualties who have paid a heavy price for their willingness to treat Islam as any of us might treat other subjects or other faiths. No Christian scholar will be tried for arguing that the Gospels contain contradictions, no Reform Jew will be arraigned for criticism of ultra-Orthodox beliefs, no politician will be brought before the law for denouncing the ideologies of Communism or Fascism. You can say that Karl Marx was misguided or that a U.S. president is terrible, and on and on, without dreading for a moment an assassin’s footfall or being locked up for your remarks.
Theo van Gogh (left) was murdered by an Islamist because he made a film critical of Islam. Salman Rushdie (right) was lucky to stay alive, spending many years in hiding, under police protection, after Iran’s Supreme Leader ordered his murder because he considered Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses “blasphemous.”
Incidents such as these or UK Labour Party Leader Ed Miliband’s promise to make Islamophobia a hate crime (without even defining Islamophobia) illustrate the most dangerous result of Islamic agitation and asserted victimhood: it has caused us to turn on ourselves, to abandon our commitment to free speech, open academic enquiry, and the readiness to question everything — the very qualities that have made us strong in the past. When Western so-called intellectuals such as Ian Buruma and Timothy Garton Ash condemn a Muslim apostate such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali for her criticisms of radical Islamism, or when Brandeis University withdraws its offer of an honorary degree for Ms. Ali when Muslim students object, we see our intellectual foundations shake. [8]
It is also necessary to ask, if Geert Wilders and others are being accused of hate speech, then why isn’t the Koran — with its calls for smiting necks and killing infidels — also being accused of hate speech?
If we do not reverse this trend of submission, censorship, blasphemy laws and all the other encumbrances of totalitarianism will return to our lives. The bullies will win, and the Enlightenment will fade and pass away from mankind. Political correctness and shari’a law will rule. How tragic if a senseless fear causes us to do this to ourselves.
[1] If you are old enough to remember the Cold War, you will also recall the remarkable outpouring of literary engagement with the issues it provoked. Not just dissident narratives likeAlexander Solzhenitsyn‘s Gulag Archipelago or novels such as his One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch, but the many spy thrillers by mainly British authors like John Le Carré, Len Deighton, Ian Fleming (the creator of James Bond), and many others, Trevor Dudley-Smith (‘Adam Hall’), and Jack Higgins. Later, several Americans came to match the popularity of their British counterparts: Tom Clancy, Robert Ludlum, Nelson DeMille, and others. But with the collapse of the Soviet Union as a threat, Cold War themes rapidly died out.
[2] There have been several films such as The Siege or the more recent American Sniper, and TV shows such as Homeland and the BBC’s award-winning drama The Honourable Woman. In 2014, a new drama appeared on BBC America and is due to play in the UK this April: The Gameis set in the 1970s and tells a story of spies fighting the Cold War.
[3] The Times, 4 March 1989.
[4] Michael Walzer, “The Sins of Salman,” The New Republic, 10 April 1989.
[5] The most notorious of the many cases involving perceptions of blasphemy started November 25, 2007, when an English kindergarten teacher at a school in Sudan, Gillian Gibbons, was arrested, interrogated and finally put in a cell at a local police station. Her crime? She had allowed her class of six-year-olds to name their teddy bear “Muhammad.” From this innocent mistake, matters got worse for Gibbons. On November 26, 2007, she was formally charged under Section 125 of the Sudanese Criminal Act, for “insulting religion, inciting hatred, sexual harassment, racism, prostitution and showing contempt for religious beliefs.” Sudan’s top clerics called for the full measure of the law [death] to be used against Mrs. Gibbons; and labeled her actions part of a Western plot against Islam.
On November 29, she was found guilty of “insulting religion” and was sentenced to 15 days’ imprisonment and deportation. The next day, approximately 10,000 protesters, some of them waving swords and machetes, took to the streets in Khartoum, demanding Gibbons’s execution.
In the end, Gibbons was released from jail and allowed to return to Britain. But her case put the fear of savagery in many people’s hearts, as they recognized that it take nothing more than a slip of tongue to bring down death on oneself.
In yet another irony, Sherry Jones, an American writer who said she wanted to bring people together, wrote a novel entitled The Jewel of Medina, a story of the romance (if that is the word) between the Prophet Muhammad and his child bride A’isha, who came to be his most beloved wife. This was a noble project designed to show that Westerners are not all “Islamophobes,” and written in sentimental prose to reassure Muslims of Jones’s warm feelings towards their prophet. Random House bought the story for a large fee. Influenced by the leading apologist for Muhammad, the anti-historian, Karen Armstrong, Jones even bowdlerizes the tale, delaying consummation of the marriage until A’isha had fully attained puberty (despite what the Islamic historians tell us, which is that marriage was apparently consummated when A’isha was nine).
A publication date in 2008 was set and a nationwide tour planned – a promotion few new authors get. But neither Jones nor one of America’s oldest and biggest publishing houses had reckoned with the fallout from The Satanic Verses.
[6] Cited Nick Cohen, You Can’t Read this Book, rev. ed., London, 2013, p. 72.
[7] Danish author Lars Hedegaard has suffered an attack on his life and lives in a secret location. Kurt Westergaard, a Danish cartoonist, has suffered an axe attack that failed, and is under permanent protection the of intelligence services. In 2009, Austrian, a politician, Susanne Winter, was found guilty of “anti-Muslim incitement,” for saying, “In today’s system, the Prophet Mohammad would be considered child-molester,” and that Islam “should be thrown back where it came from, behind the Mediterranean.” She was fined 24,000 euros ($31,000) and given a three-month suspended sentence. In 2011, Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff, a former Austrian diplomat and teacher, was put on trial for “denigration of religious beliefs of a legally recognized religion,” found guilty twice, and ordered to pay a fine or face 60 days in prison. Some of her comments may have seemed extreme and fit for criticism, but the court’s failure to engage with her historically accurate charge that Muhammad had sex with a nine-year-old girl and continued to have sex with her until she turned eighteen, regarding her criticism of it as somehow defamatory, and the judge’s decision to punish her for saying something that can be found in Islamic sources, illustrates the betrayal of Western values of free speech in defense of something we would normally penalize.
[8] This backing away from our Enlightenment values has been documented and criticized by many writers, notably Paul Berman in his 2010 The Flight of the Intellectuals, Britain’s Douglas Murray in Islamophilia (2013), or Nick Cohen in You can’t read this book (2012)
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