Posted tagged ‘Paris’

« WarSclerotic home page
Newer Entries »

French President Hollande was top target in multiple terror atrocity in Paris

November 14, 2015

French President Hollande was top target in multiple terror atrocity in Paris, DEBKAfile, November 14, 2015

Paris_Bataclan_concert_hall13.11.15

Our sources suspect that the survivors of the group are lying low and may be planning to emerge for a second round of atrocities in the coming hours or days, like after the Charlie Hebdo episode ten months ago, which was quickly succeeded by a massacre at the Jewish kosher store.

2.  A second group of back-up confederates was made up of drivers, who drove the terrorists to the scenes of attack and were ready to extricate any survivors. They handed the attackers their bomb belts, automatic weapons and explosives and acting also as spotters who watched and recording the movements of French security forces. They also photographed the incident.

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

The geography of the six Paris locations targeted by terrorists Friday night points to precise advance planning in support of a primary target, namely, French President Francois Hollande, while at the same time sowing bloody havoc in the French capital, frightening tourists away and shaking the French governing system to the core. The cost in lives has not been finally tallied. Estimates range from 127 to 153 with dozens of people injured.

Paris_map_attacks_13-14.11.15_1

DEBKAfile’s counterterrorism sources note that the parties who orchestrated the deadliest terrorism attack on any European capital took into account that President Hollande would be attending a friendly French-German football match at the Stade de France, presenting them with a high-quality target for assassination or capture as their hostage. Saturday, the president was the first French official to explicitly accuse ISIS of “an act of war” against France.

Hollande_13.11.15

One of the terrorists shouted before he died, “Francois Hollande’s foreign policy is to blame!” Another was reported by a witness as shouting “This is for Syria!” while spraying gunfire in one of the targeted restaurants: The other attacks on at least six locations were a kind of vicious subplot with the dual purpose of bloody terror per se as well as a diversionary tactic to confuse French security forces and keep them running around in several directions. The president’s bodyguards were meant to be distracted by two earsplitting explosions staged by two suicide bombers outside the stadium.

The guards however quickly whisked the president out of the stadium in time to escape harm.

Whatever their primary objective, coordinating so many simultaneous terror attacks by a large team called for months of preparation, precise intelligence, a variety of weapons and a large team of dedicated killers backed by exceptional staff work and organization.

Our analysts attribute the multiple assaults to a collaborative effort between Al Qaeda and the Islamic State. Together they were capable of putting up the necessary resources which included: –

1. A group of at least 20 terrorists for executing the six attacks. The French Prosecutor’s office reported Saturday that seven died in suicide bombings and the eighth was killed by security forces when they raided the concert hall, where dozens of hostages were being killed. Others may still be at large.

Our sources suspect that the survivors of the group are lying low and may be planning to emerge for a second round of atrocities in the coming hours or days, like after the Charlie Hebdo episode ten months ago, which was quickly succeeded by a massacre at the Jewish kosher store.

2.  A second group of back-up confederates was made up of drivers, who drove the terrorists to the scenes of attack and were ready to extricate any survivors. They handed the attackers their bomb belts, automatic weapons and explosives and acting also as spotters who watched and recording the movements of French security forces. They also photographed the incident.

3. A command group planned the attacks, enlisted operatives, directed and coordinated them, and maintained communications among the different teams.

At least 200 operatives at various levels were completely in the picture and directly involved in at least two months of advance planning.

The night of November 14 will be remembered for the failure of France’s Director-General for Internal Security (DGSI) and Director-General for External Security (DGSE) – or their refusal – to pick up the slightest clue to the massive preparations afoot for a horrendous, wide-scale terrorist outrage against their capital city.

Reclusive Muslim communities populate whole Paris suburbs and often practice an extremist Islamic life style which does not recognize the authority of the French Republic. When French police are forced to enter those areas they take care to have an armored military escort with automatic rifles. Rife with crime, poverty and deprivation, these communities are perfect breeding grounds for terrorist networks.

The alienation of the Paris Muslim community and the experiences of young radicals in former Islamic terrorist operations in the past two years have raised a high wall against penetration by French intelligence and police services and any attempts by them to enlist informers, undercover agents or collaborators able to whisper a warning when trouble lies ahead.

The French agencies therefore work in the almost total absence of human intelligence from Arabic speakers conversant with the local dialect, and rely almost exclusively on “signal Intelligence” (SIGINT) for warnings of a deadly threat of the kind that swept Paris Friday and is unlikely to end any time soon.

Since it could not have been the work of 200 lone wolves, but only a large organization with headquarters in Syria and Iraq and impressive multinational capabilities, it is hard to understand how the far-reaching preparations for a multiple Paris terror assault were not detected by any Western signals intelligence branches, including ECHELON, the all-seeing American digital surveillance system and its small brother, Frenchelon. This is bad news for other Western capitals, which ISIS has placed under threat.

Categories: Al Qaeda, Asylum seekers, Hollande, Islamic culture, Islamic immigration, Islamic invasion, Islamic slaughter, Islamic State, Paris, Paris Muslim attack
Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Comments: Be the first to comment

Deaths rise to 60 in multiple terrorist violence in central Paris

November 14, 2015

Deaths rise to 60 in multiple terrorist violence in central Paris, DEBKAfile, November 14, 2015

French police are preparing to place areas of Paris under curfew Friday night as the city comes under multiple terrorist attack with at least 60 dead, hundreds injured and around 100 hostages. French President Francois Hollande said that in view of the unprecedented assault, he has ordered French borders closed, halted air and rail traffic and mobilized the army under a state of emergency. Three locations were initially targeted but there may be twice as many. In an automatic shootout at a Paris restaurant near the Charlie Hebdo magazine left 11 dead. Then two explosions possibly by suicide bombers hit a bar near the football stadium during a French-German match. President Francois Hollande was evacuated from the stadium and has called an emergency cabinet meeting at midnight. At the Bataclan Theater, two gunmen fired 20 shots during a rock concert killing at least 15 are people and have taken 100 hostages from the audience which they are said to be killing one by one. A shooting is also reported at Les Halles shopping mall in the town center and incidents near the Louvre and the Pompidou Center.

More details are awaited from the Paris police.

President Barack Obama is being updated on the situation in Paris after US intelligence judged the attacks to be coordinated although terror was not mentioned. UK Prime Minister David Cameron has offered the French government all possible help.

Developing…

Categories: Paris, Terrorism
Tags: ,

Comments: Be the first to comment

EU “considering a ban on Islamophobia” after Paris attacks

January 18, 2015

EU “considering a ban on Islamophobia” after Paris attacks

After the Charlie Hebdo and related attacks, the European Union is being presented with proposals to ban Islamophobia, so as to stem a perceived backlash against Muslims. Eurocrats are sympathetic but do not believe they are practicable

by Brussel sprout on 17 January 2015 16:15

via EU “considering a ban on Islamophobia” after Paris attacks – The Commentator.

 

Sharia_europe

Diplomatic and NGO sources in Brussels say that the European Union is now considering proposals from Muslim groups to strengthen laws against “hate speech” following the fatal attacks in Paris at the Charlie Hebdo satirical magazine and a Jewish Supermarket.

The proposals are based on fears that the attacks by Islamists could provoke a backlash against Europe’s growing Muslim community, leaders of which uniformly condemned the killings, while simultaneously protesting against denigration of Muhammed.

Mainstream Muslim leaders have close contacts with the European Union and its related institutions, as do the leaders of other faith groups.

The sources, consulted in the last two days, who insisted upon anonymity, said that senior EU officials were sympathetic to calls for libel and hate-speech laws to be strengthened, but were sceptical of getting support from member governments or from the European Parliament where Right-leaning parties increased their presence at last year’s European elections.

One well-informed member of a non-governmental orgainsation in Brussels said:

“The conversation is going on. In fact, it’s the only game in town after Paris. But you aren’t going to get anyone to go on the record right now.  Everyone’s too scared, and I don’t mean scared of the Islamists, I mean scared of being accused of being politically correct, even if they are. ”

“The Jewish groups are terrrified, but let’s face it, how many Jews are there in Europe against the number of Muslims? But, yes, they are considering a ban on Islamophobia”.

Opinion polls show that the majority of European Union Muslims want Sharia law for their communities, but do not believe that that should extend to the non-Muslim majority. However, they do believe that insulting the Muslim Prophet should be against the law.

In 2003, the EU suppressed a report on anti-Semitism in Europe which concluded that attacks on Jews were mainly perpetrated by young Muslims.

Categories: Uncategorized
Tags: , , ,

Comments: 3 Comments

After the Paris murders: Islam and the West, and blaming the Jews

January 15, 2015

After the Paris murders: Islam and the West, and blaming the Jews | Anne’s Opinions, 14th January 2014

The horrific terrorist murders in Paris have led to much thinking and opining about the root causes of the attacks and Muslim hostility towards the West and the Jews. The prime root cause in my humble opinion is Western denial about such hostility in the first place. The Blaze for example has a detailed article about President Obama’s denial of the link of Islam to any one of the multiple terror attacks that have taken place around the world in recent years.

David Horovitz in an excellent article (all his articles are excellent) in the Times of Israel really hits the nail on the head in The death cult ideology that France prefers not to name:

The obsession with Netanyahu’s words and deeds in Paris, and with what Hollande did or didn’t want, might seem trivial in the context of the day’s great exhibition of determined resistance to terrorism. The question of whether France would have mobilized in the way it did solely for Jewish victims might seem jaundiced and small-minded after a day of such grand display.

Netanyahu at the Grand Synagogue in Paris

But now that the 3.5 million marchers have all gone home, we are left with the question: What are the French actually going to do about the mounting challenge of Islamist terrorism? More security? Evidently so. More vigilance? Doubtless, at least for a while. More substantive action, truly designed to eliminate the danger? Don’t bet on that.

France promised the world to its Jewish community after the murderous Toulouse attacks. Hollande vowed time and again that France would do everything to counter anti-Semitism, to fight hatred, “to tear off all the masks, all the pretexts.” This time, too, he pledged unity and vigilance in the battles against racism and anti-Semitism. What he didn’t explicitly promise, then or now, however, was to tackle violent Islamic extremism. On Friday, indeed, he asserted in an address to the nation that “these terrorists and fanatics have nothing to do with the Islamic religion.”

It would be nice to think that they didn’t. But it is their perverted interpretation of obligation to that religion that they invoke in carrying out their acts of terror and fanaticism. And it is the growing brutal resonance of their kill-and-be-killed ideology, and the failure of mainstream Islam to effectively challenge it, that led Egypt’s President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi to appeal to Muslim clerics in a remarkable speech on January 1 to promote a more “enlightened” interpretation of Islamic texts. As things stand, el-Sissi warned, the Islamic world is “making enemies of the whole world. So 1.6 billion people (in the Muslim world) will kill the entire world of 7 billion? That’s impossible … We need a religious revolution.” [I blogged about Sisi’s speech last week -anneinpt.]

Islamist jihad cannot and will not be defeated if it is not honestly acknowledged. The enemies of freedom will not be picked out at border crossings, tracked on the internet, targeted, thwarted and ultimately marginalized if insistent self-defeating political correctness means those enemies are not even named.

Jonathan Spyer, writing in “Reflections on the murders in Paris” in Middle East Forum provides some background to the motivations of political Islam which lead to Jihad and offers some remedies:

The Islamic world is currently in the midst of a great historic convulsion. This process is giving birth to political trends and movements of a murderously violent nature. These movements offer a supposed escape route from the humiliation felt at the profound societal failure of the Arab and to a slightly lesser extent the broader Muslim world.

The escape is by way of the most violent and intolerant historic trends of Islam, into a mythologized and imagined past. The route to this old-new imagined utopia is a bloody one. All who oppose or even slight it must die. The simple and brutal laws of 7th century Muslim Arabia are re-applied, in their literal sense. The events of last week in Paris were a manifestation of this trend.

…

The political trend in question is called political Islam. It manifests itself in its most extreme form in the rival global networks of the Al Qaeda movement and the Islamic State. But these, alas, are only the sharp tip of a much larger iceberg.

Political Islamists are not all, or mainly, young men from slums. On the contrary, its adherents include heads of state, powerful economic interests and media groups, and prominent cultural figures. Some of these, absurdly, were even present at the “solidarity rally” in Paris.

They rendered this event an empty spectacle by their presence.

…

Political Islam is a reaction to profound societal failure. It is also a flight into unreality. It has nothing practical to offer as an actual remedy to Arab and Islamic developmental problems. Economic, legal and societal models deriving from the 7th century Arabian desert are fairly obvious impediments to success in the 21st.

Where they are systematically imposed, as in the Islamic State, they will create something close to hell on earth. Where they remain present in more partial forms — as in Qatar, Gaza, Iran, (increasingly) Turkey, and so on — they will merely produce stifling, stagnant and repressive societies.

But the remedy for failure that political Islam offers is not a material one. It offers in generous portions the intoxicating psychological cocktail of murderous rage and self-assertion, and the desire to strike out and destroy those deemed enemies — infidels who transgress binding religious commandments, Jews and so on.

…

In contemporary western European societies, political Islam meets a human collectivity suffering, by contrast, from a profound loss of self. No one, at least in the mainstream of politics and culture, seems able to quite articulate what western European countries are for, or what they oppose — at least beyond a sort of vapid belief in everyone doing what they want and not bothering each other.

The result is that when violent political Islam collides with the satiated, lost societies of western Europe, the response is not defiance on the part of the latter, but rather fear.

This fear, as fear is wont to do, manifests itself in various, not particularly edifying, ways.

The most obvious is avoidance (“the attacks had nothing to do with Islam,” “unemployment and poverty are the root cause,” “the Islamic State is neither Islamic nor a state,” etc etc).

Another is appeasement — “maybe if we give them some of what they want, they’ll leave us alone.”

This response perhaps partially explains the notable adoption in parts of western Europe of the anti-Jewish prejudice so prevalent in the Islamic world.

The ennui of the western European mainstream will almost certainly prevent the adoption of the very tough measures which alone might serve to adequately address the burgeoning problem of large numbers of young European Muslims committed to political Islam and to violence against their host societies.

Such measures — which would include tighter surveillance and policing of communities, quick deportations of incendiary preachers, revocation of citizenship for those engaged in violence, possible imprisonment of suspects and so on — would require a political will which is manifestly absent. So it wont happen. So the events of Paris will almost certainly recur.

And lastly, since the elites will not be able to produce resistance, it will come from outside of the elites. Hence the growth of populist, nationalist parties and movements in western Europe. But Europe being what it is, such revivalist movements are likely to contain a hefty dose of the xenophobia and bigotry which characterized the continent of old.

Both these articles clearly illustrate the West’s problem with facing up to the awful brutal reality of religiously inspired political Islam which leads to the Jihadism that we are facing today on the streets of Europe and Israel.

Much of the media however appears to blame Israel, or even the Jews as a whole, for the murders of the four French Jews at the supermarket on Friday.

The BBC’s Tim Wilcox hit a new low by comparing Palestinian deaths to the murder of the French Jews, and then compounding the insult by claiming the Palestinians deaths were “at the hands of the Jews” – not Israel. BBC Watch reports:

Tim Willcox interrupts an interviewee talking about the recent antisemitic attacks in France to inform her – forty-eight hours after four Jewish hostages had been murdered in a terror attack on a kosher supermarket – that:

“Many critics of Israel’s policy would suggest that the Palestinians suffer hugely at Jewish hands as well.”

He then goes on to lecture her:

“But you understand; everything is seen from different perspectives.”

Here’s a short clip of his interview:

Wilcox later apologized but the “apology” was such a travesty that it itself became a further insult:

The reporter later took to social media platform Twitter to offer an apology of sorts. “Really sorry for any offense caused by a poorly phrased question in a live interview in Paris yesterday – it was entirely unintentional,” Willcox wrote.

Campaigners against anti-Semitism were unimpressed, however. “Tim Willcox is right to have apologized for the question, but the thinking behind it was just as problematic as the way he phrased it,” Dave Rich, Deputy Director of Communications for the Community Security Trust, the official communal security body of British Jews, told The Algemeiner. “There are simply no grounds on which to suggest that random Jewish shoppers in a Paris kosher grocery might be responsible for the fate of the Palestinians.”

Michael Salberg of the Anti-Defamation League accused Willcox of engaging in “anti-Semitism, plain and simple,” describing the reporter as “a proponent of anti-Jewish conspiracy theories and stereotypes.” As The Algemeiner reported last November, Willcox caused a separate furore during a BBC television panel discussion when he suggested that Jewish voters uncomfortable with British Labour Party leader Ed Miliband’s stance on Israel were motivated by financial concerns. “A lot of these prominent Jewish faces will be very much against the mansion tax,” Willcox said, referring to a Labour proposal for an additional tax on properties worth $3.5 million or more.

Wilcox is a disgrace and the fact that he hasn’t been fired by the BBC reflects as much on the BBC as on himself.

CNN downplayed the targeting of the Jews:

On CNN, meanwhile, reporters Chris Cuomo and Isa Soares implied that the assault on kosher supermarket Hyper Casher had not intentionally targeted Jews since the store was located in an “ordinary” part of Paris and Muslims also shopped there.

WATCH the CNN video below:

It was only a “surprise” to anyone who has not been following the huge rise in antisemitism in France. CNN is a prime example of politically-correct blindness.

CNN’s Jim Clancy went on a total anti-semitic meltdown in a Twitter screed documented by the Elder of Ziyon, yet Clancy, like Wilcox, is still employed by CNN. Again, this reflects as much on CNN as on Clancy.

Meanwhile the New York Times found the eve of the funerals of the Jewish victims the perfect timing to publish an anti-Israel op-ed by an Israeli:

Even a week of terrorist outrages in Paris wasn’t enough to convince the New York Times editorial page to temporarily suspend its obsession with the supposed evils of Israeli policy.

On Monday morning, alongside a piece signed by the Times Editorial Board which discussed anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim sentiment in France in several places – but did not deign to mention the fear among French Jews of rising anti-Semitism – readers of the “newspaper of record” were confronted with another article, entitled “Why I Won’t Serve Israel.”

…

Gilead Ini, a senior analyst with media watchdog CAMERA, slammed the Times for “perversely using the emigration of over one percent of the French Jewish population as an occasion to do what the newspaper does so often: Undermine Israel’s right to exist or, in this case, its ability to defend itself, by giving the country’s most marginal and hateful critics a platform.”

Added Ini: “It is a reminder that the New York Times opinion editor recently admitted to treating Israel with a harsher standard.”

For Rabbi Cooper, however, the publication of the piece “inadvertently highlighted an important truth.”

“Israel the only democracy in the neighborhood,” he said. “Good luck to the author if he had dared pen such a piece from Beirut, Damascus or Tehran.”

Jennifer Rubin at the Washington Post quotes Canadian PM Stephen Harper and Israeli PM Binyamin Netanyahu’s statements on the terror attacks and then notes:

Israel is the beacon of light, the representative of democratic values and civilization itself in the Middle East. This is obviously why jihadists seek to destroy “Little Satan”; it is a warm-up to taking on Big Satan, the United States.

Like it or not, the Europeans and the left more generally have taken up anti-Israel doctrine as part of their creed, not realizing that Israel is essential to their survival and the values of democracy, pluralism and tolerance. It is not merely that Israel battles the jihadists in the Middle East, although this is crucial to the West. More important, Israel’s existence is confirmation that the West will defend itself, that those who yearn for a new caliphate do not get a free pass. Its presence is a refutation of the Islamists’ vision.

Killing Jews as the first step in a barbaric onslaught is, alas, not unique to the Islamic terrorists. It is an uncomfortable truth that whatever the latest “ism,” forces of tyranny and suppression target Jews, whether it is Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union or the jihadists in Gaza and Tehran. If ever there is confusion about who is the enemy of civilization itself, look at who is seeking to kill Jews.

The trouble is that the West, its leadership and its media, are having great difficulty in internalising and acknowledging that Islamic terrorism has nothing to do with Israel or Jews per se, nor with anything Israel is perceived to have done.

The West has a problem understanding or agreeing that those same Hamas terrorists that Israel is fighting in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon are of the same jihadist mindset as the Paris murderers or the 9/11 terrorists or the Muslim terrorists who blew up buses and trains in Madrid and London on 7/7, and committed mass murder in Bali and Mumbai, and who killed hostages in an Australian cafe. Israel’s building settlements or demanding the right to pray on the Temple Mount is irrelevant to the Jihadis, no matter what they say to willing ears in the Western media. The Muslim terrorists’ problem with Israel is that it exists, full stop.

It’s long beyond high time that the world stopped hectoring Israel on what it “must” or “must not” do. As long as Israel exists we will be the target of terrorism, and Western antagonism to us only encourages the terrorists.

Moreover this Western hostility to Israel makes the Jihadists miscalculate and think that since the world blames Israel for the terrorism targeting it, they can similarly get away with targeting the West. And thus the roundabout continues. As one Twitter user observed:

https://twitter.com/ThisIsPalestine/status/555036840496209921

Categories: Antisemitism, Europe, France, Islam, Terrorism
Tags: , ,

Comments: 1 Comment

The Real Scandals of the Paris March

January 14, 2015

The Real Scandals of the Paris March

January 14, 2015 by Bruce Thornton

via The Real Scandals of the Paris March | FrontPage Magazine.

French President Francois Hollande welcomes Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas at the Elysee Palace before attending a solidarity march in the streets of ParisCommentators on both the left and the right are slamming President Obama for missing the march in Paris last Sunday. Even a stalwart courtier like CNN’s Jake Tapper sniffed that he was “ashamed” that the U.S. was represented by an ambassador––one, by the way, who got her appointment by bundling money for the president’s political campaigns. But who’s surprised at this latest display of diplomatic incompetence? This is the same president who gave the queen of England an I-Pod loaded with his speeches, banished a bust of Churchill from the White House, bowed low to the Saudi King, blew off Margaret Thatcher’s funeral, and insulted on an open mike the prime minister of Israel, our most important ally in the Middle East. Missing the march is just Obama being Obama.

More significant is the fact that these complaints are just distracting us from more important questions about the march. The first is, what took the French so long? In 2012, to take just one example, a jihadist killed 7 people, including 3 Jewish children, in Toulouse and Montauban. Why did those deaths not merit a large display of  “solidarity” and multicultural togetherness? Some will argue that the Charlie Hebdo killings deserve more attention because they struck at a foundational belief of liberal democracy, free speech. Indeed it did.

But killing Jewish children just because they are Jews strikes at equally foundational beliefs––that all people have human rights whatever their race or creed, and that confessional tolerance is mandatory for an open and free society. Yes, the latest massacre also killed 4 Jews just because they were Jews, but those victims of the violent assault on our principles have been an afterthought. Passionate proclamations of the importance of free speech? Heard a lot those. Equally passionate calls to fight anti-Semitism? Not so much. Perhaps some people have some residual decency, and are embarrassed at being reminded that just 6 months ago, these same streets of Paris were filled with protestors marching in support of Hamas, vandalizing synagogues, and shouting anti-Semitic and genocidal slogans.

So there is a fair amount of hypocrisy in such calls for free speech and tolerance, coming as they do from the same people who institute “hate speech” codes against the critics of Islam, and who brand as “Islamophobes,” and “xenophobes,” and “neo-fascists” those political parties that call for a renewed commitment to Western civilization, and take pride in the culture that created human rights, democracy, tolerance, and all the other goods the scorners of national and cultural pride take for granted. Hence Bernard Henry-Levy snidely dismisses as “arsonists of the soul” those parties that call for patriotism and pride in their culture, and the need to defend it from the enemies that want to destroy it. So much for Henry-Levy’s cries for “national unity,” an invitation apparently valid only for those who endorse the flabby “tolerance” and multicultural fantasies that have enabled the illiberal, homophobic, misogynistic, and lethally intolerant jihadists shedding blood in the streets of Paris.

One suspects that the outcry reflects anger not so much at those who murder innocents in order to destroy liberal democracy and human rights, but at these particular killers who dared to slaughter left-wing journalists in what François Hollande laughably called the “capital of the world.” One wonders what the response would have been had the same number of people been murdered in a National Front office out in the sticks. It’s the arrogant provincialism of the has-been great power, the Gallic version of that old New Yorker cover showing the U.S. as a vast wasteland west of the East River. Killing Jews or cops in the provinces is one thing, but left-wing journalists in the City of Lights? Now that’s a cause for outrage. Roger Kimball got it right when he wrote, “The whole production is slightly nauseating in its fakeness, its self-aggrandizing narcissism, and its essential mendacity.”

But the most nauseating scandal of the march was the presence of Palestinian honcho

Mahmoud Abbas, participating with other heads of state in an event supposedly memorializing victims who include 4 Jews killed by jihadists. But Abbas is not a “head of state.” He is the “chairman” of a terrorist gang called the Palestinian Liberation Organization, a member of another terrorist outfit, Fatah, and a holocaust denier. Since 1993 he has headed up the Palestinian Authority, that Potemkin “government” behind which for 20 years now he and his cronies have incited hatred against Jews in Arab Palestinian popular culture and schools, brutally suppressed political rivals, fleeced the West of funds that arm soldiers and line the pockets of the PA’s “leaders” ($100 million just for Abbas), and serially engineered terrorist murders of Israelis, over 1500 since Oslo handed control of Judaea and Samaria to the Palestinians.

So a “leader” whose whole life has been committed to the destruction of Jews and their national homeland, who has colluded in terrorist murder, who regularly praises murderers of Israelis as “martyrs” and names schools after them, and who has rejected offers of the nation that he tells gullible Westerners is people’s purpose of their violence––this man who embodies everything opposed to the liberal democratic principles of Western civilization is invited to march in a celebration of those principles? A “leader” who arrests and tortures journalists marches in support of free speech? A killer of Jews attends a memorial in which Jews have been killed? But what should we expect when nations forged by Western principles have sunk so low that they make a terrorist gang a member of U.N. institutions––with the approval of France, remember–– and the International Criminal Court, one of whose charges is to prosecute genocide and war crimes like randomly firing rockets into cities. You have to go back to the bloodstained Soviet judges sitting on the Nuremberg Tribunal to find such absurd hypocrisy.

The rot in the West, its failure of cultural nerve and collapse of civilizational morale, will not be stopped by big talk and displays of communal emotion. To quote Churchill’s words in response to the Munich debacle, “This is only the first sip, the first foretaste of a bitter cup which will be proffered to us year by year unless by a supreme recovery of moral health and martial vigour, we arise again and take our stand for freedom as in olden time.” And that “stand” will require more than just words and marches.

Categories: Uncategorized
Tags: , ,

Comments: 1 Comment

Reflections on the Murders in Paris

January 13, 2015

Reflections on the Murders in Paris

The rise of political Islam in the west is not being adequately addressed by our elites.

By Jonathan Spyer

January 12, 2015 – 12:40 pm

via Reflections on the Murders in Paris | PJ Media.

 

The Islamic world is currently in the midst of a great historic convulsion.  This process is giving birth to political trends and movements of a murderously violent nature.  These movements offer a supposed escape route from the humiliation felt at the profound societal failure of the Arab and to a slightly lesser extent the broader Muslim world.

The escape is by way of the most violent and intolerant historic trends of Islam, into a mythologized and imagined past. The route to this old-new imagined utopia is a bloody one.  All who oppose or even slight it must die. The simple and brutal laws of 7th century Muslim Arabia are re-applied, in their literal sense.  The events of last week in Paris were a manifestation of this trend.

These trends exist not only in the Arab and Muslim worlds themselves.  Because of mass immigration from the Arab and Muslim world to western European countries, they are also powerful and present in immigrant communities in these countries.  The Kouachi brothers and Amedi Coulibaly are the latest, and no doubt not the last representatives of this political world to impose themselves on us.

The political trend in question is called political Islam.  It manifests itself in its most extreme form in the rival global networks of the Al Qaeda movement and the Islamic State. But these, alas, are only the sharp tip of a much larger iceberg.

Political Islam and its followers are not all, or mainly, young men from slums.

On the contrary, its adherents include heads of state, powerful economic interests and media groups, and prominent cultural figures.  Some of these, absurdly, were even present at the “solidarity rally” in Paris.

They rendered this event an empty spectacle by their presence.

Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu of Turkey, for example, came to offer his solidarity to the victims of journalists murdered by Islamists in Paris, just two days after the Turkish courts sentenced a pianist to a 10 month prison sentence, suspended for five years,  for the crime of “denigrating religion (ie Islam).”

More urgently, Turkey has been an active supporter of both Islamic State and al-Qaeda forces in northern Syria over the last three years.  That is, Davutoglu was marching in condemnation of forces to which his own government has offered support.

Political Islam is a reaction to profound societal failure.  It is also a flight into unreality. It has nothing practical to offer as an actual remedy to Arab and Islamic developmental problems.  Economic, legal and societal models deriving from the 7th century Arabian desert are fairly obvious impediments to success in the 21st.

Where they are systematically imposed, as in the Islamic State, they will create something close to hell on earth.  Where they remain present in more partial forms — as in Qatar, Gaza, Iran, (increasingly) Turkey, and so on — they will merely produce stifling, stagnant and repressive societies.

But the remedy for failure that political Islam offers is not a material one. It offers in generous portions the intoxicating psychological cocktail of murderous rage and self-assertion, and the desire to strike out and destroy those deemed enemies — infidels who transgress binding religious commandments, Jews and so on.

This is not the first time that Europe has encountered political phenomena based on murderous rage and utopias buried in the magical past.  The European fascist movements produced precisely such a mix.  But of course, this time around, the rage and the utopia derive not from European culture, but from an alien culture which has implanted itself among the Europeans.

Here is the second part of the problem.  Arab and Muslim societies may be failures and basket cases, but they retain an exceptionally strong and vivid sense of themselves.  It is the irony of history that this sense of self is precisely of a type that is bound to keep their societies mired in failure. But history favors irony, and this sense  nevertheless remains powerfully experienced and hence politically potent.  In this respect,  the modern Islamic world resembles western Europe of 80 or 90 years ago, but not the contemporary continent.

In contemporary western European societies, political Islam meets a human collectivity suffering, by contrast, from a profound loss of self.  No one, at least in the mainstream of politics and culture, seems able to quite articulate what western European countries are for,  or what they oppose — at least beyond a sort of vapid belief in everyone doing what they want and not bothering each other.

The result is that when violent political Islam collides with the satiated, lost societies of western Europe, the response is not defiance on the part of the latter, but rather fear.

This fear, as fear is wont to do, manifests itself in various, not particularly edifying, ways.

The most obvious is avoidance (“the attacks had nothing to do with Islam,”  “unemployment and poverty are the root cause,” “the Islamic State is neither Islamic nor a state,” etc etc).

Another is appeasement — “maybe if we give them some of what they want, they’ll leave us alone.”

This response  perhaps partially explains the notable adoption in parts of western Europe of the anti-Jewish prejudice so prevalent in the Islamic world.

The ennui of the western European mainstream will almost certainly prevent the adoption of the very tough measures which alone might serve to adequately address the burgeoning problem of large numbers of young European Muslims committed to political Islam and to violence against their host societies.

Such measures — which would include tighter surveillance and policing of communities, quick deportations of incendiary preachers, revocation of citizenship for those engaged in violence, possible imprisonment of suspects and so on — would require a political will which is manifestly absent.  So it wont happen.  So the events of Paris will almost certainly recur.

And lastly, since the elites will not be able to produce resistance, it will come from outside of the elites. Hence the growth of populist, nationalist parties and movements in western Europe.   But Europe being what it is, such revivalist movements are likely to contain a hefty dose of the xenophobia and bigotry which characterized the continent of old.

None of this can, at present, be discussed in polite European society. But all of it is fairly obvious. For this reason, Europe’s Jews are at present warily eying the door.  As someone who was born in western Europe, and left it 25 years ago for Israel, I am happy to conclude that as a result of the efforts and sacrifice of many, Europe’s Jews are this time around neither defenseless nor alone.  Nor will their blood be free to be taken with impunity.

Categories: Uncategorized
Tags: , ,

Comments: 1 Comment

Millions March in Paris; Gov’ts & Media Scrub Islamist Motive

January 13, 2015

Millions March in Paris; Gov’ts & Media Scrub Islamist Motive, Clarion Project, Meira Svirsky, January 12, 2015

France-We-Are-Charlie-Reuters-IPA banner that reads ‘We Are Charlie’ at the march in Paris in support of slain journalists from the Charlie Hebdo magazine. (Photo: © Reuters)

[T]he Islamists will have won on many accounts. The fact that leaders of the Western world have demurred to differentiate between Islam and Islamism (the implementation of Islam on a political level, including the instituting of sharia law) due to desire not to offend Muslims or be labelled racists means that they will not implement the measures needed to stamp out the Islamist ideology and its resulting violence.

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

By refusing to censor themselves and bow to the requests of sharia law, the publishers of Charlie Hebdo refused to be part of this sabotage.The Western world needs to take up their gauntlet.

World leaders joined a march of one and a half million people today in Paris in a show of unity to the 17 slain in the Islamist terrorist attacks across France last week.

“Unity against extremism” was the theme in Paris’ Republique plaza, as reflected in the words of France Prime Minister Manuel Valls, who said Saturday, “We are all Charlie, we are all police, we are all Jews of France.”

The French prime minister was referring to the attacks on theCharlie Hebdo magazine on Wednesday that left 10 journalists and 2 policemen dead, another policewoman dead in a separate attack on Thursday and four hostages killed in a take-over of a kosher mini-market on Friday.

Two brothers armed with AK-47s along with another gunmen stormed the Charlie Hebdo magazine’s offices after deeming cartoons they had published offensive to Islam. The magazine’s headquarters had been firebombed in 2011 for the same “offense.” The magazine had police protection and its editor, who was killed in the attack, employed a policeman as a personal bodyguard.

In a video of the attack as it played out afterwards on the street  taken by a Parisian who had escaped to the roof of a neighboring building, the attackers could be heard shouting “Allahu Akhbar” (“God is Great” in Arabic) as they shot a policeman on the street, then finishing him off at point blank while he lay wounded.

Witnesses also reported hearing the gunmen yell, “We have avenged the Prophet Mohammed.”

As explained by British Islamist Anjem Choudary – and as well understood by the French president as well as every other world leader who will be attending Sunday’s rally — insulting the prophet of Islam is a crime punishable by the death penalty according to sharia (Islamic) law.

Which make it even more surprising that, in one of Francois Hollande’ s first statements following the attack on the magazine, the French president said, “These madmen, fanatics, have nothing to do with the Muslim religion.”

The White House press secretary Josh Earnest, took the obfuscation one step further when he kept referring to the attack as “violence,” prompting his CNN interviewer to pin him down saying, “Josh, when you talk about countering the message, you keep using the word violence. I mean, this is an act of terrorism, that’s what the president of France called it — an act of terrorism … Do you see this as an act of terrorism, and is this something that has to be condemned on that level?”

To which Earnest replied obscurely, “Based on what we know right now, it does seem that’s what we’re confronting here. And this is an act of violence that we certainly do condemn, and if based on this investigation it turns out to be an act of terrorism, then we would condemn that in the strongest possible terms, too.”

After the beheading of journalist James Foley,  U.S. President Barack Obama declare that the Islamic State “is not Islamic.”  Following this stance, Obama initially released a statement which read, “I strongly condemn the horrific shooting at the offices of Charlie Hebdo magazine in Paris that has reportedly killed 12 people.”

Later, he managed to refer to the attack simply as “terrorism.”

For their part, many media outlets were busy scrubbing the frames of the video where “Allahu Akhbar” could be heard. The New York Times originally reported a quote from a survivor of the magazine attack, Sigolène Vinson, a freelancer who was at the magazine’s office that morning and later spoke to French media.

Relating how she thought she would be killed when one of the attackers put a gun to her head, Vinson reported that the gunman said instead, “I’m not going to kill you because you’re a woman. We don’t kill women, but you must convert to Islam, read the Quran and cover yourself.”

The quote was short-lived on the Times, who later edited Vinson’s quote from the attacker to read, “Don’t be afraid, calm down, I won’t kill you. You are a woman. But think about what you’re doing. It’s not right.”

CNN, for their part, managed to question whether the kosher store was chosen by the Islamist attacker for anti-Semitic reasons since “many Muslims shopped there” and because there were a “variety of shops” in the non-Jewish neighborhood.  The network chose to ignore a widely circulated report by a French reporter who spoke to the terrorist by phone. “He said he did it to defend oppressed Muslims, especially in Palestine, and he chose a kosher supermarket because it served Jews,” said the French reporter.

Amid the reporting was the recurring question asked by the media, “What can be done?” as well as the implied answer given by the French president when he said, “France has not seen the end of the threats it faces” – an answer unfortunately relevant to the rest of the Western world.

Hollande’s response will, regrettably, be the correct assessment if those in charge refuse to face the reality of the threat: Failure to address the “Islamist” component of the terrorism that is striking the West is not only disingenuous but erects an impenetrable barrier to overcoming it.

And so, the Islamists will have won on many accounts. The fact that leaders of the Western world have demurred to differentiate between Islam and Islamism (the implementation of Islam on a political level, including the instituting of sharia law) due to desire not to offend Muslims or be labelled racists means that they will not implement the measures needed to stamp out the Islamist ideology and its resulting violence.

“Everyone is focusing on the fact that that the jihadists went after cartoonists,“  said Clarion Project’s national security analyst Ryan Mauro in an interview on national news (see below for full interview). Yet, “there is always going to be a target [emanating] from this ideology that says that ‘Things like this are so illegal undersharia that they must be retaliated against violently in order to make societies conform to our belief system of sharia.’”

Our leaders must realize that speaking about terror motivated by Islamist ideology does not connote anti-Muslim sentiment.

“The issue we face is not, as Islamist groups falsely claim in the United States – ironically the very ones invited to the White House, Homeland Security, Department of Justice, and State Department — that using the term Islamic terrorism connotes a generalization that all Muslims are terrorists any more than using the term “Hispanic drug cartels” means that all Hispanics are druggies or that the term “Italian mafia” means that all Italians are mobsters or that the term “German Nazis” mean that all Germans were Nazis, “ writes Steve Emerson of the Investigative Project on Terrorism.

“The term Islamic terrorism means just that: terrorist attacks with an Islamic motivation — whether they attempts to silence critics of Islam, impose Sharia, punish Western ‘crusaders,’ commit genocide of non-Muslims, establish Islamic supremacy (or a Caliphate), or destroy any non Muslim peoples (e.g. the Jews and Christians) that are ‘occupying Muslim lands,’” says Emerson.

Failure to identify the Islamist ideology driving terrorism necessarily means we will not succeed in our battle against it. Moreover, we will be willingly complicit in our demise.

If we don’t want to be part of that, the events in France teach us, “Don’t censor yourself,” says Mauro. “Recognize that this attack is a means to an end. Victory for them isn’t the attack itself, the victory comes when we censor ourselves. Because they are not powerful enough to enforce their form of sharia governance upon us, what they can do is to intimidate us into implementing it on ourselves.”

In a document recovered from a 1991 meeting which outlines the Muslim Brotherhood‘s strategic goals for North America, the founders of the Islamist movement in America wrote, “The Ikhwan[Muslim Brotherhood] must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers…”

By refusing to censor themselves and bow to the requests of sharialaw, the publishers of Charlie Hebdo refused to be part of this sabotage.

The Western world needs to take up their gauntlet.

Categories: Antisemitism, Charlie Hedbo, Christians, Europe, Foreign policy, France, Freedom, Human rights, Humor, International Community, Islam, Islamic slaughter, Islamism, Islamophobia, Jews, Koran, Multiculturalism, Muslim Brotherhood, Sharia law, Terrorism
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Comments: Be the first to comment

Gut Check: Cartoonish Behavior

January 12, 2015

Gut Check: Cartoonish Behavior

via Gut Check: Cartoonish Behavior – Breitbart.

 

by Greg Gutfeld12 Jan 20150

As the massive march unfolded in Paris, it served to remind us why everyone showed up in the first place: because some fanatical, determined assholes murdered a bunch of innocent citizens.

It serves to remind us of this simple fact, as this initial outrage gets lost among other phony concerns, desires and political wishes.

The march is no longer a simple, defiant repudiation of radical Islamic assholes. No – it’s now against other things – including racism, backlash, and so on.  Instead of learning a lesson about evil, the media return to wimpy, vacant pronouncements of tolerance – like an amnesiac dog devouring its own vomit.  That’s the cartoon I keep seeing.

While we watched the march, over in Nigeria fiends attached explosives to young girls and sent them off on dual suicide missions. Six people were killed in a market, that mid-afternoon – the second attack to use young girls as death-delivery systems. Ten years old or so – all that’s left are parts of their torso and hair. This, occurring on the heels of Boku Harem’s latest and deadliest attack – one that killed up to 2,000 women, children, and elderly civilians.  It’s a monstrous ugly thing that got lost in the Paris shuffle. And no arm-linking chant of famous names and famous faces is going to stop that.

So forgive me if a march for unity leaves me cold. It should be a march for war.

I pray one day everyone will wake up, and realize this is not a time for a call for unity  under the guise of tolerance, but for a unity of will – a collective fortitude necessary to destroy a movement that wants to destroy us. Most people get this. The media, not so much.

What are the barriers to this? To me, it’s pretty simple.

We are dealing with a death cult that’s aided and abetted by two different fifth columns, both of which are cults in themselves.

If you’re new to the phrase, “fifth column,” it describes any group of people who act to undermine their own country from within. What makes these two fifth columns different is their actions are almost entirely performed out in the open, egged on and saluted by the rich, the educated, the upwardly able, the elites.

The first fifth column is the academic media complex that previously deemed the War On Terror Islamophobic, unnecessary and laughable. These are those cretins who spent more time obsessing over our response to 9/11, than 9/11 itself.  They are the same cretins who see in every terror attack our culpability, and therefore an avenue for dismissing any legitimate response. This is not just stupidity, it’s worse: it’s a calculated movement to undermine the west from within. The accusation of “Islamophobia” is nothing more than a movable shrub camouflaging an eradication of will, rendering us incapable of fighting an ever growing, and ever more vicious threat.

The second fifth column is the academic media complex that deems the War on Terror intrusive to your privacy, as if the NSA really is interested in reading your stupid emails.  You need intelligence to engage in espionage, one must track evil to catch it,  and covert eavesdropping is a must – but it’s oh so unfair and mean-spirited!  How dare you spy!  That’s so deeply offensive to my pocket constitution! Sure, Snowden adulation was active and easy when threats were dormant. But now that the needles in the haystack are starting to stab – the Greenwald groupies and Snowden suck-ups are as quiet as a mime fart.

(It is interesting to note that those in that first fifth column have migrated into the second fifth column, blending in with naïve conservatives and their talk radio taskmasters.)

As I watch the news now, I hear one anchor wondering if we’re doing enough to track global terror. Is there “not enough coordination?”

Only years ago, perhaps to this person – such tracking of “global jihad” seemed overblown.  At the march, there were something like 40 heads of state including Angela Merkel and David Cameron (no Obama).  So, just like that, we’re back to a global war on terror?  Anyone want to send a bouquet of flowers to Dick Cheney?  Can we stop whipping ourselves over torture?  Has Dianne Feinstein changed her mind, again, about spilling our methods?

Anchors now spend their time in air conditioned studios wondering about this new competitiveness between ISIS  and al Qaeda – a line of thought that allows one to avoid admitting that “lone wolves” are actually a well-trained pack.

And as some others point fingers at a country like France for not “assimilating” its new immigrants enough – which leads to alienation, then terror – its observable that terror still occurs in areas where assimilation is not an issue at all. Muslims are blowing up Muslims in Muslim places. And besides, it’s usually the responsibility of the immigrant to assimilate to the country, not the reverse. But academics tell us that’s racist. All cultures are equal, and expecting someone to leave barbaric practices back home is bullying.

Worse, as one CNN hack already labeled terrorists “activists,” and another identified a black French terrorist as an African American,  still another wonders if the Paris demonstration might strengthen the radical’s defiance.

What is she suggesting then, exactly? Go home and hope this shit blows over?

After I posted a monologue on the Paris attacks, a Muslim girl tweeted at me, demanding I stop interchanging Islam with terror (which I hadn’t, but she really didn’t care).  I asked her, then and there, if she would condemn terror with me, and the horrific acts of radical islam.  She didn’t – instead she went after Israel.

I gave her another chance – pointing out that she’s accused me of conflating Islam and terror – yet she, as a Muslim would not condemn terror. SO isn’t she conflating the two?  Like a pre-programmed robot, she stuck to her script of Islamophobia – and it became clear (as it always does), that we’ve created these idiots, by indulging their phony victimhood.

The first step in any problem is admitting you have one.  But we have already given in to the mindset of that girl above – worried more about  backlash than the “frontlash,” – that Charlie Hebdo will happen again, and again.

But, as always, I propose a deal. It is one I made on The Five a few days ago, and it seems to make a lot of sense to me.

If you believe that terror is not a religious issue, and I agree with you – then what does that mean, exactly?

It means that if I don’t “see” Islam, when I fight terror, then you cannot “see” Islamophobia when I fight it.

On the contrary, as a Muslim you should join me in championing the elimination of such heathens – since after all, it has NOTHING to do with religion. We can fight this together, if we look at our enemies through the same lens:  seeing as they are murderous scum who should die.

However, if you have a problem making that step – like that moronic girl who tweeted me – then perhaps it is you who has the problem separating religion from terror.

It’s a problem you should solve. Soon.

Because we aren’t waiting for you.

And then we become that ACME safe that lands on the Wile E. Coyote that is radical Islam. I love that cartoon.

Greg Gutfeld is a mainstay on Fox News as co-host of The Five and the host of Red Eye. He’s also the NY Times best-selling author of Not Cool and The Joy of Hate: How to Triumph over Whiners in the Age of Phony Outrage. For more from Greg check out hisofficial site or follow him on Twitter.

Categories: Uncategorized
Tags: , , ,

Comments: Be the first to comment

How to Answer the Paris Terror Attack

January 8, 2015

How to Answer the Paris Terror Attack, Wall Street Journal, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, January 7, 2015

If there is a lesson to be drawn from such a grisly episode, it is that what we believe about Islam truly doesn’t matter. This type of violence, jihad, is what they, the Islamists, believe.

Those responsible for the slaughter in Paris, just like the man who killed the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh in 2004, are seeking to impose terror. And every time we give in to their vision of justified religious violence, we are giving them exactly what they want.

We appease the Muslim heads of government who lobby us to censor our press, our universities, our history books, our school curricula. They appeal and we oblige. We appease leaders of Muslim organizations in our societies. They ask us not to link acts of violence to the religion of Islam because they tell us that theirs is a religion of peace, and we oblige.

We have to acknowledge that today’s Islamists are driven by a political ideology, an ideology embedded in the foundational texts of Islam. We can no longer pretend that it is possible to divorce actions from the ideals that inspire them.

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

After the horrific massacre Wednesday at the French weekly satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, perhaps the West will finally put away its legion of useless tropes trying to deny the relationship between violence and radical Islam.

This was not an attack by a mentally deranged, lone-wolf gunman. This was not an “un-Islamic” attack by a bunch of thugs—the perpetrators could be heard shouting that they were avenging the Prophet Muhammad. Nor was it spontaneous. It was planned to inflict maximum damage, during a staff meeting, with automatic weapons and a getaway plan. It was designed to sow terror, and in that it has worked.

The West is duly terrified. But it should not be surprised.

BN-GI167_EDPHir_M_20150107184019GETTY IMAGE

If there is a lesson to be drawn from such a grisly episode, it is that what we believe about Islam truly doesn’t matter. This type of violence, jihad, is what they, the Islamists, believe.

There are numerous calls to violent jihad in the Quran. But the Quran is hardly alone. In too much of Islam, jihad is a thoroughly modern concept. The 20th-century jihad “bible,” and an animating work for many Islamist groups today, is “The Quranic Concept of War,” a book written in the mid-1970s by Pakistani Gen. S.K. Malik. He argues that because God, Allah, himself authored every word of the Quran, the rules of war contained in the Quran are of a higher caliber than the rules developed by mere mortals.

In Malik’s analysis of Quranic strategy, the human soul—and not any physical battlefield—is the center of conflict. The key to victory, taught by Allah through the military campaigns of the Prophet Muhammad, is to strike at the soul of your enemy. And the best way to strike at your enemy’s soul is through terror. Terror, Malik writes, is “the point where the means and the end meet.” Terror, he adds, “is not a means of imposing decision upon the enemy; it is the decision we wish to impose.”

Those responsible for the slaughter in Paris, just like the man who killed the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh in 2004, are seeking to impose terror. And every time we give in to their vision of justified religious violence, we are giving them exactly what they want.

In Islam, it is a grave sin to visually depict or in any way slander the Prophet Muhammad. Muslims are free to believe this, but why should such a prohibition be forced on nonbelievers? In the U.S., Mormons didn’t seek to impose the death penalty on those who wrote and produced “The Book of Mormon,” a satirical Broadway sendup of their faith. Islam, with 1,400 years of history and some 1.6 billion adherents, should be able to withstand a few cartoons by a French satirical magazine. But of course deadly responses to cartoons depicting Muhammad are nothing new in the age of jihad.

Moreover, despite what the Quran may teach, not all sins can be considered equal. The West must insist that Muslims, particularly members of the Muslim diaspora, answer this question: What is more offensive to a believer—the murder, torture, enslavement and acts of war and terrorism being committed today in the name of Muhammad, or the production of drawings and films and books designed to mock the extremists and their vision of what Muhammad represents?

To answer the late Gen. Malik, our soul in the West lies in our belief in freedom of conscience and freedom of expression. The freedom to express our concerns, the freedom to worship who we want, or not to worship at all—such freedoms are the soul of our civilization. And that is precisely where the Islamists have attacked us. Again.

How we respond to this attack is of great consequence. If we take the position that we are dealing with a handful of murderous thugs with no connection to what they so vocally claim, then we are not answering them. We have to acknowledge that today’s Islamists are driven by a political ideology, an ideology embedded in the foundational texts of Islam. We can no longer pretend that it is possible to divorce actions from the ideals that inspire them.

This would be a departure for the West, which too often has responded to jihadist violence with appeasement. We appease the Muslim heads of government who lobby us to censor our press, our universities, our history books, our school curricula. They appeal and we oblige. We appease leaders of Muslim organizations in our societies. They ask us not to link acts of violence to the religion of Islam because they tell us that theirs is a religion of peace, and we oblige.

What do we get in return? Kalashnikovs in the heart of Paris. The more we oblige, the more we self-censor, the more we appease, the bolder the enemy gets.

There can only be one answer to this hideous act of jihad against the staff of Charlie Hebdo. It is the obligation of the Western media and Western leaders, religious and lay, to protect the most basic rights of freedom of expression, whether in satire on any other form. The West must not appease, it must not be silenced. We must send a united message to the terrorists: Your violence cannot destroy our soul.

Categories: Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Diversity, Europe, Foreign policy, Freedom, International Community, Islam, Islamic jihad, Islamic slaughter, Islamic State, Islamophobia, Moral equivalence, Multiculturalism, Political correctness, Terrorism
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Comments: Be the first to comment

Newer Entries »