The goal of Islamic Cartoonophobic terror is to intimidate critics of Islamic ideology. The right way to respond to the terror attack against Charlie Hedbo is to fight the Islamic/Leftist attempt to isolate critics by reposting the Hebdo Mohammed cartoons.
We stand up for freedom of speech by practicing controversial speech in defiance of those who would censor us. Mere sympathy is not solidarity.
Standing up to the Jihadists takes more than a hashtag. It demands that we practice the freedom they hate so much.
(How about “stand with the murdering, antisemitic pedophile worshiped by billions of Muslims?” Unfortunately, Obama’s multiculturalism-based foreign policies vis a vis Islam and opposition to Islamic terror seem to reflect the sentiments of the “Muslim leaders.” — DM)
Koran / AP
Organizers of the conference claim that the media and Islamophobes in America are the main reason why Islam and its prophet have such a bad reputation in the Western world.
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Muslim leaders from across America will gather in Texas this weekend to hold the annual Stand With the Prophet in Honor and Respect conference, a weekend forum that is being billed as a “movement to defend Prophet Muhammad, his person, and his message,” according to event information.
The Saturday event, which seeks to combat “Islamophobes in America” who have turned the Islamic Prophet Muhammad “into an object of hate,” according to organizers, comes just a week after radicalized Islamists in France killed 17 people.
The victims died in events that began with the shooting attack on French newspaper Charlie Hebdo for its satirical cartoons that skewered the prophet.
Organizers of the event place the blame for Islam’s bad reputation on the media and so-called American Islamophobes who have “invested at least $160 million dollars to attack our Prophet and Islam,” according to the conference web page.
Keynote speakers at the event will include Georgetown University professor John Esposito, founding director of the school’s Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, which has come under fire for, among other things, hosting 9/11 Truthers and a member of Egypt’s Nazi Party.
Also scheduled to attend the forum is controversial New York-based Imam Siraj Wahhaj, who was an “unindicted co-conspirator” in the 1993 World Trade Center bombings trial. Wahhaj has called the FBI and CIA the “real terrorists” and expressed a desire for all Americans to become Muslim, according to the New York Post.
Organizers of the conference claim that the media and Islamophobes in America are the main reason why Islam and its prophet have such a bad reputation in the Western world.
“This is not an event. It is the beginning of a movement,” organizers write on their website, which blames Americans for giving Islam a bad name. “A movement to defend Prophet Muhammad, his person, and his message.”
“All these accusations were invented by Islamophobes in America,” the group claims. “As we celebrate the Prophet in our now annual, nationwide event: Stand with the Prophet, we recommit ourselves to rectify his image, peace be upon him.”
The event seeks to capitalize on outrage over cartoons and other materials mocking Mohammed in popular culture.
“Frustrated with Islamophobes defaming the Prophet?” the event materials ask. “Fuming over extremists like ISIS who give a bad name to Islam? Remember the Danish cartoons defaming the Prophet? Or the anti-Islam film, ‘Innocence of Muslims’?”
The event is being backed by several Muslim groups, including SoundVision, an Illinois-based website that provides advice and products to Muslims; RadioIslam, an AM radio station based in Chicago; and MuslimFest.
It will take place Saturday evening at the Curtis Culwell Center in Garland, Texas.
The goal of the forum, which costs $20 to attend, is to raise money to fund a “Strategic Communication Center for the Muslim community, which will develop effective responses to anti-Islamic attacks, as well as to train young Muslims in media.”
This center will be equipped to respond to insults to the prophet, such as when publications run cartoons critical of Mohammed.
“When real events warrant, like the Danish Cartoon controversy, Sharia ban, Quran burning, Boko Haram kidnappings. [Islamic State] brutality, etc., we articulate fresh talking points and content quickly, and in a timely manner, working with professionals to disseminate it through community spokespersons and our allies,” organizers state on their website.
Meanwhile, a German newspaper that re-ran Charlie Hebdo satirical cartoons of Mohammed was firebombed over the weekend, according to reports.
The Muslim groups hosting the Stand with the Prophet event blame the media for fomenting the wrong ideas about Muslims. The site promoting the forum includes a Pew survey finding that the media is the largest influence on the public’s opinion about Muslims.
“Media is making the life of Muslims difficult by turning our neighbors against us,” the website states.
Martin Kramer, a Middle East expert and president of the Shalem College in Jerusalem, criticized Georgetown’s Esposito for participating the Stand with the Prophet forum.
“John Esposito favors ‘incitement to hatred’ legislation, under the rubric of religious freedom, that would effectively trump freedom of expression,” Kramer said. “‘Belief as well as unbelief needs to be protected,’ he has written. ‘Freedom of religion in a pluralistic society ought to mean that some things are sacred and treated as such.’”
“Rallies such as the one Esposito will address have one purpose: granting Islam a protected status, and denying that protection to its critics,” Kramer said.
Esposito did not respond to an email seeking comment about his participation in the event. A Georgetown University spokesman also did not respond to an email request for comment.
Phone calls to SoundVision, the group sponsoring the event and hosting information about it online, were not answered or returned. An email to the site’s informational address also was not returned.
Patrick Poole, a terrorism expert and national security reporter, said the conference is part of larger campaign to blame some in America for the negative impression of Muslims in the West.
“This is a yet another manifestation of ‘Islamophobia’-phobia,” Poole said. “The conference organizers invoke an ‘Islamophobia hate machine’ based in the U.S. that is responsible for defaming Muslims worldwide but the events of the past week and other recent attacks have done more to damage the image of Islam than any other factor.”
The Muslim community must take responsibility and stop blaming the West for Islam’s faltering image, Poole said.
“What this conference makes clear is that the Muslim community needs to find better leadership. The jig is up on Islamic leaders who rush to the microphones to denounce terrorism, only to find they justify and support terrorism when speaking inside their mosques or conferences,” Poole said.
“The standard message that any terrorist yelling ‘Allahu Akhbar’ has nothing to do with the Muslim community while any graffiti on a mosque is a sign of widespread ‘Islamophobia’ just isn’t selling any more,” he added. “Rather than revising their talking points, they’re doubling down on their narrative and it will only serve to isolate the Muslim community even further.”
Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West (PEGIDA) have ‘strolled’ again, but despite a week of Islamist terror in France and the fire-bombing of a German news paper which printed Mohammed cartoons, the German establishment has continued to condemn the movement.
The group has continued its apparently unstoppable growth, leaping from 20,000 last week to 25,000 on the streets of Dresden yesterday, with 30,000 strolling nationwide. The group, which is dedicated to non-violent resistance in the style of the East German protesters who opposed the former hard-line communist regime with weekly ‘strolls’ in the 1980s, this week called upon its supporters to not bring placards depicting Mohammed cartoons.
Some German politicians accused PEGIDA of taking advantage of the tense situation after the France shootings, but the group insisted the attacks proved the point they had been making all along. PEGIDA said: “The Islamists, which PEGIDA has been warning about for 12 weeks, showed France that they are not capable of democracy but rather look to violence and death as an answer”.
After roundly criticising PEGIDA in her new year’s address, German chancellor Angela Merkel again made clear moves to signal her disdain for the popular movement while hosting the prime minister of predominantly Muslim Turkey.
Sharing a platform with prime minister Ahmet Davutoglu, who is thought to be instrumental in Turkey’s slide towards institutional Islam after nearly a century of peaceful secularism, and has been criticised worldwide for his policy of inaction towards the jihadist Islamic State, chancellor Merkel said “Islam belongs to Germany”.
Merkel has announced her intention to march with a Muslim, anti-PEGIDA march today.
The concerted campaign against the anti-Islamisation rallies appears to be having some effect, as the counter-protest movement continues to grow in strength. Some reports suggest up to 100,000 gathered across the country to oppose PEGIDA yesterday.
The German justice minister called on the organisers to abandon the organisation, calling the movement “simply disgusting”. Despite his position within the government, the Social Democrat politician has been repeatedly seen marching with counter-PEGIDA protest movements.
Despite this, the movement continues to grow, going from 200 to 25,000 supporters strolling over the course twelve demonstrations.
The PEGIDA leadership, headed by self declared apolitical, working-class orator Lutz Bachmann are aware the marches tread a fine line with the state police, who allow the strolls to assemble every week and clear the way of counter-protesting groups. TheLocalreports the remarks of one local Christian Democratic Union politician, who said: “As long as there is no outright racism and xenophobia, they have the right to march”.
Despite the events of last week and a global call for freedom of expression and speech in reaction to the slaying of journalists in France, the overt display of Mohammad within the Dresden stroll could give the authorities the pretext needed to shut the movement down.
The City of Leipzig, where PEGIDA marched for the first time yesterday, initially stated they would enforce a ban on showing images of Mohammad, but later backed down and allowed images at the rally. Commenting on the U-turn, mayor Burkhard Jung said: “Freedom of opinion is a very worthy cause, and against the backdrop of the attacks in Paris it cannot be valued highly enough”.
For many Germans, the terrorist assault against journalism and freedom of speech did not end in Paris on Friday. A handful of European newspapers chose to publish cartoons of Mohammed in solidarity with Charlie Hebdo, with some being on the receiving end of retaliatory attacks for their editorial decision.
Three were arrested after a car pursuit on Sunday as they were spotted outside Danish newspaper the Jyllands-Posten carrying assault rifles and pistols in a “suspicious” vehicle.
Although the weapons turned out to be imitation firearms, and the incident was dismissed as a “prank”, members of the staff at the Jyllands-Posten have had multiple attempts made on their lives since they published cartoons of Mohammed wearing a bomb in his turban in 2005. Along with Charlie Hebdo it was the first mainstream publication in Europe to print such images in the modern age, and many staff members still receive round-the-clock police protection.
The Hamburger Morgenpost was less fortunate this weekend, as its offices were fire-bombed in the early hours of Sunday morning in an apparent retaliation for publishing images of Mohammed last week. The images of piles of charred papers and office equipment piled up in the street outside the gutted office were highly redolent of the fire-bombing of the Charlie Hebdo Paris office in 2011.
Clinging to the position that a prohibition on defamation of Islam is somehow a justifiable and measured response to perceived insult will continue inciting attempts to silence critics.
With millions marching in France and increasing unrest across Europe focused on Muslim immigrants, let’s hope the leaders of the Muslim world acknowledge that the effort to turn blasphemy into a crime has done more to breed religious intolerance than any cartoon or YouTube video.
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The OIC, whose member states range from moderate U.S. allies such as Jordan to adversaries such as Iran, describes itself as the world’s largest international body after the United Nations. For more than a decade, “the collective voice of the Muslim world” has spread the belief that any insult directed against the Muslim faith or its prophet demands absolute suppression. Quashing “defamation of Islam” is enshrined as a chief objective in the organization’s charter.
With countless internal resolutions, relentless lobbying of the international community and block voting on resolutions advocating a prohibition on defamation of religion at the U.N., the OIC continuously pushes to silence criticism of Islam.
Translated into practice inside Islamic nations and increasingly elsewhere, this toxic vision breeds contempt for freedom of religion and expression, justifies the killing of Muslims and non-Muslims alike, and casts a pall of self-censorship over academia and the arts.
By building the expectation that dissent or insult merits suppression, groups such as the OIC and the Arab League have emboldened extremists to take protection of Islam to the next level. With the most authoritative Muslim voices prepared to denounce violence but not to combat the idea that Islam should be immune from criticism, a meaningful response to counteract the resulting violence continues to be glaringly absent.
An OIC statement released after a 2011 Charlie Hebdo issue “guest-edited” by the prophet Mohammed typifies this troubling position: “Publication of the insulting cartoon … was an outrageous act of incitement and hatred and abuse of freedom of expression. … The publishers and editors of the Charlie Hebdo magazine must assume full responsibility for their … incitement of religious intolerance.”
This ominously prescient declaration tepidly closed by urging that Muslims exercise restraint.
Blasphemy is a crime
Likewise, after the attack last week, the OIC “strongly condemned the terrorist act,” but quickly added “that such acts of terror only represent the criminal perpetrators.”
If the OIC, Arab League and Muslim states genuinely want to distance themselves and the religion of Islam from such ghastly acts of terror, they must reversethe years spent advancing the motive that spawned them. As a start, they should stop punishing their own citizens for failure to properly respect Islam.
Support for a prohibition on defamation of religion must be decisively repudiated. To counteract the damage that has been done, OIC members should embrace the promotion of tolerance, including sponsorship of moderation and tolerance efforts in mosques and madrassas globally. The OIC and its members should compensateCharlie Hebdo and the victims’ families.
Clinging to the position that a prohibition on defamation of Islam is somehow a justifiable and measured response to perceived insult will continue inciting attempts to silence critics.
With millions marching in France and increasing unrest across Europe focused on Muslim immigrants, let’s hope the leaders of the Muslim world acknowledge that the effort to turn blasphemy into a crime has done more to breed religious intolerance than any cartoon or YouTube video.
All Hamas is devoted to is death and destruction. If Israel ceased to exist and all the Jews in Israel were murdered, Hamas would die — without anything to destroy and anyone to kill, it would have no reason to exist.
“Hamas announces military training camps for 15 year olds,” Elder of Ziyon, January 11, 2015 (thanks to The Religion of Peace):
The Hamas al Qassam Brigades announced that it open up registration for military camps for children aged 15 and up throughout the Gaza strip on January 20.
The camps will be called “Vanguard of the Liberation.”
Hamas doesn’t try to hide that it is training children to be armed terrorists. The announcement states that “the camps will include military drills and skills, shooting live ammunition, scouting skills and sermons, as well as courses in civil defense and first aid.”
Kids can register for the camps “at the nearest mosque or the nearest Qassam Brigades military site.” Since the army sites are sprinkled liberally throughout residential areas, that makes it much easier to find a place to register.
Here’s the flyer announcing the camps:
This is the third year of the camps. Here are some photos from last year’s graduation ceremony (a full video is here.)….
Amidst the rise of ISIS and the jihadi attacks in Europe, the International Criminal Court (ICC) admitted the Hamas-linked Palestinian Authority into its ranks, in effect, welcoming terrorists.
The Palestinians have long sought statehood. The official narrative proclaims a desire for an independent state in the “occupied territories” of Gaza and the West Bank, with East Jerusalem as its capitol. But in reality, Palestinians consider all of Israel to be “occupied” and many seek the extermination of the State of Israel entirely.
Israel and Palestine are bound by the Oslo accords to negotiate for peace through bilateral talks. The premise is that Israel will relinquish land in exchange for peace and security. But when Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, instead of receiving peace, Israel was bombarded with 10,000 Kassam rockets and Palestinians renamed their streets to “honor” jihadi martyrs.
Over the years, peace talks have failed repeatedly and negotiations have been interrupted by multitudes of Palestinian assaults on the Israeli civilian population. The Palestinian Authority (PA), the only representative of the Palestinians officially recognized by Israel and the U.S., has been unable to halt the terrorism.
To make matters worse, in 2014, the PA and Hamas joined together to form a “unity government” in an effort to reconcile the Fatah-Hamas conflict. This “reconciliation”, in effect, made the PA official collaborators with Hamas, which is a State-designated terrorist organization. Hamas refuses to recognize the State of Israel or to negotiate with her. Its charter spells out its mission to obliterate Israel through violence, and its deeds back up its words.
It is illegal to fund a terrorist organization and there is no exception for the U.S. government. However, the Obama Administration has bent over backwards to find legal loopholes through which it could still funnel financial aid to “Palestine,” to the tune of 400 million dollars annually. In contrast, Israeli officials refuse to negotiate with a terror-affiliated entity.
PA President Abbas publicly proclaimed that the unity government would recognize Israel’s right to exist, be non-violent, and be bound by prior PLO agreements. The Hamas spokesperson, on the other hand, admits that it never did, or would, recognize the State of Israel. Furthermore, Hamas claims that its affiliation with the PA ended after a six month term. Abbas insists to the contrary, that the unity government is still in full force.
Either way, “Palestine” is not a state, and therefore fails to qualify for ICC membership. Never-the-less, in an attempt to make an end-run around bi-lateral negotiations, the Palestinians applied for, and obtained, an upgrade in UN status. In 2012, pursuant to a UN General Assembly vote, Palestine’s status went from “observer entity” to “non-member observer state”. This change in status made admission to the ICC possible.
It is noteworthy that this is the same GA that on a regular and frequent basis, passes anti-Israel resolutions. Indeed, the entire UN apparatus in incredibly biased, holding Israel to a standard to which no other country is held. Resolutions condemning Israel in the GA and the Human Rights Council are numerous, while both bodies turn a blind eye to real human rights abuses in countries like Sudan, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.
Additionally, Palestine has been lobbying countries to provide it with unilateral recognition of statehood. Many states have acquiesced, with a swell in the western ranks during 2014, though sometimes the recognition extended is diplomatic and not legally binding. These states include Sweden, France, Spain, Britain, Ireland, and Iceland, as well as the EU.
Palestine’s goal has been to join the ICC for the purpose of filing claims against Israel for war crimes and crimes against humanity, in an attempt to force unilateral concessions without an exchange of peace. Already, the PA is preparing its paperwork for submission to the ICC. The PA seeks to have Israel prosecuted for its 2014 campaign against Gaza, though it was a response to Palestinian terrorism and the illegal smuggling of weapons through underground tunnels. Additionally, the PA wants Israel prosecuted for her settlements on so-called “occupied territory”, despite the fact that it is quite a stretch to allege that settlement activity constitutes a war crime.
Israel is not a member of the ICC, but the ICC asserts jurisdiction over anyone that commits war crimes or crimes against humanity on the territory of its member states. Jurisdictional disputes are determined by the ICC itself, demonstrating one of the many problems with its expansive, unchecked power. Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu has already promised that Israel will stand by the IDF soldiers as they have defended Israel, but what that means in legal terms is unclear. Israeli citizens are also at risk for potential prosecution if the ICC accepts the PA’s case.
Already there is blowback from the PA’s move to ICC membership, which Israel considers to be a game-changer of escalatory proportion. Accordingly, Israel has frozen 127 million dollars in tax revenue designated for the PA, which the Palestinians direly need, and the peace talks are virtually dead. Additionally, U.S. officials are re-evaluating appropriations and will consider legislation to cease U.S. aid to “Palestine” if it demands the prosecution of Israel.
Still, the PA seeks momentum in the court of public opinion. Its goal on the world stage is to gain international recognition of Palestinian statehood and to delegitimize Israel.
On June 13, 2014, “Palestine” accepted ICC jurisdiction by means of a declaration pursuant to article 12(3) of the Rome Statue (the treaty that provides for the creation and jurisdiction of the ICC). The PA government signed the Rome Statute on December 31, 2014. This was one day subsequent to its failed bid at the UN Security Council to pass a resolution calling for Israel to withdraw to the pre-1967 borders within the next three years. “The State of Palestine’s” instruments of accession to the ICC were deposited and effected as of January 2, 2015. The PA also signed a multitude of treaties and international conventions shortly thereafter.
The official date on which Palestine will become a full-fledged ICC member is on April 1, 2015, April Fool’s Day. In a world where anti-Semitism and Islamic jihad are on the rise (both stealth and violent), April Fool’s Day will be a grim day indeed. But the joke is not on Palestine. It will be on all those in the West who profess to care about freedom and human rights, but have abandoned their principles in capitulation to Islamist demands and welcomed terrorists into their midst.
It used to be that the media would at least wait a day before sweeping the latest victims of Muslim terrorism into the trash to refocus on the looming “anti-Muslim backlash” that never actually comes.
The increase in Muslim terrorism however has made it risky for the media to wait that long. 24 hours after a brutal Muslim terrorist attack, there might be another brutal Muslim terrorist attack which will completely crowd out the stories of Muslims worrying about the backlash to the latest Muslim atrocity.
The massacre at Charlie Hebdo was quickly followed by a massacre at a kosher supermarket and somewhere in between them the Islamic State in Nigeria had wiped out the populations of sixteen villages.
With so many Muslim attacks crowded together, the media had no choice but to take a deep breath and dive in with its “Muslim backlash” stories.
The Voice of America ran its “Muslims fear backlash” piece while the bodies were still warm. The Los Angeles Times rushed out its “Muslims fear backlash” story before the Kosher supermarket massacre. It quoted the Muslim spokesman for the National Observatory Against Islamophobia asserting that it is Muslims who suffer after such attacks. Muslims however weren’t the ones who suffered. The four dead Jews at a Kosher supermarket did the suffering at the hands of a Muslim gunman.
While Muslim murderers were still prowling France for victims, the media was making the story about the perpetrators, not the victims.
And Muslims around the world lined up to join the “Fear of a Backlash” party like it was an exclusive nightclub. Both Belgian and Swedish Muslims claimed to be afraid of a backlash after the Paris attacks. At least those Swedish Muslims who weren’t calling for Allah to “multiply such attacks.”
Even Detroit Muslims got in on the act. Dawud Walid, executive director of CAIR in Michigan, claimed, “We are concerned about backlash against Muslims in the west.”
Walid had endorsed the historical Islamic mass murder of Jews on Twitter and stated in a sermon, “Who are those who incurred the wrath of Allah? They are the Jews, they are the Jews.”
Even while Jews were set to be murdered by a fellow exponent of Walid’s anti-Semitic ideology, the media was pandering to his phony claims of victimization thousands of miles away.
The Muslim backlash narrative insisted that the real victims weren’t Yohan Cohen, Yoav Hattab, Philippe Braham and Francois-Michel Saada dying in a Kosher supermarket in France, but Dawud Walid, the anti-Semitic spokesman for a hate group closely linked to terrorism over in Michigan.
Is it really a backlash that Muslims fear or a moral reckoning?
In the rush to make bigots like Walid the victims, instead of the actual men and women being murdered in the name of his violent ideology, the hard questions about the connection between the historical Islamic anti-Semitism bandied about by Dawud Walid and the modern massacres of Jews go unasked.
The murder of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists had its roots in an Islamic political and legal tradition of punishing blasphemy that has continued uninterrupted for over a thousand years. The murder of four Jews in a Kosher supermarket was part of a great Islamic tradition that began with Mohammed. The defenders of the “Prophet” began by killing blasphemers and then continued his work by killing Jews.
Muslims are not the victims of the Hebdo massacre. They are not the victims of mass murder in a Kosher supermarket. They are not the victims of the Sydney Siege.
They are the perpetrators.
When the media rushes to print interviews with Muslims claiming to suddenly be terrified of an imaginary backlash, it is marginalizing and silencing the real victims of Muslim violence who have been the subjects of a Muslim assault for over a thousand years complete with literal lashings.
Not every Muslim supports what happened, but the history and theology of Islam support the ends of silencing blasphemers and killing Jews, if not necessarily the provocative individual means.
The root cause of Islamic violence is Islam. Everything else, from poverty to YouTube videos, is subsidiary at best.
The cries of “Islamophobia” and the claims of a backlash silence the victims of Muslim terror and encourage social blindness to the next Muslim attack against Jews, Christians, Atheists, Hindus, Buddhists and countless others.
The Muslim backlash story is a great media tradition that dates back to at least September 11. While the streets of downtown Manhattan were still streaked with the ashes of the dead, the media began running stories about Muslims who were changing their clothes and putting up American flags out of fear that the maddened patriotic rabble would shortly begin massacring Muslims.
The mass anti-Muslim riots after September 11 never materialized; just as they never materialized after the Sydney Siege in Australia or the latest Muslim massacres in France.
The worst thing the media came up with in Australia, after touting its phony #Illridewithyou hashtag warning that Muslims were being persecuted, was three men and one woman holding up a sign reading, “Death to ISIS; Get Out You Rag-Headed F___s.”
They were immediately interviewed by police on possible charges of Isisphobia.
If the police had been as assertive in going after every Muslim in Australia waving a “Behead all those who insult the Prophet” sign, Australia would have been a lot safer.
And if the Australian media had been as aggressive in going after Sheikh Monis, as it did after a few young men waving Australian flags on a shopping center roof, the murder of two Australians in a café might not have happened.
But instead of fighting Jihadists, the media and politicians are determined to fight the threat of a backlash to Muslim terrorism. The obsession with the backlash however implicitly admits the existence of Islamic terror and sidelines it to instead focus on the reaction to it as the greater threat.
On one side are bodies heaped across Europe and America. On the other is the occasional slice of pork on a mosque door, a little graffiti scrawled on a wall or a dirty look on public transportation.
One is genocide and the other is petty vandalism.
We don’t need any more earnest interviews in which Muslims claim that they are the real victims of Muslim terrorism because they now feel “unwelcome” when the bodies of non-Muslims still lie in the morgue.
Try comparing an “unwelcome” feeling to being dead.
It is that sense of self-pitying Muslim victimization that leads easily to Muslim violence. Violence is often sanctioned by victimhood. That Muslims believe themselves to be the victims is nothing new. The Nazis also believed that they were the victims. So did the Muslim killer in a Kosher supermarket who claimed that ISIS, with its mass rapes and genocidal campaign, was the victim of French intervention.
If European Muslims really want to end atrocities like the ones that took place in Paris, instead of making themselves into the victims, they should examine the complicity of their religion, their politics and their sense of victimization in perpetrating them.
Posted By Patrick Poole On January 12, 2015 @ 2:09 pm
Last week’s terror attack targeting French magazine Charlie Hebdo‘s office in Paris has sparked a global conversation about the nature of free speech, with the “Je Suis Charlie” hashtag in support of the murdered Charlie Hebdo staff going viral and becoming the most used hashtag in the history of Twitter.
But this afternoon, the UN representative for the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), Ufuk Gokcen, was expressing another view with respect to free speech.
The OIC is comprised of the 57 Muslim-majority nations and the Palestinian Authority. They are the largest bloc at the UN, and when they meet on the head-of-state level, they literally speak for the Muslim world.
The timing of Gokcen’s call couldn’t be more perfect.
Today, University of Tennessee law professor Robert Blitt (a colleague of our own Instapundit, Glenn Reynolds) had an oped published in USA Today calling out the OIC for its retrograde views on free speech and how they fuel Islamic extremism:
The OIC, whose member states range from moderate U.S. allies such as Jordan to adversaries such as Iran, describes itself as the world’s largest international body after the United Nations. For more than a decade, “the collective voice of the Muslim world” has spread the belief that any insult directed against the Muslim faith or its prophet demands absolute suppression. Quashing “defamation of Islam” is enshrined as a chief objective in the organization’s charter.
With countless internal resolutions, relentless lobbying of the international community and block voting on resolutions advocating a prohibition on defamation of religion at the U.N., the OIC continuously pushes to silence criticism of Islam.
Translated into practice inside Islamic nations and increasingly elsewhere, this toxic vision breeds contempt for freedom of religion and expression, justifies the killing of Muslims and non-Muslims alike, and casts a pall of self-censorship over academia and the arts.
By building the expectation that dissent or insult merits suppression, groups such as the OIC and the Arab League have emboldened extremists to take protection of Islam to the next level. With the most authoritative Muslim voices prepared to denounce violence but not to combat the idea that Islam should be immune from criticism, a meaningful response to counteract the resulting violence continues to be glaringly absent.
An OIC statement released after a 2011 Charlie Hebdo issue “guest-edited” by the prophet Mohammed typifies this troubling position: “Publication of the insulting cartoon … was an outrageous act of incitement and hatred and abuse of freedom of expression. … The publishers and editors of the Charlie Hebdo magazine must assume full responsibility for their … incitement of religious intolerance.”
As Professor Blitt notes in his oped, the OIC has been the international driving force behind the passage of Resolution 16/18, which was co-sponsored by Pakistan and the United States and passed in December 2011.
When passed, Resolution 16/18 was billed by the Obama administration as an improvement over previous “defamation of religion” resolutions. But the effort immediately came under fire from religious liberties and free speech experts:
In the view of veteran international religious liberty analyst and advocate Elizabeth Kendal resolution 16/18, “far from being a breakthrough for free speech … is actually more dangerous than” the religious defamation resolutions.
“Indeed, the strategic shift from defamation to incitement actually advances the OIC’s primary goal: the criminalization of criticism of Islam,” she wrote.
The OIC’s push to criminalize “defamation of Islam” goes back to the OIC’s 10 Year Plan of Action adopted in 2005. Under the section “Countering Islamophobia” (VII), the plan says:
3. Endeavor to have the United Nations adopt an international resolution to counter Islamophobia, and call upon all States to enact laws to counter it, including deterrent punishments.
In their published implementation plan for their 10 Year Plan of Action, they are more clear that combating “defamation of religion” is not what they were after, but rather criminalizing “Islamophobia”:
Which is effectively what they’ve accomplished with the generous assistance of the Obama administration. Just two months before the passage of Resolution 16/18, senior Justice Department officials were meeting with U.S. Islamic groups discussing that very thing.
And in November 2012, when I reported here that U.S. Embassy in Jeddah Consul General Anne Casper was going to be addressing the OIC’s symposium on “defamation of Islam,” the OIC quickly scrubbed any reference to her appearance.
My colleague Stephen Coughlin has posted a video lecture outlining how the OIC’s efforts with respect to Resolution 16/18 are really rooted in Islamic law’s codes prohibiting blasphemy:
It’s hardly surprising that even after the Charlie Hebdo attack the OIC is not content to abandon their decade-long effort to criminalize “Islamophobia.” But, much as Professor Blitt has warned in his oped today, by doing so they are pushing the global Islamic community further away from the rest of the world.
[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.
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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.
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.
DOHA, Qatar — Qatar’s top diplomat on Monday dismissed as “just rumors” an Israeli claim that the tiny Gulf nation agreed to expel a leader of the Palestinian militant group Hamas, saying he is a “dear guest” of the energy-rich country.
The Israeli Foreign Ministry last week issued a statement saying it welcomed Qatar’s decision to expel Hamas political bureau head Khaled Mashaal to Turkey. It said the Qatari decision came after heavy diplomatic pressure from Israel.
Qatari Foreign Minister Khalid bin Mohammed al-Attiyah denied there were any such plans.
“These are just rumors that are targeted at changing Qatar’s policies toward the Palestinian people. Khaled Meshaal is a dear guest in Qatar and he is in his country,” he told reporters in response to a question during a news conference with his visiting Venezuelan counterpart, Delcy Rodriguez.
Hamas officials in both Qatar and Gaza earlier rejected the claim that Mashaal planned to leave Qatar, a member of OPEC that will host the 2022 World Cup.
“The motivation for these rumors,” al-Attiyah added, “is to put pressure on Qatar to change its position on this issue. This is impossible because the Palestinian issue is at the heart of the principles of the country’s foreign policy.”
An Israeli official last week said his government had received word from “official channels” that Qatar had ordered Mashaal’s expulsion.
Israel used to have a trade office in Qatar — effectively a diplomatic outpost — but that was ordered closed following the 2008 Israeli conflict with Hamas. It still maintains low-level relations with the country.
Qatar’s former emir, the father of the current ruler, in 2012 became the first head of state to visit Gaza since Hamas militants seized control in 2007.
The Gulf state has pledged hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to the seaside territory. Al-Attiyah has previously said his country’s support is not for Hamas but for the Palestinian people.
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