Durkah Durkah Muhhamed Jihad!

*No tolerance for intolerance*
Youssef Ibrahim in the NY Sun: “A Lack of Tolerance That Is Justified” (via JihadWatch)

This week, the 57-nation Organization of the Islamic Conference decried what it called the “shrinking space” for tolerance toward Muslims in Europe.

“Muslims have noted with concern that the values of tolerance are eroding and there is now shrinking space for others’ religious, social and cultural values in the West,” the Saudi-based OIC, the world’s largest Islamic association, said a statement sent to Reuters.

This lack of tolerance is absolutely as it should be.

If anything, there is still far too much tolerance of European Muslim isolationists and their preachers, whom the OIC and its Saudi patrons train, fund, and influence to promote barricaded communities inside cultural ghettos, waging war against the societies that embrace them.

For decades, these interconnected webs of mosques, Islamic schools, and imported OIC imams have used the same freedom of speech they deny others to introduce the favored OIC concept of repressed societies to the heart of liberal Europe.

Their quest has not been limited to insulating their communities from a sea of democracy. They also have sought to reverse freedoms for Western citizens who want to publish, write, make films, and read. Witness the hounding of the British author Salman Rushdie and his books, the mayhem over the Danish cartoons of Prophet Muhammad, the upheaval over Pope Benedict’s critical comments on Islam, and the far too numerous attempts to ban creative works on Islam.

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OIC member nations should be told in the bluntest terms that no more mosques will be built in Europe until Saudi Arabia and other states reciprocate by allowing the construction of churches in the heart of Riyadh, Jeddah, and other cities and the lifting of restrictions on Christians and Jews living and working there.

Eight million expatriates live and work in Saudi Arabia, many of them Philippine Catholics, American and British Christians, and Buddhists. They are not only deprived of houses of worship but at risk for punishments, including whipping, if they hold a private service.

By contrast, the Saudi royal family has been allowed to fund the building of hundreds of thousands of mosques and schools in Europe, America, Asia, and Australia, where Muslims are free to worship and be indoctrinated in Wahhabism.

It is high time for equality.

Special treatment for ’special’ people. Why the surprise?
David Davis in the Telegraph: “Do Muslims really want apartheid here?”

At its very least, there is a growing feeling that the Muslim community is excessively sensitive to criticism, unwilling to engage in substantive debate. Much worse is the feeling of some Muslim leaders that as a community they should be protected from criticism, argument, parody, satire and all the other challenges that happen in a society that has free speech as its highest value.

The Cantle Report into the 2001 riots in Bradford, Burnley and Oldham talked about communities living “parallel lives”. These are places where people from different ethnic origins never meet, never talk, never go into each others’ homes. It is by daily contact that we overcome our differences. Habitual contact enables us to fight the underlying problems of poverty, bad housing and lack of opportunity, which blight too many of our cities.

The Government’s attitude to all this has been confused, confusing and counterproductive. Take the Danish cartoons that sparked outrage in the Muslim world. Several months passed between their publication and the backlash. It was not a spontaneous reaction and appeared to have been coordinated by extreme elements. The demonstrations in Britain appeared to incite violence or even murder of “infidels”.

For two days Government ministers dithered over whether anything should be done. It was only after we called for prosecutions that Number 10 got a grip and said that the law would be upheld.

We witnessed similar dithering by the authorities on the prosecution of imams who foment hate and incite violence, most obviously the case of Abu Hamza. It took years before they were eventually embarrassed into bringing a case — which concluded with his conviction on 11 counts!

Moderation and tolerance in Bangladesh. And the Freedom to Screech (for the death of Jews and Christians).
Bret Stephens: “Darkness in Dhaka: A gadfly Bangladeshi journalist runs for his life.”

Meet Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury. As these lines are being written, Mr. Choudhury, a gadfly Bangladeshi journalist, is running for his life. Assuming he survives till Thursday, he will face charges of blasphemy, sedition, treason and espionage in a Dhaka courtroom. His crime is to have tried to attend a writers’ conference in Tel Aviv on how the media can foster world peace. If convicted, he could face the death penalty.

Welcome to Bangladesh, a country the State Department’s Richard Boucher recently portrayed in congressional testimony as “a traditionally moderate and tolerant country” that shares America’s “commitment to democracy, human rights and the rule of law.” That’s an interesting way to describe a country that is regularly ranked as the world’s most corrupt by Transparency International and whose governing coalition, in addition to the ruling Bangladesh Nationalist Party of Prime Minister Khaleda Zia, includes two fundamentalist Islamic parties that advocate the imposition of Shariah law. There are an estimated 64,000 madrassas (religious schools) in Bangladesh. The Ministry of Industries is in the hands of Motiur Rahman Nizami, a radical Islamist with a reputation of a violent past. In March the Peace Corps was forced to leave the country for fear of terrorist attacks. Seven other journalists have also been brought up on sedition charges by Ms. Zia’s government, most of them for attempting to document Bangladesh’s repression of religious minorities.

But few stories better illustrate the Islamist tinderbox that Bangladesh has become than Mr. Choudhury’s. “When I began my newspaper [the Weekly Blitz] in 2003 I decided to make an end to the well-orchestrated propaganda campaign against Jews and Christians and especially against Israel,” he says in the first of several telephone interviews in recent days. “In Bangladesh and especially during Friday prayers, the clerics propagate jihad and encourage the killing of Jews and Christians. When I was a child my father told me not to believe those words but to look at the world’s realities.”

Advise for the Useful Idiot Times.
Hugh Fitzgerald absolutely nailing it at Jihad Watch: “What should The Times have been doing?”

What should The Times have been doing, not now, but for years, to cover Islam — in and out of Europe — appropriately?

In the case of Islam in Europe, it ought to have familiarized readers with the views of Oriana Fallaci, Pim Fortuyn, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Jacques Ellul, and all the others who cannot be dismissed as “right-wing” — and not one of whom can be considered a “fundamentalist” Christian or a mad-dog anything.

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It ought, that Times of New York, that New Duranty Times, to have noted that everywhere, in every Infidel land, there were problems with Muslim immigrants, no matter the political or economic regime, or the background of the local Infidels. It ought to have noted, and not merely noted but attempted to explain to readers, why it was that in places as different as Denmark and Spain, or Italy and Germany, with widely disparate national cultures and expectations, there was always the grim problem of Muslims who viewed their new surroundings not with gratitude, but as a place that as if by right belonged to them. It ought to have noted that when those immigrants repeat, as they do, that “we are here to stay” and “this is our country,” those phrases, which ordinarily might be found stirring, take on an entirely different and sinister meaning.

And The New Duranty Times might have tried to understand why it is that wherever there are Muslim immigrants in sufficient numbers to give them the impression that they need not disguise forever their real attitudes, there have been problems — so that the problem must lie not with the hosts, but with the Muslim guests, and does not depend either on the nature of that host country, or of the place from whence those particular Muslim immigrants came.

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And then there is the most important thing of all….

Taliboys: Slaves of Allah, toys for Mullah.
The Independent’s Salman Rushdie profile is subscription only, but IRIS blog has a great extract: “Salman Rushdie: His life, his work and his religion “

“If tomorrow the Israel/Palestine issue was resolved to the total happiness of all parties, it would not diminish the amount of terrorism coming out of al-Qaeda by one jot. It’s not what they’re after,” he adds, his foot tapping against mine as he leans forward. “Yes, it’s a recruiting tool, rhetorically. Many people see there’s an injustice there, and it helps them to get people into the gang, but it’s not what they want. What they want is to change the nature of human life on earth into the image of the Taliban. If you want the whole earth to look like Taliban Afghanistan, then you’re on the same side as them. If you don’t want that, you’re not. They do not represent the quest for human justice. That, I think, is one of the great mistakes of the left.”

Within this Talibanist morality, there is room for great slabs of delusion and hypocrisy. In Shalimar the Clown, Rushdie shows sparingly how the jihadi fighters of Afghanistan have sex with adolescent boys, and the next day chop to pieces men they have dubbed “homosexual”. “One of the great untold stories of al-Qaeda is that they are all these men who **** little boys. They all have these disciples who they’re ostensibly training in the way of the warrior, but they’re also enjoying. For a while, then they go off – and they have their wives and families at home. It’s like Classical Greece.” Does he think Osama bin Laden has done it? “I wouldn’t like to say,” he says tactfully. “He’s an Arab, he’s not an Afghan. But Mullah Omar, he’s another story…”

Don’t lose sight of the bigger picture, leftards. Oh wait, you have to actually see it first. Back to the regularly scheduled drooling.
Mark Steyn brings back the perspective in the NY Sun: “An election Foley-equipped with frivolity”

In my new book (out this week, folks: you’ll find it at the back of the store past the 9/11 Conspiracy section and the Christianist Theocrat Takeover of America section and the ceiling-high display of the new Dixie Chicks six-CD box set of songs about how they’re being silenced), I say that some of us looked at September 11th as the sudden revelation of the tip of a vast iceberg, and I try to address the seven-eighths of that iceberg below the surface – the globalization of radical Islam, the freelancing of nuclear technology, the demographic weakness of western democracies. Other folks, however, see the iceberg upside down. The huge weight of history – the big geopolitical forces coursing through society – the vast burden all balancing on the pinhead of the week: in this instance, Mark Foley.

Prison break.
Yitzhak Benhorin on Ynet news profiles Wafa Sultan: “I want to beat Islamic prison” (via HotAir)

WASHINGTON – Dr. Wafa Sultan recently became a legend. Her two interviews with al-Jazeera, in which she censured Islam and the way in which it inflicts ignorance and alienation on its followers, have made her into a phenomenon: an educated Muslim that demands that the Arab world take its head out of the sand.

In a recent interview , the only time I see tears creeping into Dr. Sultan’s eyes is when she speaks of her family in a small village in western Syria, two or three hours from northern Beirut. In their eyes, she is a shameful stain on the family, which includes seven brothers and three sisters.
Her eldest brother claims that she received a million dollars from the Jews in order to denounce Islam. Her mother, age 74, refuses to speak to her on the telephone.

The legacy of Muhammad’s example, “the epitome for religious warriors”.
Andrew Bostom in the Washington Times reviews Robert Spencer’s “The Truth About Muhammad”

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the former Dutch Parliamentarian and secular Muslim reformer, has courageously identified the taboo discussion which must take place to understand, and defuse, the scourge of modern jihad terrorism:
“In their thinking about radical Muslim terrorism most politicians, journalists, intellectuals, and other commentators have avoided the core issue of the debate, which is Muhammad’s example.”
This taboo is all the more puzzling, and dangerously delusional, given the public pronouncements of Muslim Brotherhood “spiritual” leader, Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, one of the most influential contemporary Muslim thinkers.
The immensely popular Qaradawi reaches an audience of tens of millions of Muslim sympathizers across the globe with his regular appearances on Al-Jazeera television. During a June 19, 2001 broadcast, Qaradawi delivered a sermon entitled, “The Prophet Muhammad as a Jihad Model,” proclaiming: ” . . . Allah has . . . made the prophet Muhammad into an epitome for religious warriors [Mujahideen] since he ordered Muhammed to fight for religion . . . “
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Disregarding murderous threats, and the prospect of social ostracism, the intrepid author Robert Spencer — a serious independent scholar of Islam for the past two decades — has taken up Hirsi Ali’s challenge in his compelling new book, “The Truth About Muhammad.”

The legacy of Muhammad’s example 2: Pax Muhhamedina?
Suzanne Fields on Real Clear Politics.com (Creators Syndicate): “Is Islam the Real Problem?”

Muhammad proselytized with violence and used violence to consolidate conquest. Occupying territory was as important as converting or killing unbelievers. When the Jews of Medina resisted Muhammad in the 7th century, he beheaded the men and sold their women and children into slavery. The prophet, who claimed to derive his power and authority from Allah, was not only head of the captured states but was the single religious authority. “This allowed the prophet to cloak political ambitions with a religious aura,” writes Mr. Karsh, a professor at the University of London, “and to channel Islam’s energies into its instrument of aggressive expansion.” The ultimate goal would be for the world either to embrace Islam or live under its domination.

This goal was realized in part with the establishment of the Ottoman Empire, which allowed certain other religions to exist but not prosper. Christians who sought domination, on the other hand, never invoked the teachings of Christ to justify violence. Early Christianity made clear the distinction between God and Caesar, spiritual and earthly power, even though such distinctions were not always honored.

“If Christendom was slower than Islam in marrying religious universalism with political imperialism,” says Professor Karsh, “it was faster in shedding both notions.” The imperialistic impulse, rooted in the beginning of Islam, never fully retreated and is crucial today to understanding the shedding of blood now in the name of Allah. Although Muhammad forbade violence against the community of believers, it was easy in the chaos of the Middle East to initiate violence against differing sects with their different interpretations of the Koran.

The interpretation of the Islamist mentality as rooted in Muhammad’s appeal to violence, and the Islamist determination for religious domination of the world, may not tell the whole story today, but it explains why, for millions of Muslims, the image of the warrior trumps the image of a prophet of peace — if, indeed, there ever was one.