Thomas Sowell writing on “The Anger of the Left”:

That people on the political left have a certain set of opinions, just as people do in other parts of the ideological spectrum, is not surprising. What is surprising, however, is how often the opinions of those on the left are accompanied by hostility and even hatred.

Particular issues can arouse passions here and there for anyone with any political views. But, for many on the left, indignation is not a sometime thing. It is a way of life.

How often have you seen conservatives or libertarians take to the streets, shouting angry slogans? How often have conservative students on campus shouted down a visiting speaker or rioted to prevent the visitor from speaking at all?

Or beat their teacher to death with sticks, for that matter. Here’s an example from China’s Cultural Revolution of what results when that anger is taken to its pathological conclusion and made into state policy:

“What is your name?” the Great Helmsman asked a young student as she pinned a Red Guard armband on him in front of the Gate of Heavenly Peace. “Song Binbin,” she responded enthusiastically. The name her parents chose meant “properly raised” and “polite,” qualities that Mao Zedong found unappealing. “Be violent!” he ordered the girl. A short time later she changed her first name to Yaowu, or “Be Violent.”

It was Aug. 18, 1966 and the 72-year-old Chinese leader had called male and female students to assemble on Beijing’s Square of Heavenly Peace to launch his Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Hundreds of thousands waved Mao’s little red book and cheered the old man.

Mao’s call to violence fell on willing ears among many young people. Thirteen days earlier Song, 19 at the time, was presumably present when the female students at her school, which was part of the Beijing Teachers University, killed their teacher, Bian Zhongyun. The girls brutally beat the 50-year-old woman to death using wooden sticks spiked with nails. On the day before the killing, members of the Red Guard had already maltreated the teacher, who was the party leader at the school — they suddenly viewed her as a “counter-revolutionary revisionist” who they believed had gambled away her life.

Bian went down in history as the first victim of the Cultural Revolution — the bloody mass movement Mao used to eliminate his enemies within the party. The teacher’s murder was followed by the killings of millions of Chinese people. The ten-year campaign destroyed entire families, irreplaceable cultural treasures and centuries-old traditions. In August 1966 alone, about 100 teachers were murdered by their own students in the western section of Beijing.

Thomas Sowell sums up his point:

If it is hard to find a principle behind what angers the left, it is not equally hard to find an attitude.

Their greatest anger seems to be directed at people and things that thwart or undermine the social vision of the left, the political melodrama starring the left as saviors of the poor, the environment, and other busybody tasks that they have taken on.

It seems to be the threat to their egos that they hate. And nothing is more of a threat to their desire to run other people’s lives than the free market and its defenders.

And here’s an example of what free market capitalism has been teaching the children of China’s great Asian competitor, India:

During the mid-1990s, the first Internet cafes began opening up in Bangalore, with one going into operation nextdoor to Gopinath’s house. “My brother Shreyas took me there. I was fascinated. The Internet changed my life,” he says. He spent every spare minute online.

He taught himself how to build Web sites. “He spent every rupee he had in the Internet Café,” says his mother, disapproval still evident in her voice. Gopinath admits, “I had been a good student up until then. After I discovered the Internet, I was an average student.” Before finding cyberspace, he had dreams of becoming a veterinarian.

So what did he become instead? How about this:

Suhas Gopinath started a software company at age 14 and has since become one of the most remarkable success stories of the Indian IT boom. Now he’s 21 and runs a world-class business with 400 employees.

Nice one, Suhas!

From the Malaysia Sun:

‘The crises confronting the Islamic world are not only external but also internal, flowing from our own weaknesses, our own vulnerabilities, our own divisions within,’ he said. ‘The Islamic world is on a downward slide and we must face this.’

General Musharraf said Islamic countries have failed to invest in education and lag far behind the rest of the world in literacy and economic growth.

The president also lashed out at Muslim hardliners who he blamed for fueling Western fears of the Islamic world.

‘While the world views Islam as a militant, intolerant religion, this thought is reinforced by our own extremist forces,’ he said. ‘We are in a state where these semi-literate clerics are closing the minds of people.’

Unfortunately when someone is on a “downward slide” you often need to allow them to hit rock bottom before the lesson is really learnt.

And talk about creating a monster. Pakistani intelligence agencies and military have been encouraging a zombie army of “semi-literate clerics” and Islamist militants at home and abroad for decades, from Afghanistan to Bangladesh and continued to do so even as the above lecture was being given. So best of luck facing a problem you yourselves helped create and should have faced a long time ago. Ironically at the same Musharraf has actually made some decent progress in modernising Pakistan’s economy and education system. Can’t have it both ways though – either you build medieval Deobandi madrassahs or you build modern liberal universities.

(H/t Saint)

The people that gave the world Clonaid are back with a new project: Clitoraid. The aim of the project is to provide surgery that “restores sexual sensibility” to victims of Female Genital Mutilation.

Go to the Clitoraid website to “Adopt a Clitoris”, read some “touching testimonies” or make a donation for the construction of their “pleasure hospital” in Burkina Faso, which is due to start next week.

I reckon you’d have to be pretty brave to let these people anaesthesize you. But then, who in Burkina Faso has even heard of Raelism?

(h/t Right Truth)

Below are excerpts from an interview with a very interesting fellow called Rory Stewart. Here’s a bit about him:

Rory Stewart is chief executive of the Turquoise Mountain Foundation, a non-profit organization in Kabul devoted to social and urban redevelopment in Afghanistan. A former member of the British Foreign Office, he served, from 2003 to 2004, the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq as Deputy Governor of the southern provinces of Maysan and Dhi Qar, an experience he described in the book The Prince of the Marshes.[*] The following text is based on Stewart’s dialogue about Iraq with audience members, after his discussion with broadcast journalist Dan Harris, at the Asia Society in New York on April 20, 2007.

Rory on the reconstruction effort:

Woman in audience: I wanted to know since you were in Afghanistan in 2002, and then had left and gone to Iraq in 2003–2004, what made you want to go back and live there?

Rory Stewart: The experience that I had in Iraq was a disillusioning one. Originally I supported the invasion because I had served in Indonesia, the Balkans, and Afghanistan and I thought Iraq could be more stable and humane than it had been under Saddam. I realized in Iraq that I had been wrong. I was working for the British government as coalition deputy governor of the southern provinces of Maysan and Dhi Qar and I had by April 2004 $10 million a month delivered to me in vacuum-sealed packets which we were supposed to be dispensing in order to get programs going. And almost none of the programs caught the imagination of the local population; and then I was facing hundreds of people demonstrating outside my office day after day, saying, “What has the coalition ever done for us?” And we restored 240 out of 400 schools; we restored all the clinics and hospitals; but nobody seemed interested or remotely engaged with the process.

There were only two projects we did that I thought had some kind of impact: one of them was the restoration of the bazaar in al-Amara, the capital of Maysan province, and the other was the creation of a carpentry school for street children in Nasiriyah. The carpentry school took two hundred children and had them go through a pretty good training course in carpentry and then found them jobs. It was the one project where suddenly we had the Iraqi police chief and the Iraqi mayor of Nasiriyah visiting it, and Iraqi television stations and al-Jazeera covering it, and people seemed gripped by it.

So coming to Afghanistan again in 2005, I saw that a quarter of the historic city of Kabul was due to be demolished again. They had resurrected the 1976 East German master plan under which it was to be flattened and replaced with East German–style concrete blocks. And I discovered that people like Ustad Abdul Hadi, who had been among the most famous craftsmen in the country, were selling fruit in the marketplace, the historic buildings were collapsing, and the garbage was seven feet deep in the street. Afghans wanted jobs, incomes, and a renewed sense of national identity. I sensed that restoring the traditional commercial center of the city and creating a crafts center that would make furniture, ceramics, and textiles would not only be good for the economy but would also catch imaginations. I could not undertake this kind of project in Baghdad. Those are some of the things that came together to make me do it. [..]

Moderator: Does the carpentry school still exist in Nasiriyah?

The carpentry school in Nasiriyah does not still exist, unfortunately. The funding stopped. It ran out of money.

I’d like to hear his thoughts on why “nobody in Iraq was interested or remotely engaged with the process” or reconstruction. Resentment, cultural differences, fear, stubbornness, prejudice, all of the above?

And his thoughts on withdrawal:

[.] I believe that the time has come to withdraw, that our presence is infantilizing the Iraqi political system. That we’re like an inadequate antibiotic. We are sufficiently strong to have turned what might have been a conventional civil war into a highly unconventional neighborhood conflict. But we’re not strong enough to eliminate it entirely. At the same time I fear that, without intending to, we have discredited democracy in the eyes of many Iraqis. We have created a situation in which many Iraqis now feel that the only way to keep security is to bring back a strongman. They are extremely skeptical of our programs and suggestions for development.

I think that Iraqi politicians are considerably more competent, canny, and capable of compromise than we acknowledge. Iraqi nationalism, in my view, can trump the Shiite–Sunni divisions. Our continuing presence is encouraging Iraqi politicians to play hard-ball with each other. Were we to leave, they would be weaker and under more pressure to compromise. In our relations with the Iraqis we often blocked negotiations with Moqtada al-Sadr or Sunni insurgency leaders, or the offer of troop withdrawals and amnesties for former Baathists and insurgents, among others. Yet these will probably be elements in any kind of settlement.

And therefore, my belief—and I emphasize this is my belief, not a certainty—is that were we to withdraw, things would improve

He goes on to further explain his reasoning and why he believes even the prospect of region-wide escalation or intervention by neghbouring states do not trump the reasons for withdrawal. I think he perhaps underestimates the ruthless determination of the Iranians and the extent to which they have already penetrated Iraqi society and the implications of this for the long term stability of the whole region. Iraq’s future is no longer a matter between the US and the various Iraqi factions. On a strategic level it is largely a matter between the US and Iran. Steward addresses the possibility of Iranian invasion or Iranian destabilisation of Iraq with covert operations. The problem is they may have already consolidated their power base in the Shiite regions too far for either option to be necessary. And then there is the question of what would happen to Kurdistan in the event of an complete withdrawal.

From a Radio Free Europe interview with Irshad Manji:

RFE/RL: You argue that Islam needs to be reformed and that the Koran — the holy book of Muslims — is a contradictory human book. Is your view, your perspective, being taken seriously in the Muslim world?

Irshad Manji: Well, it is in fact being taken seriously; and the reaction is most intense among young people in Muslim countries. It’s interesting [that] when my book first came out in English, and because of the burst of international press that it received, my e-mail box overflowed with messages from young Muslims in the Arab world begging me to get the book translated into Arabic so they could share these ideas with their friends, whom they said were hungry for honest conversation about Islam. My standard unimaginative response to them was, “Come one, name one Arab publisher that will have the guts to translate this book, let alone publish it.” And most of these young people wrote back to say, “You’re right, but so what, Irshad? You get the book translated into Arabic [and] you then post that translation on your website; and when we can download it privately, that means that we can read it privately and therefore safely.”

Well only a year and a half later, I can tell you that there have been already 200,000 downloads of the Arabic version of the book. Just last week, I received an e-mail from a reporter with “The New York Times” magazine who said that she saw how the book in Arabic is being distributed among young people in Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan. Even when I was in Cairo this time last year, young Muslim men — not just women — would approach me to say, “Thank you, we’re reading it, our friends are reading it, and it’s now making the rounds of the democracy movement.” So much of the criticism that you hear is more from an older generation. The younger generation — the one that knows that it lives in a very interdependent, wired, and connected world — is hungry for more information and wants these debates even when the conclusions are ones that they can disagree with.

Drops in an ocean or a sign of changing currents? Proceed with caution.

Writer and philosopher Dariush Shayegan believes that the currents are indeed changing in.. Iran:

. In a lecture given last year and now translated for the magazine, he comes to a surprisingly optimistic conclusion. “Tehran is on the brink of fundamental change. In the shadows of this grey and sad city an astonishing new world lies hidden, and when its underground powers surface one of these days, we will witness a radical change in perspective. Its lay character will emerge in all its freshness from inside the so-called Islamic society. We hope that we are gradually beginning to see light at the end of the tunnel through which other Islamic countries, in the hope of establishing a religiously determined order, are travelling in the opposite direction. In the not too distant future Tehran will become the lively and eloquent example for change.”

And Fareed Zakaria concurs:

In five or ten years, an Iran will emerge with more modern policies than the other countries of the Middle East, putting religion once more firmly in the private sphere. That’s just the way it is: life exerts a natural pressure toward modernisation, and sooner or later religion follows.

Ever the optimist Zakaria has recently written that the Islamic Reformation has already started, pointing at the conflict between the Shia and the Sunnis. No, I don’t understand his logic either. For now I am taking his opinion with more than a grain of salt.

Back to Irshad though, with a bit of a feel good story:

RFE/RL: You have proposed the plan of reforms that you call Operation Ijtihad. What does that include?

Manji: The idea would be here for one plan to happen in the traditional Islamic world and another plan to take place among Muslims in the West. In the traditional Islamic world, the idea would be to offer women microcredit loans so that they can start their own businesses, earn money from their businesses. And there is consensus within Islam that when a woman owns her own assets, she gets to keep 100 percent of those assets and do with them as she sees fit. Now what could women do with the money they earn from micro-businesses? Well, for a starter they could become literate — learn to read the Koran for themselves instead of relying only on imams to give them selected verses. And when they learn to read the Koran for themselves, they see all of the passages that the Koran has that give them dignity and self-respect — passages that, for example, tell them that they have the right to choose marriage or not choose marriage. Let me tell you a quick story.

About eight months ago, a journalist in Kabul e-mailed me to say, “Remember those progressive female-friendly verses of the Koran that you identified in your book?” “Yes,” I said. And she said, “Today I met a Muslim woman in Afghanistan who took a microcredit loan from a nongovernmental organization; she started her own candle-making business, she earned her own money, and she learned to read the Koran for herself with that money. And she saw all the passages in there that give her options for dignity; she then recited those passages to her husband, who was illiterate and who had been beating her ever since they got married. And when he realized that these passages are in God’s book, he has never hit her again.

Good for her of course, but whats going to happen when she reads him the various “war verses” or even the verse that instructs that men are actually allowed to beat their wives? Something tells me she may skip that last one. Maybe she can explain that the Koran is a “contradictory human book” first.

Read all about the recently held “Festival of Resistance” in Canada where Islamists and Marxists got to hold hands and find reassurance in the fact that someone out there is as deluded as themselves, the sheer lunacy of it all is sure to make you chuckle. (h/t Oh Canada)

Tarek Fatah summed it up nicely (again):

“For atheists, considered worthy of the death penalty by Islamists, to team up with their ultimate opponents in attacking Canadian civic society, demonstrates the fundamental bankruptcy of these two political ideologies.”

Jonah Goldberg points out the absurdities and hilarities of a similar event in Cairo:

At the annual Cairo antiwar conference in Egypt, the hot panel discussion this year was “Bridge-Building Between the Left and Islam.” John Rees, a British Trotskyite, observed: “Where else can you sit down in a single evening and listen to senior people from Hamas, Hezbollah, the Muslim Brotherhood, people from the revolutionary left and the antiwar movement from around the globe?”

Gosh, it sounds great. I’m just sorry I missed the rollicking game of Pictionary between the Castroites and the jihadis afterwards.

[..]

In the 1960s, every would-be revolutionary called himself a Marxist, usually without any serious regard to what Marx wrote, said or believed. The specifics of the ideology didn’t matter, because Marxism was the oogah-boogah word radicals used to scare the fat, lazy bourgeoisie. In 1969, Stuart Schram, a specialist on Chinese Communism, wrote that “never in the course of the past century has the name Marx been so widely invoked; never has this name served to justify so many ideas and actions totally foreign to the genius of Marx.”

Today, Marxism has lost its oomph. Yuppies drinking five-dollar lattes put Che Guevara t-shirts on their private-school toddlers.

And because nobody thinks Marxists are scary anymore, radicals consumed with hatred for the status quo — for America, for Western civilization or for the plain old dreariness of their boring lives — don’t bother calling themselves Marxists anymore. It’s not that they’re any more or less Marxist then they were before. It’s just that Marxism won’t get a rise out of your in-laws the way it used to.

But Islamic radicalism? Hooboy, that’s where the action is. Of course, not everybody follows the John Walker Lindh route and actually converts to Islam, just as not every Black Panther supporter became a bank robber. But who can deny that this post-colonial, anti-imperialism, indigenous-peoples-and-the-suburban-revolutionaries-who-love-them-unite! stuff is in many respects just a magnet for the same riffraff and rabble rouses of yesteryear?

Sure, there’s much to fear in Jihadism. But there’s also something deeply pathetic about it, too. And that’s worth pointing out.

More on the great useful idiot tradition of the Left here.

And another great essay from Fjordman:

[..] Sweden is a great example of why we need limited government, a state that only upholds law and order and does not concern itself with pushing a particular ideology on its people.

Why does the government dispense with the social contract and attack its own people? Well, for starters, because it can. The state has become so large and powerful that is has become an autonomous organism with a will of its own. The people are there to serve the state, not vice versa. And because state power penetrates every single corner of society, there are no places left to mount a defense if the state decides to attack you. Its representatives are no longer leaders of a specific people, but caretakers preoccupied only with advancing their own careers through oiling and upholding, and if possible expanding, the bureaucratic machinery.

[..] A characteristic of the situation in Western Europe is that we have more and more laws, yet at the same time more and more lawlessness. The German journalist Jens Jessen claims that his country has been gripped by a “prohibition orgy” regarding tobacco, cars, cheap holidays and computer games, television and fast food. The process is “disconcerting and almost grotesque in its systematization.” He believes there is some level of compensation going on for the powerlessness of politicians.

Parallel with an explosion in street crime, the state turns on its law-abiding citizens with a proliferation of regulations and an inflation of laws. The less control the state has over the the most important tasks of society, the stronger its desire to assert its power over the tiniest details becomes. Or is it a subtle show of force, a constant reminder to the average citizen of who’s boss, a sign that resistance to state policies is feared?

As Jessen points out, the dangerous thing about this spirit of prohibition is that “once it’s out of the bottle, it spreads like an infection” whose first casualty is tolerance: “The fettered citizens are going to loll in security; the more unbearable the state regulations, the more relaxed they will feel. But such a society, one that makes the individual citizen and he alone responsible for all possible environmental sins, can easily become the blind accomplice to the worst catastrophes on the international stage.”

[..]When does the rule of law break down? It breaks down when laws are no longer passed with the consent of free people, when citizens no longer feel that the law is just, when regulations become so numerous that it is virtually impossible even for decent individuals not to break the law on a regular basis and when the authorities are incapable of protecting their country’s borders while criminals rule the streets. It breaks down when the law appears increasingly arbitrary, when it invades the most intimate details of the life of law-abiding citizens while it allows great freedom to criminals. In short, it breaks down when it no longer corresponds to reality and to the sense of justice experienced by ordinary people.

Unless current trends are changed, I fear parts of Western Europe could reach critical mass soon.

Do read the whole thing.

The grateful citizens of Kosovo are on their best behavior as the legitimization of their criminal “state” draws ever closer, writes Rebecca Thornton for Prospect magazine:

The UN has so far succeeded in maintaining relative peace within the province, but it is a peace built on black-market economics and organised crime. Kosovo might well be, along with its cousin Albania, the most criminalised place on earth. Evidence of criminal activity dominates the landscape of the province. Black-market trading goes on flagrantly in every town and city. The filthy roads are lined with new petrol stations, which the Kosovo Liberation Army uses for money laundering.

Since the end of the conflict in 1999, the province has seen spectacular rises in drugs, arms and people trafficking. Kosovar Albanians import 80 per cent of Europe’s heroin, worth up to £12bn a year. Meanwhile, a recent Save the Children report observed an alarming rise in the number of minors trafficked into Kosovo.

In July 2006, an email from Unmik’s chief security officer, which I have seen, informed all staff “that a number of establishments in Kosovo use what appears to be a legitimate front to further illegal activities such as prostitution. We as Unmik officers CANNOT be seen as condoning these activities.” According to Amnesty International, the Unmik personnel presence has boosted the demand for prostitution. Kate Allen, director of UK Amnesty, says, “Women and girls as young as 11 are being sold into sexual slavery in Kosovo and international peacekeepers are… fuelling this despicable trade by themselves paying for sex from trafficked women.”

A founder of Koha Ditore, a Kosovar Albanian daily newspaper, tells me, “The government is doing nothing. Drugs, rackets, prostitution—the criminals co-operate very well, regardless of ethnic background. The international community is not doing enough to fight organised crime. They like to say ‘We’ve fulfilled our mandate,’ but if you scratch beneath the surface… I never dare write anything about organised crime. If I touch this issue, then my chance is, at best, to live two hours more.”

Seven years of UN rule has done little to facilitate any kind of relationship between the Kosovar Albanians and the Serbs. The change of atmosphere in the north of the country, where the Serbs are concentrated, is visible; and in the south, the crisp I LOVE USA posters that were once tacked to the rusty railings are nowhere to be seen. The tensions are symbolised by the Mitrovica bridge, which both physically joins and spiritually divides the Serb heartlands north of the Ibar from the Albanian regions to the south. I recently attended “Zadusnice,” a Serb commemoration day for the dead. At a graveyard south of the bridge, on the majority Albanian side, mourning Serbs are escorted by troops with armoured vehicles from Mitrovica, north of the bridge. The families are given one hour to visit the desecrated tombstones of their relatives, rubbish-strewn monuments that have been broken into heaps of dirty stone, surrounded by piles of litter and cigarette butts. Most of the visitors fall to their knees immediately, spending their allotted hour trying to clean the graves. As a man pulled jerkily at the grass at his wife’s tombstone, he said, “I can’t come to my wife’s grave when I want to. When I do come I have to be escorted. This situation is all too cruel to be civilised.”

Aww, they’ve taken down the I LOVE USA posters? But have they started replacing them with posters of their good friend Uncle Benny yet?

I do like the way Rebecca ends her article:

“Kosovo” is Serbo-Croat for “crow.” The creatures are everywhere here, swarms of them, with squawks reverberating off the detritus of years of war and desultory nation-building, reminding one of the collective noun for this symbol of Kosovo’s identity: murder.

And how is it possible that the Europeans are allowing all this to happen in the own backyard? Hmm:

During a February mission to Brussels led by Kosovo Bishop Artemije, after getting the usual empty assurances that there will be guarantees of human rights and protections for Kosovo’s Serb minority, American Council for Kosovo director Jim Jatras asked a Hungarian member of the European parliament, “Isn’t all this talk of protections for Serbs a tacit admission that among the Kosovo Albanians are a lot of violent and intolerant people? Why would you reward their violence with state power?”

Looking Jatras in the eye, the parliamentarian replied, “Because we’re afraid of them.”

My previous posts on the developing situations(s) in the Balkans here.

MEMRI has extensive quotes from three liberal Arab authors who have criticized the support for terrorism in Arab and Muslim society. Here’s what two of the them had to say.

Iraqi Author Riyadh ‘Abd compares the reaction of Virginia Tech killer Cho Seung-Hui’s family to that of families of suicide bombers in Iraq:

“What caught my attention was a report… that the criminal’s family… offered its apologies and expressed grief, embarrassment, and shame, as well as consternation and incomprehension of their son Cho Seung-Hui’s atrocious crime… This Korean family expressed a sense of sadness and grief, profound remorse, and a sense of partial responsibility for what their son did.

“Let’s compare this natural, human, civilized behavior that places value on human life with [that of] the families of Arabs in Islamic lands who lost their sons in Iraq in criminal suicide operations whose victims number tens of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians.

“Instead of the Iraqis receiving apologies and feelings of grief and consolation for these filthy criminals’ killing and slaughtering of innocents and their demolishing and destroying of property, we see the families of these killers holding mourning ceremonies and bragging of the ‘martyrdom’ of their sons the mujahideen – [and at these ceremonies] they receive congratulations instead of condolences.

“This strange behavior and sick pride in criminal acts can only be explained as a conclusive sign of the moral decline and deterioration of contemporary Islamic and Arab civilization.”

“Don’t the Iraqi People Deserve an Apology From the Family” of Abu Mus’ab Al-Zarqawi?

“There are hundreds of examples of this barbaric and disgraceful behavior, from Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and other Arab countries. Where is the apology from the family of the barbaric criminal, the beheader known as Abu Mus’ab Al-Zarqawi, to the Iraqi people for the crimes of mass murder, destruction of property, and cutting off [people's] livelihoods? Don’t the Iraqis deserve an apology from the family, tribe, and village of this dirty scoundrel?

“Where is the apology from the family of the Jordanian criminal who caused the deaths of 200 innocent civilians in Al-Hilla, in a suicide bombing in a popular market in 2005? It is known that there was a large mourning ceremony after the death of this criminal, that was attended by a number of important Jordanian statesmen…

“I read an article from a few years ago about an attempt by CNN… to interview, in Cairo, the father of the criminal Muhammad ‘Atta, the commander of the group responsible for [9/11]… It is known that this individual had at first spread made-up stories about the Mossad kidnapping his son, stories snatched up at the time by the Egyptian media, which is known for its addiction to invented stories and raving analyses…

“Later he began to brag about what his son did, calling his abominable criminal act ‘jihad.’ When CNN asked him for an interview, he made it contingent upon them paying him $5,000 for it. When they told him that it is station policy not to pay interviewees, Muhammad ‘Atta’s father turned down the interview, claiming that a Muslim is not allowed to aid the infidels without remuneration. Did the Muslims disapprove of this disgraceful position?… I don’t think so.

Saudi author Rim Al-Salih wrote about the differences between the Virginia Tech killer and the culture of Islamic terrorism:

[..] without lying to ourselves, can we compare the crime committed by an individual due to madness, mental illness, depression, or even due to the desire to kill and avenge, and the death supported by organizations, fatwas, [TV] stations, websites, funding by the millions, and pledges of allegiance taken in front of the holy Ka’ba?…

“The sanctification of death for death’s sake is a distinctly Islamic-Arabic specialization. Coveting death, suicide, and the killing of innocents as a shortcut to Paradise is not shared by anyone else among Allah’s creation. Is there any non-Arab who cuts the throat of journalists and peace workers – [people] who left their homes to do a true service or to aid our causes – for the crime of being fair-skinned and because of their eye color?…

“Some even go so far as to accuse the news channels of treason if they use the words ‘killing’ or ‘killed’ [instead of 'martyrdom' and 'martyr'], despite the fact that these terms are more accurate. Our vulgarization of the term ‘martyrdom’ (shahada) has made it lose its meaning, and death has lost its value and awe. The martyrdom-seeking (istishhad) of the Arabs has become like a reward for them, instead of a disaster or a calamity…

“The exaggeration in sanctifying death has made many youth prefer taking a shortcut to Paradise, instead of obeying the will of the Creator, who considers whoever kills one soul without justification as though he has killed all humanity, and considers whoever saves one life as though he has saved all humanity. [The Creator] wants [this youth] to strive to work, to live, to use the great energies he granted him in order to make the world flourish, and to leave his human imprint on existence…”

MEMRI also has quotes from Kuwaiti columnist Khalil ‘Ali Haydar who gives 10 differences between Islamist terrorism and other forms of extremism and terrorism in the non-Muslim world.

Yet another Muslim Arab author who has been bitterly speaking out about the decline of his culture is the Syrian poet Adonis (Ali Ahmad Said):

“I don’t understand what is happening in Arab society today. I don’t know how to interpret this situation, except by making the following hypothesis: When I look at the Arab world, with all its resources, the capacities of Arab individuals, especially abroad–you will find among them great philosophers, scientists, engineers, and doctors. In other words, the Arab individual is no less smart, no less a genius, than anyone else in the world. He can excel–but only outside his society. I have nothing against the individuals–only against the institutions and the regimes.

“If I look at the Arabs, with all their resources and great capacities, and I compare what they have achieved over the past century with what others have achieved in that period, I would have to say that we Arabs are in a phase of extinction, in the sense that we have no creative presence in the world.”

Interviewer: “Are we on the brink of extinction, or are we already extinct?”

Adonis: “We have become extinct. We have the quantity. We have the masses of people, but a people becomes extinct when it no longer has a creative capacity, and the capacity to change its world.”

[. . .]

“The great Sumerians became extinct, the great Greeks became extinct, and the Pharaohs became extinct. The clearest sign of this extinction is when we intellectuals continue to think in the context of this extinction.”

Interviewer: “That is very dangerous.”

Adonis: “That is our real intellectual crisis. We are facing a new world with ideas that no longer exist, and in a context that is obsolete. We must sever ourselves completely from that context, on all levels, and think of a new Arab identity, a new culture, and a new Arab society.”

[. . .]

“Imagine that Arab societies had no Western influence. What would be left? The Muslims must . . .”

Interviewer: “What would be left?”

Adonis: “Nothing. Nothing would be left except for the mosque, the church, and commerce, of course.”

[. . .]

“The Muslims today–forgive me for saying this–with their accepted interpretation [of the religious text], are the first to destroy Islam, whereas those who criticize the Muslims–the non-believers, the infidels, as they call them–are the ones who perceive in Islam the vitality that could adapt it to life. These infidels serve Islam better than the believers.”

Tarek Fatah is a Canadian Muslim who has been speaking out, despite persistent death threats, against the Islamists, as well as against the useful idiots on the far left who blindly ally with them (Toronto Star):

Tarek Fatah, a long-time left-leaning Muslim, jokes that maybe he’s just too good looking to be taken seriously as a representative of Islam. Certainly, the things he has to say about small-l liberals and the radical left in Western democracies – and their attitudes toward his faith – are anything but pretty.

“The liberal-left has a preconceived vision of what a Muslim is, and most of us don’t fit that mould,” says Fatah, a moderate leader in the Canadian Islamic community.

Clean-shaven himself, Fatah says many on the left expect Muslims to have dark, unruly beards and to be wearing unflattering flowing robes.

Fatah and many of his friends eschew both, but he’s known Muslims to rent robes when they meet with politicians or activist groups, in order to provide good visuals for the media.

But more disconcerting, he says, is a tendency he’s noticed among many on the left to embrace radical Muslims because they like the anti-U.S., anti-George W. Bush rhetoric of such people.

“They think they’re like the Sandinistas,” he says, referring to the Nicaraguan rebels of the 1980s.

Fatah’s frustration boiled to the surface this week as he prepared to fly to New York for a private screening of Islam vs. Islamist, a film cut from the line-up of the America at a Crossroads series of documentaries last month after PBS producers decided it was too alarmist.

For Fatah, the abrupt cancelling of a film looking into intimidation of moderate Muslims such as himself by conservatives is a symptom of something much more troubling he’s noticed in Western society – liberal guilt feeding liberal racism.

“It’s the racism of low expectations,” he says, adding the left is too willing to overlook the sexist and homophobic attitudes of conservative Muslims in hopes of gaining an ally against the U.S. administration.

Add to that liberal guilt for being part of the rich West, he says, and a situation soon develops in which the most outspoken Muslim critics of the West get the most attention.

“Moderate Muslims don’t have a place where they can speak, and the censoring of this film shows it,” says Fatah, who is featured in the film, produced by Martyn Burke.

Fatah lashed out at anti-war groups who march shoulder to shoulder with conservative Muslim groups to protest the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, without paying enough attention to the politics of the groups they are allying with.

[..]
A subject of numerous death threats for his criticism of conservative Muslims, Fatah says members of the left, by trying to be culturally sensitive, have at times become little more than apologists for those making the threats.

“The people who we hope in Western society would say, `How dare you make death threats,’ are saying, `Oh, we can understand, there’s a cultural disposition that permits people to be idiots’,” he says.

“They’re homophobes, but we understand.”
[..]
But for Fatah, the issues are much larger, a marriage of convenience between the left and conservative Muslims.

“Nothing makes them feel better than to say, `Those people who are being pissed on by George Bush, we’ll take care of them,’” Fatah says.

In so doing, he says the left may be falling into the same trap that the right once did – allying with Muslim fundamentalists to satisfy short-term goals, without enough attention paid to what those people believe.

“Toronto’s downtown war-withdrawers, Trotskyites march with the very people who would hang them,”
he says, pointing out that many on the left are atheists.
“The biggest crime in the eyes of Islamists is someone who denies the existence of God.”