UK: Telegraph in "black heart of Islam" row

Thats it, the vipers have been let loose on another individual who had the guts to say it like it is, we are in no doubt as to who the masters of "free" speech are in England.

I would like to know upon what grounds they sacked him!

I have read the articles before. They are intelligent and obviously well thought out. There is not venom or xenophobiia ...so what is the problem?

If indeed the rules are SO sensitive, I want the Head of the idiot in the BBC who wrote the scurrilous report this morning reported on their radio news about the "French Law Banning Wearing of Headscarves" which was nicely interlaced with the demands of those terrorists in Russia for the law to be repealed. The BBC repeatedly calls this a ban on headscarves, which it is not. Why do they do this? Surely given the obvious zero ability of Islam to accept ANY criticism it MUST be obvious to the BBC that such a statement will inflame and outrage........ Hence "Name Please Mr lefty BBC Editor and here is your red card"

If we cast our minds back Robert Kilroy Silk was fired by the BBC for writing this:

We Owe Arabs Nothing
By Robert Kilroy-Silk, Express 4/1/04
Jan 13, 2004, 11:17
We are told by some of the more hysterical critics of the war on terror that "it is destroying the Arab world". So? Should we be worried about that? Shouldn't the destruction of the despotic, barbarous and corrupt Arab states and their replacement by democratic governments be a war aim? After all, the Arab countries are not exactly shining examples of civilisation, are they?
Few of them make much contribution to the welfare of the rest of the world. Indeed, apart from oil — which was discovered, is produced and is paid for by the West — what do they contribute? Can you think of anything? Anything really useful? Anything really valuable? Something we really need, could not do without? No, nor can I. Indeed, the Arab countries put together export less than Finland. We're told that the Arabs loathe us. Really? For liberating the Iraqis? For subsidising the lifestyles of people in Egypt and Jordan, to name but two, for giving them vast amounts of aid? For providing them with science, medicine, technology and all the other benefits of the West? They should go down on their knees and thank God for the munificence of the United States.
What do they think we feel about them? That we adore them for the way they murdered more than 3,000 civilians on September 11 and then danced in the hot, dusty streets to celebrate the murders? That we admire them for the cold-blooded killings in Mombasa, Yemen and elsewhere? That we admire them for being suicide bombers, limb-amputators, women repressors? I don't think the Arab states should start a debate about what is really loathsome.
But why, in any case, should we be concerned that they feel angry and loathe us? The Arab world has not exactly earned our respect, has it? Iran is a vile, terrorist-supporting regime — part of the axis of evil. So is the Saddam Hussein -supporting Syria. So is Libya. Indeed, most of them chant support for Saddam. That is to say they support an evil dictator who has gassed hundreds of thousands of their fellow Arabs and tortured and murdered thousands more. How can they do this and expect our respect? Why do they imagine that only they can feel anger, call people loathsome? It is the equivalent of all the European nations coming out in support of Hitler the moment he was attacked by the US, because he was European, despite the fact that he was attempting to exterminate the Jews — and Arabs.
Moreover, the people who claim we are loathsome are currently threatening our civilian populations with chemical and biological weapons. They are promising to let suicide bombers loose in Western and American cities. They are trying to terrorise us, disrupt our lives. And then they expect us to be careful of their sensibilities? We have thousands of asylum seekers from Iran, Iraq, Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries living happily in this country on social security. This shows what their own people think of the Arab regimes, doesn't it? There is not one single British asylum seeker in any Arab country. That says it all about which country deserves the epithet loathsome.
George Galloway, the member of parliament for Baghdad Central, as his tormentors describe him, called the British and American troops "wolves" and called for the Arab countries to rise up and fight them and to cut off oil from the combatants. Later he called upon British troops to refuse to obey "illegal orders". He has, predictably, been vilified. His comments have been termed a disgrace, disgusting, outrageous and so on.
He has been called a loony, naive, gullible and a traitor. There have been demands that George's constituency party should deselect him, that his constituents should not vote for him at the next general election, and that he should be deported to Iraq. No one, as yet, has demanded that he be put in the stocks or burnt at the stake, though no doubt this will come.
But why all the fuss? Why is everyone getting into such an excitable lather over the predictable remarks of a no-mark?
Who with any sense cares an Iraqi dinar for what dear George thinks? Like Clare Short, George is a licensed court jester. He acts the buffoon while she's the straight part of the act, though she exaggerates her sanctimonious seriousness.
Neither are taken seriously. Both are totally discredited laughing stocks that add to the variety of political life. At least George is open, honest and sincere.

However, Tom Paulin the poet and Oxford don was NOT fired for saying the following in an Egyptian Newspaper:

" Jews living in the Israeli-occupied territories were "Nazis" who should be "shot dead".

I defend neither faith but I see nothing wrong in the words of Mr Kilroy-Silk OR Mr Cummins. If I however were an Islamist who cannot accept ANY criticism of my "robust" religion then I would complain. What does this say about the BBC editorial board AND the British Council ( Maybe there should be the word "Muslim" Between "British" and "Council"

Will Cummins lost his job for stating the obvious? And Rod Pryde, of the British Council and its Muslim outreach, has kept his? And Kilroy-Smith lost his job? And Alan Clifford, for clearly comparing the very different messages of Christ and Muhammad (a comparison, incidentally, quite common in the 19th century, and by some of the greatest figures in American history as well), is under assault?

Someone must re-hire Cummins. The best solution is for him to find full-time work as a journalist, writing on such issues as Islam and the ideological preparation (along with the systematic attention being given to fiqh for a "new" Europe that even now is being worked on)of Eurabia. The current inhabitants of Great Britain owe something to those who created their civilization. How long to they think Shakespeare or the common law, or what remains of free speech and free thought, or the free inquiry which was possible under Christianity (vide Isaac Newton, vide Watson and Crick, vide Max Perutz and Aaron Klug) and the spirit of easygoing mockery (vide Tom Stoppard).

What was the name of that book by Peter Laslett? Yes, The Civilisation They Lost. This cannot continue. It cannot continue in France, where the phony displays by the local Muslims -- not yet feeling themselves powerful enough to rip off the mask -- of phony solidarity over the kidnapped journalists. It cannot continue in Italy, where more than 1/2 the world's art treasures would, in a Muslim regime, be subject to the same kind of destruction that all Infidel art work (the Bamiyan Buddhas were the least of it) suffer -- and since statues and paintings of humans are strictly forbidden, just what do you think will eventually happen to the statues in Florence and Rome, and to the paintings in the Uffizi, and all those churches with their haram frescoes? Think ahead, everyone. Not a month ahead, not a year ahead, but ahead, ahead, ahead.

If there is not a single terrorist attack from now on, that means nothing. Demographic conquest, Da'wa, is the problem. And the fact that under Islam, once the gates of ijtihad were closed, and once the remaining Christians and Jews living in the lands conquered by the Muslims had effectively been pushed completely to the side and reduced in numbers (after the first 2-3 centuries -- it took a while, just as in Europe, as Islam slowly builds, "European civilizaton" will not die out all at once)-- no art save pitiful calligraphy and mosques, a mainly on Byzantine models, no science (see what Muslim historians of Islamic science, beyond those who greatly exaggerate the "achievements" and the "Islamic" nature of that science -- compare the sober judgements of Charles Singer, A. C. Crombie, Herbert Butterfield on both the extent, and the nature, of the contributions of Islamic science -- reveal as their own attitude toward free inquiry. One need only look at the hysterical review of George Saliba to a book by Toby Huff (who is hardly known as being ill-inclined toward Islam -- if anything, he has been a stout, far too stout, interfaith defender, as his comments on Bat Ye'or reveal)on science, and on the puzzling question of why, for some reason, nothing came of Islamic science, no use was made of Aristotle for example -- it was only in Europe that further developments were made, and in the same year Copernicus and Vesalius published their important works -- works which could not possibly have been produced, or permitted, in "Islamic civilization" but were quite possible in that of Western Christendom. Despite all the talk about the Church and Galileo (himself made possible by Copernicus) it is clear, as the work of Rodney Stark and others shows, that Christianity was not inimicable to scientific and free inquiry, and that is why modern science developed, in all fields, within Christian Europe (and later, of course, when Jews were permitted to contribute, those contributions were, and remain, spectacular -- despite the supposed mental constraints of Judaism). Only Islam remains to crush human thought; Muslims who are in the West, and who jettison their faith, are quite capable, as ex-Muslims, of doing more than being technicians, or mechanical engineers, that sort of thing. Islam is a threat to human thought.

In Europe, in England, it is already crushing or threatening to crush those who wish to state the obvious about it. Clifford and Cummins are heroes, though all they are saying is something that would have been obvious, say, to Burckhardt or Pirenne, to Voltaire or Diderot, to Sir William Muir or Margoliouth or Schacht or K. S. Lal or a thousand others -- whom, if you happen to be a student takinig courses, or doing graduate work in Islam, please find out about them here, for most of your teachers will move heaven and earth to make sure you never read the real scholars of Islam. MESA, the Middle East Studies Association, as 2,600 members, more than 2,000 of whom are flat-out apologists for Islam, for Muslims, and for an agenda that both obscures, and hence promotes, the Jihad in its various local manifestations ("Palestine" of course heading the list).

The Telegraph should simply hire Will Cummins. Does it dare? Will there be a letter of protest -- you know, with the usual signatories of such letters, beginning with Harold Pinter and ending with Margaret Drabble? Somehow one doubts it. But perhaps some of the remaining sane people in the U.K. -- Tom Stoppard, Aaron Klug (former president of the Royal Society), Oswyn Murray of Balliol -- all come to mind, could insist that this witch-hunt (the only witch-hunt being conducted is that of Muslims, and those afraid of offending them, such as Rod Pryde, agaisnt those who dare to express a few home-truths about Islam) stop. No shame? No desire to be true to all those freedoms of speech adn thought for which England was once famous, and which contributed so much to the American Founding Fathers' view of things? All gone, because of a population of potential fanatics, making demands just as in France they have assaulted the laic state? No powers of resistance at all? And yet the Luftwaffe over London could be resisted?

Two more good articles about Islam:

Severed heads and the Arab world's foul predicament

http://dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=10&categ_id=5&article_id=7570

Arab-Islamic World Is a Hostage of Its Own Delusions

http://www.americanoutlook.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=publication_details&id=3440&pubtype=DailyArticles

I know I've said this on another thread, but one aspect of the Will Cummins saga is really strange. His real name is Harry ...er....Cummins. 'Will Cummins' is hardly a pseudonym. Since he clearly isn't stupid - his article was polemical but very perceptive - I can't help thinking that he engineered his own sacking as a publicity stunt, and one which will do him no harm at all in his future career as a controversial journalist. In this career I wish him all the best.

Everything Hugh and others say about free speech is true. However, Cummins' views, however true, are not compatible with the role of the British Council, however dubious that role may be. This is why he was sacked. He is not being gagged as some commentators have suggested.

As a parallel, I may think that some products of the company I work for are inferior to those of our competitors. If I said so in The Daily Telegraph this would be incompatible with my role as an employee of the company, and I would have to accept the consequences. But I would be free to say so were I a freelance journalist. The principle of free speech is not an absolute one - few here would argue that Vanunu (sp?) was free to speak freely about Israel's nuclear weapons, for example.

Hugh's excellent post begs the question - where is the new Emile Zola?

where are the intellects to challenge and expose the awful islamist propagandists and their cohorts of deceitful dhimmy journalists, who bury the truth for the global jihadists who daily pound the western world with new attrocities !
The wonderful mayor Giuliani puts the start of global jihad at the 1972 Munich olympic games where the world stood by and waited for the slaughter of 11 israeli athletes so the games could carry on.Soon after, the perpetrators were discretely set free by the German Government.
Was this the start of european Dhimmitued?
I hardly think so. Christian and academic dhimmitued is possibly as old as Islam itself.
But netherless an embolding point for the jihadists who recognised the spinelessness of europe and were to take full advantage of it in later years.
An so after more than thirty years we come to the point that hardly one journalist or western politician can call the "terrorism" by its true name for a variety of reasons of which cowaRDICE IS FOREMOST IN THE LIST.
Hugh gives us the names of the brave few who have stood up and spoken and have as a result lost their livelihoods.
Are they hardline rascists? Are they Oswald Mosely thugs? Are they indeed extreme rightists?
No they are ORDINARY highly intelligent people.
What is frightening is how the slightest intellectual criticism of Islam brings down the sword of damaclese, wielded not only by the Islamic propagandists but by the most hallowed of British journalistic institutions.
A clear and precise indication of how these institutions have been manipulated and infiltrated.
How, in thirty years only did we get to this situation?
Please, if anyone has an analysis, post it now!

Vanunu (sp?) was free to speak freely about Israel's nuclear weapons, for example.
No one would dispute his right to speak GENERALLY about Israeli nuclear policies.
However giving specific details to a london Newspaper such as the sunday times is NOT acceptable.
Imagine if a British nuclear scientist were to divulge specific details to a foreign newspaper.
How would the British gov. react?

Sent off an E Mail yesterday to Marina Hyde of the
Guardian defending Will Cummins' courageous articles. Found an abusive E Mail from the 'lady'
waiting for me this morning. Have sent this person another E Mail, politely asking her to supply verses from Qur'an forbidding Muslims to go on Jihad or kill Infidels....Also pointed out Will Cummins never said aught against Muslims, he
was talking about the Ideology of Islam. Suggest
others write to this Dame : expect vitriolic replies!

Send off protest E Mails to 'Marina Hyde.'
E Mail address ' diary@guardian.co.uk

Above the last two posts from the armorican-sounding Morgane, nonsuch (or "nonesuch") asks how we got to this point.

Several ways.

One, the Jihad as an idea, and the general understanding of Islam, simply disappeared from public view. The old experts in Islam retired or died. No one in Holland replaced C. Snouck Hurgronje, the keenest Dutch student of Islam, and a sometime adviser to the Dutch East Indies. In France, a whole brilliant generation of French scholars simply retired or died, and when France left Algeria in 1962, having already left Morocco and Tunisia, the ability to easily acquire some immediate apprehension of Arab Muslim realities disappeared as well. No Fagnan, no Abel, no Vajda. Jews had always been important Orientalists, but the Jewish population of Europe, one may recall, was severely diminished by World War II. In England, those who tried to maintain some kind of sobriety about the Arabs were constantly under siege by the pro-Arab lobby and by those famous Arabists in the Foreign Office. One example: in the early 1970s, J. B. Kelly and A. K. S. Lambton, the great experts on the Arabian peninsula and Saudi Arabia, and on Persia, respectively, had a dinner party with Anthony Parsons, at that time either Deputy Foreign Minister or some equally high muckamuck position. Both warned him that things were afoot in Saudi Arabia and Persia, respectively, that there was danger of the Jihadist variety. The oil money had unhinged these societies, and given them power that could only be used in ways inimical to Infidels. And, they both warned, Europe itself would suffer -- in Europe itself. Parsons poohpoohed the whole thing. Nothing would happen outside the MIddle East, he said. To quote the valet of Emperor Maximilian, as they both stood before the Mexican firing squad: "You said it would not come to this. You see that you were wrong."

Soon after 1973, with a cunning use of money, the Arabs began to pay for Centers of Arab and Muslim Studies. They started, in England, at the University of Exeter. They basically began to control, as well, the Arab program at St. Antony's College, Oxford, which has been the single most influential center of pro-PLO "scholarship." Its resident tame Israeli is one Avi Shlaim. That is where the PLO groupie Roger Owen, now a full professor at Harvard, modestly started out; it is where the Said epigone and propagandist Rashid Khalidi got his D.Phil. in propaganda studies (he for years was, literally, a PLO propagandist in Beirut); now he is that grand thing, the Edward Said Professor at Columbia, and in a very good position to mislead people and to keep them off the subject of Islam, its tenets and its history. All over the Western world it is becoming harder and harder to study the very thing, the very subject, that most needs study -- Jihad and dhimmitude, the tenets of Islam, and the history of Muslim treatment, through time and space, of non-Muslims.

Now it is time for the news. But I will add more later.

Nonsuch:

My purpose in mentioning Vanunu (???sp??)was that rights such as free speech carry responsibilities.

One of the criticisms often, and rightly, made about Muslims in the West is that they claim rights without accepting responsibilities. An employee has responsibilities as well as rights.

Harry, 'alias' (ho ho) Will Cummins voluntarily agreed to work for the British Council. This organisation promotes co-operation between Britain and the Muslim world, amongst other, more laudible aims. Whether or not you agree with this aim, and there is much to say in favour of not co-operating with the Muslim world, that was the organisation he joined. They paid him to play by the rules. He broke the rules, in my opinion knowingly and correctly, and therefore must take the consequences, in this case dismissal. End of story.

Now he is free to do as he wishes and to criticise Islam. Good luck to him. But to draw conclusions from this about free speech in the UK would be completely wrong.

I have just watched on Channel 4 a hard-hitting documentary about 9/11. Sure to cause controversy. I have yet to see anything from the US that compares. Watching this space...

Two, neither before nor after the 1967 war did the Israelis ever properly identify the nature of the conflict against them. Jabotinsky, the great orator (Konstantin Dmitrievitch Nabokov, the Russian ambassador to Great Britain before the Revolution, and uncle to the writer V. V. Nabokov, said -- perhaps it is in the memoirs of Joseph Gessen -- that Jabotinsky was the finest orator in Russian that he, K. D. Nabokov, had ever heard), writer (as the journalist "Altalena"), and political thinker, who in Warsaw addressed a vast crowd of Jews in 1938, warning them of precisely what was to come, and begging them to get out, "to Palestine" (i.e. to Mandatory Palestine). Jabotinsky understood, as no one else did, that the Arabs simply would not accept the Jews. Period. End of story. He thought that only an "Iron Wall" of resistance would force the Arabs to accept the reality. He was right, of course -- but he did not understand that the opposition was based on the tenets of Islam. He did not understand, and so neither he nor any other subsequent Israeli articulated, the fact that an Infidel sovereign state was simply unacceptable. It does not matter what its size (Israel possesses about 0.2% of the total land area of the members of the Arab League, and not a drop of oil or any other natural resource -- its sole resource is human talent) may be. Now a few people did recognize this -- one of them was the former editor of Ma'ariv. A few scholars of Islam began to understand. But in Israel itself for many decades the establishment consisted of Jews not from Arab lands, but from Europe -- and they knew as little about Islam as most Americans and Europeans do today.

Furthermore, despite the intelligent analyses of such present-day Israeli scholars as Moshe Sharon, Mordechai Nisan, and Raphael Israeli, there is a strong element of denial among Israelis. Imagine that you were an Israeli, perhaps with a young son. Would you, could you, allow yourself to believe that the conflict was endless, was hopeless? Would you want to look forward to such a thing? Would you not, rather, make endless mental efforts to persuade yourself that the opposition of the Arabs really was one of simple "nationalism," and that the "Palestinian Arabs" were not simply a fabricated nationality, post-1967, but did in fact have a national consciousness that would not disappear overnight once Israel had disappeared?

Another factor, of course, was the clever use of Christian "Palestinian" Arabs -- the Hanan Ashrawi, Naim Ateek types -- who having internalized the dhimmitude of so many Christians in the Muslim East (though not all, including not all Maronites and not all Copts -- and once those people are out of the Muslim lands, they feel much freer to speak openly about the horrors of the humiliation, degradation, and insecurity they constantly experienced at the hands of Muslims -- which is why, for example, Lebanese Christians in Paris, or in Montreal, or in Boston, feel such alarm at the refusal of Americans to realize what Islam is all about). This permitted the Jihad to be disguised -- both for Israelis, and for outside supporters of Israel.

Now the situation of Israel is of course permanently perilous. And one hesitates to criticize them. But had the Israelis themselves early on properly identified the problem that confronted them, the basis for the relentless Jihad against them, they would possibly not have made concession after concession on territory, or set up expectations for further concessions. By helping to teach the West about Islam, and about the Jihad, in invoking its relevance to their own situation, they might, far earlier, not only have seen their own situation properly and presented it more effectively, but what is more -- they might have helped Western Europe itself recognize the danger that, at that dinner thirty years ago, Ann Lambton and J. B. Kelly had tried to warn Anthony Parsons about it in vain.

Let it be plainly put: there is hardly a Frenchman, a Dutchman, an Italian, a Spaniard, or an Englishman, whatever his or her general views on immigration, whatever his or her views on taxes or education or defense, would not, if he or she could, would not undo the Muslim migration to Europe. Everyone knows, though no one says publicly, and certainly not the pusilllanimous public men of Europe or the Arab hirelings of the E.U. (Chris Patten, Javier Solana, Romano Prodi, all come swimmingly to mind), will articulate or even recognize that truth. Europe is living a lie. And so is the United States, whenever we use that absurd word "terrorism" stripped of its necessary epithet: Muslim, Islamic, Qur'an-and-hadith-inspired terrorism.

At this point, there is still time to stop further Muslim migration, to remove all those who reveal that they are disloyal to the Infidel nation-state, and to create institutions which will, at every turn, make it more rather than less difficult for the conduct of Muslim life. If you believe that Islam is an inoffensive religion, if you really believe that the Jihad is not central to Islam, if you refuse to undertake the careful reading of Qur'an and hadith and sira (the sacralized biography of Muhammad), if you content yourself with pieties about how "everyone is the same the whole world over" and "all religions are the same" and "we all share the same abrahamic faith" and the rest of the rot, go ahead. But you are making the lives of all the rest of us much more unpleasant, expensive, and dangerous than they would otherwise be.

Laziness, sheer mental laziness, along with the sentimentality that is such a staple of the mass media (from that stupid story about mating pandas, or a dog that has been rescued from a hole, that they like to end the nightly news on every so often), about how everyone wants the smae things, and a belief-system that has an unbroken record of aggression and subjugation of Infidels, wherever those Infidels may have been conquered, and whether or not they were Christians, or Jews, or Zoroastrians, or Buddhists, or Hindus, or Confucians, or who knoww what -- they were Unbelievers, and either deserved to be killed, or converted, or forced to live as dhimmmis.

In the United States, as in Western Europe, the universities have largely been captured. It has been, in the first place, a function of the clever deployment of Arab money. First, Kuwaiti and others set up in Washington, at Georgetown, a Center for Contemporary Arab Studies that hired the likes of Michael Hudson, a shill for the Arabs. Then a rich "Palestinian" Christian businessman with a contracting business based in Lebanon, gave the money for another Washington isntitution, the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, and plucked that by now infamous apologist for Islam, and poohpooher of "an Islamic threat" as a "myth," John Esposito; it was money well spent. And the money spent on his sidekicks Voll and Yvonne Haddad was also well spent. In the Clinton years, there were those in government who actually consulted with Esposito, who relied on his "expertise." No wonder nothing coherent came of a policy to undo not merely Bin Laden, but all the other instruments of the world-wide Jihad.

Now, of course, most American universities have, step by grim step, permitted the takeover of their MIddle Eastern departments by apologists for Islam. Columbia, once the home of such celebrated scholars of Islam as Joseph Schacht and Arthur Jeffery and Richard Gottheil, now has the show being run by Rashid Khalidi, sometime PLO propagandist, protege of Edward Said (he is that grand thing, the "Edward Said Professor" at Columbia -- a professorship paid for by Arab money, Sheikh Zayed, the Olayans, and so on, along with bits kicked in by Rita Hauser and Gordon Grey, Jr. and the odd Morgan Stanley "financial services" company -- it took a year of steady pressure to get Columbia to reveal, as by law it is required to, the sources of the funding for this chair, which was earmarked in fact for Khalidi himself. Ah yes, la carriere ouverte aux talents, as long as one can be assured that those talents will be in the service of the PLO). Khalidi did not disappoint, nor does his sidekick Hamid Dabashi, whose maudlin tribute to Edward Said must be read, and enjoyed, by one and all -- a tribute that is entirely in the spirit of an apparatchik weeping in verse at the death of Joseph Stalin. And, in truth, without Said's thuggish attempt to silence real students of Islam (first in "Orientalism" and then in "Covering Islam") well, how could someone like Dabashi, full of talk of "colonialism" and "postcolonialism," ever get a job in the first place. It would have been unthinkable when there were still standards -- indeed, as unthinkable as would be the possiblity of Joseph Schacht, or David Margoliouth, or Arthur Jeffery, or K. S. Lal, ever being hired in an American or European university today to teach about Islam. It has been viewed by some only in terms of the anti-Israel aspect of all this, and craven university administrators like to "buy off those complainiing Jews" by offering the transparent sopo of an extra professor of "Israeli studies" or some such. This should satisfy no one. It ighnores the real problem: there are virtually no serious students of Islam, the tenets of Islam, and of dhimmitude, at the so-called major universities, who are not themselves apologists, whether Muslim or, like Dean Graham at Harvard Divinity School, non-Muslim fellow travellers who, without managing to get tenure, have somehow carved out remarkable careers for themselves. Careerism, and the Development Office -- this is the modern university.

It is at smaller schools where the best and most reliable scholars of Islam are now likely to be found. Here and there one or two hold on. Of course, while Bernard Lewis has not been nearly as truthful about Islam, and has been disgraceful in his nunc pro tunc presentation of the Ottomans and their treatment of non-Muslims (he has too many friends, too many contacts, too much of his own vanity satisfied by the much he is made of in Istanbul, to be a complete truthteller); the same is true of Sanford Shaw. The Turks have, because of a kind of backdating of Ataturk, gotten a free ride, and in so doing, those Ottomanists who have helped them along are also helping, willy-nilly, to obscure a serious study of Islam. Much too much is made, by the way, about the fact that Jews from Spain found refuge in Salonika and other parts of the Ottoman Empire -- or rather, too little is madfe of how badly the Jews of Europe were treated in Europe, which is why even dhimmitude in the Ottoman Empire (with the occasional hakim effendi -- the court physician -- helping to defend Jewish interests as, amusingly, Ataturk's Jewish dentist did) has been so understudied and seldom discussed.

Well, here we are. Evidence of the JIhad, with different groups but all of them motivated by the same texts, the same attitudes, the same propaganda based on those texts, whether in Russia or in Afghanistan or in Pakistan or in the Moluccas or in Israel or in Montreal. Not a world-wide conspiracy, but something different - people who share a single belief-system, and prompted, independently of each other, by the same tenets which will always cause them, here and there and everywhere, to act, as best they can, to spread Islam, to subjugate non-Muslims, and to assure themselves the rightful role of Islam, which is "to dominate and not to be dominated." That, not a single coordinated group, is the problem.

Until this is clearly understood, not by everyone but by enough people, a coherent strategy somewhat better than "bringing them democracy because all people want that" will not be fashioned. Great expense and pain can be avoided, merely by opening a few books. Is that so difficult?

We need some more Pim Fortuyns, but with better security this time.

Isn't it interesting how these journalists who choose to exercise their fundamental right to free speech and state a theological/analytical critisism of fundamentalist islamic doctrine/ideology are sacked yet are not charged for breaking any laws. In other words why don't we all sack people from their jobs whenever someone just doesn't like what that person says. Hey...if that is the case lets have everyone sack everyone else. What a brilliant precedent in society this is. I wonder who used to be sacked in the west in the 1920's and 1930's when they criticised totalitarian states. Gee...now all a future Hitler/Stalin now needs to do is set up a totalitarian ideology and claim it is a revelation from god (i.e. a religion)...and then with everyone being sacked when they criticise that ideology/religion he/she can do anything they want and never be critisised for it. What is it Voltaire said...
"I dissaprove of what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it".
Isn't it great (sarcasm) that this fundamental Western principle of free speech is being broken and people are now being socially and economically punished for exercising their right to free speech (while they are not breaking any laws). Voltaire would be turning in his grave.

Cummins was sacked because he expressed views incompatible with the organisation he worked for. He knew exactly what he was letting himself in for, and in terms of employment law he doesn't have a leg to stand on.

This is not a free speech issue. Cummins was not an academic or (yet) a journalist expressing unorthodox views. He worked for an organisation, one of whose stated aims is co-operation with the Muslim world. This is what he signed up for.

If a vicar states repeatedly in the national press that he doesn't believe in God, then the Church is within its rights to sack him. (Not, of course, for criticising Islam.)

Cummins' views on Islam are correct in my opinion, and I hope that he continues to write many more articles along the same lines. But he is not a martyr to the cause of free speech.

To Interested..
I can understand what you are saying...that Cummings must have breached some sort of written agreement /standard at the Telegraph not to criticise religion while working there...even when using a false name...what I don't understand is why in the media people like him (even editors and I presume others at the telegraph) can't express their opionions...what is the purpose of these standards in the media if not to stop him and his fellow workers from debating the issues fully and expressing their opinions? I don't think such standards are very conducive to free speech for those working in the media. This is just my opinion.

Correction..Cummings didnt work at the Telegraph but the British Council. Still I hope they don't sack the Telegraphs editor.

Apologies to the Telegraph for the previous posts...was confused. I just hope people can still be free to post their opinions without repercussions (regardless of what organisations they work for) if they do so anonymously.

Hugh- an astonishingly brilliant and thought provoking 2 part post.
so much to consider!
thank you.
A gargantuan knot which may never be untangled.

Nonsuch (a favourite hunting place of Henry V11)