WaPo changes headline on Geller/Spencer piece to malicious libel

It's easy to see who the true liberals are. Those like Robert Spencer and Sam Harris in his Daily Beast article.
Then along come the idiots like Peter Beinart in his reply to Harris.
Beinart and his like are getting desperate and increasingly emphatic, verging on hysterical, knowing the tide is turning against them.
Thanks to the true voices of reason. Spencer, Geller, Warraq, et al.

Seems to be a lot of scrubbing going on. I posted a penetrating but civil comment on Laura Rozen's Politico page last night (I know, I shouldn't be surprised, right?) within which was the "O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, so kill him" text that justifies the killing of Jews. This text followed a quote from an imam who had just visited a Holocaust site and couldn't understand why the Nazis did it. Then I concluded by saying that the Quran didn't cause the Holocaust but it clearly justifies killing Jews. Politico--or Rozen--removed everything I wrote but the quote from the imam, rendering my post absolutely pointless. I guess some folks "don't need no stinking investigation"--they'll just erase all evidence of dissent and counter-argument (and absolve Islam from self-examination of its anti-Jewish hatred simultaneously).

I don't believe Mr Spencer is anti-Muslim, just anti-Islam, because he attacks Westerners who support Islam as much, if not more than, native born Muslims.

Yes, the "liberals" are all in it by now, and calling others bigots is all part of keeping up the "spirit of good-natured debate", when they find it difficult to stand on facts and reason.

No that it matters matters in the big scheme of things, but this is what gets deleted on British Economist, without so much as explaining what exactly and how breaks which point of their policy:

Dear Sir,

The attached comment, posted under the pen name P_P, has been deleted from Economist.com. The comment was removed because it breaks our comments policy:
http://www.economist.com/about/terms_and_conditions.cfm#8

We ask that future comments be made in the spirit of good-natured debate. Repeated violation of our comments policy will result in your being blocked from posting comments on Economist.com.

Yours sincerely,

Comments Moderator
Economist.com

Your comment:
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It really needs to be boiled down to something simple, I think. Namely, whether or not the unlikely liberal(!) mosque backers accept difficult to deny, dare I say, fact - 9/11 was an act of religious /mass/ murder.

That act was inspired and encouraged by Islamic law's mandate to wage "holy war" against and to subjugate unbelievers. Islamic law also institutionalizes ill-treatment of women and calls for killing of apostates, among other contradictions to otherwise universally accepted principles of human rights.

No amount of misdirection or false equivalence with individual acts of violence by Christian abortion clinic bombers, whose deeds will find no doctrinal or other support in their religion, can get around that.
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Yusef

How about being called a liar? Is that an attack? Or is it just a statement of fact? It is the latter. I never called you a "worm." I did a search at Jihad Watch just now and didn't find myself calling anyone else a worm either. I did find a few instances of your coreligionists calling me a worm, however. The truth has a tendency to worm its way to the surface, eh?

Cordially
Robert Spencer

"Malicious" !?!?
This is "Malicious", this is "Pure Malice".
(video)
http://crossmuslims.blogspot.com/2010/06/never-forget-mumbai.html

Yusef, not that my little remark will overturn the stone that seems to lodged somewhere in the reasoning faculty of your mind, nevertheless I live in hope that you, on re-reading the sequence of comments on this thread, might arrive at the conclusion that you are in error.

"The pens of anti-Muslim conservatives impact N.Y.C. mosque debate mightily."

Would the WaHoPo have adopted the same kind of friendliness towards totalitarianism during World War 2, and published something titled along the lines of "Winston Churchill's resilience and bulldog spirit impact Europe's peaceful march towards Nazification mightily"?

I guess I belong to that small wing of the still inchoate anti-Islam movement that sees nothing wrong with being "anti-Muslim", insofar as any given Muslim is the concretization of the abstract body of ideas to which one refers as Islam. If Islam is to be opposed, then surely its concretization is to be opposed.

How interesting--what was "scrubbed" on 081810 is now back on 081910. Someone is reading jihadwatch or atlas shrugs!

Courreges W--Even better, get screen captures. :}

O I see we have either a moral equivalencer ...or a Mohammedan spin-doctor throwing a huge shower of sand at the end of the thread.

"Do you know any Muslims personally? Talk to them ask them about these things."

Problem is: are you *sure* they will tell us the truth?

http://www.meforum.org/2538/taqiyya-islam-rules-of-war

"How Taqiyya Alters Islam's Rules of War: Defeating Jihadist Terrorism," by Raymond Ibrahim in the Middle East Quarterly, Winter 2010.

Also see, by the same author, 'Islam's Doctrines of Deception', in Jane's Islamic Affairs Analyst, 26 September 2008.

Ladies and gentlemen.

I think 'cityslicker' is a Muslim and a liar; or a non-Muslim and either abysmally ignorant, or a liar.

As evidence I quote, from its posting above: "There are 1.6 billion Muslims today dude. We are not going to hit them before they hit us, its just a silly fight to instigate. Go to a nice Muslim dating site and get yourself a pretty Muslim and start making babies."

Observe the boastful statement about how there are so many Muslims, they're so big and strong and powerful, we better not start a fight with them, (but what if *they* attack us? Which they did, on Sept 11). That is straight-out Mohammedan thinking: boasting and threats.

Now for the lie. "Go to a nice Muslim dating site and get yourself a pretty Muslim and start making babies."

But if cityslicker is a Muslim, cityslicker knows that non-Muslim men can't marry Muslimas - or leastways, *not without having first converted to Islam*. So if cityslicker is a Muslim, cityslicker is lying.

If cityslicker is not a Muslim, then cityslicker is defending Islam without knowing very much about it at all. *I* know damn well that one of the cast-iron sharia rules is that although Muslim men are allowed to marry - or to take as sex-slaves - Jewish and Christian women who have not converted to Islam, the reverse is strengst verboten. Woe betide any dhimmi male, Christian or Jewish, who is caught making eyes at a Muslim woman! Woe betide any Muslim woman who enters into a relationship with a non-Muslim man (without first demanding that he convert to Islam). In the UK, the Muslim girl who played a Hindu girl, Parvati Patil, in the 'Harry Potter' movies, was beaten and threatened by her brother and father...for having taken a Hindu boyfriend, and for refusing to end the relationship at her male owners' behest. Also in the UK, a non-Muslim British man married a Muslim girl (while himself remaining non-Muslim); they lived in hiding and on the run for years, because her family sent hit squads after them to kill them.

Because of Robert and Pamela and the great work that they do I have hope.

Haha.
Very thinned skinned are we Rob? You can dish out the abuse much like you have just done now in another typically bigotted hate filled rant, projecting your lies as truths, but then bitch and whine when you are called out for what you are?

You are anti-muslim. You have been exposed as such. How many of your stories about Muslims, contain so much of your sensationalist tripe?

Obama is a muslim is he not? Your buddy Geller, labeled him a Third worlder & the illegitmate son of Malcolm X ( which she later deleted, but i very much doubt you'd let Muslims get away with anything like that), she called for the destruction of the Al-Aqsa mosque.

Oh no Rob. You're learning that this increased media coverage of you will expose you and that racist bigot of a friend of yours Pam Geller are going to be exposed for the liars & hate-mongers you really are.

Hi guys. I guess you are right that my tone was boastful in some parts. Sorry about that. I can tell you my background since that seems to be of interest. I was born and grew up in New York City in a poor area with near minimum wage earning parents. My parents are Catholic from the Dominican republic. My mother practices, my father does not. I am atheist. My father is of mixed race (all Dominican however), and my mother white (again Dominican). I have a master's degree in engineering and took one class (I'm not trying to say I'm an expert) in studies of the Middle East. I've known roundabout 15 Muslims on a personal basis. I've been acquainted with maybe 50, hard to say. I would not say I have more exposure to Muslims than other Latinos or white non-Muslim non-Latinos. I have lived in the Mid-West, West Coast, South America (for 3 years) and I am a 35-year old straight male.

WRT, the 1.6 billion comment, I would also suggest we try to make nice the Chinese, Indians/Pakistanis. These guys have nukes and we would be a shame to expend our military fighting avoidable conflicts because we are not sensitive to the sensibilities of "others" because "those people". Generally people will be sensitive to others they know, but may or may not care about a faceless group of people. I like the idea of speaking softly and carrying a big stick. I don't like the idea of going out and looking for who is out there that wants to fight us so that we can put a boot in their ass. I would prefer to save our arms and troops for a rainy day and work the outreach and diplomacy to the bone. We can always use the boot, just gotta keep it polished.

To answer dumbledoresarmy's point about knowing if Muslims that you meet are lying about their real beliefs and cultures. It's true that if you ask someone a question they are apt to tell you want they think you want to hear. However to find answers as to how Muslims really are and think, you can do some other things other than ask. This are the things that have formed my impression of Islam and Muslim in practice:

• The class Antholopoloy of the Middle East, which went over the history of the region in terms of language, technology and religion, including non-Islamic ones, and also goes into the current cultures of the various countries, politics, marriage issues, land ownership, women's issues (my professor was a woman, we spent an expanded time on this one), and pop culture.
  
• I've watched 2 Arab movies. These really help since I've never been to an Arab country. It gives you a view of how the people see themselves and is fun, even though you're reading captions the whole time.
  
• I've consumed news media naturally.
  
• Read sources of facts like various encyclopedia articles, including Wikipedia and Expedia, World Book 198?s version.
  
• Muslims I know also form an impression. I ask them about their country and what they do there. Many listen to rock and roll, some drink alcohol, shave, women don't wear head covering in a good chunk of the places. BTW, it's interesting to note that women's head hair is considered sexual so it is a practice of modesty to cover it up. Similar to the way Western women cover their legs more in some places than others. That's not such a stretch of the imagination that hair may be considered too sexual to show. I love a woman with long straight black shiny hair. Oh man! What was I talking about again?. Oh yeah... In Turkey mixed couples are typical.
  

WRT, non-Muslims not being able to marry Muslim woman without converting, I personally know several mixed Muslim/non-Muslim couples. I know for sure that at least one of them did not convert and I doubt that they all did. Some may have. Jews have the same laws in this respect and I have known several mixed Jewish and non couples that again not all have converted. I have had drinks with Muslims, peperoni pizza with Jews and I've know Christians who have sex outside marriage. What I'm getting is only that theologians and religious books can say some interesting stuff, but it depends on how much adoption there. The proof of the pudding is in the tasting. We should also pay a good deal amount of attention to what people actually do on a daily mundane basis. We should look at both the averages and the extremes.

To answer the issue of Muslim lying to avoid persecution in which the article How Taqiyya Alters Islam's Rules of War states:

"Taqiyya [lying for fear of religious persecution] presents a range of ethical dilemmas. Anyone who truly believes that God justifies and, through his prophet's example, even encourages deception will not experience any ethical qualms over lying. Consider the case of 'Ali Mohammad, bin Laden's first "trainer" and long-time Al-Qaeda operative. "

That is an interesting article I read most of it and the conclusion at the end. I am not convinced of inevitable link between the fact that Islam says it's OK to lie so that you are not persecuted for your beliefs and the idea that Muslims will simply be OK with lying for just anything. If he can show some statistics gathered by sociologists then OK, otherwise I don't think the slope is so slippery. But in terms of the point of how I can be sure that a Muslim is being honest, you are totally right. I cannot be sure they are being honest, I have to use other means. The article is very educational however thanks.

I think we should talk about generalities about Muslims carefully. The individual Muslim people, countries, and leaders march to the beat of different drummers. So what applies to some won't to others.

cityslicker

you watched "2 'Arab' movies"? What were they? Who made them, and when, and where? What were they about?

Tawfiq Hamid, who calls himself a moderate Muslim, says that in Egypt, when he was growing up, he watched lots of movies about Jihad that were intended to make Muslims proud of all their past conquests and inspire them to more. Soo - did your teacher/s show you a classic Muslim Jihad movie? (I doubt they'd have shown you a beheading video).

In Muslim Turkey, recently, people made a viciously antisemitic film called 'Valley of the Wolves'. And in Egypt they did a 'documentary' (that was what it purported to be) that treated the calumnies of the bizarre forgery 'Protocols of the Elders of Zion' as if they were FACT...that one was screened during Ramadan, and it was wildly popular.

Nonie Darwish - apostate from Islam, author of 'Now They Call Me Infidel' and a book about sharia law, called 'Cruel and Usual Punishment' - mentions a popular Egyptian movie she saw when she was young. It was about 'honor' murder. It was called 'Bidaya wa Nihaya', Beginning and Ending. Perhaps you should watch *that* one, if you can find it anywhere.

John Roy Carlson, in Jordan, in 1948, saw an Egyptian Arab-made movie set in a Muslim milieu. It was about honor murder, too. Here's his description of the plot:

"The film was an Egyptian tale about a Bedouin triangle in which a desert sheikh contrived to kidnap the fiancee of another sheikh the night before the wedding.

"The lover was killed and the girl murdered by her father for letting herself be kidnapped, and presumably kissed.

"As for the ending, nobody lived happily ever after.

"Thus Arab justice triumphed - for there is no greater sin in the lexicon of Arab morals than feminine unchastity.

"No one cares about the morals of the male."

Did your nice lady teacher discuss honor murders, much? Or FGM, which is rampant in Islamic Egypt? Did she discuss Qur'an 4: 34 which prescribes a thrashing by way of a pre-emptive strike against feared or suspected feminine disobedience?

Oh, and you might consider watching Ayaan Hirsi Ali's 'Submission'. She was inspired to make that little film on the basis of her own lived experience in the world of Islam, and what she had seen of the lives of many, many other Muslim women, not only Somalis but of other backgrounds, while working as an interpreter with migrants in the Netherlands.

I'd say: read Wafa Sultan, read Ayaan Hirsi Ali, read Nonie Darwish. And *think*.

And if you want to test the 'moderation' of your nice Muslim friends, try mentioning Jews (in positive terms, more than once, on different occasions), watch closely, and see what happens. You could also raise the subject of Rifqa Bary, very public apostate from Islam to Christianity in the USA. She ran away from her family because she feared they were going to kill her to punish her for her apostasy. Or mention Ayaan Hirsi Ali, or Magdi Cristiano Allam, both very public apostates. Just try it. Your friends might not react. But on the other hand, they might. It ought to be interesting.

From the posting by 'cityslicker', above:

"I have a master's degree in engineering and took one class (I'm not trying to say I'm an expert) in studies of the Middle East...

"The class Antholopoloy [sic: Anthropology] of the Middle East, which went over the history of the region in terms of language, technology and religion, including non-Islamic ones, and also goes into the current cultures of the various countries, politics, marriage issues, land ownership, women's issues (my professor was a woman, we spent an expanded time on this one), and pop culture."

'My professor was a woman', says 'cityslicker', and they 'spent an expanded time' on 'women's issues'. I wonder whether 'cityslicker''s professor was a Muslim or a non-Muslim?

Hugh Fitzgerald - who has, I think, a wide connection with persons in academia, on the subject of the state of play in 'middle eastern studies', 'Islamic studies', and suchlike, in the modern West, at the moment.

http://www.jihadwatch.org/2005/01/fitzgerald-mesa-nostra.html

http://www.jihadwatch.org/2005/10/fitzgerald-a-brief-mesa-nostra-taxonomy.html

http://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm/frm/12343/sec_id/12343

I suspect that the lady who taught 'cityslicker' what to think about 'the middle east' and the Islamic world, may have been a member of what Mr Fitzgerald has dubbed 'MESA nostra'.