Here is a good report from Blogwrath about the event last night in Toronto. Video of my talk is here and of Pamela Geller’s is here.
…Pamela Geller defined her premise as a struggle to uphold individual rights. You can’t see this promoted by the Muslim leadership — the opposite is encouraged by them, the individual is sacrificed to an extreme ideology. She is interested only in the truth, which is controversial in our modern world. We are in a situation, where we cannot even name the problem, which we are facing. The situation is very similar to sharia control, because we are not allowed to insult Islam.
There is an information war going on now. On one hand we have the Muslim propaganda, which is protected by the media; on the other hand, the criticism of it is discouraged. She gave the example with the FBI bus ads featuring 15 of the most wanted terrorists. They happen to be Muslims, because of that, they were considered disparaging to Muslims and inappropriate. That forced her to create her own ad campaign based on the FBI materials. Every one of her campaigns is a response to a lie. You can see in the video the samples — as a response to the “my jihad” campaign, designed to whitewash the most violent pillar of Islam, Geller ran her own version featuring violent jihadi statements of real prominent Muslims.
The Muslim anti-Semitism is whitewashed not only in posters, but also in the press, shameful events like the pogroms in Palestine in the 1920″s and 1930″s are never mentioned and so is the Muslim collaboration with Hitler. In the USA Muslim organizations use lawfare to impose Islam in the public life and on corporations (like it was the case of Disney). The Muslim atrocities around the world can’t be questioned. The UK case of banning Geller and Spencer, which I mentioned, resulted in legal action against the government. The government should always be challenged; the lawsuit forces them to address the issues they ignore. Savagery must be named and shamed — especially when it involves innocent people like the Fogel family or Daniel Pearl.
Obama’s pandering to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt has played a major role to bring this sorry state of the affairs. The result in the area is that the jihadists are advancing and the Christians are being cleansed and exterminated. Obama’s policy is very weak — the Russians and the Chinese are taking control of the world affairs. The leftists dominate the official media and the internet remains a source of uncensored credible opinions. The media mock everybody who differs from the officially sanctioned position; we have no other choice but to oppose them and fight. It is our task to do something to educate the others and save freedom.
In his presentation Robert Spencer demonstrated an enviable knowledge of the Muslim scriptures. He carried a copy of the Koran, but was able to quote chapters and verses from it without opening it. Hate speech was the main issue he wanted to address. He started with the accusation by CAIR Canada that he is spreading hate speech. One talking about Islam, you can’t avoid hate speech, but that’s because there are plenty of examples of it in the Koran. The Jews are called apes and pigs; the jihad is war against the “people of the book” (Jews and Christians) must continue until they submit and start paying taxes to the Muslims, etc.
The terrorists use the Koran to justify their actions — like in Osama bin Laden’s letter to the USA in 2002, where he said that he would fight against them until they accept Islam, a statement supported by a Koranic verse he quoted. An interested case was that with the Islamic law handbook published by Al-Azhar University in Egypt, the most respected place of Islamic scholarship. There were many points in it restricting the legal rights of non-Muslims, all justified with verses from the Koran. A Muslim in the audience in Grand Prairie, Alberta, where Spencer talked about the book, accused him he was quoting the verses out of context. That was ridiculous, because then he must admit that the Al Azhar scholars were also quoting the Koran incorrectly.
The Muslims are afraid of an open debate, that’s why his debate at the University of Toronto (scheduled for today) was mysteriously cancelled. Muslim extremists do a great job in blackmailing their opponents. They gradually introduce regulations and demands that limit our freedoms based on sharia — the dhimmi concept. His book on Mohammed’s life was condemned, although he followed strictly the sources — but he didn’t approve any of the “prophet’s” deeds and they hated him for that. Since the Muslim blasphemy laws are unlikely to be accepted, the Muslims get around them by using the hate speech laws. That’s why Geller and Spencer are demonized and even people who agree with them are unwilling to support them openly. The goal is to make everybody afraid of condemning jihadi violence — and it’s working.
He gave an example with a group of Muslim wannabe terrorists from New Jersey — the group planned to go and shoot soldiers with the hope to get killed and go to paradise. That was backed by a statement of that nature in the Koran — if you kill for the prophet and get killed, you end up in heaven. They had plenty of propaganda materials on VHS tapes — jihadi lectures, Osama speeches, beheadings, etc. They wanted to transfer the tapes to DVD”s. The VHS transfer guy in the store hesitated to report them because it could be considered racist. And all of them were Albanians, all white. (If you have spent any time in Europe, you would”ve noticed that the Albanians are much whiter than most Sicilians and many Spaniards.) That is the tragedy — we are now conditioned to believe that when you criticize Islamic extremism you”re a racist; racism is a Western trauma which is used successfully to manipulate people’s minds.
Muslims usually condemn terrorist acts after the fact (some organizations even use templates for that), but never teach the right interpretation of Koran that the terrorists supposedly distort. Those who want to reform Islam are ostracized and declared heretics. Stating publicly that Islam is peace is a deception — that’s not what they teach in the mosques. Geller and Spencer were banned from Britain while another imam, who thinks that jihad is smashing the infidels” skulls, was let in. Spencer agrees with the imam’s view about jihad, but he is against it, and in a bizarre way that is accepted as hate. CAIR clouds the minds of people making them think that the critics are wrong, not the violent jihadists. We need to spread the light of truth. If we allow them to destroy every critic, they very well may win, as the trials of Ezra Levant and Mark Steyn demonstrated.
The presentation ended with an auction for an original poster from one of Pamela Geller’s anti-jihad campaigns. It sold for $500. The event concluded with a short Q&A session.
Read it all and see more photos here.