Dhimmitude at the LA Times: understanding the "why" of suicide bombing

I received this message from a friend about an article in the LA Times, "Killers rendered in shades of gray," that is aptly characterized as an "erudite and subtle propaganda piece."

Below is a discussion of a new movie that tells the story of a pair of suicide bombers. The author of the article refers to them at one point as "the two heroes."

Increasingly, you will be expected to "understand" the "why" of suicide bombing. Read this erudite and subtle propaganda piece that "squarely places the blame" on the "occupation." But do you have the tools to recognize what is missing from this analysis? To wonder why no mention is made of the brainwashing of Muslims into the ideology of jihad?

There is a total absence of any reference to the perpetual hate messages in the "Palestinian" media; the ingrained Jew-hatred in Muslim society; the role of Muslim clergy who encourage, justify and endorse suicide bombing; and, above all, to the role of Islam in supplying the ideology for such bombings and the promise of their just reward: Paradise.

Do you wonder why the article does not mention how the "occupation" came into being? Why the writer did not tell you that it resulted from relentless warfare and terrorism by Arab states determined to destroy Israel? That when the same land was under Jordanian and Egyptian occupation prior to 1967, its inhabitants were treated to unremitting cruelty, neglect and rejection by their own Arab brethren? And, lastly, do you wonder why the author did not inform you that failed but unremitting aggression against Israel spawned the realization that terrorism would achieve what conventional warfare could not?

Suicide bombing is the Muslim weapon of choice, not because of despair, humiliation or "occupation," but because the Muslim world believes that suicide bombing works.

But now we are asked by our own media to, essentially, "give suicide bombing a chance." See the positive in it. Blame Israel for it. Remove all responsibility from the shoulders of those who recruit for it, finance it, promote it, practice it, celebrate it, reward it, perpetuate it and glorify it. In short, Israel's enemies are absolved.

Clearly, the writer with the obligatory Jewish name is counting on your naivete and ignorance.

On the other hand, perhaps the writer is promoting a powerful idea whose time has come.

Now that she has succeeded in "understanding" aggrieved suicide bombers who kill Jews because of "occupation," next month she just might end up having to "understand" aggrieved suicide bombers who kill people -- other than Jews -- for unrequited love; for personal vengeance; for greed; for pro-choice; for pro-life; for the right to die; for the right to live; for the environment, for the right to have an SUV, for the war against SUVs, for animal rights, for vegetarianism, for anti-vegeterianism, for, for, against, against...etc. etc. etc.

Why is this ideology being foisted upon us?

Can we envision where it will lead?

Has the LA Times no obligation to publish responsibly?

Write a letter to the times if you are so inclined. I can't say I believe it will help.

But I do recommend that everyone go and see another movie, one that might get no attention from the LA Times at all: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. You will get to watch a lot of the same material suicide bombers are raised on. And do recommend the movie to Rachel Abramowitz.

And here is an excerpt of the Times piece:

In untangling the roots of Middle Eastern terrorism, two ambitious fall releases find that the heroes and the villains aren't always easy to discern.

WHEN the towers came down on Sept. 11, Stephen Gaghan, the Oscar-winning writer of "Traffic," realized in a flash that "Hollywood has done a terrible job creating villains." It all used to be so simple, so black and white. There were the good guys and the bad guys — not people willing to blow themselves up in orderr to blow up their enemies.

This fall Gaghan and the Palestinian director Hany Abu-Assad will release films that represent ambitious attempts to unearth the root causes of terrorism and suicide bombers. Both happen to come from the Warner Bros. conglomerate — Gaghan's $50-million "Syriana," from big Warner's, and Abu-Assad's $2-million "Paradise Now," from Warner's new specialty division, Warner Independent. Both are thrillers in a sense — but without the genre's usual catharsis. In a throwback to the politically engaged films of the '70s, the point isn't to reassure moviegoers but to provoke them....

Abu-Assad's film is much like a Palestinian "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead": It focuses on two people on the periphery of history and watches them breathe. If the culminating event is horrific, the day-to-day buildup is almost surreal in its very mundaneness. When the two heroes make their martyrs' video — in the same spot in Nablus where real suicide bomber farewell videos are shot — the camera fails to work, so they have to redo it. Their guerrilla group handlers watch and noisily eat their lunch — packed by the unsuspecting mother of one of the would-be bombers.

Indeed, the guerrillas appear less ideologues than thugs preying on young men's despair. When one of the friends suggests they'll get to paradise afterward, the other smacks him on the head as if to knock that naiveté right out. One of the protagonists is motivated by family shame — he is the son of an Israeli collaborator killed by Palestinians. Yet their anguish seems palpable — born of some mixture of poverty, hopelessness, fatherlessness and disenfranchisement. Abu-Assad shows their journey from the poor streets of Nablus to the beautiful and prosperous high-rises of Tel Aviv, a shocking journey, no doubt, but for American viewers it is unfortunately no more shocking than a trip from South-Central to Santa Monica.

Abu-Assad is a pacifist who doesn't believe in the values of suicide bombing, but he does place the blame for Palestinian suffering squarely on the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and formerly Gaza. Still, he didn't intend to make a polemic. "If this is the case, I could make an article about it. I didn't need to make a film."

Crackdown on mannequins in Iran

Sharia update from Iran! "Alluring mannequins" are now verboten in Iran, and are being impounded. This is in the interests of public chastity, you see. After all, we can't have men falling for mannequins, can we? It might lead them to...join biker gangs!

You Can't Make This Stuff Up Alert: "City tackles titillating mannequins," from Reuters, with thanks to all who sent this in:

TEHRAN (Reuters) - Police in northeastern Iran are launching a new morality drive by confiscating alluring mannequins from boutiques and clothes stalls in the bazaar, authorities in the city of Bojnourd said on Monday.

A spokesman for the city's judiciary, who asked not be named, explained the drive would tackle problems of "public chastity". Sixty five mannequins have been impounded so far.

He explained the crack-down on tailors' dummies was part of a larger offensive against anti-social behaviour such as vandalism and biker gangs.

Muslims issue Internet death threats to Omar Sharif

Because he dared to portray a Christian. "Terrorism: Internet Terror Threats to Omar Sharif," from AKI, with thanks to Erick Stakelbeck:

Rome, 28 Oct. (AKI) - Death threats to the Egyptian-born actor Omar Sharif have appeared in Islamist forums on the Internet, after Sharif's appearance as a Christian, Saint Peter, in an Italian biblical epic for television. A threatening message from user 'bachirma1' on one of the forums used by jihadi groups linked to al-Qaeda, reads:"In my view Omar Sharif is an infidel - enter here". Inside it continues; "He is a crusader who offends Islam and Muslims and is applauded by the Italian people. I give you some advice, my brothers, you should kill him."

From the exchange of messages it would appear that the sender of the death threats may be in Italy. A flurry of insulting messages endorse the condemnation of the 73 year old actor who shot to international stardom in the classic Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and with the title role of Doctor Zhivago (1965).

Chesler: Truth on Trial

Phyllis Chesler at FrontPage highlights the cultural conflict that is a growing aspect of the global jihad, and to which few have given any attention:

Are we winning the war against terror or more precisely, against the death-cult ideology of extreme hate that employs terror as one of its weapons? America, Britain and Israel have all committed significant sums of money to fight back militarily and to ensure civilian safety. However, we must fight another very hot war, one which will ultimately decide whether Western Civilization lives or dies. This is a war we are not winning and some argue that it is a war we have not yet even begun to fight.

I am talking about The Culture War, the war that must be fought to oppose the campaign of lies and propaganda that Islamists and western Stalinists launched against the West, beginning with Israel, arguably anywhere from forty to seventy years ago.

The Culture War is a very hot war: no prisoners are taken, no mercy is shown. And there are now penalties for trying to tell the truth about the danger of jihad or about the barbaric and pathological nature of militant Islam today. Indeed, if you try to discuss the Islamic religious and gender apartheid and its dangerous proliferation into Europe and North America (i.e. there have been honor killings in Cincinnati, St. Louis, Chicago, Jersey City, Toronto, as well as all over Europe and in the Muslim world), this is what will happen to you:

If you tell these truths in the Arab and Muslim world, you’ll be beheaded, probably tortured, certainly jailed, exiled if you are lucky. Many Muslim and Christian dissidents have suffered precisely this fate. There are no more Jews there, the Islamist Caliphate has rendered the entire Middle East Judenrein long ago. Try to say this in Europe and you might be butchered, as Theo Von Gogh was, or simply imprisoned in purdah, veiled, or threatened, forced to go into hiding, or honor-murdered as so many Muslim girls and women are.

Try to tell the moral tragedy that the United Nations represents, or the even greater tragedy that the word “Palestine” has come to represent objectively, and therefore in a non-politically correct way, on European and on North American campuses, or on the increasingly left-dominated liberal media airwaves, and you may not be shot on the spot, but you will be slandered and called a “racist” and a “fascist.” I have been called both.

If you are a North American intellectual, you may not be imprisoned or be-headed but you will be heckled, mocked, and shunned. You might need security in order to speak. If you’re a feminist, you will no longer be taken seriously as an intellectual, nor will you be “heard.”

Expose the permanent Intifada against Western Civilization and against the Jews and you will be sued and driven into exile, as Oriana Fallaci has been, or sued and prevented from traveling to certain countries, as Rachel Ehrenfeld has been. You will be sued and silenced in all those places where you were once published, even lionized. Dare to say that the torturer and genocidal tyrant, Saddam Hussein, is on trial today only because of America and Iraq’s sacrifice and their bold vision of democracy and you will be called a reactionary, a liar, a fool, and the worse epithet of all: a conservative.

Both Western leftists and Islamists brandish many tools against America and Israel in this war. Their first weapon is the systematic misuse of language. Mainstream and liberal newspapers write about “insurgents,” not “terrorists,” whom they describe as “martyrs,” not “killers, and as “freedom fighters,” not as “well educated evil men.”

Anti-American and anti-Israel demonstrators, who are clearly and visibly filled with hate and rage, are described as “peace activists.” Anti-Semitism is legitimized, while the slightest criticism of Islam is banned because of the disallowance of “Islamophobia.” Telling the truth has become an offense which is unprotected by free speech doctrines, which instead protect the telling of lies.

I was once held captive in Kabul, Afghanistan. I experienced, first-hand, what life is like in a Muslim country, one that has never been colonized by the West. I learned that it was both foolish and dangerous to romanticize Third World countries. And, I learned first-hand, that evil and barbarism exist a priori, and are not caused by western imperialism or colonialism or by the “Zionist entity.” It’s where I also learned to reject the doctrine of multiculturalism, that teaches that all cultures are equal, formerly colonized cultures even more so. This leads to isolationism and non-interventionism and condemns millions of civilians to Islamist torture, terror and genocide.

Although, to their credit, a handful of feminist activists and journalists have sounded the alarm, once America invaded Afghanistan, these very activists, all Democratic Party operatives, swiftly opposed the military routing of the Taliban. And why? Because the expedition had not been undertaken, apparently, with women in mind. It’s as if they did not think that bin Laden’s terrorism kills women too.

I hold the Western academy, including the feminist academy, which has been utterly Palestinianized, responsible for failing to expose and condemn the realities of Islamic gender apartheid. I know feminist graduate students who are busy “de-constructing” the veil, polygamy and arranged marriage as possible expressions of feminist or female power—no different than the bikini. None have congratulated President Bush on his excellent choice of Condoleeza Rice as Secretary of State and none have given her the slightest credit for her pro-woman, pro-human rights and pro-Israel speeches.

The number of lies being told in the Western academy and among western activists are literally beyond belief. Here’s one: Mohammed was really great to women, especially to one Safiya bint Huyay whom he married—even though she was Jewish. Yes. But first he beheaded her father and her husband and exterminated her entire village. And then he forced poor Safiya to convert to Islam before he married her. This disinformation campaign leaves me speechless.

Our own intelligentsia—our professors—are so politically correct and so multi-culturally relativist, that they refuse to call “barbaric” the act of stoning a woman to death because she was raped or because she refused to marry her first cousin. Nor will they denounce subjecting women to genital mutilation and public gang-rape as “barbaric.” Nor did American media commentators who showed the Palestinian lynching of two Israeli reservists in Ramallah in 2000 describe the event, which they played over and over again, as “barbaric.”

The intelligentsia did not describe what was done to us on 9/11 as “barbaric” either. Indeed, I know American and European intellectuals who are convinced that America and Israel are the greatest barbarians of all, and that we deserved 9/11. According to Islamists and Western academics and journalists, Bin Laden is not an “Islamo-fascist." To them, President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Ariel Sharon are the “Nazi fascists.”

And then there is that vast industry of Palestinian, Arab League and United Nations funded and distributed doctored footage and fake film massacres, fake gun battles, the faked death of Palestinian children at Jewish and Israeli hands. Our Islamist opponents have turned out this propaganda nonstop around the world.

As propagandists, they are far more sophisticated than Goebbels, and far more patient. We cannot afford to underestimate their skill at telling Big Lies. Islamists understood that if they funded madrassas in the East and Middle Eastern Institutes in the West, and if they funded the total Palestinianization of the United Nations and of every international human rights groups that in thirty to fifty years, they would have brainwashed generations to see things their way.

Islam is sacred -- it cannot be insulted. Imagined slights are as important as real slights. Lies have as much weight as the truth. Whether American military forces did or did not flush a Koran down the toilet does not matter. What matters is that Muslims thought they did. No penance is good enough to atone for this crime.

Millions of people have been systematically brainwashed against America, against Israel, against Jews, against women and against the western concept of truth, objectivity, truth-telling, and independent thinking. All are under siege.

We have a serious fifth column in our midst, one that has made common cause with Islamists against us, one that has been well funded by Arab oil billionaires for more than forty years. Now, George Soros too, a fifth column General who, for a variety of reasons, has actually been leading the cultural war against the West. They are fools—but they are dangerous fools. Do they think they will be spared because they are so politically correct? Do they think that they would enjoy the same freedom of speech in Mecca or Tehran that they enjoy in the West?

What must we do in the face of this tyrannical threat? We must rescue language. It must bear some relationship to the truth and morality. Everything is not relative. It is not all Rashomon. We must not allow our media or academics to continue to insist that Islam is not the problem, but that even if it is, that we cannot say so, lest we be deemed racist. We must teach the history of jihad against infidels, and the history of how infidels (Jews, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, Zoroastrians) were treated under Islam. We must insist that criticism of America and Israel be balanced, not pathological, obsessive and cult-like as it is now. We must insist on civility in public discourse. We must model it for the coming generations.

We must fund seriously a collective effort to combat vulgar lies and vilification, the propaganda against us which has brainwashed countless generations.

We need a War Room effort to counter the Big Lies. We need international radio and television channels to educate people. We need to teach people about intellectual diversity and tolerance.

This country has birthed two significant waves of feminism. We must now take that feminist vision global. We need our foreign policy to contain serious provisions about women’s rights abroad. Otherwise, democracy cannot and will not evolve or flourish in Muslim countries.

The way I see it, everything is at stake. This is a time when we must all be heroes. We must all stand up to evil in our lifetime. We must acknowledge that Islamist terrorism is evil and has no justification. We must teach this to our children. We must support Muslim and Arab dissidents in their fight against Islamic tyranny and gender apartheid. We can do this. We must do this. Otherwise, we will die, and our history and our values and our entire way of life will die with us. If we fail, we will betray all that we believe in as a free people.

Selective Muslim Silence

Judith Apter Klinghoffer, senior associate scholar at the Political Science department at Rutgers University, and author of Vietnam, Jews and the Middle East, writes this at History News Network about the Denmark Muhammad cartoon controversy:

So, here we are: part of the Muslim community is in the thrall of a totalitarian ideology which turns young Muslims into human bombs. Photos of Muslim and non Muslim civilian body parts flying in the middle of markets, mosques, discos and hotels have become routine. Beheadings of Christian and Jewish men and women are no longer surprising. And what do the ever-silent and passive-defensive Muslim countries, Organization of Islamic Conference and the Arab League vociferously condemn? They are condemning the publication of cartoons featuring Muhammad in a Danish paper. The absurdity of this action is only matched by its hypocrisy.

Read it all.

France: Church-state debate revived by call for mosque funding

What's causing jihadist sentiments among French Muslims? Must be a shortage of mosques! Yeah, that's it! If we fund mosques, any idea that Sharia must someday be imposed in France will vanish from among French Muslims!

That seems to be the line of reasoning. But is there any evidence to back it up? Any support for it at all? Do they think that if French Muslims come to depend upon the French government for money, they will moderate to please it? Has it escaped their notice that the Saudis have a good deal of money themselves? Will they make it illegal for mosques to receive foreign money? That is not mentioned in this article. Will they attach requirements for teaching to the money, so that mosques will lose their funding if they teach that Sharia must someday reign in France? Will they fax sermons to French imams and not allow them to preach their own, a la the Turks? None of that is mentioned in this article. "Church-state debate revived by call for mosque funding," from AFP, with thanks to Sr. Soph:

PARIS, Oct 31 (AFP) - A call for a change to a century-old French law to allow the state to fund new mosques has sent sparks flying in a society deeply attached to the separation of religion and state.

Concerned that a shortage of mosques is allowing extremists to gain a foothold among Frances 5.5 million Muslims by funding places of worship, interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy earlier this month named a panel to look into the prickly question.

Due to report to the government in June next year, the committee is being asked, among other things, to suggest ways of reviewing the 1905 secularity law that bans the state from funding places of worship.

The initiative placed Sarkozy squarely at odds with both president Jacques Chirac and prime minister Dominique de Villepin, who sees the century-old law as one of the pillars of our republican system and rejects the idea of updating it.

True, more work is needed to recognise the rightful place of France's Muslims, de Villepin said, but as members of a strictly secular community....

Sarkozy has repeatedly argued that breaking the French taboo to provide public money for mosques and imams would be the best way of bringing the Muslim community into the mainstream, out of the garages and basements it is often forced to use as unofficial prayer rooms.

"To separate French Islam from foreign influences," Sarkozy said last month, "let us give it the means to be independent."

Islamic radicals are already thought to control 20 mosques in the country, according to France's domestic intelligence service, which also says militants are increasingly congregating in secret prayer-rooms, out of sight of the authorities....

In 2003, French Islam obtained its first ever officially-recognised representative body, the French Council for the Muslim Religion (CFCM), which has responsibility for issues ranging from the funding of mosques to the ritual slaughter of animals.

Now a recognised public institution, it is the government's main point of contact with the Muslim community.

And in June this year a government-backed 'Foundation for Islam' was also set up to oversee the financing of the religion in France, grouping private donations from France and abroad, held in a state-owned bank to ensure maximum transparency, to pay for building and renovating mosques as well as training imams.

Many in the political establishment are against taking the states role any further, including the CFCM president Dalil Boubakeur, rector of the Paris mosque, who immediately backed de Villepin in opposing any change to the secularity law.

But other voices within the CFCM took a less hostile view and the influential rector of the Lyon mosque, Kamel Kabtane, supports a review of the 1905 law.

Mukhtar Mai speaks in Chicago

This woman, ordered gang raped by her local village council, has been allowed by the Pakistan government to travel after all. "Rape survivor brings fight here," from the Chicago Sun-Times:

Three years ago, Mukhtar Mai was gang-raped on the order of a village council in her native Pakistan, sparking international outrage when she reported the crime. On Saturday, Mai stopped in Chicago to speak out against the feudal justice system that continues to victimize Pakistani women.

"I am fighting against oppression and cruelty where the rights of poor men and women are violated by landlords and feudals," Mukhtar said through an interpreter to a crowd of about 60 people at DePaul University. "You and I will get the victory."

Mukhtar was a 30-year-old Quran teacher in the Pakistani village of Meerwala when she was ordered gang-raped by a tribal council, or jirga, after her 12-year-old brother was seen walking with a girl from a higher-ranking tribe. Mukhtar's brother also was beaten and sodomized for the offense...

On Nov. 2, Mukhtar will be the recipient of one of 12 "Woman of the Year" awards given by Glamour magazine for work on behalf of women's rights.

Before she arrives in New York for the award ceremony, Mukhtar is on a cross-country speaking tour to help raise money for her "I can survive" fund, which will help develop a resource center for victims of violence in Pakistan...

Mukhtar, a soft-spoken woman who could not read or write when she was attacked, stressed that tribal councils that sanction rape and murder do not act in accordance with Islam.

"Where does it say in Islam that you should violate women? Our Islam does not allow this, absolutely not," Mukhtar said, through her host and translator, Dr. Amna Buttar...

A Qur'an teacher who is unable to read or write, no doubt because she is female, speaks authoritatively what is in the Qur'an, informing us that the circumstances in which she finds herself have nothing to do with Islamic law. Of course, if Islam were just applied more perfectly, social harmony would be the natural result...(yes, that's sarcasm).

Fitzgerald: The cultural imperialism of the Arabs

Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald discusses how Arab-ness is in many ways inextricable from Islam -- a phenomenon that has had effects even among dhimmi populations.

Within Islam, a supposedly universalist religion where all Muslims in the ummah are equal, there is a special place for the Arabs. But how could it be otherwise? Islam itself, a mishmash of pagan Arab lore, Judaism and Christianity, has its origins in the attempt to take what was available and construct out of it something, a belief-system, that would both promote, and justify, Arab attacks on, and Arab conquest of, far more advanced, settled, and wealthy populations of Christians, Jews, and pagans -- and with the attack on Sassanid Persia, Zoroastrians.

Within Islam, the supremacist ideology is expressed first, and perhaps most importantly, in linguistic and cultural imperialism. The Qur'an is written in Arabic, and was delivered to, given to, revealed to, the Arabs, that best of people. That best of men, Muhammad, was an Arab, and so were the Companions. The Qur'an itself should ideally not be read in any language other than Arabic (the Arabic in which it was written, not in any simplified or updated version). Qur'anic recitation is in Arabic. The students in Pakistan or Indonesia or elsewhere who pass their young lives memorizing Qur'anic passages are essentially memorizing Arabic, a language that they do not know at all, and understand most imperfectly. Yet it is 7th century Arabs, real or imaginary, who must serve as a guide to existence. Was Muhammad against sculptures? Against music? Against painting of living creatures? Very well then. For all time, and in all places, good Muslims will emulate Muhammad. For he is central to Islam, far more significant than Jesus is in Christianity. Yes, it is true that "Allah knows best" but so to does Muhammad – see Qur’an 33:21. They both know best.

Think of all the Pakistanis, clearly the descendants of persecuted or terrified Hindus, who have taken Arab names, or appropriated the honorific Sayeed to indicate their connection to the Prophet. Think of how the Berbers and other non-Arab Muslims have had to struggle to save their own language. The Iranians supposedly managed to prevent linguistic arabization through the superior quality of their own poets -- for after all, "Islamic literature" is mostly a product not of Arabs but of Persians. High Islamic civilization was very much a product both of non-Muslims and Muslims, and in the latter category, the Arabs played a much smaller role than the Persians.

The riots in Tizi-Ouzo a few years ago -- unreported in the Western world except in France -- reflect the unhappiness of the Berbers with this cultural and linguistic imperialism. So does the greater participation of Berbers in such organizations as "Maghrembins laiques" in France. The Kurds, the black Africans with their marabouts and syncretism, and even those described as Malaysian "intellectuals" and Indonesian "intellectuals," have realized that the Arab supremacist view, which encourages all Muslims to ignore their own pre-Islamic or non-Islamic history and heritage, leaves a lot to be desired. This is similar to the phenomenon in Brazil, where what prevails is not always orthodox Christianity, but some blend with pagan African beliefs and traditions that gives rise to Candomble.

And then there are so many examples of Arabs riding roughshod, and worse, over non-Arab Muslims. Think of the treatment of the Berbers, especially but not only in Algeria. Or of the black African Muslims in Darfur, or in Chad, or elsewhere where Arabs and blacks, even if all of them are Muslims, collide. There is also a religious dimension. Though there are non-Arab Sunnis (Turks, Kurds) and Arab Shi'a (see southern Lebanon, Yemen, the Hasa province of Saudi Arabia, the Hazaras in Afghanistan, Bahrain, even Kuwait, especially among Fouad Ajami's worldly Behbehanish friends and hosts), and both Sunni and Shi'a in Pakistan, Sunni Islam is identified with the Arabs, Shi'a Islam with Iran. No getting around this.

In Saudi Arabia there is apartheid: the signs "Muslim" and "Non-Muslim" are everywhere, both physically and in the minds of men. But "Muslims" are further divided into Arab (first class) and non-Arab (second class). This has not escaped the attention of the many Muslim non-Arabs who live in Saudi Arabia -- or at least not the attention of all of them.

As Infidels seek out ways to divide and weaken Islam, surely the exploitation of this linguistic, cultural, and political imperialism of the Arabs should be high on the list. Remember how the "Arabs" were hated even by some of their "Afghan" allies whom they treated with such cannon-fodder contempt --at least according to all the reports that have come out of Afghanistan. The resentment of non-Arabs, of Kurds, Berbers, blacks, Persians, Malays and so on, is perfectly understandable. It is not a Western invention. It has not in any way been fanned by the West. It need not be. It need only be pointed out. And even then, the Arabs themselves help this cause by continuing to show their contempt and indifference for non-Arabs, though they wish those non-Arabs to adopt whatever causes they, the Arabs, deem important.

Part of weakening Islam is to show many Muslims that Islam was simply an Arab invention and export, a poisoned chalice that has lain low higher and superior civilizations. This is likely to resonate especially in Iran among those who have had their fill of the Islamic Republic of Iran -- that is, every thinking and morally aware person in Iran.

The treatment by the Arabs of non-Arabs has been at least high-handed, and as the glinting daggers of Arab aggression tell us, often of a more horrid hent.

Yet at the same time, the pride in Uruba -- Arabness, Arabdom -- that affects so many Arabs, has also convinced many non-Arab people who speak Arabic that they too are or must be or should be "Arabs." The scholar Franck Salameh has written a brilliant analysis of linguistic imperialism, of how the Arabic-user (even the Maronites) comes to believe that he therefore must be an "Arab" -- even if his ancestors clearly were living in, say, the Lebanon long before the Arabs arrived on the scene. It is quite a trick.

Yet almost all of those who left Lebanon and Syria between 1880 and even as late as about 1930, even if their passports identified them in some cases as "Turks" (they were still in the Ottoman Empire) knew that they were something else, and that the best way to describe themselves was as "Lebanese" or as "Christians." Only later did some of them begin to think that they were “Arabs.” Muslims in the United States have tried to create a false sense of an identity of interest, using that meretricious term "Arab-American." This is meant to enroll in the Muslim Arab campaign for acceptance, the descendants of people who not only were not part of the Muslim Arab world, but were the main victims of that very world – people who left the Middle East precisely because of their growing insecurity among the Muslims. From 1860 on there were massacres of Maronites and Assyrians and other Middle-eastern Christians in present-day Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq.

The Christian Arabs, or those who have considered themselves Arabs, needed to find a place in the sun. They knew they had to appeal to something, anything, other than Islam straight up. What was Ba'athism, which the Christian from Damacus, Michel Aflaq (he made a deathbed conversion to Islam) but an attempt to find a way for the Christians of the area to be enrolled in something that, in its philosophy, would be aggressive, totalitarian, but more pan-Arab than pan-Islamic? So it was that Ba’athism was born and found its greatest appeal in the two countries where, for various and complex reasons, the ruling elites (Alawite in one case, Sunni the other) found it useful to have an alternative to pure Islam. For the Alawites were not orthodox Muslims, and had Islam been the only game in town, in Iraq the sectarian majority was Shi'a, not Sunni.

Note that the phenomenon of "islamochristians" is particularly pronounced among the "Palestinian" Arabs. Despite the obvious and steady pressure on Christians and Christianity wherever the "Palestinians" have extended their sway, Naim Ateek and Hanan Ashrawi are both perfect examples of the cunning propagandistic use to which islamochristians can be put. Why, Naim Ateek is the go-to guy for the Christian churches' Middle-Eastern policy, judging by all the divestment measures he has skillfully, sabeellly, managed to push. And we all know of the requited affection between the late Peter Jennings and Hanan Ashrawi, whom he had as a special guest on September 13, 2001, to discuss you-know-what.

Compare, among those who live in or came from predominantly Muslim lands and who are Christians, the non-Arab and the Arab Christians. It is fascinating to see the difference. Christian Pakistanis have nothing to do with Islam. They do not defend it in the slightest. Look at Christian Iranians. They do not defend Islam. They have nothing to do with it. Look at Christian blacks in Nigeria or the Sudan. They have nothing to do with Islam. Look at Christians in Indonesia. They feel no need to defend Islam.

But many (although by no means all) Christian Arabs do -- and the reason is that goddam ethnic pride in being an Arab -- or thinking one is an Arab because everyone tells you that if you speak Arabic you must be (not true, of course). And Islam is the great gift of "the Arabs," and Islam and the Arabs go way back, and well -- it's hard for some, perhaps many, Arab Christians not to end up as Defenders not so much of the Faith (that Faith being Islam) but of the political attitudes and atmospherics and defensiveness that all arise so naturally from Islam.

Second night of rioting in Paris

Here is fruit of the immigration-without-assimilation policy the French have pursued so thoughtlessly for decades -- as detailed in Bat Ye'or's Eurabia. "A police union spokesman says a Paris suburb is seeing 'civil war.'" From CNN, with thanks to Fjordman:

PARIS, France (Reuters) -- Hundreds of French youths fought with police and set cars ablaze in a suburb of Paris early Saturday in a second night of rioting which media said was triggered when two teenagers died fleeing police.

The two teenagers were killed and a third seriously injured on Thursday night when they were electrocuted in an electricity sub station as they fled from police investigating a break-in, media reported.

Firefighters intervened around 40 times on Friday night in the northeastern suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois where many of the 28,000 residents are immigrants, mainly from Africa, police and fire officers said.

Unidentified youths fired a shot at police but no one was hurt, police said.

A police trade union called for help from the army to support police officers.

"There's a civil war underway in Clichy-Sous-Bois at the moment," Michel Thooris, an official of police trade union Action Police CFTC, said .

"We can no longer withstand this situation on our own. My colleagues neither have the equipment nor the practical or theoretical training for street fighting," he said.

Fjordman has much more.

Prince Charles to plead Islam's case during White House visit

When not busy disgracing his nation and his family through his various peccadilloes, the future king of England, Prince Charles, has regularly assumed the position of lead European missionary in the service of the Islamic faith. As he will tell President Bush this week, it is not Islam's fault that thousands of non-Muslims have been murdered in recent years, but rather the racism of the West. From the Telegraph:

The Prince of Wales will try to persuade George W Bush and Americans of the merits of Islam this week because he thinks the United States has been too intolerant of the religion since September 11.

The Prince, who leaves on Tuesday for an eight-day tour of the US, has voiced private concerns over America's "confrontational" approach to Muslim countries and its failure to appreciate Islam's strengths.

The Prince raised his concerns when he met senior Muslims in London in November 2001. The gathering took place just two months after the attacks on New York and Washington. "I find the language and rhetoric coming from America too confrontational," the Prince said, according to one leader at the meeting.

It is understood that Prince Charles did not - and does not - believe that the actions of 19 hijackers should tarnish the reputation of hundreds of millions of law-abiding Muslims around the world.

Khalid Mahmood, the Labour MP for Birmingham Perry Bar, was also at the meeting at St James's Palace. "His criticism of America was a general one of the Americans not having the appreciation we have for Islam and its culture," he said.

The prince's actions should not strike anyone as surprising, as Charles is hardly a newcomer to the field of Islamic apologetics:

Prince Charles, who is about to embark on his first official foreign tour since his marriage to the Duchess of Cornwall, wants Americans - including Mr Bush - to share his fondness for Islam. He has agreed to attend a seminar on religions at Georgetown University, Washington, on Thursday: the only event where he will not be accompanied by the Duchess.

"The seminar will look at how faith groups can alleviate social problems in their community," a royal aide said.

The Prince and Duchess will attend a lunch and dinner with President Bush and his wife, Laura, at the White House on Wednesday.

Prince Charles has done more than any other member of the Royal Family in history to understand Islam. He said in 1994 that when he became Supreme Governor of the Church of England, he would rather be "defender of faiths" than "defender of the faith".

A year earlier Prince Charles made a speech, acclaimed throughout the Arab world, on relations between Islam and the West. He urged the West to overcome its "unthinkable prejudices" about Islam and its customs and laws.

He spoke warmly of the West's debt to the culture of Islam and distanced moderate Muslims from misguided militants. "Extremism is no more the monopoly of Islam than it is the monopoly of other religions, including Christianity," he said.

Richard the Lionheart is rolling in his grave.

Trifkovic: The Racial and Religious Hatred Bill: A Milestone on Britain’s Road to Dhimmitude

Serge Trifkovic explains just why the UK's new Racial and Religious Hatred Bill is so wrong, and dangerous, in this superb piece in Chronicles (thanks to Andy and Steve):

The House of Lords is clashing with Tony Blair’s Labour government over its proposed Racial and Religious Hatred Bill. This is an Orwellian piece of legislation. Its real purpose of preventing any meaningful discussion of Islam. If passed it would enable authorities to charge people with “inciting religious hatred” even if they speak or write the truth about the Kuran, the hadith, the historical practice of jihad, or the long-term aspirations of the Muslim diaspora in the West.

The proposed measure has been denounced by human rights groups and prominent individuals as a new blasphemy law in a dangerous new guise. Stephen Fry, the actor, said the plans were unworkable: “Religion, surely, if it is worth anything, doesn’t need protection against anything I can say.” Rowan Atkinson, one of Britain’s best known comedians, has warned that the prime motivating energy for the Bill did not come from communities seeking protection from bullying,

but from individuals with a more aggressive, fundamentalist agenda, those who have sought, from the very day of the publication in 1989 of Salman Rushdie’s book The Satanic Verses, to immunise religions against criticism and ridicule—or at least to promote legislation that is so sinister and intimidating, it can provide that immunity without even the need to prosecute anyone. In other words, to impose self-censorship.

Somewhat unsurprisingly, the intended criminalization of “threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour” was hailed by Iqbal Sacranie, secretary-general of the Muslim Council of Britain, as a “long overdue” measure. Sher Khan, chairman of the group’s public affairs committee, criticized opponents of the bill, and particularly Mr. Atkinson, for having created “a media frenzy by claiming that the proposed law will ban criticism of religious beliefs; it certainly will not.”...

If Racial and Religious Hatred Bill is passed, we will be a step closer to the fulfilment of T.S. Eliot’s warning that the West would end, “not with a bang but a whimper.” In 1899, a 26 year old Winston Churchill expressed hope

that if evil days should come upon our own country, and the last army which a collapsing Empire could interpose between London and the invader were dissolving in rout and ruin, that there would be some—even in these modern days—who would not care to accustom themselves to a new order of things and tamely survive the disaster.

Even Churchill’s prescience could not envisage the possibility that “the invader” would have his Quislings and abettors at No. 10, at the Old Bailey, and at London’s County Hall.

Read it all.

Islam feminists urge gender jihad

Someone recently asked me why I cover women's issues at Dhimmi Watch. The simple answer is that under Sharia, women face discrimination and second-class status, as do dhimmis. This conference aims to undo that. While the stated purpose of holding it in Spain was to reach Muslim women in Europe, I think it is likely that these women are aware of what might have happened to them if they had tried to hold it in Riyadh or Lahore.

From the BBC, with thanks to Leveller:

Women from the Islamic world are attending the three-day conference Organisers of the first international congress on Islamic feminism are calling for a "gender jihad".

Organiser Abdennur Prado Pavon says the struggle for gender equality in Islamic countries involves refuting chauvinist interpretations of Muslim teachings.

The congress is being held in Spain, organisers say, because they want their message to reach the growing number of Muslim women in Europe.

Around 300 delegates are looking at women's rights in the Islamic world.

Mr Prado, of the Catalan Islamic board, believes a common misconception in the West is that women's liberation is not possible in Muslim societies.

Activists representing the Islamic feminist movement are in Barcelona to counter that view and discuss ways of achieving female equality in an Islamic context.

Collaboration

Among the delegates is the Pakistani feminist Riffat Hassan, regarded as one of the pioneers of Islamic feminist theology.

Also here are representatives from the international association, Islamic Feminism.

Islamic Feminism argues that the inferior legal and social status of women in Muslim countries is a result of misogynistic distortions of the teachings in the Koran.

Well, we have been here before. The Qur'an, after all:

1. Likens a woman to a field (tilth), to be used by a man as he wills: "Your women are a tilth for you (to cultivate) so go to your tilth as ye will" (2:223);
2. Declares that a woman's testimony is worth half that of a man: "Get two witnesses, out of your own men, and if there are not two men, then a man and two women, such as ye choose, for witnesses, so that if one of them errs, the other can remind her" (2:282);
3. Allows men to marry up to four wives, and have sex with slave girls also: "If ye fear that ye shall not be able to deal justly with the orphans, marry women of your choice, two or three or four; but if ye fear that ye shall not be able to deal justly (with them), then only one, or (a captive) that your right hands possess, that will be more suitable, to prevent you from doing injustice" (4:3);
4. Rules that a son's inheritance should be twice the size of that of a daughter: "Allah (thus) directs you as regards your children's (inheritance): to the male, a portion equal to that of two females" (4:11);
5. Tells husbands to beat their disobedient wives: "Men are in charge of women, because Allah hath made the one of them to excel the other, and because they spend of their property (for the support of women). So good women are the obedient, guarding in secret that which Allah hath guarded. As for those from whom ye fear rebellion, admonish them and banish them to beds apart, and scourge them" (4:34).

Are these verses capable of a non-misogynistic interpretation?

Hirsi Ali: Minister Ignores Islam Is The Problem

Ayaan Hirsi Ali once again speaks truth to power. From the NIS News Bulletin, with thanks to Jihad Watch News Editor Eric Schwappach:

THE HAGUE, 29/10/05 - Measures to prevent terrorism will not succeed if these do not go hand in hand with the awareness that Islam is the core of the problem, according to conservative (VVD) MP Ayaan Hirsi Ali. She lashed out at Justice Minister Donner in an interview with public broadcaster NOS on Friday.

Hirsi Ali says Donner does not want to link religion to the murder of her friend Theo van Gogh for strategic reasons. "I consider this (position) fundamentally wrong", said the MP. Politicians must not be afraid to acknowledge that the core of the problem of terrorism "is puritan Islam", in her view. "If politicians run away from that, citizens will always keep the feeling: 'do they actually understand' (the problem)?"

Indeed. The killer attached a note to Van Gogh's body containing Qur'an verses. He said in court that he killed Van Gogh for his religion. The sooner European -- and American -- authorities stop ignoring that and start taking realistic steps to deal with the fact that there are many more Bouyeris out there, the safer we will all be.

Harper College pulls photo exhibit upon Muslim protest

It was supposed to highlight human rights abuses. Instead it became a freedom of speech case. "Harper pulls photo exhibit upon Muslim protest," from the Daily Herald, with thanks to SAC:

An art exhibit that included photographs of nude Muslim women wearing only a head covering was taken down Thursday afternoon just hours after opening for public viewing at Harper College in Palatine.

Muslim students at the college protested to officials about the pieces on display in Building C.

Several students say the pieces — some showing young Muslim men with machine guns — were downright offensive.

“I think they should rip this down,” student Matt George said.

Another student, Hussein Ali, says a number of Muslim students at Harper now are thinking about leaving.

“The Muslim students are thinking about boycotting Harper because of this,” said Ali, 23, of Schaumburg.

Ahmad Basalat, 21, of Bartlett said the exhibit expressed hatred toward Muslims....

The school invited Chicago photographer Amir Normandi to exhibit his works depicting Muslim women in Iran defying the wearing of the jilbab.

Johnson said he thought the exhibit would be an interesting topic because it deals with human rights.

Salma Habed, 20, of Hoffman Estates said some of the pieces continued with the stereotype that Muslim women are oppressed.

“We go to school. We have careers. It’s not like we’re oppressed like some people feel for some reason,” Habed said....

Fitzgerald: And To Think I Could See It On Mulberry Street

Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald demonstrates some admirable foresightedness as he begins planning now for the relocation of Europe's treasures:

When Eurabia is a fully-realized entity, what will become of European art? It's never too early to start planning.

Memo to Philippe de Montebello: begin raising money now for that special "Louvre" wing of the Metropolitan that you are going to have to build in 10-20 years. It will require at least that time for all the planning. Actually not a wing -- I'm afraid you are going to have to have a space as big, or even bigger than the Louvre, because everything is going to have to be flown out if it is not to offend Muslim sensibilities, and you know what Muslims do to statutes and paintings of living things, don't you? And for the smaller museums, the Musee Guimet, the Musee Nissim Camondo, and all the rest -- well, why not just reproduce them, as is, and place them in nice cities and towns around the country?

First we (and England) got Panofsky, and Friedmann, and Jakob Rosenberg, and Rudolph Wittkower, and E. H. Gombrich, and Ernst Kitzinger, and Gisela Richter and George Hanfmann and Rudolf Arnheim and so many others, and all of the people they helped to train, and the standards they helped to raise and, for a while, maintain -- and now the art will soon be following.

Are we Americans lucky, or what?

Let's take this idea for a walk, shall we?

The New Rijksmuseum might best be placed where there once stood Nieuw Amsterdam. Close to New York City, but not in it. Mamaroneck, Oyster Bay, Scarsdale so that first you can take in the Hals, Rembrandts, Ruisdaels, and the odd Vermeer, and then stop at well-advertised Zachy's just before getting on the train to go back to the city.

The New Prado, possibly as a tribute to the general Hispanidad, would best be placed either in Miami, or possibly in Texas, or New Mexico. The wild West will come to mean a bit more than sagebrush and the Durango Kid. A little hint of Felipe Segundo right outside Albuquerque, or San Diego, would be most appropriate.

The New National Gallery? Virginia, definitely Virginia. But where? Southside Virginia, Brookneal, and a hint of David K. E. Bruce and the English-Speaking Union? Or better, and more accessible to Washington, would be the riding country, the land of Three-Day Eventing, and admirers of Charles Chenevix French. Yes, possibly Upperville would do for the New National Gallery. And docents, winsome female docents, all of them, please, definitely FFV (First Families of Virginia). Or, if you insist, a handful of interns as well from the Main Line, and the farther shores of Long Island (Jamestown will do).

The New Uffizi? Here we have a problem. I'll leave this one up to you, dear reader. Where do you want to place all those sculptures, and paintings (say, of Guido da Montefeltro, or the Venus on a Half-Shell)which according to Sheik Al-Qaradawi's handy guide to what is haram and what halal, cannot be permitted to exist unless they have been vandalized and defaced, so that they no longer can command respect -- which respect would violate the laws of Allah.

Maybe we can cut a deal here, hmm? After all, Italy does contain 2/3 of the Western world's art treasures. Without Italy, Western civilization is unthinkable (that can't be said for Germany, I'm afraid, or for France). So let's throw the rest of Eurabia completely to the wolves, but Italy must be spared and kept free from Islam. And we Americans will guarantee its security (as, for other reasons, we will guarantee that other essential component in the spiritual heritage of the Western world, Israel).

But if the Muslims prove implacable, then we will have to bring over the contents of the Uffizi, and whatever statues of Michelangelo, Donatello, and others are all over the place, in the Piazza della Signoria, in Rome, everywhere -- lock, stock, and barrel, and offer them a refuge here. Possibly all those Americans now putting their tax-deductible dollars to work in the "Save Venice" Campaign, forgetting that the real sea that may swamp all of Italy, not just one city, consists of adherents of a grim ideology that commands the destruction of art works (and the recent destruction of Joseph's Tomb and of the Bamiyan Buddhas were simply the most recent examples of 1400 years of such destruction of Christian, Jewish, Hindu, and Buddhist artifacts and monuments).

Hanover Street and the North End in Boston being what they now are, with Big-Dig and gentrification changes in the works, one would have to opt for Little Italy and Mulberry Street. Yes, Gennaro, there is a Santa Claus -- and everyone can now visit the Uffizi Without Leaving Home.

And someday someone will write a book about all the art treasures of Italy, kept from harm, as in some fabulous fable, by being housed in the warm embrace of Little Italy, and Big America, the country with a heart. It will be a simple book, with pictures of some of the sculptures and paintings, carefully labelled (Mich-el-ang-e-lo), designed to introduce young children to the wonders of the fine arts. And that future book will be called:

"And To Think that I Saw It On Mulberry Street."

Oops. I think that title's been taken.

As Joe E. Brown once said, nobody's perfect.

Hebron: Jewish holy books desecrated

Pictures may be found here. From Hebron News:

Hebron Arabs, celebrating the impending conclusion of the month of Ramadan, today desecrated dozens of Jewish holy books, at Ma'arat HaMachpela, the Tomb of the Patriarchs and Matriarchs. Hebron residents discovered the remains of the books, torn to pieces, in the garden behind the "Gutnick Center," which is in front of Ma'arat HaMachpela. Ripped-up books were discovered on the ground, spread out throughout the garden, and in a garbage pail....

A Hebron spokesman issued the following statement: It seems that military and political leaders are more concerned with "Arab sensitivity" as opposed to desecration of Jewish holy books. One can only imagine the response had Arabs discovered 'desecrated Korans' in the vicinity of Ma'arat HaMachpela. It should be remembered that an Israeli woman, Tatiana Soskin, was jailed for two years for 'desecrating' a Koran. It is unheard of that such a desecration should be left unpunished. We demand that Ma'arat HaMachpela be closed to Muslim worship until the culprits responsible for this crime are apprehended, tried and punished.

UK: Mosques targeted for closure

The imam is wrong when he asserts that "radicalisation and extremism does not take place in mosques." We have seen again and again that it does. From the MuslimNews, with thanks to Kemaste:

Religious leaders have expressed alarm at the Government’s new controversial proposals to give the police powers to close places of worship, which fail to comply with an order to prevent them from being used to foment extremism.

Home Secretary, Charles Clarke, has been accused of failing to listen to the advice of Muslim task forces set up in the wake of the July bombings in London in a whole raft of anti-terrorism legislation.
Imam Ibrahim Mogra, Deputy Convenor of the working group on Imams and Mosques said that he was surprised by Clarke proceeding to issue a consultation paper on ‘Preventing Extremism Together – Places of Worship’ on October 5 after he rejected suggestions that mosques would be targeted when welcoming the task forces’ recommendations last month.

“Charles Clarke told us on September 22 that the Government was not intending to close down any mosques but that he wanted cooperation and assistance from the Muslim community,” Mogra told The Muslim News. “I told the Home Secretary that mosques are doing good work and we need to celebrate good practice,”he said.

The Leicester-based Imam, who chairs the Muslim Council of Britain’s Mosques and Community Affairs Committee, warned that the Government’s focus was misdirected. “Radicalisation and extremism does not take place in mosques. It takes place elsewhere. So the shift has to be to other areas where young people are vulnerable,” he said.

Anti-Islamist blog shut down in Austria

I received this email this morning:

Hi,

You might remember me I run one of the very rare german language
anti-islamist blogs in Austria under http://iblis.twoday.net.

Well, I did so until this morning.

In Austria there is no such thing like the first amendment - so my blog was shut down by my internet provider in order to keep up with their perverted idea of "political correctnes".

I had some 45.000 visitors in the first 120 days - I guess this was by
far too much truth for certain people in the p.-c.-establishement...

Maybe you'd like to spread the message - maybe even in your newsletter
and blog... maybe you'd like to ask my provider some questions:
[address removed]

Thanks anyway & best wishes!
iblis
mail2iblis@hotmail.com

If you write to his provider, remember: be polite and respectful. Any insults of any kind will only reinforce his prejudices. Ask him why the blog was shut down. Perhaps offer him information about jihadist activity in Europe, to underscore the urgency of getting this message out.

UPDATE: I just received an email from Iblis' provider asking that his address be removed from here, and I have complied. He says he is talking to Iblis now.

Uzbekistan: Converts to Christianity Face Crushing Opposition

Still more evidence that the freedom of conscience is still severely restricted in the Islamic world, even in countries deemed "moderate." "House Church Faces Crushing Opposition: Village strongman mounts vicious attack against local Christians," from Compass Direct, with thanks to the Constantinopolitan Irredentist:

Christians in a remote village of Uzbekistan are being beaten, publicly humiliated and hounded out of their homes and jobs for converting to Christianity.

Kaldibek Primbetov, leader of the beleaguered group of Protestants in Janbashkala village, near Turtkul in southwestern Uzbekistan, said one man is orchestrating this harsh opposition against their small congregation.

“There is no place here for Christians,” Primbetov was warned two years ago, when the village’s most wealthy and influential man mounted a vicious campaign against fewer than 100 Protestant believers.

“Our whole population here is Muslim,” village strongman Tokhtabay Sadikov told the families who had converted to Christianity. “So you’d better go to Kazakhstan or Russia, if you want to be Christians.”

As the most powerful man in the village, Sadikov since early 2004 has pressured local police and civic officials, the prosecutor’s office, the secret police and Muslim clerics to impose punishing measures against every villager known to have “abandoned the Muslim faith of their parents” to become Christian.

Protestant believers in the predominantly Kazakh village of 12,000 are now refused access to drinking water for their homes, with men, women and even children subjected to severe beatings for their faith, Primbetov told Compass. Others have lost their jobs or businesses, had their homes attacked or confiscated and faced astronomical fines for participating in house church meetings.

Fitzgerald: What we have lost, and stand to lose

Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald lists some of the things we have lost already because of this business of Islamic terror, and what we stand to lose in the future in the West if our supine dhimmitude in the face of an increasingly obvious and large-scale cultural challenge continues:

What have we lost because of Islam? A short list:

Security: At every airport, subway station, bus station, at every sports event, at every public lecture, in every office building, at every museum, at every large gathering and many small gatherings all over this country (particularly those that are specifically Christian or Jewish or Hindu, and certainly all those that are devoted to discussing the menace of Islam), there are now security guards, security checks, long waits that use up, at airports alone, billions of man-hours that were never used up in such fashion before. Why? All is because of the threat not of "terrorism" but rather of Muslim terrorism. Measures may also soon be taken to monitor emails, telephone calls and so on, all of which may affect all of us, and none of which would have been necessary in the absence of Muslim terrorist threats which come out of Islam.

Freedom to travel over much of the world: How many of us now realize that it will be difficult or dangerous from now on out to visit all of the sites of classical antiquity that can be found in North Africa, or the Middle East, or in Turkey, because these lands are in the grip of increasingly restive and aggressive Muslims, not all of whom are content merely to take the dollars of Western tourists? Think of how many attacks there have been, prompted in the minds of the perpetrators by the tenets of Islam, the doctrines of Islam, the attitudes of Islam, against Swiss tourists at Luxor (68 stabbed to death, and many decapitated), or tourists elsewhere in Egypt, or at Djerba in Tunisia, or at Marrakech in Morocco. One may well be indifferent to the little created under Islam, but what is now off-limits is the much created before Islam, or despite Islam.

This is not just a matter of tourism, but of cultural patrimony that is not of Islam, but is located in lands ruled by Muslims and hence by Islam. Only the desire for tourist dollars (and in Egypt some vestigial pride, least strong in the most Muslim, in those pyramids and mastabahs)have kept all the relics of the pre-Islamic past in Muslim countries from falling into disrepair and worse, no matter how cherished they are in the mind of the West. And this indifference, or even hostility, toward their own pre-Islamic past that all those falling under Islam are taught to feel, whether they were forced to convert either by outright threat, or gradually brought to Islam by the slow anguish of the dhimmi status, at times endurable and at other times unendurable (and in those times, many did convert to Islam, only in order to end the unendurableness of being a non-Muslim in a Muslim-ruled world, has brought about an attendant impoverishment of their own societies and themselves.

Freedom to think: How many of those born into Islam over the last 1200 years might have, but for Islam, made some kind of mark on the world, something in art, science, moral philosophy? Something, anything. Instead, what we have is pitiful, compared not only to the Western world, but to the civilizations of the East, and of pre-Columbian America. All of North Africa, all of the Middle East and many other places, subdued to Islam, their peoples deprived of many means of artistic expression, and their ability to engage in free and skeptical inquiry permanently dampened.

Freedom of conscience: the right, which took some time to develop in the West, but is permanently forbidden in Islam, to believe or not believe whatever you wish. Apostasy may not always and everywhere be punished by death, but it is certainly punished by death in some places, and the penalty is threatened everywhere. It is often carried out by vigilantes, as in the case of Farag Foda, the Egyptian writer. Think of what happened to Ali Dashti in the Islamic Republic of Iran, or to Taha Hussein in the Sudan, or to that nice Mr. Qambar (Robert Hussein) in Kuwait about six or seven years back (he was not killed, but it was a close thing). And even in the United States, those who wish to leave Islam are often very quiet about it, afraid of social ostracism (from others who have remained Muslim) and worse.

The extraordinary Total Regulation of Life, from what you eat and what you wear to exactly how you wash, makes people into zombies, following rules that often make no sense, that are ludicrous, but must be followed. Shall I give some of the embarrassing details, about the odd number of stones, and so on, or would you prefer that I spared all of us that sort of thing? Just go to any Muslim website where questions are asked as to whether I can do this or can't do that. Why follow these rules? Oh, because Allah Knows Best. Q.E.D. That is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

Then there is the equally extraordinary belief that the Qur'an contains everything, all of science, all of knowledge, absolutely everything, if only we have the wit or understanding to detect it. If there is a surer way to stunt the mental growth of hundreds of millions, I can't imagine what it might be.

Those of us who are not Muslims should thank god we were not -- for we might well have been -- born into Islam. It is no great achievement to have avoided Islam by not being born a Muslim. It is a great achievement, a moral and intellectual achievement, apparently, given how fearsome the consequences, to be born into Islam and then to reject it.

It is a negative achievement, an astounding feat of mental self-immolation, to be born a non-Muslim and then to actually wish to become a Muslim. There are those on their Spiritual Search who simply ran out of places to look, or decided to stop at the next inn or caravanserai, the one with Arabic script and the hubble-bubble pipe, and the calligraphy on the green-colored walls.

But is a hubble-bubble pipe and calligraphy worth those mind-forged manacles in exchange?

Denmark: Six charged for honour slaying

Welcome to the New Europe. From The Copenhagen Post, with thanks to Filtrat:

Police have arrested six members of a Pakistani family for hunting down and killing a 19-year-old girl, who had married against the family's wishes.

Daily newspaper Jyllands-Posten reported that with two further arrests in the case, five men and one woman were now in remand for the suspected honour killing of Ghazala Abbas, who was shot to death in front of the central station in the western Zealand town of Slagelse on 23 September.

The day before, Abbas had married a 27-year-old Afghan-born man....

Police said the investigation was hampered by the implicated persons' reluctance to talk, but that the last four arrests had led to a breakthrough in the investigation.

Five of the people arrested are Ghazala's close relatives, including her father and her older brother, who was the one that shot her to death and severely injured her husband in front of a large group of witnesses in broad daylight in Slagelse.

The couple was married the day before they were attacked, supposedly without the bride's family's consent.

Daily newspaper BT reported that a network of Pakistani taxi drivers and the woman arrested had helped the brother track his sister down.

Copts Release Video of Mass Rioting, Destruction of Churches and Bibles: Fear impending ethnic cleansing of Christians in Egypt

A reaction to the Muslim anti-Copt riots in Egypt from the International Christian Union (ICU) and American Coptic Association (ACA):

UNION CITY, NJ: Fearing a repeat of the recent riots against the Coptic Church in Alexandria, which left four dead, over 80 wounded and seven churches defaced, the International Christian Union (ICU) and American Coptic Association (ACA) are calling on the U.S. Government and the United Nations to take immediate action to stop the bloodshed and destruction of churches.

Exclusive video footage released by the ICU/ACA today, reveals the destruction of the Assemblies of God Church for Evangelical Copts in Moharam Bek, on Friday, Oct. 21.

"We are receiving numerous reports that Fanatic Muslim groups are planning to surround the Alexandria churches again on Friday, Oct.28, and at the end of Ramadan on the following Tuesday, promising the death of Christians and the continued destruction of churches throughout Egypt," Dr. Monir Dawoud, president of the ICU/ACA, said.

Dawoud faults the security forces for encouraging violence by first "giving the green light to the mob," and then failing to control the resulting riots. "If the momentum of the riots is allowed to continue, the crowds will be impossible to contain," Dawoud said.

Over 5,000 Muslims demonstrated outside of the Alexandria Coptic Orthodox Church last Friday to protest the production of a drama staged at the church two years ago. The protestors say the play blasphemes Islam. According to recent statements by the Coptic Church, however, the play does not defame Islam.

"Copts and other minorities in Egypt are continually subjected to physical and verbal harassment by extremist Muslim groups. Yet we do not destroy their houses of worship or call for bloodshed," said Amgad Zakhari, one of the youth leaders with the ICU/ACA.

In addition to the protests, the Egyptian newspaper, El Fagr, published threats made by Muslim radicals against the Coptic Pope Shenouda III. According to this report, Muslim radicals publicly announced their threats through mosques in the outskirts of the city of Alexandria and were calling for the death of the Pope in revenge for an alleged insult to Islam's prophet.

The ICU and the ACA are planning a demonstration in front of the UN next week to protest the persecution of Christians in Egypt.

Non-Muslims 'must wear scarves'

"Is this not disrespectful of a plural society?" Why, yes, it is. Islamic tolerance alert from Malaysia. From SA, with thanks to Cyca:

Kuala Lumpur - Malaysia's government has endorsed a university's ruling that requires non-Muslim women to wear headscarves on its campuses, a report said on Wednesday.

The minister in charge of national unity, Maximus Ongkili, said the decision by the International Islamic University earlier this year was not a religious one, but merely part of university procedures.

"As the rule was approved by the university senate, it is not religious in nature but a matter of uniforms that must be followed. It does not breach basic human rights," Ongkili was quoted as saying in the Star daily....

The growing influence of Islam on Malaysian society over the past two decades has seen a major increase in the number of Malay Muslim women wearing headscarves as a sign of religious devotion.

Formulated

Ongkili told parliament that Malaysians had to respect rules formulated by the government and other institutions to prevent social unrest.

"In a multi-racial country each community must respect one another. But at the same time we must respect the laws of the country, institutions and organisations to ensure there is no disturbance to the community," he said.

He was responding to opposition leader Lim Kit Siang, who had read out an email from a non-Muslim undergraduate from the university complaining she was forced to wear a headscarf to her graduation ceremony.

Lim accused the government of recanting on an April statement that non-Muslims would be "encouraged" but not forced to wear headscarves.

"So why the change now? Is this not disrespectful of a plural society," he said according to the Star.

Banned in the U.K.

Rachel Ehrenfeld in FrontPage details how a Saudi billionaire has used English libel laws to try to silence her:

I was prevented from attending a meeting last weekend that I organized in the U.K. on "How to Combat Terror Financing." Had I gone, I would have been in jeopardy due to British libel laws.

I have been sued for libel in London by the Saudi billionaire Sheikh Khalid bin Mahfouz because my book, Funding Evil, documents how his charity, the Muwafaq Foundation, “transferred at least $3 million, on behalf of Khalid bin Mahfouz, to Usama bin Laden, and assisted al Qaeda fighters in Bosnia,” according to testimony of former National Security advisor Richard Clarke. Bin Mahfouz sued in London, because British libel laws guarantee that he could win without challenging the facts.

The British libel laws are so destructive that they affect writers and publications who never set foot in Britain and never published there. They are used effectively by Saudi billionaires who can afford the steep legal fees to silence successfully writers and publishers around the world who attempt to expose how the Saudis have funded and continue to fund the spread of Wahhabism, Islamist radicalism, and indoctrination that leads to global terrorism.

British libel laws are not the only tools that the Islamists use to silence their opponents. They exploit the laws that are designed to ensure freedom to subvert democracies throughout the world. And what they cannot achieve by exploiting the laws, they often achieve through intimidation and invoking political correctness.

Their success is demonstrated by Britain’s submission to Islamic will. These include the Dudley Council’s ban on all representations of pigs - “in the name of tolerance” - and the Tate Gallery’s cancellation of John Latham's “God Is Great," portraying Christian, Muslim, and Jewish holy-books, “because it could upset Muslims.” This submission is surprising in a people who stood up to the Nazis and did not bend under the Blitz. But now, the Queen knights a Muslim "community leader," Iqbal Sacranie, after he praises former Hamas leader Ahmed Yassin at his memorial service. In fact, Sacraine has also stated publicly, that "death is perhaps too easy" for Salman Rushdie.

This British submission did not help stop the July 7 bombings or the later bombing attempts. But even after the attacks, the Prime Minister appointed to the new anti–terror task force, which they call “the working group on tackling extremism,” Muslim advisers who are known to support Radical Islam, including Tariq Ramadan. Ramadan's U.S. visa was revoked last year, and he is believed to have connections to al Qaeda. Furthermore, last August, to enable Ramadan to speak at a gathering of Muslim youth in London, Scotland Yard contributed $15,000 of taxpayers money. Ramadan, who is also believed to have organized a meeting between Ayman al Zawahiri and Sheik Abdel Rahman currently teaches at St. Antony College, in Oxford. Another advisor to the Prime Minister’s task force, Inayat Bunglawala, was appointed despite his public praise of bin Laden as a “freedom fighter.”

This submissive attitude also leads the British to turn a blind eye to the sale of books like Mein Kampf and The Protocol of The Elders of Zion, which are printed in Egypt and Lebanon in Arabic and distributed in and from London to the rest of Europe. Clearly, the British legal system that banned my book seems to see nothing wrong with this anti-Semitic propaganda, even though this propaganda helps to create the climate that encourages Jihadist recruits from all over Europe to come to Britain to join the international brigade of Jihadis. From Britain, the Jihadis go on to fight British and American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Statements, new laws and banning terrorist organizations are important, but they are useless as long as Islamo-Fascism is allowed to flourish. As President Bush emphasized earlier this month, Islamo-Fascism cannot be eliminated by appeasement, or by dialogue, or negotiated solutions, as many falsely believe, especially in Europe. Indeed, without the political will to stop the direct and indirect financing of terrorism, no law or convention will stop it.

We should have tried to stop the spread of Wahhabism and Islamo–Fascism two decades ago. Our inaction, as much as their efforts, facilitated the funding of terrorism that has killed and maimed many thousands. In addition, Islamo-Facism has already infected tens of millions around the world with a hatred of democracy and freedom.

Although prevented from doing my job in the U.K., I’m challenging the funders of terrorism in the U.S. so as to defend my First Amendment rights. I have sued Khalid bin Mahfouz in the Southern District of New York.

CAIR Director Attends State Department Ramadan Iftar

"She also spoke about the need to promote universal human rights..." I wonder how this squares with the words of CAIR's former Board Chairman Omar Ahmad: "Those who stay in America should be open to society without melting, keeping Mosques open so anyone can come and learn about Islam. If you choose to live here, you have a responsibility to deliver the message of Islam ... Islam isn't in America to be equal to any other faiths, but to become dominant. The Koran, the Muslim book of scripture, should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on Earth."

A CAIR press release (thanks to Diana West):

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- (OfficialWire) -- 10/26/05 -- Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice Tuesday night hosted the State Department's seventh annual "Iftar," or Ramadan fast-breaking dinner, in Washington, D.C.

The dinner took place after sunset, in accordance with Islamic practices. Muslim participants broke the fast with water and dates before performing their sunset prayers. (Ramadan is the month on the Islamic lunar calendar during which Muslims abstain from food, drink and sensual pleasures from break of dawn to sunset.)

Those in attendance at the dinner included Nihad Awad, executive director of the Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), as well as representatives of other local and national Muslim organizations, Muslim students, diplomats from Islamic countries, and State Department officials.

In her remarks, Secretary Rice reflected on the meaning of Ramadan and thanked Muslims for their generosity in donating to relief for victims of Hurricane Katrina and the recent earthquake in South Asia. She also spoke about the need to promote universal human rights and mentioned the legacy of civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks, who died Monday at the age of 92.

"Oh, you're a Muslim? Well, then, carry on with that wife-beating"

"Police told to respect traditions," from the Herald Sun, with thanks to Terry:

POLICE are being advised to treat Muslim domestic violence cases differently out of respect for Islamic traditions and habits.

Officers are also being urged to work with Muslim leaders, who will try to keep the families together.

Women's groups are concerned the politically correct policing could give comfort to wife bashers and keep their victims in a cycle of violence.

The instructions come in a religious diversity handbook given to Victorian police officers that also recommends special treatment for suspects of Aboriginal, Hindu and Buddhist background...

Police are told: "In incidents such as domestic violence, police need to have an understanding of the traditions, ways of life and habits of Muslims."

They are told it would be appreciated in cases of domestic violence if police consult the local Muslim religious leader who will work against "fragmenting the family unit".

Islamic Women's Welfare Council head Joumanah El Matrah called the guidelines appalling and dangerous.

"The implication is one needs to be more tolerant of violence against Muslim women but they should be entitled to the same protection," Ms El Matrah said.

"Police should not be advising other officers to follow those sorts of protocols.

"It can only lead to harm."

Ms El Matrah said Muslim leaders should be brought into domestic violence investigations only if requested by the abused woman.

The tyranny of the minority: elimination of holidays "just an excuse to hide bias against Muslims"

Faced with a school board that decided against giving all students in Hillsborough County, Florida holidays for Yom Kippur, Good Friday or Eid ul-Fitr, Ahmed Bedier, spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, unsurprisingly concluded that this was of course "just an excuse to hide bias against the Muslims." (This is from "Schools Scrap Religious Holidays," from Tampa Bay Online, with thanks to the Constantinopolitan Irredentist:

It did not occur to him that Catholicism and Judaism, as well as Islam, are minority religions in America, but that in keeping with our American principles of government by the majority with respect for the rights of the minority, students have been excused from school without penalty for religious holidays -- a policy that will continue.

School Board Attorney Tom Gonzalez explained:

"A school board cannot recognize a religious holiday for the sole purpose of recognizing a religious holiday," Gonzalez said at a meeting packed with dozens of members of the Muslim community, some pleading to have no school on holidays for all religions. So many people celebrate Christmas that businesses can't operate on that day, Gonzalez said. If large numbers of students and teachers are absent on other religious holidays, the district may opt to again make those days off, he said.

That is in fact the case in some Michigan and New Jersey school districts where Eid is already a school holiday. School holidays do not imply government sanction, just recognition of the wishes of significant numbers of the population. Of course, it is hard not to notice that the C-word is not used in the calendar:

Winter holidays-- Dec. 18-Jan. 1

The "spring holiday," meanwhile, is nowhere near Easter. It's contemptible that they cannot call it a "Christmas holiday" and that they can't have an "Easter holiday," since the majority of their students celebrate those days. But the confusion the ACLU has sown about the establishment clause predates pressure from CAIR about Eid.

Where Muslims are in significant numbers, there is no problem with schools putting an Eid holiday on their calendar. Muslim students in Hillsborough County can already take a day off from school for Eid without penalty. That that is not enough for Bedier indicates that he does not understand the parameters of American pluralism. And that the school board responded by banning all religious holidays is an unwarranted dhimmi overreaction.

Iran: Feminist websites censored

Sharia alert from AKI, with thanks to Sr. Soph:

Tehran, 26 Oct. (AKI) - The wave of censorship in Iran, which began with the rise to power of hardline president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, continues after the targeting of newspapers, journalists, internet sites and bloggers. In the past few days, sites and blogs that focus on women's rights and issues have now been censored. Iranian web surfers have been blocked from navigating in particular the websites of 'Womeniniran', 'Irwomen', 'Iftribune' and 'Womeniw', four of the most popular feminist websites in the country.

In total, it is estimated that there are 130,000 websites which Iranians have been prohibited from navigating.

The main Iranian women's groups are currently involved in collecting signatures for an appeal to protest against censorship in Iran. The petition by Iranian women can be accessed at http://new.petitiononline.com/womeno/petition.html.

Anti-dhimmitude in Denmark: Muslim ambassadors will not get meeting over Muhammad cartoons

As noted here last Friday, Muslim ambassadors from eleven nations were irked about depictions of Muhammad that appeared in a Danish newspaper. But they will get no satisfaction from Danish PM Fogh Rasmussen: Denmark, you see, has this funny little principle called "freedom of speech." "Muslim ambassadors will not be granted a meeting with the prime minister on the freedom of speech," from the Copenhagen Post, with thanks to Nosy:

Eleven Muslim ambassadors in Denmark looking to meet with Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen to discuss what they call a 'smear campaign' in the media against Islam and Muslims have had their request denied.

The prime minister had otherwise been encouraged by the opposition to meet with the group as a way to increase understanding in an increasingly controversial public debate....

Pictorial depictions of Mohammed are frowned upon by Islam.

'This is a matter of principle. I won't meet with them because it is so crystal clear what principles Danish democracy is built upon that there is no reason to do so,' said Rasmussen.

Rasmussen reiterated his message that individuals who felt offended by the tone of the public debate should bring their grievances to the courts.

'As prime minister, I have no power whatsoever to limit the press - nor do I want such a power,' he said. 'It is a basic principle of our democracy that a prime minister cannot control the press.'

Fitzgerald: Saudi Arabian accountability

Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald urges that Saudi Arabia be called to account even if the Senate Judiciary Committee is not at present up to the task:

The Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on the Saudi Arabia Accountability Act have been canceled. Saudi Arabian accountability should not be canceled.

Though the debauches of the Saudi princelings far outdo anything mere Westerners could dream up, these practices take place behind high walls of the palaces and palacettes of Saudi Arabia, or in Belgravia, or the Avenue Foch or, especially, in villas in the south of Spain and south of France. (Prince Bandar, to be fair, has the Plantagenet hunting-lodge of Wychwood, not to mention that little place in Aspen, where he had a small American mountain earth-moved, because it annoyingly spoiled his view). Where is the CIA, collecting mountains of incriminating photographs and videos of these people, to threaten them with exposure that will cause them great difficulties among their own puritanical people, and which might be used, not to earn their friendship (which is simply not possible) but their dutiful collaboration, which is?

The tribute the ruling princelings pay, if they are to continue robbing the country (the country which, through its oligopoly rents, is robbing all the rest of us) and to spend what they grab as they see fit, requires them to support to the hilt the religious establishment, and not to veer from Wahhabi Islam. They will lie and delay and pretend that they are practically holding a constitutional convention on the American model, and talk grandly of "reform," and one or two princes will write a "daring" article that more-or-less says something close to the obvious, and we will always be on the verge of some bold new program -- just enough to let Tom Friedman wax poetic about it. A few Senators (including one or two Republicans on the Foreign Relations Committee who seem quite soft on Saudi Arabia) will be pleased, and we will have the mixture as before. Saudi princes will not change course, or change their malevolent system and hostile country. They can't. They don't want to. They won't.

Stop talking, stop writing, stop hoping, about "our Saudi ally." Saudi Arabia is not our ally, and never has been. It was not when FDR met Ibn Saud in 1945. It was not when the forces of Abdul Aziz's father, accompanied by Captain Shakespear, were soundly defeated in 1915 when they went out to do battle with the tribesman of Jabal Shammar (yes, the very same Shammar tribe that runs from Syria to northern Saudi Arabia, one of whose leaders is Sheikh Ghazi Yawer, interim president of Iraq). Saudi Arabia sells oil to us, as it sells oil to everyone else. It sells oil to us at precisely the same price it sells oil to everyone else. Got that? It is just a huge gas station. No friendship, no special favors, nothing. When the Saudis "helped" in Afghanistan, they did so not as a favor as us, but to help fellow Muslims against the Infidel Russians. That's it. End of extent of "friendship." Why does the press, why does television, why do people in Washington continue to call Saudi Arabia an "ally," a "friend," or as the BBC likes to do, a "staunch ally"?

The Saudis, the Egyptians, the Jordanians, the Qataris, the "United Arab Emiratians," the Kuwaitis, fill in the rest yourself here, are not and cannot be friends to us, for we are Infidels. We can persuade them, through pressure, to do what we want. Their people are not our friends. Their press and television are not our friends. Their worldview, which comes out of Islam, ensures that they will not be our friends (but will believe everything bad about us, for we are Infidels).
It is time, finally, to defeat the Jihad and Save the Earth (environmentalists, we are with you, but possibly not for quite the same reasons). All at one go. Time to internalize the true costs of that oil that funds the Jihad. Do everything possible to diminish the Saudi revenues. Let them work for a living, the way we Infidels have to.

Yes, some businesses will suffer. Revenues will go down for the house and croupiers at Monte Carlo, and among the arms dealers, and at the houses of high-end cognacs, and also among the champagne-producers in Ai and Epernay and Reims. The taxable income declared by madams in every major Western city will decline. Highest-end leather goods on the via Condotti and via Tornabuoni will also suffer. Too bad. Don't worry, you who will suffer a temporary loss of business: some other group of undeserving tycoons will come along to make it up to you. Undeserving, but not mortal threats to the rest of us, the non-Muslims of the world.

Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Saudi Arabia Accountability Act postponed

Ostensibly the reasons were because some staff members of various Senators were unprepared, and need to devote their attention to the Harriet Miers hearings. But the hearing has not yet been rescheduled.

Here and here are two recent articles I have written on Saudi Arabia that underscore the need for these hearings, and for passage of the Act.

Pipes: Islamophobia?

Daniel Pipes makes some cogent and much-needed observations about the spurious phenomenon of "Islamophobia" in FrontPage (many good links in the original):

An Islamist group named Hizb ut-Tahrir seeks to bring the world under Islamic law and advocates suicide attacks against Israelis. Facing proscription in Great Britain, it opened a clandestine front operation at British universities called “Stop Islamophobia,” the Sunday Times has revealed.

Stop what, you ask?

Coined in Great Britain a decade ago, the neologism Islamophobia was launched in 1996 by a self-proclaimed “Commission on British Muslims and Islamophobia.” The word literally means “undue fear of Islam” but it is used to mean “prejudice against Muslims” and joins over 500 other phobias spanning virtually every aspect of life.

The term has achieved a degree of linguistic and political acceptance, to the point that the secretary-general of the United Nations presided over a December 2004 conference titled “Confronting Islamophobia,” and in May a Council of Europe summit condemned “Islamophobia.”

The term presents several problems, however. First, what exactly constitutes an “undue fear of Islam” when Muslims acting in the name of Islam today make up the premier source of worldwide aggression, both verbal and physical, versus non-Muslims and Muslims alike? What, one wonders, is the proper amount of fear?

Second, while prejudice against Muslims certainly exists, “Islamophobia” deceptively conflates two distinct phenomena: fear of Islam and fear of radical Islam. I personally experience this problem: despite writing again and again against radical Islam the ideology, not Islam the religion, I have been made the runner-up for a mock “Islamophobia Award” in Great Britain, deemed America’s “leading Islamophobe,” and even called an “Islamophobe Incarnate.” (What I really am is an “Islamism-ophobe.”)

Third, promoters of the “Islamophobia” concept habitually exaggerate the problem:

· Law enforcement: British Muslims are said to suffer from persistent police discrimination but an actual review of the statistics by Kenan Malik makes mincemeat of this “Islamophobia myth.”

· Cultural: Muslims “are faced with an extreme flow of anti-Islamic literature that preaches hatred against Islam,” claims the president of the Graduate School of Islamic and Social Sciences in Virginia, Taha Jabir Al-‘Alwani: “novels, movies, books and researches. Just among the best selling novels alone there are almost 1000 novels of this type.” One thousand bestsellers vilify Islam? Hardly. In fact, barely a handful do so (for example, The Haj, by Leon Uris).

· Linguistic: A professor of Islamic studies at George Washington University, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, falsely reported (in his keynote speech at a U.N. event, “Confronting Islamophobia,” reports Alexander Joffe) attempts to hide the Arabic origins of English words such as adobe – which derives in fact from ancient Egyptian, not from Arabic.

· Historical: The term anti-Semitism was originally used against Arabs living in Spain, Nasr also stated in his speech, and was not directed at Jews until after World War II. Nonsense: anti-Semitism dates back only to 1879, when it was coined by Wilhelm Marr, and has always referred specifically to hatred of Jews.

Fourth, Hizb ut-Tahrir’s manipulation of “Stop Islamophobia” betrays the fraudulence of this word. As the Sunday Times article explains, “Ostensibly the campaign’s goal is to fight anti-Muslim prejudice in the wake of the London bombings,” but it quotes Anthony Glees of London’s Brunel University to the effect that the real agenda is to spread anti-Semitic, anti-Hindu, anti-Sikh, anti-homosexual, and anti-female attitudes, as well as foment resentment of Western influence.

Finally, calling moderate Muslims (such as Irshad Manji) Islamophobes betrays this term’s aggressiveness. As Charles Moore writes in the Daily Telegraph, moderate Muslims, “frightened of what the Islamists are turning their faith into,” are the ones who most fear Islam. (Think of Algeria, Darfur, Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan.) “They cannot find the courage and the words to get to grips with the huge problem that confronts Islam in the modern world.” Accusations of Islamophobia, Malik adds, are intended “to silence critics of Islam, or even Muslims fighting for reform of their communities.” Another British Muslim, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, discerns an even more ambitious goal: “all too often Islamophobia is used to blackmail society.”

Muslims should dispense with this discredited term and instead engage in some earnest introspection. Rather than blame the potential victim for fearing his would-be executioner, they would do better to ponder how Islamists have transformed their faith into an ideology celebrating murder (Al-Qaeda: “You love life, we love death”) and develop strategies to redeem their religion by combating this morbid totalitarianism.

Anti-Semitic Material Featured in the Iran Pavilion of this year's Frankfurt Book Fair

Zombie reveals some German dhimmitude:

FRANKFURT-AM-MAIN, GERMANY (Zombietone News) -- The official Iranian pavilion at this year's Frankfurt Book Fair prominently featured virulently anti-Semitic literature, in violation of German law.

The display was noticed by Hamburg-based author Matthias Küntzel, whose first-hand account appeared Sunday on both the euroneuzeit blog and on the German Jewish site Die Jüdische....

Some of the books on sale at the Iranian pavilion at the 2005 Frankfurt Book Fair: The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, The International Jew, and Tale of the "Chosen People."...

With 280,000 attendees this year, the Frankfurt Book Fair is the world's most important (and by far the largest) publishing industry event, with exhibitors, publishers, buyers, agents and authors from over 100 countries arriving every year to make the business deals that keep the book industry humming....

At the time of this writing (Monday, October 24), the media has not yet discovered the story: the only evidence of it is in a blog entry from UK blogger Colin Meade, who provides rough translations of portions of Küntzel's German text, and a news article in the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

Photos, more details, and addresses to send protests -- all at Zombie's site.

Jihadists threaten to kill Coptic Pope

In revenge for the video shown in the Coptic church. Apparently a stabbed nun and three deaths aren't enough. "Muslim radicals threaten to kill Pope Shenouda III," from the FreeCopts blogspot, with thanks to Susan:

EL FAGR Egyptian newspaper published threats made by Muslims radicals against the Pope of Alexandria. According to the newspaper, Muslim radicals publicly announced their threats through small mosques in the outskirts of the city of Alexandria and regarded the bloodshed of H.H. Pope Shenouda III as Halal (permissible) in revenge for what they considered an insult to Islam's prophet....

On the other hand, the "Mother of All Radicals" or the so called "Muslim Brotherhood" group has been giving out fliers inciting the Muslims to revenge the honor of their prophet.

You can see the flyer and the newspaper article at the Free Copts site.

UK banks ban piggy banks

More on the British headlong rush into dhimmitude and war against pigs: "Piggy banks 'offend UK Muslims,'" from AAP, with thanks to Susan:

British banks are banning piggy banks because they may offend some Muslims.

Halifax and NatWest banks have led the move to scrap the time-honoured symbol of saving from being given to children or used in their advertising, the Daily Express/Daily Star group reports here....

Salim Mulla, secretary of the Lancashire Council of Mosques, backed the bank move.

"This is a sensitive issue and I think the banks are simply being courteous to their customers," he said.

However, the move brought accusations of political correctness gone mad from critics.

"The next thing we will be banning Christmas trees and cribs and the logical result of that process is a bland uniformity," the Dean of Blackburn, Reverend Christopher Armstrong, said.

"We should learn to celebrate our difference, not be fearful of them."

Khalid Mahmoud, the Labour MP for a Birmingham seat and one of four Muslim MPs in Britain, also criticised the piggy-bank ban.

"We live in a multicultural society and the traditions and symbols of one community should not be obliterated just to accommodate another," Mr Mahmoud said.

"I doubt many Muslims would be seriously offended by piggy banks."

Well, I hope not. But banned they are nevertheless: this must have been done to please someone.

Fitzgerald: Victory is not inevitable

Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald explains why we may end up losing the struggle against the global jihad:

There is nothing inevitable about the defeat of the worldwide Jihad. In fact, if one looks at the emptying out of non-Muslim populations within the last half-century or century, one finds that the non-Muslim population of North Africa, the Middle East, Turkey, and Iran, consisting of Christians and Jews, has gone steadily down. And the non-Muslim population of Pakistan and Bangladesh, consisting mainly of Hindus (and some Sikhs and Christians) has gone steadily down. And the non-Muslim population in Malaysia and Indonesia has gone steadily down. In every case, forced expulsion, steady persecution, mass murder, and even genocide, as in Turkey, has helped to explain such a change.

Meanwhile, everywhere in the Lands of the Infidels, millions of Muslims have been allowed to settle. And in India and Lebanon, where they have long been present as a minority, they have been steadily outbreeding the non-Muslims. The percentage of Muslims in the population has steadily, almost it seems inexorably, risen.

If demography is destiny, and if nothing is done to halt Muslim in-migration, and Muslim overbreeding that astounds -- in France the non-Muslims increase by .5% a year, while Muslims increase by 5% per year -- 10 times the rate. In Italy (with a negative birth-rate), in Spain, in England, in Germany, the same kind of results. Anyone can do the simple calculation. It can already be seen that Western politicians, having no sense of their own civilizations or what needs to be retained at all costs, more and more willingly appease Muslim voters. A few years ago a prominent leader of the Socialist Party sent out word to his underlings that they should forget entirely about "the Jews" and Israel, and concentrate entirely on winning the Muslim vote, which can only be won by adopting Muslim demands in foreign policy and meeting Muslim demands for changes in the laws, customs, and manners to be observed within the Infidel land in which they happen to have settled. Much the same kind of cravenness by politicians can be observed in Great Britain, where in local elections, and not only in London with Ken Livingstone, the politicians vie in their desire to appease and please Muslim voters. Those who would like to register their fear and dismay, and their desire to make their country less welcoming to Muslims who do not wish the resident Infidels well, have only the beyond-the-pale (as many of them see it) BNP in England or Le Pen in France. Thus they are without an articulate, respectable figure to lead, to warn, to instruct, and to help rescue those who did nothing to deserve this except to be insufficiently attentive -- for they trusted their own leaders -- to the immutable nature, and menace, of Islam and its adherents, both those who are clearly "immoderate" and those who claim, and for the moment may be, that slippery thing, a "moderate" Muslim.

When Rice prates about how Iraq reminds her of Germany and France after the war -- anyone can in a moment think of three or four major ways in which this analogy crumbles into dust -- or stoutly insists that we will "not falter or fail" and lets alliteration do her thinking for her, when Bush prates about "staying the course" and not "cutting and running," and his fan club, among so-called "Conservatives," shrieks with delight, one begins to despair. And among those who should by this time know better, there is still this willingness to utter inanities and illogical remarks about "democracy" in Iraq, without any argument as to why this "democracy" in Iraq could conceivably lead to a better situation for Infidels, when the best thing that could happen as far as Infidels are concerned is the break-up of Iraq and permanent war, cold or hot, between Shi'a and Sunni along the fault line that now runs through Iraq, as well as the creation of a non-Arab Muslim state, Kurdistan, that might inspire other non-Arab Muslims and cause all of them to focus a bit more clearly on Arab supremacist ideology within Islam.

Last week at the Union League in New York, The New Criterion sponsored a small meeting to discuss the islamization of Europe. As it happened, quite by chance, the person who knows most about this subject in the world, Bat Ye'or, was in the vicinity and, at the last minute, took part. But it was clear from reports that there was a widespread inability, in those who attended and of whom more might be expected, to understand the time-frame in which events in Europe are taking place, and how late things are for the Americans (and the Europeans) to come to their senses. Like our rulers, when they go to Europe they live in certain hotels, meet certain people, and are cushioned by their own ignorance of languages (so that, for example, even reading "Le Monde" or "Le Figaro" or the "Corriere della Sera" or "El Pais" is impossible, and information arrives filtered through the English-language press, or television). Thus they are less alarmed than they should be by the islamization of Europe, and continue to believe that Bush and company must know what they are doing in Iraq, and that despite its seeming illogicality, surely something wonderful or at least hopeful will come of it. No it won't. The most hopeful thing that could possibly come of it is not a stable, well-functioning nation-state, its army thoroughly trained to Western standards by American officers (and no doubt that newly-trained "Iraqi" army will be happy to share all its new expertise with armies of other Muslim states -- just what we need, better Muslim armies, with better logistics, equipment, and morale).

Once the regime was overturned, once Saddam himself was captured and his sons and associates killed or captured, and the country scoured for major weapons, and weapons projects permanently disrupted, and weapons depots blown up where appropriate, the war was won. The Sunnis had been deposed; the Shi'a were now tasting power and would not ever again relinquish it. At that point it was time to leave. It has been time to leave for at least a year. The longer we stay, the more expertly we train Muslim Arabs, whether Shi'a or Sunni, the more men and money we so obviously squander, the more morale in the army will go down -- not among all the troops, but the more thoughtful of them, the ones least inclined to parrot the line from above. The more we stay, the fewer civilians will enlist in the Reserves and the National Guard, and standards for enlistment will go down – and have already. The longer we stay, the more people will heed the siren-song of those who think there is nothing about Islam to worry about and that we should leave Iraq, but for all the wrong reasons, and that we certainly should not exploit the natural fissures within Islam -- because there is nothing wrong with Islam (when everything is wrong with Islam).

And so, while our attention and money and men and materiel and morale are monomaniacally focused on, and squandered in, Ir