Recently in journalistic bias Category

Obama is in the White House and endorses their efforts. The OIC has tried for years to compel Western states to restrict free speech and outlaw truth-telling about Islam, and now it is pressing on toward final victory. Apparently OIC top dogs are not satisfied with the current rate of compliance of the dhimmi mainstream media, even though it is almost total: the media constantly ignores, downplays, and obfuscates the ways in which Islamic jihadists use the texts and teachings of Islam to justify violence and supremacism, the Islamic character of honor killings, and more. Yet the OIC thinks that there is a "smear campaign against Islam in newspapers and media institutions in the West" -- in other words, the truth is still getting out, because Muslims keep committing acts of violence in the name of Islam and it is hard even for the media to cover it up totally. So...time for another media workshop.

"OIC To Hold Media Workshop To Address Smear Campaign Against Islam," from Bernama, February 13:

KUALA LUMPUR, Feb 13 (Bernama) -- The Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) is to hold a media workshop in Brussels on Feb 15 to 16 pertaining to the smear campaigns against Islam in newspapers and media institutions in the West.

The objective of this first-of-its-kind workshop is to develop media-related mechanisms to address the smear campaigns, the OIC said in a statement.

It said the workshop will discuss at length the reasons behind and the results of the Western media's offensive campaigns against the symbols and sanctities of Islam and Muslims, which it added still occur from time to time.

"The workshop will represent a quantum leap in media action, as it discusses, beyond rhetoric, the practical steps to address the phenomenon of Islamophobia," the OIC said....

The New York Times, fresh from its alarmist campaign to intimidate New York City officials into dropping all attempts to tell the truth about the stealth jihad in America, is running a piece today about how the violent jihad is nothing to worry about, either -- featuring a new "study" by a dhimmi academic and numerous omissions of fact and leaps of logic. Clearly, for the Times, "Islamophobia" is a much greater threat than jihad -- after all, what's a few, or a few hundred, or a few thousand murdered Americans?

On the journalistic integrity of Scott Shane, see here.

"Radical Muslim Americans Pose Little Threat, Study Says," by Scott Shane in the New York Times, February 8 (thanks to Hussam Ayloush of Hamas-linked CAIR, who gleefully tweeted this link today):

WASHINGTON - A feared wave of homegrown terrorism by radicalized Muslim Americans has not materialized, with plots and arrests dropping sharply over the two years since an unusual peak in 2009, according to a new study by a North Carolina research group.

The study, to be released on Wednesday, found that 20 Muslim Americans were charged in violent plots or attacks in 2011, down from 26 in 2010 and a spike of 47 in 2009.

Only 20? Relax!

Charles Kurzman, the author of the report for the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security, called terrorism by Muslim Americans "a minuscule threat to public safety." Of about 14,000 murders in the United States last year, not a single one resulted from Islamic extremism, said Mr. Kurzman, a professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina....

These figures are jimmied to start with: by "Islamic extremism," of course, the Times is referring only to terrorist acts, but take another example of Islamically justified violence: honor killing, and specifically the honor murder of Jessica Mokdad. If one follows mainstream media practice (and that of dhimmi pseudo-academics) and ignores all the evidence that honor killing is broadly sanctioned by many Muslim authorities, and then also ignores all the evidence that Jessica Mokdad was murdered for not being Muslim enough, then one can conclude that her murder was not related to "Islamic extremism."

And so voila, no murders due to "Islamic extremism" in 2011. Then there were all the foiled plots: if a few jihad plots had succeeded, such as this one or these three that were revealed in one week recently, there would have been murders -- possibly even hundreds or thousands of deaths. But Scott Shane and Charles Kurzman do not consider that a possibility worth entertaining.

Forty percent of those charged in 2011 were converts to Islam, Mr. Kurzman found, slightly higher than the 35 percent of those charged since the 2001 attacks. His new report is based on the continuation of research he conducted for a book he published last year, "The Missing Martyrs: Why There Are So Few Muslim Terrorists."...

It would be interesting to hear Kurzman explain why so many converts to Islam misunderstand their peaceful new religion -- and why all do so in the same way. But Kurzman would probably consider the question itself to be "Islamophobic."

The 2011 cases include just one actual series of attacks, which caused no injuries, involving rifle shots fired late at night at military buildings in Northern Virginia. A former Marine Corps reservist, Yonathan Melaku, pleaded guilty in the case last month in an agreement that calls for a 25-year prison sentence.

More on that one, including video, here.

Other plots unearthed by law enforcement last year and listed in Mr. Kurzman's report included a suspected Iranian plan to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the United States, a scheme to attack a Shiite mosque in Michigan and another to blow up synagogues, churches and the Empire State Building....

That scheme to blow up the Shi'ite mosque came from a white American convert to Sunni Islam. Since it wasn't initially reported that he was a Muslim, Hamas-linked CAIR initially trumpeted the plot as more evidence of "Islamophobia." Whoops!

And consider once again: if the plot to blow up the Empire State Building had succeeded, would even someone as willfully blind and compromised as Scott Shane of the New York Times dare to publish this twaddle?

Join us in Dearborn, Michigan, on April 29, the anniversary of the honor murder of Jessica Mokdad, for the Jessica Mokdad Human Rights Conference.

"Media whitewash yet another 'honor' killing," by Pamela Geller in WND, February 8:

Last Thursday, Fox News Detroit aired a revealing segment on my AFDI/SIOA Jessica Mokdad Human Rights Conference on honor killing and Islamic law, which will be held on April 29 in Dearborn, Mich. The segment was originally supposed to air last Sunday, the day that the multiple first-degree murder verdict came down in the Shafia mass honor killing in Canada, but was inexplicably delayed. The segment focused on the fact that Mokdad family members, one in particular, are livid that we are using Jessica’s name in connection with “honor killing.” Various female Mokdad family members, including Jessica’s “stepmother,” Cassandra Mokdad, alleged that Jessica’s murder was not an honor killing, despite the overwhelming evidence that it was.

The report was typical for the mainstream media and unworthy of Fox, which, while not perfect, is generally much better than its competitors: Reporter Alexis Wiley doesn’t bother to give even a shred of the evidence that it was an honor killing, and instead gives the impression that it is something I am making up. She doesn’t mention that initial reports were quite clear – a shocking thing for the mainstream media – that her stepfather killed Jessica because she “wasn’t following Islam” (report from TwinCities.com) and was “not adhering to Muslim customs” (Star Tribune).

Arab American News reported that the last recorded dispute between Jessica Mokdad and her stepfather was over the wearing of the hijab (head scarf), which he originally forced her to wear (just as in the honor murder of Canadian teen Aqsa Parvez). Jessica didn’t want to wear it, thereby bringing shame on him and the family. Her stepfather, Rahim Alfetlawi, who murdered her, was pathologically controlling, after the pattern of honor killers. At one point Jessica called her father and told him: “Dad, I can’t live here anymore; he’s too strict. I can’t even go to the store to buy a pop if I want.”

Macomb County Assistant Prosecutor Bill Contaldo said: “He thought she was becoming too Westernized. I think this was a very nice young lady wanting to experiment with Western culture without control and without abuse.” The Detroit Free Press reported: “Mokdad’s mother told police that Alfetlawi felt so shamed by her daughter’s Western ways. He killed her in an honor killing, Warren Police Sgt. Stephen Mills said.” Alfetlawi was so concerned about her behavior that he even forced her to go to a mosque and marry her boyfriend.

The Daily Mail reported this from London: “Devout Muslim stalks his stepdaughter over four states before killing her for being too Western.” The Daily Tribune reported: “Stepfather charged with murder in Warren, upset victim didn’t adhere to Muslim customs.”

And Alexis Wiley’s own previous report for Fox Detroit reported it as an honor killing as well: Wiley reported, “He forced her to wear a traditional head scarf instead of allowing her to make that decision on her own, and when she stopped wearing a scarf, friends say he became furious.”

 But last week on Fox and in the accompanying print report, Wiley gave no hint of the existence of these reports or her own. Why? Who is paying off Alexis Wiley? Or is it that she is scared, intimidated, afraid to “offend Islam”? Or is it that her political correctness makes it impossible to think of Muslims as anything but victims?

But in that case, why doesn’t Jessica Mokdad matter?

Apparently she doesn’t matter to her family, either. These family members’ apoplexy about the conference shows that they’re more concerned with offending Islam than with the honor murder of Jessica Mokdad. Jessica’s “stepmother” Cassandra, though just a few years older than Jessica, has been particularly vocal and vicious, with nasty Facebook comments, denials and cover for the honor killer. First Cassandra claimed that Saddam Hussein was responsible, then that the murder was an act of passion. Then in last week’s Fox report she said: “He wanted to have a relationship with Jessica as more than her stepfather. He wanted to have a more romantic relationship with her.”

Even if this is true, it doesn’t mean the murder was not an honor killing. He could have been angry with Jessica both for her Western ways and her refusal to wear the hijab, and for rejecting him. Islam expects women to be completely subservient and obedient – or else. If Alfetlawi killed her for refusing him, either way, the murder is a reflection of the attitudes of Islamic culture.

Read it all.

Hey hey hey! It's Fat Abu! (In an image banned by the BBC)

How clueless and compromised is the mainstream media? This clueless and compromised: "BBC tells its staff: don’t call Qatada extremist," by Neil Midgley and James Kirkup in the Telegraph, February 7 (thanks to Pamela Geller):

The BBC has told its journalists not to call Abu Qatada, the al-Qaeda preacher, an “extremist”.

In order to avoid making a “value judgment”, the corporation’s managers have ruled that he can only be described as “radical”.

Journalists were also cautioned against using images suggesting the preacher is overweight.

A judge ruled this week that the Muslim preacher, once described as “Osama bin Laden’s right-hand man in Europe”, should be released from a British jail, angering ministers and MPs.

Adding to the row, Kenneth Clarke, the Justice Secretary, yesterday insisted that Qatada “has not committed any crime” and said his release has nothing to do with the European Court of Human Rights.

A British court has called Qatada a “truly dangerous individual” and even his defence team has suggested he poses a “grave risk” to national security.

Despite that background, BBC journalists were told they should not describe Qatada as an extremist. The guidance was issued at the BBC newsroom’s 9.00am editorial meeting yesterday, chaired by a senior manager, Andrew Roy.

According to notes of the meeting, seen by The Daily Telegraph, journalists were told: “Do not call him an extremist – we must call him a radical. Extremist implies a value judgment.”...

BBC staff were also cautioned against using library images suggesting the cleric is overweight, because he has “lost a lot of weight”....

Appeasement. The author's name is Islamic, which may explain why CNN starts by praising his academic titles. Not only does CNN promote his views -- they praise the guy. Titles or not, this is the kind of logic that will lead you straight to hell.

Better buy some Iranian oil and forget about those Armenians -- we do not want to set up a clash with those innocent peaceful Muslims. The Clash of Civilisations was started by us, according to this distinguished professor:

"Is Europe setting up clash between Muslims and the West?," by Mohammed Ayoob for CNN, February 3:

Editor's note: Mohammed Ayoob is University Distinguished Professor of International Relations at Michigan State University and adjunct scholar at the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding

(CNN) -- Europe and the Muslim world seem to be on a collision course that could have major political, economic and ideological ramifications. January 23, 2012, may well come to be remembered as the crucial date when Samuel Huntington's "clash of civilizations" thesis, which many of us believed discredited beyond repair, was reaffirmed.
Political scientist Huntington wrote in 1993 that cultural divisions preclude a defining global civilization, and the West and the Muslim world would never share the same values.

Last month, Europe took two different actions that nonetheless sent the same message to the Muslim world: You are not our equals and are doomed to be judged by standards different from those by which we judge ourselves. Future historians might call January 23 the day when Europe irreversibly alienated not one, but both, pivotal powers -- Iran and Turkey -- that in all probability will dominate the political landscape of the Middle East for several decades.

One action was the European Union's decision to ban oil purchases from Iran ...

At the same time, the French Senate passed a law making it a crime to deny genocides that are officially recognized by France. The two genocides in this category are the Holocaust and the killing of 1.5 million Armenians in Anatolia during the last years of the Ottoman Empire. Because the denial of the Holocaust is already a crime under French law, the obvious objective of the bill is to criminalize the denial of the 1915 Armenian genocide.

The Free Press Society was started in Denmark in 2004 by Lars Hedegaard, who is still chairman. Hedegaard is now 69 and last I saw him -= at a Christmas dinner in December 2011 -= he was as energetic, sharp and humorous as ever, a gun powder owl, as we say in Danish. On January 31, 2012, the Swedish branch was launched -- read about it here: "Sweden: Launching the Swedish Free Press Society under police protection".

On February 2, the Swedish newspaper The South Swedish printed an essay "In good company", in which the writer states that the Swedish Free Press Society "with good conscience can dissolve itself at the next meeting" -- since free speech is unchallenged.

On the same day, the famous Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten (the one with the Muhammad drawings) reported about the Swedish launch in the article "Free words in safe surroundings" (not online). The fact that the Swedish police knew about the venue even though it was not announced anywhere shows that the police are very aware of the problems:

In Malmö the Free Press Society's newborn Swedish sister organization was launched -- under massive police protection. The goal is to have a critical public debate on immigration, feminism and other controversial topics that are covered with politically correct consensus and pressure against freedom of expression.

How the Swedish police got to know about the evening's event is not known. For it was not advertised anywhere. Not even on the Internet. So there are no obstructive troublemakers on this cold January evening. But about 120 interested men and women of all ages have found their way to the inaugural meeting of the Swedish Tryckfrihetssällskap in Malmo on Tuesday evening, and they seemed safe, considering the 10-15 policemen. ...

At both ends of the foreseeable side street Skolgatan police cars patrol at night long. And on all floors in the municipal building where the venue takes place, several uniformed policemen are protecting the meeting and the participants.

Below is a credulous article summarizing the group's "findings." Western support of the "Arab Spring" has depended a great deal on wishful thinking, and continues the previous administration's pattern of repeated attempts to prop up a "moderate" Islamic regime to serve as a model for the Muslim world. It keeps not working, because policymakers keep underestimating or denying the actual substance of Sharia law is it is practiced in Muslim societies, and not what it could, would, or should be according to apologists or academic exercises.

Another common tactic is to credit developments that happen in spite of Islamic law as occuring because of it. A prominent example is the existence of Turkey for some time as a modern, secular state, which was possible because a competing ideology kept Sharia in check, as was the case to some extent via Indonesia's Pancasila principles. In both cases, the resurgence of interest in Islamic rule has led to the erosion of tolerance and free speech by increasingly aggressive Islamic groups.

Turkey's "moderate Islamist democracy," as it is described below, is not a static entity, but has been undergoing a slow-motion revolution of its own, and that process is not leading toward "moderation." Nor will it in Egypt, Libya, or Tunisia. "Turkey 'a useful model for new Arab regimes'," by Michel Sailhan for Agence France-Presse, February 5:

For many in the Arab world, Turkey embodies something of an elusive ideal: an Islamist-based democracy with a strong economy.

A survey published Thursday by the Turkish Economic and Social Studies Foundation, a non-governmental think-tank, found almost 80 percent of respondents in the Middle East had a favourable view of Turkey, and three out of five considered the country a model for a modern Islamic state.

Following last year's Arab Spring uprisings, an unprecedented wave of popular revolt that swept the Arab world and led to the ouster of a string of dictators, many analysts are wondering if Turkey serves as a useful example of what a moderate Islamist democracy looks like.

The country is seen as having "reconciled two dynamics: economic growth and a democratic system put in place by an Islamist-derived party," Turkish foreign policy expert Sinan Ulgan said.

Turkey, a secular Muslim-majority country that straddles Europe and Asia, is viewed especially favourably by many in Libya, Tunisia and Egypt, countries in which Ankara backed the sprawling Arab Spring protest movements which led to the toppling of their dictators.

Turkey's economy has staged a strong recovery after a severe recession, with gross domestic product (GDP) growing 8.9 percent in 2010 following a contraction of 4.7 percent the previous year.

GDP rose by a record 9.6 percent during the first nice months of 2011.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's AKP party, the Islamist-based party that has been in power since 2002, won a broad victory in June parliamentary elections, gaining 50 percent of the votes.

But some analysts temper the notion of Turkey as a model democracy, pointing to clampdowns on journalists and ongoing problems with the country's sizable Kurdish population.

About 15 million Kurds live in Turkey, which has a total population of 73 million. The Kurdish population has for decades been trying to establish an independent state in Turkey.

Since 1984, the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) has led an armed rebellion in the Kurdish-majority southeast that has claimed some 45,000 lives.

A 2009 attempt to grant more rights to Kurds and sap support for the PKK went nowhere, and fighting has resumed along with mass arrests.

Critics also point to what they call the "Putinisation" of Erdogan, referring to the Russian prime minister's at-times hardline stance against opponents.

"The number of those who are filling jails because of their opposing views and actions and those who are agonized by legal proceedings is increasing," wrote university professor Ahmet Insel in the daily Radikal newspaper. "(The) number of arrested university students is increasing and except a few weak voices, academia is silent." [...]

For Tunisian academic Amor Boubakri, Turkey's successes would not be easily replicated in Tunisia, which last year saw the overthrow of its president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, because the country has an increasingly vocal radical Islamist sector.

Naturally, this report did not address religious persecution in Turkey at all; nor did it mention Turkey's fits over acknowledgement of the Armenian Genocide.

Fox News Detroit ran an incredibly irresponsible, unfair and biased piece on TV last night (video above), along with a similarly flawed news article. The thrust of both is that the Mokdad family is angry about our Jessica Mokdad Human Rights Conference, coming up April 29 in Dearborn, Michigan. They're insisting that Jessica's murder was not an honor murder, and Fox reporter Alexis Wiley gives the impression that the only person saying it was an honor killing is Pamela Geller. Wiley doesn't bother to present any of the evidence that it was an honor killing.

So Pamela Geller posted the facts here. She also went into the comments field of the news article and left some of that evidence. What happened then was quite revealing:

Pamela Geller · New York, New York

The evidence that this was an honor killing was left out of this story. The last recorded dispute between Jessica Mokdad and her stepfather was over over the wearing of the hijab (head scarf) (http://www.arabamericannews.com/news/index.php?mod=article&cat=Community&article=4322), which he originally forced her to wear (just as in Aqsa Parvez's honor killing). She didn't want to wear it, thereby bringing shame on him and the family. This report is typical for the mainstream media and unworthy of FOX, which, while not perfect, is generally much better than its competitors: Alexis Wiley doesn't bother to give even a shred of the evidence that it was an honor killing, and instead gives the impression that it is something I am making up. She doesn't mention that initial reports were quite clear -- a shocking thing for the mainstream media -- that her stepfather killed Jessica because she "wasn't following Islam" (report from TwinCities.com reprinted here: http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/2011/05/jessica-mokdad-islamic-honor-killing-in-michigan.html) and was "not adhering to Muslim customs" (http://www.startribune.com/local/121175819.html).

The Daily Mail reported: "Devout Muslim stalks his step-daughter over four states 'before killing her for being too Western'.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1383603/Devout-Muslim-stalks-step-daughter-states-killing-Western.html#ixzz1lIMmyrp3.

The Daily Tribune Reported: News.
Stepfather charged with murder in Warren, upset victim didn't adhere to Muslim customs.

http://www.dailytribune.com/articles/2011/05/03/news/doc4dbff0f36037f544732591.txt

And Alexis Wiley's own report for FOX Detroit reported it as an honor killing as well: Wiley reported, "He forced her to wear a traditional head scarf instead of allowing her to make that decision on her own, and when she stopped wearing a scarf, friends say he became furious."

http://www.myfoxdetroit.com/dpp/news/alexis_wiley/20-year-old-woman-dead;-stepfather-charged-with-murder

But Wiley gives no hint of the existence of these reports or her own. Why? Who is paying off Alexis Wiley? Or is it that she is scared, intimidated, afraid to "offend Islam"? Or is it that her political correctness makes it impossible to think of Muslims as anything but victims?

Reply · 2 ·

· 13 hours ago

• 

  Kayla Chuba · Henry Ford Community College

  ok u need to leave her name out find another story! She meant alot to me and hearing this is just bull crap she is in heaven now just leave her name out of everything.You honestly have no clue what your talking about

  Reply · 3 ·

  · 13 hours ago
• 

  Pamela Geller · New York, New York

  Kayla Chuba You were her friend. You do know.
  
  FOX News, April 11, 2011 reported you saying the following:
  
  "He forced her to wear a traditional head scarf instead of allowing her to make that decision on her own, and when she stopped wearing a scarf, friends say he became furious.
  
  "She just wants to express herself the way she wants and not what he wants," said friend Kayla Chuba.
  
  That's why her friends helped her escape.
  
  "She packed up all her stuff. She told me she put it in a bush. She acted like she was taking out the garbage so he wouldn't see all her stuff packed," Chuba said.
  

  Reply ·

  · 12 hours ago
• 

  Kayla Chuba · Henry Ford Community College

  yes i know what i said but of course they didnt put everything I said. There is more to the story and its not right to use her name. Jessy loved Islam and she was very proud to be a muslim. That girl meant alot to me and to alot of people and you are hurting her family and friends this is not right and I will fight for her no matter what.

  Reply · 2 ·

  · 12 hours ago

Why did Kayla Chuba change her story? And if "they didn't put down everything [she] said," what else could she have possibly said that would mitigate the fact that he was angry with Jessica for refusing to wear the hijab (which was also the immediate cause of the honor murder of Aqsa Parvez)? Did someone speak to Kayla Chuba and tell her she needed to change her story? And why was Alexis Wiley so compliant in putting together a story that exonerated Islam from any role in the killing -- even though her new story contradicts her old one?

Mohammmad Shafia murdered his daughters and his first wife and then raged about his daughters: "God's curse on them for generations....There can be no treachery, no violation more than this. They committed treason from beginning to end. They betrayed humankind. They betrayed Islam."

Midday Monday I got this email, with the subject line "URGENT: NBC Nightly News Request":

Message: Hi there—

My name is Shannon Urtnowski and I work with NBC Nightly News. We are working on a spot for tonight about honor killings, and I understand this is on the rise in American, among other countries. We were hoping to speak with an expert who can tell us more about this today. IF you can please reach out to me just as soon as possible, I would
appreciate it.

Many thanks--

Shannon Urtnowski
NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams

I emailed her back, and she responded: "We'd like to try to see if we might be able to set up a camera interview with you in a bit." We spoke on the phone, and I explained to her the information that you can find here: that Islamic law stipulates no penalty for a parent who kills his child, and several Muslim countries have relaxed penalties for honor killings, with Islamic clerics resisting attempts to stiffen those penalties. I also gave her information on other Islamic honor killings in the U.S. and Canada: Noor Almaleki, the Said sisters, Aqsa Parvez, Jessica Mokdad, etc.

Urtnowski took it all in and told me she would set up studio time for me to be interviewed on this. She even asked me for contact information for a nearby studio, which I gave her. But shortly thereafter, Urtnowski called me back and said that NBC had decided to go with an expert closer to the correspondent's Chicago location, and so I wouldn't be appearing after all.

I was not at all surprised by that, of course. Nor was I surprised when NBC's story aired and it contained no mention of Islam, despite Mohammad Shafia's own words, but instead spoke about "patriarchal societies" and the Shafias' "strict religious family," religion unspecified. See the Newsbusters report here.

There was nothing surprising in NBC's coverage of the Shafia murders at all. It was just another example of how the mainstream media routinely whitewashes Islamic violence, and essentially lies to the public about the nature, extent and magnitude of that violence. It is no wonder that the public is thereby rendered largely clueless and complacent, and that Islamic honor killings are occurring with increasing frequency in the West, with no one daring to challenge the Muslim community to work against the beliefs that give rise to them.

The mainstream media and the Islamic supremacist Hamas-linked hate group CAIR are still doing all they can to whip up a frenzy about the NYPD's showing of the film The Third Jihad to police officers.

Lost in the hysteria is the question of whether there is anything inaccurate or false in the film -- no one who is protesting against this film is going beyond the claim that it is "Islamophobic." In a sane world, Kelly and Bloomberg would not be apologizing at all. They'd be saying, "Yes, we showed the film, and we're going to keep showing it, and what of it? If the Muslims in New York are upset about it being inaccurate, let them demonstrate its inaccuracy by taking positive steps to fight in their own community against the stealth jihad activity that the film documents."

Also, in a sane world, the Mayor and the NYPD would not be expected to reach out to the Muslim community and prove their good will. The Muslim community would be reaching out to the Mayor and the NYPD, eager to prove its good will. And the Mayor and the NYPD would be telling Hamas-linked CAIR that its counterterror cooperation was not enough, instead of letting this execrable Islamic supremacist Hamas front dictate New York City's counterterror operations.

But instead, we get more inverted reality coverage: "Really? Bloomberg Says Anti-Islam Film Flap Hurts NYPD's 'Credibility' With Muslims," from Gothamist, January 27:

Top cop Ray Kelly and his spokesman Paul Browne have been on the defensive all week after they were caught lying, or misremembering, the details of Kelly's involvement in an Islamophobic propaganda film that was screened on a continuous loop for over 1,300 officers. Asked again about the controversy yesterday, Mayor Blooomberg told reporters, "Anything like this doesn’t help credibility. Ray’s got to work at establishing, or re-establishing, or reinforcing the credibility that he does have [with the Muslim community]. In other news, the NYPD has credibility with the Muslim community?

Not so much, says Cyrus McGoldrick of [Hamas-linked] CAIR-NY, a group that advocates for Muslim civil rights and has called for Kelly's ouster. "This controversy has moved beyond an issue of poor judgment in the use of an Islamophobic training film to an issue of the integrity of public officials," McGoldrick said in a statement. CAIR-NY and several other groups also called for Browne's resignation, and even Bloomberg criticized his storytelling abilities. "I keep saying to everybody, ‘Get the whole story out right away,’ and that’s to keep it from going on and on and on, and to give the public the information they need," said Bloomberg. "That wasn’t done as well as we could have done it, and next time we’ll do it a little bit better."...

Sir, yes, sir! We will not offend Muslims by training the NYPD to fight jihad, sir!

Hamas-linked CAIR smells blood, and is going in for the kill. They've eliminated any truth about Islam and jihad from national FBI training, and are now trying to eliminate it everywhere. The outcome will be a cadre of agents and police officers who are full of politically correct nonsense that will render them clueless and complacent in the face of jihad activity. And so the jihad in the U.S. will advance unimpeded.

Here is a sterling example of how the mainstream media lies to the American people and misleads them about the nature and breadth of jihad activity in this country as well as elsewhere. "Motive of shooter who targeted military sites is unclear," by Josh White for the Washington Post, January 26:

Yonathan Melaku was sneaking through Fort Myer and Arlington National Cemetery, his backpack filled with plastic bags of ammonium nitrate, a notebook containing jihadist messages, and a can of black spray paint. The 23-year-old former Marine was heading to the graves of the nation’s most recent heroes, aiming to desecrate the stones with Arabic statements and leave handfuls of explosive material nearby as a message.

Before police foiled the plan in June, the vandalism was to be Melaku’s sixth attack, months after he went on a mysterious shooting spree that targeted the Pentagon, the National Museum of the Marine Corps and two other military buildings in Northern Virginia. A video found after Melaku’s arrest showed him wearing a black mask and shooting a 9mm handgun out of his Acura’s passenger window as he drove along Interstate 95, shouting “Allahu Akbar!”

It was all part of a solitary campaign of “fear and terror,” federal prosecutors said. But authorities and Melaku’s defense attorney said no one knows for sure what led Melaku — a naturalized U.S. citizen from Ethi­o­pia, local high school graduate and former Marine Corps Reservist — down that path or what message he was trying to send.

Melaku stood in U.S. District Court in Alexandria on Thursday morning to plead guilty to three counts, including shooting at the Pentagon on Oct. 19, 2010, and attempting to injure veterans’ memorials on U.S. property. As part of a plea agreement, Melaku admitted to using his legally obtained 9mm handgun to shoot the National Museum of the Marine Corps, the Pentagon and two military recruiting offices in October and November 2010.

The agreement calls for Melaku to serve 25 years in prison. Judge Gerald Bruce Lee accepted the plea, and Melaku is scheduled for sentencing on April 27.

Although Melaku acknowledged shooting at the buildings — attacks that did not injure anyone but caused an estimated $111,000 in damage — it still remains unclear why he did it. In a video entered into evidence and released by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia, Melaku says that he was targeting the museum as a military building, to “turn it off permanently.”

FBI officials and prosecutors said Melaku was on a personal terror mission. They said he researched jihadism on the Internet and had references to terrorism in a notebook and on his computer. It also seemed like he was gathering materials to make an improvised explosive device, though there was no indication how he would have used it.

Melaku wanted “to create fear and terror, which is what terrorists do,” said Dana Boente, first assistant U.S. Attorney in Alexandria.

Special Agent Jacqueline Maguire, of the FBI’s Washington Field Office, said it was fortunate authorities caught Melaku before anyone was injured. She said it appears Melaku acted alone....

When asked what he wanted to plead to the three counts included in his agreement, Melaku leaned forward to a microphone and said: “Uh, guilty, sir.”

Gregory English, Melaku’s defense lawyer, said after the hearing that Melaku’s family is of the Coptic Christian faith and that they were stunned to learn of his involvement in the crimes and the references to Islamic jihad. English said the shootings were out of character for Melaku, and he wonders whether his client suffers from a psychological problem, which he has asked the court to evaluate.

Or maybe he just converted to Islam, as appears abundantly to be the case.

English said Melaku thought that by shooting at the buildings he did, late at night, no one would get hurt. English said the video was intended for YouTube.

“As bad as it is, this is someone who essentially broke windows,” English said. “It’s vandalism. He has no link to terrorism. . . . He had a message, but I don’t understand what that message was supposed to be.”

He "essentially broke windows," but what if someone had been on the wrong end of the bullets he shot out of his Acura while shouting "Allahu akbar"? "He has no link to terrorism" -- i.e. they didn't find an Al-Qaeda membership card in his wallet. Researching "jihadism" and shouting "Allahu akbar" while shooting a gun out of a car window doesn't count in English's politically correct world.

This whole controversy is epitomized by the photo illustration and lead paragraph of the first New York Times story on this issue: "In Police Training, a Dark Film on U.S. Muslims," by Michael Powell, January 23. The photo shows the black flag of jihad flying above the White House, with the caption, "An Islamic flag atop the White House in 'The Third Jihad.'”

Then the lead paragraph says: "Ominous music plays as images appear on the screen: Muslim terrorists shoot Christians in the head, car bombs explode, executed children lie covered by sheets and a doctored photograph shows an Islamic flag flying over the White House."

Both the Times' use of the image and its reference to it at the beginning of the story suggest that the producers of The Third Jihad doctored the photo themselves in order to push their cockamamie idea that some Muslims want to "infiltrate and dominate America." But in reality, Muslims originated this image, as we have reported here several times. Here is a photo of Muslims holding up this photo at a rally in New York in February 2006:

And another:

Yet this whole controversy is predicated on the assumption that The Third Jihad is whipping up hysteria about a non-existent threat. In reality, it covers much the same ground that I cover in my book Stealth Jihad, in which I show that the agenda of infiltration and subversion on the part of the Muslim Brotherhood and its allied groups is very real.

In "An Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Brotherhood in North America," by Mohamed Akram, May 19, 1991, Muslim Brotherhood operatives in the U.S. are told that they "must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and "sabotaging" its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God's religion is made victorious over all other religions."

There are other indications as well:

"We reject the U.N., reject America, reject all law and order. Don't lobby Congress or protest because we don't recognize Congress. The only relationship you should have with America is to topple it. . . . Eventually there will be a Muslim in the White House dictating the laws of Shariah." -- Muhammad Faheed, Muslim Students Association meeting, Queensborough Community College, 2003

"Islam isn't in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant. The Koran should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on earth." -- Hamas-linked CAIR cofounder and longtime Board chairman Omar Ahmad, 1998 (denial noted and full story explained at link)

"I wouldn't want to create the impression that I wouldn't like the government of the United States to be Islamic sometime in the future." -- Hamas-linked CAIR spokesman Ibrahim "Honest Ibe" Hooper, 1993

"If only Muslims were clever politically, they could take over the United States and replace its constitutional government with a caliphate." -- prominent American Muslim leader Siraj Wahhaj, 2002

Yet the initial Times article and all the coverage that followed are based on the assumption that no Muslim in the U.S. believes or acts upon such ideas. None of the coverage deals with the possibility that the film might be accurate, and to what extent:

During that time, at least 1,489 police officers, from lieutenants to detectives to patrol officers, saw the film.

News that police trainers showed this film so extensively comes as the department wrestles with its relationship with the city’s large Muslim community. The Police Department offers no apology for aggressively spying on Muslim groups and says it has ferreted out terror plots.

But members of the City Council, civil rights advocates and Muslim leaders say the department, in its zeal, has trampled on civil rights, blurred lines between foreign and domestic spying and sown fear among Muslims.

“The department’s response was to deny it and to fight our request for information,” said Faiza Patel, a director at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School, which obtained the release of the documents through a Freedom of Information request. “The police have shown an explosive documentary to its officers and simply stonewalled us.”

Tom Robbins, a former columnist with The Village Voice, first revealed that the police had screened the film. The Brennan Center then filed its request.

Instead of investigating its accuracy, the Times, predictably, looks into who funded the film:

The 72-minute film was financed by the Clarion Fund, a nonprofit group whose board includes a former Central Intelligence Agency official and a deputy defense secretary for President Ronald Reagan. Its previous documentary attacking Muslims’ “war on the West” attracted support from the casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, a major supporter of Israel who has helped reshape the Republican presidential primary by pouring millions of dollars into a so-called super PAC that backs Newt Gingrich.

Commissioner Kelly is listed on the “Third Jihad” Web site as a “featured interviewee.” Paul J. Browne, the Police Department’s chief spokesman, wrote in an e-mail that filmmakers had lifted the clip from an old interview. The commissioner, Mr. Browne said, has not asked the filmmakers to remove him from its Web site, or to clarify that he had not cooperated with them....

Clarion’s financing is a puzzle. Its federal income tax forms show contributions, grants and revenues typically hover around $1 million annually — except in 2008, when it booked contributions of $18.3 million. That same year, Clarion produced “Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West.” The Clarion Fund used its surge in contributions to pay to distribute tens of millions of copies of this DVD in swing electoral states across the country in September 2008.

“The Third Jihad” is quite similar, in style and content, to that earlier film. Narrated by Zuhdi Jasser, a Muslim doctor and former American military officer in Arizona, “The Third Jihad” casts a broad shadow over American Muslims. Few Muslim leaders, it states, can be trusted.

“Americans are being told that many of the mainstream Muslim groups are also moderate,” Mr. Jasser states. “When in fact if you look a little closer, you’ll see a very different reality. One of their primary tactics is deception.”

Seeing as how most of them are listed as allied groups in that Muslim Brotherhood memorandum I linked above, this is an entirely reasonable statement.

Nonetheless, and again predictably, the Times is pressing on with its campaign, New York Mayor Bloomberg is in full retreat, and the Islamic supremacist thugs at Hamas-linked CAIR smell blood and are calling for the resignation of police commissioner Ray Kelly.

And so New York has taken a decisive step today toward outlawing the truth about jihad and Islamic supremacism, which only makes it more vulnerable to them.

What anti-Islam press? The mainstream media in both the U.K. and the U.S. has been for years and remains completely unwilling to discuss jihad and Islamic supremacism. When mainstream reporters are forced to report on jihad activity, they regularly ascribe it to other factors or obscure its motives. Thus we hear about "militants," "insurgents," and "youths" in connection with violent jihad activity, while being endlessly regaled with articles designed to intimidate people into thinking that concern about the stealth jihad and creeping Sharia is "Islamophobia."

This initiative is designed to shut down the last vestiges of truth-telling about jihad and Islamic supremacist in the British mainstream media. Note also that among the signers is not only once-fashionable Leftist Bianca Jagger, but Moazzam Begg, an apologist for Anwar al-Awlaki. That's right: the fox is demanding that the farmer stop his anti-fox activity of guarding the henhouse.

"We need an inquiry into anti-Islam press," from The Guardian, January 23 (thanks to Steven):

Over the past decade, a number of academic studies have indicated a worrying and disproportionate trend towards negative, distorted and even fabricated reports in media coverage of the Muslim community. Recent research at Cambridge University concludes that "a wider set of representations of Islam would signify a welcome change to reporting practices. Muslims deserve a better press than they have been given in the past decade." And according to a recent ComRes poll, one in three people in Britain today believe that the media is responsible for "whipping up a climate of fear of Islam in the UK".

The Leveson inquiry has so far failed to adequately address unfair media coverage as it relates to less prominent cases, including those relating to Muslims and Islam, focusing as it does on the impact of phone hacking on celebrities and other high-profile individuals.

An alternative inquiry is necessary to investigate what many regard as widespread and systematic discriminatory practices in reporting on Muslims and Islam in the British media. Victims – whether prominent or not – of alleged discriminatory media coverage have a right to have their testimonies catalogued and examined thoroughly by credible, independent assessors. Recommendations can then be made to improve ethical standards in the reporting of not solely the Muslim community but of all sections of society.

Imran Khan Human rights solicitor
Bianca Jagger Chair, Bianca Jagger Human Rights Foundation
Michael Rosen Writer
Jeremy Corbyn MP
Jemima Khan
Navnit Dholakia Deputy leader, Liberal Democrats, House of Lords
Mohamed Ali Harrath Islam Channel
Hajj Ahmad Thomson Barrister
Jenny Jones Assembly member (Green), London Assembly
Andrew Boff Assembly member (Conservative), London Assembly
Rabbi Janet Burden
Walter Wolfgang
Hugh Lanning Chair, Palestine Solidarity Campaign
Sanum Ghafoor, blogger
Jean Lambert, MEP, London
Peter Murray Former president, NUJ
Dr Muhammad Abdul Bari Chair, East London Mosque
Dr Omer El-Hamdoon Muslim Association of Britain
Massoud Shadjareh Islamic Human Rights Commission
Sunny Hundal Liberal Conspiracy
Ahmed J Versi The Muslim News
John Rees Counterfire
Vivien Lichtenstein
Anas Altikriti Cordoba Foundation
Miriam Margolyes
Farooq Murad Muslim Council of Britain
Sarah Colborne Director, Palestine Solidarity Campaign
Dr Daud Abdullah Middle East Monitor
Moazzam Begg Cageprisoners
Phil Rees Out of Office Films
Nabil Ahmed Federation of Student Islamic Societies
Abdullah Faliq Islamic Forum of Europe
Rabbi Jeffrey Newman
Cllr Larry Sanders Oxfordshire county council
Diana Neslen
Shemiza Rashid Director, The Creative Muslim Network
Na'ima B Roberts Editor, Sisters Magazine
Asa Winstanley The Electronic Intifada
Richard Peppiatt Writer and former tabloid reporter
Shazia Arshad Human rights campaigner
Myriam Francois Cerrah Activist
Murtaza Shibli Journalist and author
Lindsey German Stop The War Coalition
Murad Qureshi Assembly member, London Assembly
Cat Smith Chair, Next Generation Labour (pc)
Robert Pitt Islamophobia Watch
Dr Alana Lentin University of Sussex
Robin Richardson Insted Consultancy
Cat Boyd Coalition of Resistance Glasgow
Baroness Pola Uddin
Sean Rillo Raczka University of London Union
Chris Nineham Enough Coalition Against Islamophobia
Mark McDonald Barrister
Dan Poulton Journalist
Yasmin Khatun Producer
Frances Legg Producer
Chris Bambery Journalist
Sadiya Chowdhury Journalist
Supporters of the The Alternative Leveson inquiry

As I've written before about Reza Aslan, one of the most unfortunate aspects of the politically correct straitjacket that binds contemporary public discourse is that deceitful mediocrities and intellectual flotsam and jetsam who aren't capable of independent thought or of defending their own positions except with lies and scorn, are lauded and lionized by the clueless and compromised elites, solely because they parrot currently fashionable opinions.

This applies in spades to Omid Safi, a professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Safi published a hot, steaming pile of Islamic dawah in the Huffington Post yesterday -- does the HuffPo publish wit and wisdom from Jewish or Christian apologists singing the glories of their religions? In it, he writes this:

If we look at a fellow human being, and only imagine the worst case scenario -- that the human in front of us "might cause mischief" -- we are imitating the manners of the Quranic angels. If we look at a fellow human being, and assert our own superiority over them, we are following the manners of Satan. It was Satan that looked at the human being and said: "I am better than this!"

I couldn't help but smile as I recalled Omid's self-important, pompous, arrogant mien in our exchange a few years back -- and his libelous claim about me: "He is a hateful man, who has personally threatened me and my family with death. These are not people who are interested in serious scholarly debate."

The irony is thick: when I invited him to debate, he responded with scorn. Then he falsely claimed I had threatened him with death while saying that I was "a hateful man." I beg to differ, Omid: what is hateful is falsely claiming that someone has committed a felony and refusing to retract when challenged.

Following the manners of Satan, eh, Omid?

Anyway, Safi is just another example of the many odious mediocrities who are accorded respect and given university positions solely because they hold the accepted politically correct opinions, not because they have any intellectual capabilities or, in Safi's case, any regard for ethics or honesty whatsoever.

YouTube manifests yet again the Leftist/Islamic supremacist hatred of free speech and of shedding light on jihadists' true genocidal intentions, as well as the common tendency to blame not jihadists for their hateful rhetoric, but instead those who report on that rhetoric.

An update on this story. "YouTube freezes PMW account again," from Palestinian Media Watch, January 16:

In response to yesterday's PMW video-bulletin which showed the PA Mufti's speech that Muslims' destiny is to kill Jews, YouTube has frozen PMW's account. All PMW videos are working except this one but the account is frozen and PMW cannot upload new videos for the next two weeks.

We have uploaded the video to a different server and it can now again be viewed from PMW's website.

The video that YouTube is calling "inappropriate" exposed the Palestinian Authority Mufti citing the Islamic tradition (Hadith) that anticipates Muslims' killing Jews as a precursor to the Hour of Resurrection. The Jews are also called the "descendants of the apes and pigs" by a Fatah moderator at the event. The following is the text of the video.

Moderator at Fatah ceremony:
"Our war with the descendants of the apes and pigs (i.e., Jews)
is a war of religion and faith.
Long Live Fatah! [I invite you,] our honorable Sheikh."

PA Mufti Muhammad Hussein comes to the podium and says:
"47 years ago the [Fatah] revolution started. Which revolution? The modern revolution of the Palestinian people's history. In fact, Palestine in its entirety is a revolution, since [Caliph] Umar came [to conquer Jerusalem, 637 CE], and continuing today, and until the End of Days. The reliable Hadith (tradition attributed to Muhammad), [found] in the two reliable collections, Bukhari and Muslim, says:
"The Hour [of Resurrection] will not come until you fight the Jews.
The Jew will hide behind stones or trees.
Then the stones or trees will call:
'Oh Muslim, servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.'
Except the Gharqad tree [which will keep silent]."
Therefore it is no wonder that you see Gharqad [trees]
surrounding the [Israeli] settlements and colonies.."
[PA TV (Fatah), Jan. 9, 2012]

I posted this video, a parody of A Charlie Brown Christmas in which Charlie Brown converts to Islam and becomes a jihadist, here at Jihad Watch on October 29, 2006. It had been posted at YouTube on April 17, 2006. So it is at least five and a half years old, and probably older.

But Gothamist just noticed it, and featured it December 24 in a post entitled "Video: Charlie Brown Converts To Islam In Xenophobic Peanuts Parody." The title says the video is "xenophobic"; the commenters, inevitably, call it "racist." So apparently it is both of those things and more to poke fun at jihadists, and to make even the most comically innocuous recognition of the fact, abundantly documented here day in and day out, year in and year out, that some of the people who convert to Islam end up being violent jihadists.

Xenophobic to oppose jihad. We should instead be welcoming of Islamic supremacists who want to kill, convert or subjugate us. To resist them would be racist. That's the Gothamist's take. And that of many others as well, of course.

In order to deflect attention away from jihad activity and try to portray Muslims as victims, so as to shame non-Muslims into not investigating or even being suspicious of further jihad activity, Hamas-linked CAIR and other Muslims have not hesitated to fabricate "hate crimes." CAIR and other groups like it want and need hate crimes against Muslims, because they can use them for political points and as weapons to intimidate people into remaining silent about the jihad threat.

Also, so avid are some Muslims to discredit me and obscure the truths I tell that they were even prepared to blame me for a murder in New Jersey that turned out to be a love triangle that the killer tried to frame as an anti-Muslim hate crime.

Impervious to shame, the Anti-Muslim Hate Crime industry keeps churning out spurious product. In this case it was a HuffPo Leftist pseudo-journalist who was trumpeting the fake hate crime: "Another Huffington Post Hate Crime Fizzles (Aisha Khan Found Safe)," by David Wood at Answering Muslims, December 22:

[...] In a recent Huffington Post article about Islamophobia and the Lowe's controversy, Daniel Tutt drew his readers' attention to two vicious hate crimes against Muslims--clear proof that Islamophobia is rampant and spreading:

In the background of this grassroots work, two tragic events have taken place, which reveal the real world "human impact" of Islamophobia. In Kansas City, a young Muslim college student, Aisha Khan has gone missing after complaining to her family of a drunken man harassing her. In Houston, Texas a Muslim man named Yaqub Bham was severely beaten in what family members are calling a hate crime. These events show the urgency of the problem at hand.

What evidence did Tutt have to support his claims? A Muslim student went missing after a drunken man harassed her. Tutt sees this as clear proof that Khan was abducted by anti-Muslim bigots (probably those who regularly visit Jihad Watch and Atlas Shrugs). And a Muslim man's family is calling an attack a "hate crime." Tutt doesn't bother questioning his assessment at all.

Now for the reality check. Aisha Khan wasn't abducted at all. ABC News reported this morning:

Aisha Khan, the 19-year-old Kansas college student missing for nearly a week has been found safe and unharmed, according to ABC News' Kansas City affiliate KMBC.

Overland Park Police Officer Brian Schnavel said that Khan was not abducted or held against her will, according to KMBC.

Schnavel said no criminal act occurred.

Will Tutt apologize for falsely accusing Americans of a hate crime against a Muslim girl? We can only hope.

Hope all you like, David, but "journalists" like Tutt have no sense of accountability or responsibility. They behave this way all the time, and never backtrack or apologize.

As for Tutt's other example of Islamophobia, the evidence isn't in yet. However, based on the reports so far, the man who committed the attack seems to be insane....

Read it all.

In FrontPage this morning I discuss the astonishing credulity of New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof:

Ace New York Times pundit Nicholas Kristof recently had dinner in the Cairo home of some Muslim Brotherhood members, and he had a wonderful time. And from this experience, there is something he wants you and the world to know: Muslim Brotherhood rule in Egypt, and the Brotherhood in general, is nothing to be concerned about.

Kristof’s touchingly naïve and ignorant column raises the question once again of how such an uninformed and easily misled analyst could enjoy so much respect among the nation’s intellectual elites – and the answer, as with all such mediocrities, is that they retail politically correct opinions, and so rise to the top regardless of the poor quality of their work. In this case, Kristof is pushing the theme that the Muslim Brotherhood is “moderate” – an idea in fashion today in the mainstream media, however ridiculous it may be.

Kristof marvels that his hostess, a 24-year-old woman named Sondos Asem, “speaks perfect English, is writing a master’s thesis on social media, and helps run the Brotherhood’s English-language Twitter feed, @Ikhwanweb.” Kristof warns that “the Brotherhood is far more complex than the caricature that scares many Americans” – but does he really think that because the Brotherhood employs a young woman who speaks perfect English and works in social media that somehow they don’t intend to impose the oppressive aspects of Sharia upon Egypt?

Sondos Asem specifically denies that the Brotherhood will do so regarding Sharia’s oppression of women: “It’s a big misconception that the Muslim Brotherhood marginalizes women. Fifty percent of the Brotherhood are women.” She dismisses the suggestion that the Brotherhood might bring Sharia laws regarding women to Egypt, making it resemble Saudi Arabia, Iran or Afghanistan. Egypt, she says, is “religiously very moderate,” and hence much more likely to follow Turkey’s model.

Unfortunately for Asem, and Kristof, Turkey is not presently a Sharia state, although Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is doing all he can to change that. Its religious moderation is not the product of a different model of Sharia from that implemented in Saudi Arabia and Iran, but from no Sharia at all. If Egypt adopts Sharia, as the Muslim Brotherhood wishes it to do, the only Sharia model available to it are those of Saudi Arabia and Iran, which implement classic provisions of Islamic law’s treatment of women that have been in place for centuries and are not disputed in any significant way by any sect or school of Islamic law.

Asem also assured Kristof that the Brotherhood would not change the status of the Camp David accords with Israel and maintain friendly relations with the U.S. Here again, Kristof swallowed it all, in defiance of the available evidence. Mahmoud Hussein, the Brotherhood’s secretary-general, recently said that the peace treaty with Israel would have to be reexamined: “A long time has passed since the Camp David accord was signed, and like the other agreements it needs to be reviewed, and this is in the hands of the parliament.” And when Eric Trager of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy visited the headquarters of newly elected Muslim Brotherhood MP Saber Abouel Fotouh, he found on the wall a banner celebrating a protest the Brotherhood had sponsored “outside the local ‘Zionist consulate,’ complete with an image of a burning Israeli flag.

There is more.

We have noted here many times how non-Muslim mainstream media news stories refer to the prophet of Islam as "the prophet Muhammad," as if it were universally accepted that he was in fact a prophet. A Jihad Watch reader recently wrote to the UK's "conservative" Telegraph to ask them why they continued this usage to an audience made up largely of non-Muslims, and this is what he received in response:

13 December 2011

Dear Mr xxxxxx,

My apologies for the delay in responding to you.

Please see below a link to our Style Guide and our explanation on the use of Mohammed.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/topics/about-us/style-book/1435319/Telegraph-style-book-Mm.html

Mohammed is the Prophet, and use in all other contexts unless a variant is established in a personal name.

I hope this how be of some use to you.

Yours sincerely,

Andy King
Editorial Information Executive

Apparently the Telegraph has indeed decided that we're all Muslims now. "Andy" King better adopt an Arabic name forthwith.

It was so good to see that some people are not fooled by the relentless hate propaganda that the Leftist media and the Islamic supremacists constantly pump out. "LETTER: The DNJ, Sbenaty loose with facts in attacking conference speakers," by Jerry Leith in DNJ.com, December 4:

Referencing your story of Nov. 1, Madison church to host anti-Shariah Conference: Bigotry (intolerance, prejudice) seems to be a two-way street.

Saleh Sbenaty in his remarks to Scott Broden of The DNJ says this country is "founded on equality. It's not founded on bigotry." So, apparently bigotry is OK if it shuts down speeches by Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer. Professor Sbenaty points to a rambling 1,500 page manifesto by a fascist plagiarist (think Unabomber) of questionable sanity who "mentioned" Geller and Spencer as his proof that they engage in "hate speech." Breivik "mentioned" lots of people, including Vladimir Putin whom he admired.

If the professor can quote a single statement from either Geller or Spencer that he believes would incite or inspire anyone to murder 93 people, I want to see that quote.

Sbenaty should not be given a free pass by The DNJ on everything he opines. "The truth has no agenda."

Only a few days later, The DNJ Editorial Board joined Professor Sbenaty in accusing Geller and Spencer of the very same "bigotry" and "hate speech."

Now for the update reported by the BBC amongst others: Anders Breivik has been found to have been INSANE at the time of the Norway terror attacks and suffers from paranoid schizophrenia. According to psychiatrists Torgeir Husby and Synne Sorheim, Breivik lived in his "own delusional universe where all his thoughts and acts are guided by his delusions." Public prosecutor Svein Holden said concerning Breivik, "He believes he is chosen to decide who is to live and who is to die."

If anyone really believes that a passing comment in a 1,500-word essay is the cause of this man's insanity, then they probably believe that all Norwegian psychiatrists are engaged in a plot to spread "bigotry" (the new favorite accusation of Islam and the Left) and "hate speech."

The DNJ and professor Sbenaty have their opinions, but I wonder if their opinion will change in the face of this new information. I would hope so and I would hope we will soon hear the last of "bigotry" flung about with no thought as to the impact or accuracy of the word. My opinion is that The DNJ and the professor need to have some facts at their disposal before firing off false accusations disguised as "opinion."

I invite the professor and The DNJ to show me how Geller and Spencer could possibly be considered as a source of this tragedy when they do not and never have advocated for violence. Facts are such irritating things at times.

Jerry Leith

Joben Drive

UPDATE: Mr. Leith has kindly contacted me and sent me the full text of the letter he sent to DNJ.com. For reasons that I am sure you will find absolutely unfathomable, the editors of that august publication excised these paragraphs from the version they published:

On November 1, 2011 I wrote to the DNJ in response to a news story about the Conference held at Cornerstone Church in Madison. On November 2 a very nice lady at the DNJ called to confirm that I had sent the letter, as is normal practice. When my letter had not been published by November 15th, I called Jimmy Hart to ask why it had not appeared. His response was that he did not find it and that “we had some computer problems around that time and it was probably lost.” Mr. Hart and I then had some e-mail exchanges, and I had decided not to have the letter published, because too much time had passed. However, the news of the day on November 29 has changed my mind. Here is the letter with an update following. I sincerely hope this one does not get “lost.”

Here is a statement the professor is familiar with that might provoke violence:
Quran 8:12 And the Lord said to the angels: “I am with you; go and strengthen the faithful. I shall fill the hearts of the infidels with terror. So smite them on their necks and every joint, (and incapacitate them).” Quran translation Ahmed Ali, 1984. Whatever context you assign to this, it is inciting the faithful to do violence.

I would have used the ICM website version of the Quran but it has been unavailable for at least the past two months. The same with the Hadith search function, which has disappeared completely.

"The [mainstream media] is guilty in two senses for not covering the pervasiveness of this grotesque hatred. They not only reported Palestinian lethal narratives bordering on blood libels as news, they did not report the hatreds that inspired such narratives."

More on that elephant in the room: the antisemitism that the Arab Spring has helped bring to the surface, while politically correct fantasies and "the soft bigotry of low expectations" lead many to turn a blind eye to it. "Muslim anti-Semitism, Israel and the dynamics of self-destructive scapegoating," by Richard Landes for the Telegraph, December 1 (thanks to Zulu):

One of my daughters recently wrote to me: “I was speaking to a friend of mine who had been dating a very, very, anti-Israel activist for about a year. We don't usually broach the topic but she asked me if most of the Muslim anti-Semitism in Europe wasn't based on their dislike of what is going on in Israel and not so much on religion.” This is a widely held belief among not only anti-Zionists, but among liberals in general. It takes a number of forms, all of which serve to explain the explosive and virulent hatreds of the Muslim world for Israel and the Jews (who support it), as a function of the evil that Israel has done to the Palestinians. It includes the widely held assumption that suicide bombings were a response to the despair that Palestinians felt because Israel denied them independence and dignity. It is also directly related to the problem of “Islamophobia is the new Anti-Semitism,” in which speaking of Muslim anti-Semitism becomes a new form of anti-Semitism.

The argument, of course, can work inversely: Palestinian anti-Semites have produced icons of hatred that, through modern media, have spread the virus throughout the Muslim world. The violence that Israel does against the Palestinians, from targeted killings to the separation barrier, to the blockade of Gaza, responds to Palestinian attacks inspired by anti-Semitic propaganda.

Because the Western mainstream news media (MSNM) has mainstreamed some of this propaganda, many people, including my daughter’s friend – whose only data points are the TV images of terrible violence Israelis do to Palestinians, and TV images of Palestinian hatred – assume that the hatreds are at least in part justified. “No wonder French Muslims hate you,” the French would say to their Jewish co-citoyens, “look at what your brethren in Israel do to their cousins in Palestine.”

Of course such an attitude has to ignore the fact that the Israelis do a fraction of the violence to Palestinians that Arab leaders do towards their own people with far less provocation. To “grant” the Palestinians and other Muslims “permission” to hate the Jews “given what Israel does to them,” reveals unthinking racism: “I don’t really expect anything remotely rational or balanced from these folks. If you piss them off, you deserve their rage.”

The MSM is guilty in two senses for not covering the pervasiveness of this grotesque hatred. They not only reported Palestinian lethal narratives bordering on blood libels as news, they did not report the hatreds that inspired such narratives. In the summer of 2000, the PA was blasting hatred of Israel. If the MSNM were surprised by Arafat’s “no” at Camp David, it’s because they ignored what he and his friends were saying in Arabic. On the contrary, driven by a belief that peace was around the corner, they felt that dwelling on such bad news would queer the peace process.

Nor did the Oslo war make a difference. Sheikh Halabiya gave a sermon calling on Muslims to slaughter the Jews (NB: Jews, not Israelis) everywhere. William Orme wrote a piece on Palestinian incitement in which he quoted Halabiya saying: “Labor, Likud, they’re all Jews.”

As a result, the ferocious strain of anti-Semitism in Palestinian irredentism, from the Mufti – who visited Hitler in Berlin 70 years ago today, discussed his contribution to the “final solution,” and pumped the Arab world with Nazi propaganda – to the escaped Nazis who fled to Egypt and Syria to continue their work, to Arafat and his pseudo-secular patter of “national liberation,” to Hamas’ apocalyptic paranoia, has gone largely undocumented and unknown to the average observer of the Middle East conflict. Nor is this merely a quirk of journalism, but a widespread practice of the “post-colonial” field of Middle East studies in the wake of Edward Said’s masterpiece of cognitive warfare forbidding Westerners from “othering” Muslims.

And yet, what are we to make of crowds rallied by the Obama administration-designated, "moderate" Muslim Brotherhood chant, "One day we will kill all Jews"? Since 2000, Arab and Muslim news media have been awash with gory video depictions of the Elders of Zion carrying out their blood sacrifices of innocent Muslim youth. Specialists disagree over whether this is primarily an import from the worst of European hate-mongering, especially the Nazis, or an indigenous growth with roots in the Koran. European anti-Zionists may like their fantasy that their attitude is not anti-Semitic, but in the case of the Arab and Muslim world, the slide from opposing Israel to ranting about "al Yahud" everywhere is effortless.

Given the power of genocidal anti-Semitic sentiments in the Arab and Muslim world – press and TV, mosques, public officials – one might wonder why Western audiences know so little about it. It’s more than just the powerful intimidation that pervades journalism in the Palestinian territories, so visible in the Ramallah lynch affair. It’s also related to a particularly dangerous form of political correctness, in which speaking badly of Muslims is the new form of anti-Semitism. As a Parisian colleague insisted, “The experience of the Muslims in Europe today is exactly the same as the Jews a century ago.” Of course, that’s not the case at all: both in terms of the wildly different behavior of the two minorities, and in terms of how the European elites reacted to their presence. By that logic, however, any attack on Islam is immediately comparable to an attack on Jews a century ago. [...]

Anti-Semitism is everyone’s problem, especially the Muslims'. And the sooner the “progressives” who want to help them, stop feeding their anti-Semitic vulnerabilities by joining them in demonising Israel, and help them learn some self-criticism, the sooner we are likely to see a real Arab Spring, one that benevolent people the world over can sincerely cheer.

It's inevitable: every time there is a jihad plot, the mainstream media trots out its template for stories like this one: shocked (shocked!) neighbors explain that the accused was a decent fellow, the local mosque says that they hardly knew the guy, others explain that he wasn't really all that much of a Muslim (despite abundant evidence to the contrary in this case), and Muslims wring their hands about "Islamophobia" and an impending backlash against innocent Muslims that never ever actually materializes.

And so here we go again.

"Shock, Anguish Uptown as Neighborhood Reacts to Terrorism Arrest," by Lucy Pawle for The Uptowner, November 21:

[...] Harlem and Washington Heights neighbors who knew Pimentel, reportedly under police surveillance since 2009, said he spent his days sitting alone outside the apartment building, smoking cigarettes.

“He seemed nice,” said Simon Islam, 36, who moved into the building five months ago with his wife and daughters. “He used to talk to everyone when they came in and out the building, but he was very quiet. He just used to smoke,” Islam said.

Juan Rey, whose mother lives in the building, described Pimentel as “a nice guy who used to open the door for people when they were carrying their groceries.”

David Rodriguez, who’d known Pimentel for a year, said he “never saw the look of terrorism in him.” Expressing astonishment at the arrest, he said Pimentel “could have blown the whole building up and no one would have known“ that he was the bomber. “His own grandmother wouldn’t know.” He described Pimentel as a regular guy in sweatpants and sweaters. “I never saw him praying; he wore regular clothes,” Rodriguez said. “I just can’t believe it.”

Pimentel sometimes welcomed Islam with “As-Salamu Alaykum” – a traditional Muslim greeting – and had explained to him how he’d converted to Islam from Catholicism. “He said he converted six or seven years ago,” Islam said. “Once I was drinking here with friends and cousins, and he pointed and said, ‘No, no. It’s not good.’”

But around the corner at Nadal1Deli, employee Mohammed “Alex” Alohdd pointed out that Pimentel didn’t fast during Ramadan. “He called himself a Muslim, but he wasn’t a proper Muslim,” Alohddi said. “I’ve known him for three years but I didn’t like him that much. I just didn’t feel good with him. He used to ask people outside for cigarettes.”

At the Islamic Cultural Center of New York on East 96th Street, where Pimentel visited, according to his mother, Imam Omar Abu Namous echoed Aloddi’s sentiments. “These circumstances, that he used to come to this mosque, are only coincidences, and have no relationship whatsoever with his activities,” the imam said. He hadn’t heard of the arrest and didn’t recognize Pimentel’s name, but said that if Pimentel had confided in a fellow parishioner, “they would have informed me and I would have informed the government.”

Emphasizing his opposition to fundamentalist ideology, the imam described the Islamic Cultural Center as fostering peace. He worried that Pimentel’s arrest would spark Islamophobia. “People have a deep misunderstanding about Islam,” Abu Namous....

Indeed. Including, apparently, Pimentel (Muhammad Yusuf) himself. But Lucy Pawle did not think to ask Abu Namous what he was doing to make sure others in his mosque didn't misunderstand Islam in the same way that Muhammad Yusuf did. Such a question would have been "Islamophobic."

He had a website called "True Islam" containing extensive information about Islamic teachings on jihad warfare and related matters. He wrote there:

I created this Blog in order to help people learn about the Religion of Islam, and to help clarify many issues within the Religion of Islam that many people might have a hard time understanding. My goal is to explain Islam and many topics dealing with Islam as clearly and easy to understand as possible for non muslims who want to learn about the religion. I will also provide as much evidence as possible, from muslim sources and non muslim sources in order so that the readers can feel more secure about the information provided in this Blog. I will touch on topics such as Islam, The Prophet Muhammad(PBUH), Jihad and Terrorism, Muslim Men and Women, Islamic Countries, Politics in Islam, The Life of this World, and The Afterlife. As far as Muslims who will visit my blog God Willing this blog will help you learn the Religion better and will acquaint you with the trustworthy sources where one should seek knowledge from.

So why are New York officials trying to portray him as a partyboy with only a glancing interest in Islam? Why do authorities always do something like this, whenever there is a jihad plot or attack? Why did the official U.S. government report on Nidal Hasan, a mass murderer who shouted "Allahu akbar" as he murdered, and who passed out Qur'ans on the morning of his murders, and who had raised alarm bells among his coworkers for years because of his jihadist sentiments, never mention Islam or jihad?

"Alleged 'Lone Wolf' Arrested in New York on Terror Charges," by Richard Esposito and Mark Schone for ABC News, November 21 (thanks to Nelson):

A Muslim convert arrested for allegedly making bombs in New York City was inspired by radical cleric Anwar Awlaki and was allegedly plotting to attack U.S. servicemen and police officers, according to officials.

A five-count criminal complaint against Jose Pimentel of Washington Heights says that Pimentel planned "to build a bomb and use a bomb to assassinate U.S. servicemen and women returning from active duty in Iraq and Afghanistan."

New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg said during a press conference this evening that Pimentel, an unemployed loner who lives with his mother, also wanted to kill police officers, and called him a "27-year-old al Qaeda sympathizer."

"We had to act quickly," New York police commissioner Ray Kelly said, "because he was in fact putting this bomb together." [...]

An American citizen, Pimentel was born in the Dominican Republic and came to the United States at age eight. After converting to Islam, he went by the name Muhammed Yusef.

Pimentel spent much of his time on the Internet, according to sources, and maintained a radical website called TrueIslam1. The website contains a link to the bomb-making article in "Inspire."

Pimentel first came to the attention of authorities in May 2009, when he was living in Schenectady, N.Y. He returned to New York City in January 2010. Authorities say they have been tailing him for more than a year.

He has a prior arrest for criminal possession of stolen property.

Pimentel rarely left his home, authorities said, except to buy coffee and cigarettes -- one cigarette at a time, when he couldn't afford a pack -- and to smoke. His mother did not let him smoke in the apartment.

He also smoked marijuana and drank, according to authorities, and only attended Muslim religious services infrequently.

In Human Events this morning I discuss the firebombing of the Charlie Hebdo offices and its dhimmi aftermath:

[...] Yet already there are calls for free people to surrender. Calls for self-censorship and greater “sensitivity” toward Muslims have already begun. Bruce Crumley wrote in Time magazine in the wake of the bombing that “it’s obvious free societies cannot simply give in to hysterical demands made by members of any beyond-the-pale group,” and that “intimidation and violence must be condemned and combated for whatever reason they’re committed,” but that “it’s just as evident members of those same free societies have to exercise a minimum of intelligence, calculation, civility and decency in practicing their rights and liberties—and that isn’t happening when a newspaper decides to mock an entire faith on the logic that it can claim to make a politically noble statement by gratuitously pissing people off.”

Certainly a decent person doesn’t go around gratuitously angering people. But when it comes to censorship or even legislation, who is to decide what angers people gratuitously? The people in power, of course. Time is essentially calling for restrictions on the freedom of speech and the creation of a special, privileged class that is beyond criticism. That is the death of free society and the road to tyranny, for the class that is beyond criticism will have a free hand to do whatever it wants, and what will anyone be able to say?

Unfortunately absent from the public square are the voices telling the Muslim community in Paris, and Muslims all over the West, to grow up, and to stop reacting with firebombs and threats and murder to everything that offends them. The fact that it is virtually certain that such voices will be less numerous than those calling for “sensitivity” in the face of violent intimidation and thuggery is as good an indication as any that Western society is desperately ill, and that when it comes to Islam, leaders on both sides of the Atlantic have lost all sense of perspective. Before they regain it, we are certain to be in for some very rough days ahead—days that will make the firebombing of Charlie Hebdo look like a gesture of mild disapproval.

Crumley, of course, like so many other enlightened liberals, camouflages his slouch toward totalitarianism in the guise of “sensitivity” and resistance to “Islamophobia.” The gaping hole in his argument, however, is that he is making it after Muslims reacted violently to satire. Judaism and Christianity are lampooned on a regular basis, but Bruce Crumley never lifted a finger to call for “sensitivity” toward the religious feelings of others when Piss Christ was being displayed as a serious work of art. So Time’s argument boils down to saying that we should capitulate in the face of violent intimidation. This is not really about being sensitive at all. It is about doing what the thugs want so they won’t hurt us again.

I’d rather die first.

There is more.

UPDATE: Islamic supremacist tool and hard-Left pseudo-journalist Bob Smietana has written me repeatedly this morning, insisting that he did not feed Hamas-linked CAIR his story beforehand. Suggesting otherwise is the fact that both Pamela Geller and I received the CAIR email and clicked on the Tennessean link and found it non-working, only to start working when the story went live later. But I'll give Smietana the benefit of the doubt that he has never given to freedom fighters: maybe it was a computer glitch. What a magnificent coincidence that it would be a computer glitch suggesting that he was feeding CAIR info when he has been such a CAIR stooge in the past, but still -- it's possible!

---------------------------------

I had been scheduled to appear in Nashville at the Preserving Freedom Conference on November 11, but the conference was canceled as the Hutton Hotel caved in to Islamic supremacist threats. A different event has been scheduled at a local church.

Yesterday the notoriously pro-jihad, anti-freedom "journalist" Bob Smietana of Nashville's The Tennessean newspaper contacted me for comment, and then published two marginally accurate articles about the cancellation of the conference. Tellingly, Hamas-linked CAIR included his first article in their daily email before the link to it was even live -- indicating how close Smietana is to the enemies of freedom. For some reason, both of his articles have now been taken down from The Tennessean's website.

Smietana asked me if I was going to speak at the new conference; I answered: "Bob, I have been invited to speak at the new conference. At this time, my main concern is stopping the Leftist/Islamic supremacist campaign to demonize and marginalize our efforts on behalf of human rights. The Hutton Hotel canceled the Preserving Freedom Conference under pressure from enemies of human rights and the freedom of speech. I am determined to deny them final victory, and to continue to present my message in the public arena."

And that is what is key here. I am happy to speak at churches and do so regularly; however, in this case a conference in a public space has been driven out of that space by jihadist intimidation and thuggery, and I am not going to acquiesce to that. Please continue to contact the Hutton Hotel and Amerimar Enterprises to voice, politely and courteously, your disapproval of their capitulation to the enemies of freedom.

Also, please boycott Amerimar hotels. Florida Family has sent out this press release:

Amerimar Enterprise hotel sides with Islamic extremists, cancels Preserving Freedom Conference designed to combat Sharia law.

Amerimar Enterprise has chosen to side with Islamic extremists who want the United States to be ruled by Sharia law over patriotic Americans who want to preserve freedom.

Amerimar Enterprise hotel cancels pro-American, pro-Family groups’ Preserving Freedom Conference designed to combat Sharia law. Amerimar Enterprise sides with Islamic extremists.

Several national pro-America, pro-Family groups including Pamela Geller’s Atlas Shrugs (Stop Islamization of America), Matt Staver’s Liberty Counsel, Robert Spencer’s Jihad Watch and Sharia Awareness Action Network organized a national conference for November 11, 2011. The purpose of the conference is to educate leaders and citizens from across the country on what they can do to stop the advancement of Sharia law within the United States. The Preserving Freedom Conference organizers signed contracts with the Hutton Hotel for the two day event. Hutton Hotel is one of thirteen hotels operated by Amerimar Enterprise.

However, Islamic activists protested by placing extreme pressure on Hutton Hotel management officials to cancel the event. Hutton chose to side with these Islamic, Sharia for America advocates by cancelling the event long planned by many pro-American, pro-Family organizations. Matt Staver, Liberty Counsel President wrote a demand letter to Amerimar Enterprise. Click here to read the demand letter.

Shariafreeusa.org wrote: “This situation demonstrates more clearly than ever why this conference is required. It is required not only to educate American citizens, but to strategically plan ways that will prevent the implementation of Sharia Law in the United States. One segment of the Islamists’ implementation strategy is to silence any critical analysis of Sharia Law. The breaking of our contract by Amerimar Enterprises is a poignant example of their strategy at work.”

Amerimar Enterprise has chosen to side with Islamic extremists who want the United States to be ruled by Sharia law over patriotic Americans who want to preserve freedom.

This company's actions must be countered or similar situations will become a common occurrence. Please send your email to Amerimar officials and please note the hotels they own.

Florida Family Association has prepared an email for you to send to the CEO and other officials at Amerimar Enterprise regarding their decision to side with Islamic extremists.

To send your email, please click the following link, enter your name and email address then click the "Send Your Message" button. You may change the wording in the subject line or message.

Click here to send your email to the CEO and other officials at Amerimar Enterprise regarding their decision to side with Islamic extremists.

Amerimar Enterprise owns the following thirteen hotels. Please consider patronizing other hotels when visiting these cities.

150 East Huron - Chicago, Illinois
Doubletree Club Hotel - Harrisburg, Pennsylvania
Four Points by Sheraton - Meriden, Connecticut
Georgetown Inn - Washington, DC
Holiday Inn Select - Bucks County, Pennsylvania
Hotel Derek - Houston, Texas
Howard Johnson / Days Inn - Las Vegas
The Hutton Hotel - Nashville, Tennessee
St. Ermin's Hotel - London, United Kingdom
The Hotel George - Washington, DC
The Sheraton Atlanta - Atlanta, Georgia
Washington Marriott - Washington, DC
Westin Governor Morris - Morristown, New Jersey

Click here to read more about the Preserving Freedom Conference.

Contact information:

Gerald Marshall, Chairman, President and CEO
Jon Cummins, Co-owner and COO
Stephen Gleason, Co-owner and EVP
Stephen Eckley, SVP of Hotels

Main Office:
210 West Rittenhouse Square
Suite 1900
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19103
Phone: 215-893-6000 Fax: 215-893-6060

Regional Offices:
The Timekeeper Building
307 E. 53rd. St., Suite 500
New York, New York 10022
Phone: 212-317-1800 Fax: 212-317-1882

Please forward this article to inform family and friends regarding this issue which threatens traditional American values.

Pamela Geller has more here.

Shock horror! Imagine: the mainstream media whitewashing the jihadist views of an Islamic supremacist leader! It's unprecedented! Shocking beyond measure! "Media Whitewash Ghannouchi's Radical Islamist Views," from IPT News, October 31:

A recurring media theme in recent days is that Rachid al-Ghannouchi and his Ennahda Party, which won last week's Tunisian elections, are "moderate" Islamists despite considerable evidence to the contrary.

A few notable voices in the conservative blogosphere like Martin Kramer, Melanie Phillips and Raymond Ibrahim pointed out problems with this argument, including Ghannouchi's endorsement of jihad in Gaza, stating that "Gaza, like Hanoi in the '60s and Cuba and Algeria, is the model of freedom today." Ghannouchi has expressed support for suicide bombings and welcomes the destruction of Israel, which he predicts could "disappear" by 2027.

"There is no such thing as 'moderate Islamism,'" Phillips wrote. "It's as absurd as saying there were moderate and extreme Stalinists, or moderate and extreme Nazis, or moderate and extreme proponents of the Spanish Inquisition. You cannot have moderate fanatics."

That message apparently hasn't reached some U.S. media and political elites. Before and after Tunisia's election, news outlets provided a steady stream of stories portraying the group as moderate and committed to democracy.

Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-CT) wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed (which he republished on his Senate website) declaring that "Ennahda has been giving encouraging answers about its rejection of extremism and its respect for the democratic process, individual liberties, women's rights and the rule of law."

The headline of a front-page New York Times story referred to Ennahda as "moderate." The Times quoted Ghannouchi (the founder of the party) saying that Ennahda "is not a religious party" but one whose members "merely draw their values from Islam." The Times added that the group's win at the polls in Tunisia "was sure to embolden those who favor a more liberal approach, including some within Egypt's mainstream Muslim Brotherhood."

Another Times story began: "For more than three decades, Rachid al-Ghannouchi has preached that pluralism, democracy and secular Islam are harmonious."

These and other media accounts gloss over or neglect to mention Ghannouchi's many radical statements – particularly his calls for Israel's destruction.

The Arab Spring "will achieve positive results on the path to the Palestinian cause and threaten the extinction of Israel," he said in a May interview with the Al Arab Qatari website. "The liberation of Palestine from Israeli occupation represents the biggest challenge facing the Umma [Muslim people] and the Umma cannot have existence in light of the Israeli occupation."

In the same interview, Ghannouchi said: "I give you the good news that the Arab region will get rid of the bacillus of Israel. Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the leader of Hamas, said that Israel will disappear by the year 2027. I say that this date may be too far away, and Israel may disappear before this."

This is consistent with Ennahda's platform, which declares that the group "struggles to achieve the following goals … To struggle for the liberation of Palestine and consider it as a central mission and a duty required by the need to challenge the Zionist colonial attack which planted in the heart of the homeland an alien entity which constitutes a (sic) obstacle to unity and reflects the image of the conflict between our civilization and its enemies."

Read it all.

Walid Phares and I have long admired one another's work. He said of my 2005 bestseller The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) that it was "a ‘politically incorrect’ but academically sound and challenging work. Spencer displays an enormous amount of well-researched material. He throws the ball back into the camp of Arabist historians.” And about my 2003 book Onward Muslim Soldiers he said: “This book is a necessary tool for students of History, Politics, Civilization and Ideologies....This book is a must read for all those who want to understand the world after September 11.”

Now that Islamic supremacists and their useful idiots in the Leftist media have launched a campaign to discredit and marginalize everyone who dares to resist the advance of Islamic supremacism and Sharia in the U.S., Phares has come under fire for, among other things, those endorsements. The hard-Left pro-jihad propagandist Adam Serwer, who is probably still smarting from the blistering he got here and here, mentioned those book endorsements as part of his hit piece on Phares, without bothering (of course) to produce the slightest bit of evidence that anything in either book is hateful, bigoted, or even false.

The strategy is obvious: the Islamic supremacists and the Left are trying to pick off every freedom fighter one by one, focusing on destroying one of us and then using another's connections to the destroyed one as evidence that he should be destroyed next. The ultimate goal is to leave no impediment to the advance of Sharia and jihad in the U.S. And so it is imperative that we fight back; and today, in "The Jihad against Walid Phares" in National Review, Mario Loyola responds ably to the main charges against Phares:

In recent days, the liberal blogosphere has launched a concerted attack against Walid Phares, one of Mitt Romney’s senior Mideast advisers. The likes of Ali Gharib, McKay Coppins, and Adam Serwer think they smell blood because of Phares’s former association with the Lebanese Forces, the de facto army of the Lebanese Christians during the latter half of Lebanon’s civil war. “Top Romney Adviser Tied to Militia That Massacred,” intoned Mother Jones in its headline for Serwer’s piece. The [Hamas-linked] Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) has joined in, with a particularly pathetic letter to the Romney campaign requesting “that Phares be removed” from his advisory position.

The assault on Phares is interesting not just because of the basic ignorance behind its main contentions but also because of its true motives.

A bit of background first. In the years after the 1967 war, the Palestinian Liberation Organization was expelled from the Jordanian West Bank and harried by Jordanian and Syrian forces all the way into Lebanon, where it eventually plunged the whole country into civil war. Phares was a teenager when the conflict erupted in 1975. In 1979, when he was 22 years old, Phares published the first of his many books, Pluralism in Lebanon, which called for Swiss-style federated autonomy for the country’s various ethnic and confessional communities. Of course, among liberals, an idea like that is a cause célèbre — when it is advanced by people they like — and a “hard-line extremist” product of “hateful ideology” when it comes from someone they disagree with.

By the early 1980s in Lebanon, Phares was already a well-known writer and was routinely invited to give talks and lectures to all kinds of organizations, including the Lebanese Forces, an umbrella organization in which virtually every Lebanese Christian group was represented. Phares had no official position with the Lebanese Forces until 1986, when he joined its 22-member Political Council as representative for the small left-of-center party he and his brother had previously launched. During his short tenure on the Council, he variously handled foreign affairs and diaspora issues. This, however, was enough for the Mother Jones “investigation” to uncover that Phares was a “key player” in a “sectarian religious militia responsible for massacres during Lebanon’s brutal, 15-year civil war.” 

The connection to one of the most infamous massacres of the conflict gives the Mother Jones story its hook. On their way to Beirut during the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, the Israelis surrounded two Palestinian refugee camps, at Sabra and Shatila, where PLO terrorists were ensconced. In August of that year, the hugely popular Christian leader Bashir Gemayel was elected president of Lebanon — and assassinated three weeks later. Enraged, Phalangist elements of the Lebanese Forces, under intelligence chief Eli Hobeika (later revealed to be in league with the Syrians), asked Israeli permission to enter the camps and hunt down the perpetrators. In the ensuing days, hundreds and possibly thousands of Palestinian refugees were murdered. It was generally understood that the perpetrators were connected to the Lebanese Forces, if only because if you were Christian and you were armed then you were almost certainly with the Lebanese Forces.

The question is whether the war crime of a small rogue group operating clearly outside normal chains of command can be attributed to the organization as a whole. Here the answer is demonstrably “no.” The Lebanese Forces had become the de facto army and political organization of the entire Christian community in Lebanon. It is one thing to link a specific person to a specific massacre, but to discredit someone linked to the Lebanese Forces because of its links to the Sabra and Shatila massacre is to discredit virtually all Christian Lebanese who were prominent during the conflict, even those who rose to the fore years after the massacres. The real target of such an attack is the Christian Lebanese community itself. And let’s note the Left’s rank double standard when it comes to this sort of thing. The Left habitually insists that the United States and Israel recognize the legitimacy of the Palestinians’ elected “representatives,” even if it means legitimizing people who have actually murdered innocent civilians. Mother Jones doesn’t even insinuate that Phares was connected to the massacres, or even that he ever picked up a gun. And Phares’s membership on the Political Council of the Lebanese Forces occurred years after the Sabra and Shatila massacres.

The Mother Jones piece posits several other reasons why Phares should be discredited: that he espoused a “hateful” Christian separatist ideology, that he would be representing the interests of foreigners instead of those of the United States, and that his message is anti-Muslim. The first of these is clearly false — Phares is a federalist — but even if it were true, there wouldn’t be anything hateful about it. All of Lebanon’s confessional communities zealously protect their autonomy and political rights — one of them, the Shia Hezbollah, even has its own army. And how are the separatist movements of East Timor and Palestine not equally “hateful?” The second of the contentions comes from Paul Pillar, 20-year veteran of the CIA: “It should raise eyebrows anytime someone in a position to exert behind-the-scenes influence on a U.S. leader has ties to a foreign entity that are strong enough for foreign interests, and not just U.S. interests, to determine the advice being given,” he told the magazine. The warning about representing foreign views is waved about in the Mother Jones article as a kind of dark insinuation without elaboration, and we are left to wonder just what Serwer thinks he’s talking about. But it’s irrelevant in any case. Phares has lived in the United States since 1990. Other than membership in organizations committed to resisting Syria’s and Hezbollah’s domination of Lebanon (fully in line with longstanding U.S. policy) Phares’s career remains what it has always been — that of a major writer and intellectual on Mideast affairs.

Read it all.

Will the Islamophobia never end? Eurabia Update: "Muslims Stone Catholic Festival-Goers in France," by Cheradenine Zakalwe at Islam Versus Europe, October 29 (thanks to Jack):

Muslims have attacked Christians attending a Catholic celebration in southern France.

The Joyeuse Union Don Bosco [Joyous Union Don Bosco] takes places in Nîmes, at the Sanctuary of Our Lady the Virgin of Santa Cruz, built by French people repatriated from the Algerian city of Oran following Algerian independence. These people were driven out of the place they grew up by Muslim aggression. Now they face it in France too!

After a day of welcoming and reunions, around 7 pm, the participants were leaving in their cars and vehicles when "young Arab immigrants" from the city started to throw stones at the vehicles descending from the sanctuary.

The local police, whose station is in this area, were immediately notified and the event organisers had to arrange a diversion to another route to protect the occupants of the vehicles from the savage attacks which continued.

As for the press, other than a brief honest article in "la Provence", there was no mention of the "intifada" (war of stones) attacks against the Christian religious community at Nîmes.

...it would seem that the media silence on these facts, which are occurring more and more frequently, serves to exonerate, even protect, the Muslims in their racist and anti-religious acts.

Sounds like the U.S., where as far as the mainstream media is concerned, actual hatred and supremacism is portrayed as righteous victimhood, and freedom fighting is depicted as "hatred" and "bigotry."

Hey, Saeed: how about we work out a trade? You can have some of our pro-jihad journalists, and we'll take some of your anti-jihad ones. I am sure we could work out a mutually beneficial deal for Bob Smietana, Rachel Slajda, Michael Kruse, Daniel Reed, Ann Barnard, Justin Elliott, and some pro-jihad journalists to be named later. And they would no doubt be only too happy to relocate to Pakistan, where the Religion of Peace prevails and there is no "Islamophobia." Whaddeya say, Saeed?

"Jihad is the only way for Pak survival: JuD chief," from Zeenews.com, October 20:

Islamabad: LeT founder and Jamaat-ud-Dawah chief Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, mastermind of the 2008 Mumbai attacks, has threatened journalists for what he says backing an "anti-jihad spirit" in Pakistan and asked them to be aware of the consequences.

Addressing gatherings at Vehari and Multan in Punjab province yesterday, he claimed journalists were backing the agenda of foreign intelligence agencies and furthering "propaganda against jihad and the defence of Pakistan".

He blamed journalists for promoting "hatred against jihad".

Jihad or holy war is an integral part of Islam and is binding on all Muslims, media reports quoted Saeed as saying. Saeed, the founder of the banned Lashkar-e-Toiba, warned journalists to be aware of the consequences of "becoming tools in foreign hands".

Saeed claimed jihad is the "only way for the survival of Pakistan"....

Fantasy-based analysis is now required at the highest levels in Washington. In FrontPage this morning I discuss the new truth-denying policies:

It has been a long time coming, but the Obama Administration has now officially banned the truth. Deputy U.S. Attorney General James Cole declared Wednesday at a conference in Washington that he had “recently directed all components of the Department of Justice to re-evaluate their training efforts in a range of areas, from community outreach to national security.” This “reevaluation” will remove all references to Islam in connection with any examination of Islamic jihad terror activity. The Obama Administration has now placed off-limits any investigation of the beliefs, motives and goals of jihad terrorists.

Dwight C. Holton, former U.S. Attorney for the District of Oregon, emphasized that training materials for the FBI would be purged of everything politically incorrect: “I want to be perfectly clear about this: training materials that portray Islam as a religion of violence or with a tendency towards violence are wrong, they are offensive, and they are contrary to everything that this president, this attorney general and Department of Justice stands for. They will not be tolerated.”

Holton said that he had spoken with Attorney General Eric Holder about FBI training materials that Holton claimed were “egregiously false,” and that Holder “is firmly committed to making sure that this is over….we’re going to fix it.” Holton said that this “fix” was particularly urgent because the rejected training materials “pose a significant threat to national security, because they play into the false narrative propagated by terrorists that the United States is at war with Islam.”

Cole suggested that these training materials had done damage domestically as well: “One of the many, tragic legacies of 9/11 has been an increase in prejudice, discrimination and hatred directed against persons of the Muslim and Sikh faiths and those who are, or who are mistakenly perceived to be, of Arab or South Asian descent. Some have wrongly sought to blame the horror of 9/11 on Arab-American, Muslim American, Sikh-American and South Asian American communities. It has led to attacks against places of worship and other hate crimes, to job discrimination, and to the tragic harassment of children in our schools.”

After sketching out this horror tale, Cole declared: “We must never allow our sorrow and anger at the senseless attack of 9/11 to blind us to the great gift of our diversity.” And this, he said, must involve a rejection of the stereotyping of Muslims: “All of us must reject any suggestion that every Muslim is a terrorist or that every terrorist is a Muslim. As we have seen time and again – from the Oklahoma City bombing to the recent attacks in Oslo, Norway – no religion or ethnicity has a monopoly on terror.” It was George Bush, he said, who after 9/11 “made clear to the nation that these terrorist acts were committed by individuals who distort the peaceful religion of Islam,” and now all government analysis of jihad terror would reflect that perspective.

Of course, the controversial training materials did not really claim that all Muslims are terrorists or that all terrorists are Muslims, and it is noteworthy that Cole had to resort to dismissive caricatures to make his point. For in taking this course, the Obama Administration is bowing to pressure from the Hamas-linked Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) and other Islamic advocacy groups. In a Los Angeles Times op-ed that appeared on the same day as the conference in Washington, Salam al-Marayati of the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) roundly criticized existing training materials about jihad terror and demanded that the FBI and the Justice Department “issue a clear and unequivocal apology to the Muslim American community; establish a thorough and transparent vetting process in selecting its trainers and materials; invite experts who have no animosity toward any religion to conduct training about any religious community to law enforcement.”

Al-Marayati complained that training materials reflected “bigoted and inflammatory views on Muslims, including claims that ‘devout’ Muslims are more prone toward violence, that Islam aims to ‘transform a country’s culture into 7th century Arabian ways,’ that Islamic charitable giving is a ‘funding mechanism for combat’ and that the prophet Muhammad was a ‘violent cult leader.’”

In this al-Marayati was simply repeating talking points from an “expose” of FBI training materials by hard-Left journalist Spencer Ackerman in Wired, who has been conducting a campaign for some time to get the bureau to purge its terrorism training seminars of any hint of the truth about the global jihad and Islamic supremacism. Yet like virtually all Leftist and Islamic supremacist critics of anti-jihad and anti-terror material, Ackerman and al-Marayati take for granted that such assertions are false, without bothering to explain how or why. Apparently they believe that their falsity is so self-evident as to require no demonstration; unfortunately, however, there is considerable evidence that they are true, and that in banning such materials, the Obama Administration has essentially banned the truth.

There is more.

"Investigators said documentation found inside the RV showed the men have done extensive traveling to high-level security facilities around the country." -- KENS5.com

Will the Islamophobia never end?

This story has already been sanitized and rendered politically correct. Below is the story as I found it moments ago at the KSAT link. But I took a minute to search for an embed code for the KSAT video (didn't find one), and while I was searching, the story was changed. As you can see at the link, the headline is now "5 Arrested In Break-In At Bexar County Courthouse," and the lede has been changed from "Three men described by law enforcement officials as Muslim..." to "Five men of foreign descent..." Hamas-linked CAIR will be so pleased.

Here is the original form of the story: "3 Arrested In Break-In At Bexar County Courthouse," from KSAT.com, October 19 (thanks to Ron):

SAN ANTONIO -- Three men described by law enforcement officials as Muslim were taken into custody early Wednesday morning after a break-in at the Bexar County Courthouse. Two of the men are on the FBI's watch list.

Bexar County sheriff's officials responded to a burglary alarm at 1 a.m. and found two men walking outside the building, sheriff's officials said.

The men were arrested after sheriff's officials determined they broke into the building through a door on the fourth floor, sheriff's officials said.

Surveillance video showed the men walking into the building with an item in their hands, but they did not have the item when they walked out of the courthouse, sheriff's officials said. Investigators have not said whether that item was recovered of what it may be.

Sheriff's officials apprehended a third man who was inside a recreational vehicle in the parking lot of the building. The RV contained several documents and proof the men had been traveling across the country for some time, sheriff's officials said.

The men told authorities they broke into the courthouse to get a scenic view of San Antonio, but investigators said the circumstances surrounding the break-in are suspicious.

Investigators said the men, all in their early 20s, are not U.S. citizens and told investigators they came into the country on Sept. 11, but it wasn't clear what year they entered the country. Investigators also determined two of the three men are on the FBI's watch list. Their names have not been released.

As of 7 a.m., the men had been charged with burglary, but sheriff's officials said they would be interrogated by the FBI, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Joint Terrorist Task Force.

Authorities swept through the courthouse to look for explosives but nothing was found.

Sheriff's officials said the courthouse will open at its normal hour on Wednesday.

Ever wonder why the BBC is so consistently and fanatically pro-jihad, and intent on smearing freedom fighters? "BBC Reporter Sentenced for Links to Islamist Group," from AP, October 14:

DUSHANBE, Tajikistan October 14, 2011 (AP) A court in Tajikistan sentenced a BBC reporter to three years in jail Friday over links to a banned radical Islamic group, but immediately released him after granting amnesty.

The Sughd regional court found BBC Central Asia service journalist Uronboi Usmonov guilty of failing to provide authorities with information about alleged criminal activities planned by Hizb ut-Tahrir.

The BBC World Service rejects all suggestions that Usmonov was directly involved with Hizb ut-Tahrir and says that his dealings with the group were linked exclusively to his activities as a journalist.

Usmonov was arrested in June in the northern Sughd region on suspicion of belonging to the group. But after condemnation by the U.S. government and the European Union, prosecutors downgraded that charge to failing to bring forward information to the authorities about the organization.

The BBC World Service condemned Friday's guilty verdict.

"We will continue to support (Urunboi) and hope that the appeal process will lead to his reputation as a highly respected writer and journalist being restored," said Peter Horrocks, director of BBC Global News....

The media yawned and turned away. Another imam with a firearm? Dime a dozen! But just imagine if it had been a rabbi or priest. "Another Florida Imam Arrested by the FBI, Media Ignores," from Creeping Sharia, October 12 (thanks to Pamela Geller):

As in completely ignored – check Google. via Orlando Florida Imam Arrested by the FBI » Family Security Matters.

On August 23, 2011 the FBI arrested Imam Abu Taubah aka Marcus Dwayne Robertson. The charge was possession of a firearm by a previously convicted felon, Case Number: 6:11-mj-1380 Attached to Imam Abu Robertson’s case is a Notice of Intent To Use Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Information (FISA).

The U.S. Government’s intention to use its FISA powers signals probable cause to charge Imam “Taubah” Robertson “the target of such search is a foreign power or an agent of a foreign power”.

The facts presented in these filed charges leads this reporter to suspect an element of foreign intrigue may be a key component in the prosecution of this case.

Imam Robertson’s Mosque is located at 6630 Pershing Road in Orlando, FL. The Mosque’s website Masjid al-Ishaan is down for maintenance and hopefully out of business, if these charges prove the Imam’s guilt. Thank you to The Internet Haganah for breaking this story, and shame on The Orlando Sentinel’s refusal to publish a story on the arrest. This reporter sent all the court case documents to Sentinel reporter Jeff Kurneth, a letter to the editor accompanied the documents.

On September 2nd the Orlando Sentinel did run a front page story on Imam Muhammad Musri who was charging his fellow Muslims $5 to park for Friday Jumma prayers calling it the infamous “Pay to Pray” scandal. As important as “pay to pray” may be to some, it does not take a Sentinel Editor to realize that when the FBI arrests an Orlando Muslim Imam it is big news, especially to the residents who live and work near the Mosque in question.

In another Orlando Imam related story, the Orlando Sentinel neglected to print an alarming incident with Imam Musri back in 2010. A team of eight investigative reporters caught on film Orlando Imam Muhammad Musri hosting a fundraiser featuring the infamous George Galloway, who raised over $50,000 from local Orlando Muslims for Hamas – video link. After the video was released George Galloway’s visa to enter the United States was revoked by United States Government. Imam Musri remains on the Governor of Florida’s Faith Based Advisory Council and is considered the “go to” person in Orlando for all things Islamic.

Read it all.

Photojournalism Behind the Scenes [ITA-ENG subs] from Ruben Salvadori on Vimeo.

Note, besides the obvious fakery of it all, the easy camaraderie between the photographers and the Palestinian jihadists. "An Eye-Opening Look at How Many Conflict Photos Are Staged," by Michael Zhang at PetaPixel, October 4 (thanks to Michael).

More on this story. This Middle East Online report has additional information, but has a markedly different emphasis from the prior report. Here, Muslims have supposedly thrown up their hands in disillusionment with French democracy, which has "failed" them, turning instead to Islam, even as the report acknowledges "many residents are drawn to an Islamic identity rather than simply rejecting or failing to find a secular one."

France has so rudely decided to continue being French (unmitigated Gauls, if you will), and expected people who come to live there to do likewise.

"State is not ‘halal’: resentful immigrants turn to Islam in France," by Thibauld Malterre for Middle East Online, October 7 (thanks to Twostellas):

Researchers say Islamic values are replacing those of republic which failed to deliver on its promise of 'equality'.

Local communities in France's immigrant suburbs increasingly organise themselves on Islamic lines rather than following the values of the secular republic, according to a major new sociological study.

Respected political scientist Gilles Kepel, a specialist in the Muslim world, led a team of researchers in a year-long project in Clichy-sous-Bois and Montfermeil, two Paris suburbs that exploded in riots in 2005.

The resulting study -- "Suburbs of the Republic" -- found that religious institutions and practices are increasingly displacing those of the state and the French Republic, which has a strong secular tradition.

Families from the districts, which are mainly populated by immigrants from north and west Africa and their descendants, regularly attend mosque, fast during Ramadan and boycott school meals that are not "halal".

Millions of schoolkids with food allergies, who are vegetarian, or who are avoiding meat on a Lenten Friday have packed their own lunch and managed to integrate among their peers just fine. A walkout of sorts at lunchtime may well be hoped to muscle the schools into providing halal meat and purging pork products from the menu.

With between five and six million Muslim residents and citizens, France has the largest Islamic population in the European Union, and central government often struggles to address the challenges to integration that this poses.

Kepel performed a similar study 25 years earlier, and told the daily Le Monde that the influence of Islam in the daily lives and cultural references of the suburbs has "diversified and intensified" since then.

French schools, which are rigorously non-religious, have traditionally been seen as having the role of training young citizens of the republic, but local officials say Islamic pupils are heading home for a halal lunch.

"A certain number of children don't come to the canteen any more or, if they come, they only take a starter and dessert," Xavier Lemoine, the centre-right mayor of Monfermeil, told Europe 1 radio.

Surveys suggest most in France do not object to mixed marriages, but in the suburbs the researchers were surprised find "a very large proportion of Muslim respondents said they were opposed to marriages with non-Muslims."

Did the research account for the distinction of whether respondents oppose Muslim men marrying non-Muslim women, or Muslim women marrying non-Muslim men? Sharia allows for the former, but not the latter.

The researchers also delved into the reasons behind the 2005 riots, which they said had called into question modern France's founding myth "the implicit shared belief that the nation was always able to integrate people."

While the resentment in the poor suburbs has social roots, essentially the residents' virtual exclusion from a tight jobs market, the rioters expressed frustration in a vocabulary "borrowed from Islam's semantic register."

Islamic values are replacing those of a republic which failed to deliver on its promise of "equality", and the residents of the suburbs increasingly do not see themselves as French, the researchers said.

"One of the reasons for the strong role of Islam is that the Republic has withdrawn," warned Claude Dilain, the Socialist mayor of Clichy.

"Those who fell abandoned seek another identity, and Islam satisfies that well."

But the report does not support the idea that the state has simply pulled back, to be replaced by Islam. The Clichy-Monfermeil agglomeration has been at the centre of one of France's biggest urban renewal programmes.

Many physical barriers to integration have been removed, with efforts made to plug the area into public transport networks and improve public safety -- but unemployment and low school achievement remain high.

A third of the population of the town does not hold French nationality, and many residents are drawn to an Islamic identity rather than simply rejecting or failing to find a secular one.

Kepel's study was commissioned by the Institut Montaigne, which will make recommendations in January.

The author warns: "France's future depends on its ability to re-integrate the suburbs into the national project."

In 2006, the New York Times ran a laudatory multi-part series profiling Brooklyn imam Reda Shata -- which noted that when the murderous Hamas leader Ahmed Yassin was killed, Shata told Muslims at a memorial service that a “lion of Palestine has been martyred.” He also praised suicide bomber Reem Al-Reyashi. The Times dismissed this as Shata’s zeal for what he believed to be a just cause, reassuring its readers that Shata didn’t hate Jews, and even had friends among New York rabbis. (I might believe it if they were from Neturei Karta.) In any case, Shata's reverence for Yassin, who oversaw and glorified the murders of numerous Israeli civilians, showed the ridiculous dhimmi willful blindness of the Times whitewash.

Be that as it may, Shata is still playing his moderate act, and finding eager takers:

"NYPD spied on city's Muslim anti-terror partners," from the Associated Press, October 6 (thanks to all who sent this in):

NEW YORK — Reda Shata considered himself a partner in New York's fight against terrorism. He cooperated with the police and FBI, invited officers to his mosque for breakfast, even dined with Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

Despite the handshakes and photo ops, however, the New York Police Department was all the while watching the Egyptian sheik. Even as Shata's story was splashed across the front page of The New York Times in a Pulitzer Prize-winning series about Muslims in America, an undercover officer and an informant were assigned to monitor him, and two others kept tabs on his mosque that same year.

"What did they find?" Shata asked through an interpreter at his current mosque in Monmouth County, N.J., after learning about the secret surveillance. "It's a waste of time and a waste of money."

Shata welcomed FBI agents to his mosque to speak to Muslims, invited NYPD officers for breakfast and threw parties for officers who were leaving the precinct during his time at the Islamic Center of Bay Ridge. As police secretly watched him in 2006, he had breakfast and dinner with Bloomberg at Gracie Mansion and was invited to meet with Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly, Shata recalls.

"This is very sad," he said after seeing his name in the NYPD file. "What is your feeling if you see this about people you trusted?" [...]

"You were loving people very much, and then all of a sudden you get shocked," Shata said. "It's a bitter feeling."

Indeed it is, Shata, and it works both ways.

Pamela Geller has a great deal of revealing additional information on this here.

Implying an outrageous equivalence, this story blames the "religious right" in Pakistan. More on this story. "Backlash for Pakistan judge who convicted assassin," from Agence France-Presse, October 4:

ISLAMABAD — The judge who sentenced to death the killer of liberal Pakistani politician Salman Taseer on Tuesday failed to show up at work and may be transferred after his courtroom was ransacked, lawyers said.

Judge Pervez Ali Shah on Saturday convicted police bodyguard Malik Mumtaz Hussain Qadri over the January 4 assassination that exposed huge faultlines in Pakistan.

Qadri said he killed Taseer over the politician’s opposition to blasphemy laws which sentence to death those convicted of defaming the Prophet Mohammed. Qadri’s actions made him a hero in the eyes of religious extremists.

On Monday, dozens of furious Islamist lawyers ransacked Shah’s courtroom, smashing windows to protest against the judgement.

“After yesterday’s protest and the attack on his office, the judge is not attending his office,” Malik Khalid Jawad, president of the district bar association in the garrison city of Rawalpindi, told AFP.

Asked about media reports that Shah has gone on indefinite leave, Khalid said: “What I know is that he is not coming to his office. The bar has also requested his transfer because it can create a law and order situation.”

Lawyer Farooq Sulehria confirmed Monday’s attack and said lawyers would boycott Shah’s court because of the “unacceptable” sentencing.

Shah heard the Qadri case behind closed doors in the high-security Adiyala prison, largely in order to protect proceedings from protests and attacks.

The religious right holds increasing sway in Pakistan and the government says it has no intention of reforming the controversial 1986 blasphemy law.

Samer Allawi "offered to use his position as a reporter to promote Hamas interests," and "traveled to Qatar and met with additional Al Jazeera reporters, who the Shin Bet said were Hamas operatives, and discussed the possibility of using their position to advance Hamas by criticizing the US military in Afghanistan."

How many more operatives are there? Does al-Jazeera care to find out? "Al Jazeera journalist admits to being Hamas operative," by Yaakov Katz for the Jerusalem Post, September 26:

During a Shin Bet (Israeli Security Agency) interrogation, former Al Jazeera Afghanistan bureau chief Samer Allawi said he traveled to Syria to help a terror group.

Allawi reached a deal with the Israel State Prosecutor’s Office on Sunday, under which he will receive a suspended sentence of three years, after he confessed to conspiring in Hamas operations.

Allawi, a Palestinian, was arrested in August on the border between the West Bank and Jordan.

He said he was recruited into Hamas in 1993 and served there until 2004 in a senior committee that oversees Hamas operations abroad, and is responsible for fundraising.

In 2001 and 2003 he traveled to Syria where he reported on his activities to Mousa Aba Marzook, deputy to Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal, in Damascus.

Aba Marzook offered Allawi to become an official Hamas representative in Iran, but he rejected the offer.

During the interrogation with the Shin Bet, Allawi said he attended a meeting in 2000 in Saudi Arabia in which he said he would be part of a terror operation on behalf of Hamas. He also offered to use his position as a reporter to promote Hamas interests.

In 2006, Allawi traveled to Qatar and met with additional Al Jazeera reporters, who the Shin Bet said were Hamas operatives, and discussed the possibility of using their position to advance Hamas by criticizing the US military in Afghanistan.

During his interrogation, the Shin Bet said he also discussed his activities as a member of the mujahideen in Afghanistan from 1988 to 1992, during which he said that he participated in a rebel raid on an Afghan military base and participated in guerrilla operations against Soviet forces.

Why does the Wall Street Journal publish terrorists?
by Julia Gorin

This year brought the Council of Europe’s report on the murder-for-organs scandal involving top echelons of the Kosovo Liberation Army, now wearing suits as Kosovo’s “legitimate” rulers. While top Albanian and Kosovo officials are being indicted for corruption, war crimes and deep mob ties, a Brooklyn man from Albania was arraigned on charges of providing material support to terrorists and planning to join a radical group in Pakistan -- just months after an Albanian Kosovar shot five American servicemen in Frankfurt, killing two. (Which hearkens back not only to last year’s “North Carolina Eight” that included two Kosovo Albanians and targeted a Marine base, but also to the 2007 Ft. Dix plot in which three Albanian-Americans wanted to “kill as many American soldiers as possible”.)

And so one is almost tempted to the fanciful hope that The Wall St. Journal might finally feel a tinge of reservation if not shame about unequivocally following the Foggy Bottom line on the Balkans, which unconditionally implements the maximal Albanian agenda in the Balkans.

Instead, the newspaper publishes the terrorists who won the Balkans, this time "Prime Minister" Hashim Thaci -- criminal alias “The Snake.” With no irony whatsoever, on August 29th The Journal treated us to “A Better Future for the Western Balkans,” by Thaci. This is despite his internationally long-known connection to drug- and organ-trafficking, his notoriety in Greater Albania for running every kind of racket, not to mention his intimidating witnesses in the organs affair and ordering untold murders. ( “Cadavers have never been an obstacle to Thaci’s career,” explained Bujar Bukoshi, of the late Ibrahim Rugova’s 1990s government-in-exile.)

Take it from a narco-terrorist prime minister now suppressing the press in “liberated” Kosovo on what constitutes “a better future.” And yet it’s the “rampant criminality” of Kosovo's Serb-populated north that Thaci wants to bring under his “rule of law” (the “rampant criminality” being a resistance to rule by the criminality of the rest of Kosovo). This is a gangster solidifying his turf.

North Mitrovica is the last part of Kosovo that we’re trying to submit to the thugocracy, and it’s also one of Kosovo's last multi-ethnic remnants, where a non-Albanian can leave his immediate vicinity without risking dismemberment. Ergo the Serbian “stubbornness” that our bureaucrats — and The Journal — regularly scold.

The 2008 Italian documentary “Infinite War” shows a Serbian monk serving liturgy surrounded by NATO tanks and troops. “In liberated Kosovo, this is the maximal possible freedom for Christians to profess their faith,” narrates journalist Riccardo Iacona, adding that 223,409 Serbs were cleansed after the 1999 war (the number has grown since).

It was done with the help of the never-disbanded KLA, which answers directly to high-level Kosovo politicians. “And this is how they finance themselves,” Iacona summarizes a classified UN report, “by trafficking of drugs and arms, and by extortion…They smuggle oil and practice destruction…Then, there is a list of the superiors of this organization, and the links between this military structure and politicians in PDK, Thaci’s party.”

Albanian journalist Bardulaj Ajeti was writing for the daily Bota Sot, investigating “the relations between the ex-KLA fighters and Prime Minister Hashim Thaci. He was shot in the head on June 7, 2005…[One Ajeti article] speaks about a shadow government, controlled by Thaci, giving names of those who comprise it. All of them are ex-KLA commanders. Then there is one incredible interview with Mr. Ymer Ymeri…whose brother was killed by the UCK (KLA)…[He says] the UCK erected dozens of prisons in Albania where Rugova’s men were being tortured and killed, and Thaci, the current prime minister, knew about it…”

Iacona asks Ymeri’s wife (Ymeri had fled to Germany after giving the interview), “Do all the opponents of Thaci’s UCK get killed?” She replies, “Yes, it’s like a mafia.”

According to a 2007 Institute for European Policy report, Kosovo "'is a Mafia society' based on 'capture of the state' by criminal elements...[The authors] quote a German intelligence service report of 'closest ties between leading political decision makers and the dominant criminal class' and name Ramush Haradinaj, Hashim Thaci and Xhavit Haliti as compromised leaders..."

Leading up to the war crimes trial of Haradinaj, Thaci’s predecessor and also a former KLA commander, witnesses started dropping dead, going missing, or dropping out to prevent either fate. In 2003 two Kosovo police officers who insisted on investigating the murder of witness Tahir Zemaj (found in a well with his father and cousin) were likewise killed and a third wounded.

The U.S. has systematically blocked international investigations and prosecutions of our favored mobsters and has tampered with evidence from their crime scenes, such as when officials from Camp Bondsteel removed bullets from the walls at the scene of a Haradinaj gunfight and then helicoptered him to Germany, denying UN investigators access to him. A British ex-soldier who described our Haradinaj as ‘a psychopath’ terrorizing his own men and locals into loyalty told the UK Sunday Observer in September 2000, “Someone would pass him some information and he would disappear for two hours. The end result would be several bodies in a ditch.” The charred remains of Suad Qorraj, “who had operated a satellite telephone for a rival KLA commander…were found in a nearby forest. The burial notice said he had been ‘killed by Serbs.’”

In 2001, detective Stu Kellock asked for a special task force on a bus bombing of Serbs visiting a cemetery (11 dead, 40 injured). Instead, “‘evidence from the scene was suppressed and destroyed,’” Kellock said in an interview which also quoted Washington Post: “‘NATO paved over the crater on the Nis highway within hours.’ Furthermore, NATO did not share intelligence with the UN police, phone logs of suspects’ calls were hidden in Monaco, where Kosovo’s main mobile operator is based, and the main suspect miraculously escaped from the most secure location in all of Kosovo — the American Camp Bondsteel.”

(Indeed, the European Policy study called the U.S. out for "'abetting the escape of criminals' in Kosovo as well as 'preventing European investigators from working.' This has made Americans 'vulnerable to blackmail.'")

The Italian documentary offers a post-script on the escaped suspect in question, Florim Ejupi. “For three years Florim remained at large. And then in 2004 he reappeared on this road that leads toward Pristina, wearing a Serbian uniform, in the company of three other Albanians. They wanted to commit an attack and ascribe it to the Serbs. In the end, they killed a police officer of the United Nations. Now Florim is in prison. He was sentenced to 40 years, but he never spoke. So we don’t know who the others were, and above all who gave him the orders to blow up the bus.”

Ejupi served just a year or two of that sentence when in March 2009, as its very first ruling, a EULEX (EU rule of law mission) appeals court released him. The only explanation offered was the Kosovo usual: “not enough evidence.”

Hashim Thaci, whom The Journal sees fit to print (as it did his equally ruthless predecessor and war crimes indictee Agim Ceku) is among Kosovo’s “elite that operates above the law,” as a February Foreign Policy article titled “Thug Life” summed up, adding:

Kosovo’s thugocrats owe their rise and continued impunity to the toleration or outright support of the international community — particularly the United States…In 1999, the U.S. endorsement of Thaci as hero was sealed with a kiss planted on his cheek by then Secretary of State Madeline Albright…In 2004, every American staffer at the U.S. Embassy was invited to attend Haradinaj’s wedding — and, despite his links to organized crime and impending indictment on war crimes, they went. Most recently, the night after the raid on [Transportation Minister Fatmir] Limaj’s home and offices, U.S. Ambassador to Kosovo Christopher Dell was seen laughing and chatting with the minister at a well-attended party in Pristina. [Limaj was also twice indicted but not yet convicted of "inhumane acts during the war.”]

It is difficult to see how democracy or respect [for] the rule of law could develop and flourish amid such overt displays of American support for a corrupt and criminal leadership…The war crimes taking place throughout the 1998-1999 conflict and in the immediate aftermath have never been fully investigated — in fact, in some cases they have been covered up…UNMIK (UN Mission in Kosovo) ran an incomplete investigation into the organ trafficking case brought to light by [Council of Europe rapporteur Dick] Marty in late 2010. The documents date from 2003 — when UNMIK was in full control of the internal war crimes investigations and prosecutions.

As the Italian journalist Iacona speaks with locals who won’t tell him or investigators anything they know about the “unsolved” murders whose perpetrators boast of their crimes, he realizes that “liberated” and “democratic” Kosovo is ruled by fear.

When Thaci writes about the still Serbian north as “the creation of a sort of state-within-a-state…evident trafficking of drugs, people and arms, and daily intimidation of both Albanians and Serbs by private armies who are the only ones benefiting from the absence of the rule of law,” the man is writing about how Kosovo itself was won. A classic case of projection.

He also has a bit of a Freudian slip when he refers to an internal issue “that once again pitted Serbs against Kosovars.” Clearly, by “Kosovars” he means Albanians, tacitly admitting not only that he -- a leader ostensibly representing all citizens -- does not consider Serbs Kosovars, but that the nationality the U.S. concocted to help wage the KLA’s war for independence is just another word for “Albanian.” It is also an admission of what Serbs and Albanians alike have been telling us: that Kosovo is just one leg of the plan to consolidate parts of Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and Greece into a Greater Albania.

Julia Gorin writes at Republican Riot.

The Ground Zero Mosque project is way off schedule and has been knocked off balance by all the opposition it has faced. But the mainstream media is doing its best to get it back on track. "Big Media Lauds Imaginary Opening of Ground Zero Mosque," by Pamela Geller in Big Government, September 22:

One year ago, Ground Zero Mosque leader Daisy Khan, the wife of stealth Islamic supremacist Imam Faisal Abdul Rauf, said that they would be breaking ground on September 11, 2011 for the 15-story monster mosque going up in a building that was destroyed in the Islamic attack on America on 9/11. It was redundant. They had broken ground on September 11, 2001.

Well, nonetheless, the jihadist radical Rauf and his third wife (one more, papa, and you are maxed out) have been kicked off the Ground Zero mosque project and the developer grifter Sharif El-Gamal has lopped off ten stories from his triumphal mosque. In other words, we have successfully halted the project, for now.

But the media and Islamic supremacists create their own fantasy, and they started claiming Monday that the mosque had actually opened — because the grifter El-Gamal hung some photos of kids on the main floor of the building. Pathetic. In fact, the mosque in the former Burlington Coat Factory building has been open and they have been praying there for several years now. It took the leftwing media monster a year to fine-tune its manipulative rhetoric and rather disgusting propaganda campaign to advance the building of the Ground Zero mosque, despite the overwhelming grief and pain and it has caused the majority of Americans.

The incredibly corrupt and intellectually bankrupt New York Times, long bereft of any integrity or objective journalism, devoted an entire section to a Ground Zero Mosque photo exhibit to raise funds for the mosquestrosity. In a stupid and obvious attempt at manipulation (using children, no less), this photo exhibit gets incredible New York Times coverage for a Mr. Danny Goldfield (work that last name), who “had to teach himself how to take photographs as he started the project.”

A photography exhibit by a man who isn’t even a photographer, but who gets a full spread in the New York Times? Only because it advances this cultural obscenity. These people play so dirty. No morality at all. Still, the story went worldwide, with all the mainstream media lemmings jumping on. There’s a ton of media on this fictitious story. WNYC, the Boston Globe, even the New Zealand Herald. Why? How many people attended this charade outside of media and mosqueteers? How many more patriots attended our 9/11 Freedom Rally that got zero coverage? America, you are being so played.

London’s Daily Mail reported happily: “The first part of Park51, the controversial Lower Manhattan Islamic community centre, is opening on Wednesday with an art exhibition featuring photographs of children.” It quoted El-Gamal saying: “I met Danny Goldfield when Park51 was still a new idea. I said his photographs should be the first event at Park51. I am proud to say the idea has been realized. Opening this incarnation of the community centre is a fantastic accomplishment.”

CNN also jumped on the bandwagon, reporting this: “Islamic center near ground zero touts first big event as center’s grand opening.” The report gushed: “This week, another grand opening – this one steeped in controversy – is scheduled for just a few blocks away from the site where the Twin Towers once stood.”

“A few blocks.” CNN lies. That building is 600 feet from the tower site, and it is part of Ground Zero. The landing gear from one of the 9/11 planes crashed through its roof....

Read it all.