Youssef Ibrahim once again speaks truth to power in the New York Sun (thanks to Teri):
This week, the 57-nation Organization of the Islamic Conference decried what it called the “shrinking space” for tolerance toward Muslims in Europe.
“Muslims have noted with concern that the values of tolerance are eroding and there is now shrinking space for others’ religious, social and cultural values in the West,” the Saudi-based OIC, the world’s largest Islamic association, said a statement sent to Reuters.
This lack of tolerance is absolutely as it should be.
If anything, there is still far too much tolerance of European Muslim isolationists and their preachers, whom the OIC and its Saudi patrons train, fund, and influence to promote barricaded communities inside cultural ghettos, waging war against the societies that embrace them.
For decades, these interconnected webs of mosques, Islamic schools, and imported OIC imams have used the same freedom of speech they deny others to introduce the favored OIC concept of repressed societies to the heart of liberal Europe.
Their quest has not been limited to insulating their communities from a sea of democracy. They also have sought to reverse freedoms for Western citizens who want to publish, write, make films, and read. Witness the hounding of the British author Salman Rushdie and his books, the mayhem over the Danish cartoons of Prophet Muhammad, the upheaval over Pope Benedict’s critical comments on Islam, and the far too numerous attempts to ban creative works on Islam.
Read it all.