Self-Imposed Dhimmitude Update: It is now twelve days since I first posted about how Google is censoring negative search suggestions on Islam, and six days since the mighty Internet giant claimed that this was not dhimmi self-censorship, but a “bug,” and would soon be corrected.
Twelve days, six days, and the best minds at Google, a pioneer and master of Internet technology, can’t seem to figure out how to wire their search box so that it pops up suggestions for “Islam is” that are comparable to the suggestions you get for “Buddhism is” or “Hinduism is” or “Christianity is.” Try it for yourself. Search for “Christianity is” at Google and a host of negative recommendations pop up:

It’s the same thing for “Buddhism is,” “Hinduism is,” etc. But when you search for “Islam is,” no negative recommendations come up — indeed, no recommendations at all:

The same “bug” appears at Google’s YouTube.
What a coincidence that Google’s “bug” would crop up in a way that shelters the world’s most thin-skinned religion from criticism! The one religion shielded from adverse judgment at Google is also the only religion that has is currently engaged in an organized campaign to stifle honest discussion about its texts and teachings that inspire violence. In 2008 the Secretary General of the 57-government Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), the largest voting bloc at the United Nations today, Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, warned the West about “red lines that should not be crossed” regarding free speech about Islam and terrorism. For years now the OIC has spearheaded an effort at the UN to compel member states to criminalize what it calls “defamation of religions,” but by which it clearly means any honest discussion of the texts and teachings of Islam that jihadists invoke to justify violence and supremacism. Interestingly enough, the OIC stepped up this campaign in the wake of the publication of cartoons of Muhammad in a Danish newspaper that touched off worldwide Muslim riots. Google, at the time those riots were raging, was dutifully removing from YouTube videos that depicted the cartoons.
Thus when the OIC has Google, it doesn’t need international edicts muzzling free speech. Like many on the Left, Google seems all too willing to carry water for the Islamic bloc’s war against free speech and to oblige the OIC’s totalitarian and thuggish influences, by voluntarily refraining from doing anything that might offend Muslims. While its restriction of the automated search suggestions may seem insignificant, its overall willingness to conform to notoriously fragile Islamic sensibilities and deep-six criticism of Islam is anything but trivial.