In FrontPage this morning I detail the latest in the ongoing war against the freedom of speech that Leftists and Islamic supremacists are waging:
Leftist and Islamic supremacist thugs are planning to protest the
Islamic Apartheid Conference that the David Horowitz Freedom Center is
sponsoring at Temple University Monday. Hosted by Students for
Intellectual Freedom, the Conference will feature Pamela Geller, Nonie
Darwish, Simon Deng and me. In reporting on the coming protests,
however, the Philadelphia City Paper
noted only that “two of America’s most high-profile anti-Muslim bigots”
will be speaking — Geller and me — and doesn’t mention Darwish or Deng
even once. The omission was telling, revealing the hypocrisy of the
protests as a whole.Nonie Darwish is an ex-Muslim who grew up learning hatred for
Infidels in a Muslim school in Gaza. Simon Deng is a South Sudanese
Christian who was held as a slave by Muslim captors for several years.
Both of them know Islamic apartheid firsthand, and have been its
victims. The Leftists at the City Paper therefore could do nothing but
omit them from their story attacking the Conference, for to include them
would in itself have been to reveal the reality of what they”re
denying: Islamic apartheid.The City Paper’s story focuses on Pamela Geller, retailing hard-Left
talking points against her consisting entirely of distortions,
misrepresentations, and outright falsehoods about things she has said
and positions she has taken. Its objection to the Conference appears to
be that Geller, and apparently therefore also the Conference as a whole,
is “anti-Muslim.”The irony is thick: organizing the protests are Occupy Temple, the
International Socialist Organization, Students for Justice in Palestine,
the Party for Socialism and Liberation, and other hard-Left community
and student organizations, none of which have ever raised the slightest
objection to Temple’s Israeli Apartheid Week. Nor would any of them
characterize the very idea of Israeli Apartheid Week as anti-Semitic,
although anti-Semitism is rife at such events (and our event will not
actually be “anti-Muslim” at all). The chief difference, however,
between Israeli Apartheid Week and our Islamic Apartheid Conference is
simply that there really is Islamic apartheid, but there is no Israeli
apartheid.In Israel, Arab citizens are represented in Knesset and enjoy full
legal equality. The very idea of “Israeli Apartheid” is an attempt to
stigmatize, and ultimately destroy, Israel’s efforts to defend itself.
Islamic Apartheid, however, is a very different matter. Is it
“anti-Muslim” to point out that Islamic law mandates institutionalized
discrimination against women? Muslim women are the first victims of
Islamic law’s denial of basic rights for women; is it “anti-Muslim” to
speak out for them and say that as human beings they deserve better?Women are greatly burdened in many Muslim countries. Across the
Islamic world, they endure restrictions on their movements, their
marital options, their professional opportunities, and more. In Kuwait
and elsewhere, women cannot vote or hold office. According to Amnesty
International, in Saudi Arabia “women”¦who walk unaccompanied, or are in
the company of a man who is neither their husband nor a close relative,
are at risk of arrest on suspicion of prostitution or other “˜moral”
offences.”The oppression of women in Muslim lands is not an accident. The
proposition that, as the Qur’an says, “men have a status above women”
(2:228) is all-pervasive in the Islamic world. Aisha, the most beloved
of the Muslim prophet Muhammad’s many wives, admonished women in no
uncertain terms to submit: “O womenfolk, if you knew the rights that
your husbands have over you, every one of you would wipe the dust from
her husband’s feet with her face.”The oppression of women sanctioned by the teachings of Islam, and
often by its holy book, manifests itself in innumerable ways. Among its
most notorious are female genital mutilation, which an Islamic legal
manual approved by Cairo’s prestigious al-Azhar University states is
required “for both men and women.” Then there is wife-beating,
sanctioned by nothing less than the Qur’an itself, which tells men to
“beat” women from whom they “fear disobedience” (4:34). The Pakistan
Institute of Medical Sciences has determined that over ninety percent of
Pakistani wives have been struck, beaten, or abused sexually “” for
offenses on the order of cooking an unsatisfactory meal. Others were
punished for failing to give birth to a male child. Dominating their
women by violence is a prerogative Muslim men cling to tenaciously. In
Spring 2005, when the East African nation of Chad tried to institute a
new family law that would outlaw wife beating, Muslim clerics led
resistance to the measure as un-Islamic.