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Salon takes umbrage when atheists criticize Islam

Mar 30, 2013 6:49 pm By Robert Spencer

Salon is just fine with Dawkins and Harris when they criticize Christianity, but when it comes to Islam, they are supposed to maintain a respectful silence before the Left’s favorite religion. (Both Leftists and Sharia advocates share a taste for authoritarian control. It’s a perfect marriage.) And so Salon reaches out to the creepy Travis Bickle of jihad enablers, Nathan “Garibaldi” Lean, to put on his cape and rush yet again to the defense of the harmless Religion of Peace that those mean old greasy Islamophobes keep picking on for absolutely no reason at all. Lean, of course, is a stalker who has threatened me repeatedly, repeats what he knows to be falsehoods about my record, and has called on hackers to destroy this site.

“Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens: New Atheists flirt with Islamophobia,” by Nathan “Garibaldi” Lean for Salon, March 30:

…For Harris, the ankle-biter version of the Rottweiler Dawkins, suicide bombers and terrorists are not aberrations. They are the norm. They have not distorted their faith by interpreting it wrongly. They have lived out their faith by understanding it rightly. “The idea that Islam is a “˜peaceful religion hijacked by extremists” is a fantasy, and is now a particularly dangerous fantasy for Muslims to indulge,” he writes in “Letter to a Christian Nation.”

That may sound like the psychobabble of Pamela Geller. But Harris”s crude departure from scholarly decorum is at least peppered with references to the Quran, a book he cites time and again, before suggesting it be “flushed down the toilet without fear of violent reprisal.”

Yes, well, I am not for flushing books down the toilet — any reasonably-sized book would certainly clog up the pipes, even Nathan Lean’s hate screed — but saying “the idea that Islam is a “˜peaceful religion hijacked by extremists” is a fantasy” is “psychobabble”? Does Lean, who has never been the sharpest knife in the Islamic supremacist drawer, know what the word “psychobabble” means? Here’s Merriam-Webster: “1. a predominantly metaphorical language for expressing one’s feelings; 2a : psychological jargon; b : trite or simplistic language derived from psychotherapy.” So does this clown think that doubting that Islam is a peaceful religion is psychological jargon? Mumbo-jumbo derived from psychotherapy? Predominantly metaphorical? Is it the word “fantasy” that makes him reach for “psychobabble” here? Maybe Nathan has been spending a bit too long on the couch, but in any case, it is a blot on Salon’s already quite sorry record that they are so compromised and sold out to the Islamic supremacists that they will publish this semi-coherent and essentially meaningless drivel.

Anyway, hitting Dawkins for not having read the Qur’an (I have, Nathan, innumerable times), Lean says:

…That’s topsy-turvy logic for a man who says he’s never read the Quran but seconds later hocks up gems like this from his Twitter account:

“Islam is comforting? Tell that to a woman, dressed in a bin bag [trash bag], her testimony worth half a man’s and needing 4 male witnesses to prove rape.”

Is Lean suggesting that the Qur’an doesn’t say that a woman’s testimony is worth half that of a man’s (you’ll find that in 2:282) or that it specifies four male witnesses to prove sexual crimes (that’s in 24:4 and 24:13). And so Dawkins said he hadn’t read the Qur’an, but then he indicates that he is familiar with at least some of its teachings. This should give Lean pause, but like any good “war is deceit” acolyte, he charges on, hoping his hapless Salon readers will not know that the things Dawkins attributes to Islam are actually in the Qur’an.

…Where exactly Dawkins gets his information about Islam is unclear (perhaps Fox News?). What is clear, though, is that his unique brand of secular fundamentalism cozies up next to that screeched out by bloggers on the pages of some of the Web’s most vicious anti-Muslim hate sites. In a recent comment he posted on his own Web site, Dawkins references a site called Islam Watch, placing him in eerily close proximity to the likes of one of the page’s founders, Ali Sina, an activist who describes himself as “probably the biggest anti-Islam person alive.” Sina is a board member for the hate group, Stop the Islamization of Nations, which was founded by anti-Muslim activists Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer and which has designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

The SPLC is a well-heeled propaganda machine that smears conservatives for cash. It labels as “hate groups” many who simply disagree with its political stance, and is an integral part of the ongoing Leftist effort to demonize and destroy legitimate conservative voices like our American Freedom Defense Initiative by lumping them in with the likes of the KKK. While Lean constantly invokes this as if it demonstrates something, neither he nor Salon nor anyone else ever explain why the SPLC actually has any credibility in designating “hate groups” in the first place. For the SPLC turns a blind eye to the real hate that comes from the Left and Islamic supremacists, and offers with its hate group listings not only an incitement to violence, but a handy tool that lazy Leftist mainstream media journalists use to try to intimidate people away from supporting our message of human rights. The SPLC richly deserves its place on AFDI’s Threats to Freedom Index.

…For his part, Dawkins spins wild conspiracy theories claiming that ordinary terms like “communities” and “multiculturalism” are actually ominous code words for “Muslims” and “Islam,” respectively. The English Defence League, a soccer hooligan street gang that has a history of threatening Muslims with violence and assaulting police officers, has made identical claims, as have leaders of Stop the Islamization of Europe (SIOE), a ragtag coterie of neo-Nazis whose hate franchise spans two continents: Stop the Islamization of America (SIOA), its American counterpart, is led by bloggers Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer.

Lean probably got the libel that SIOE is a neo-Nazi group from his boss Reza Aslan, the Islamic Republic of Iran apologist who made it up out of thin air in 2010. I challenged Aslan to substantiate this claim at that time. He never did, because he can’t, because it’s false.

In July of 2011, Dawkins re-published a lengthy diatribe by former SIOE leader Stephen Gash on his website. Gash, too, has an aversion for scholarly decorum. He once unleashed a public temper tantrum during a debate on Islam at the esteemed Cambridge University Union Society, shouting and storming out of the auditorium when the invited speaker, a Muslim, rebutted his ideas before the audience.

This one made me laugh. Lean is criticizing someone for shouting and storming out of an auditorium (not that I believe his characterization of events)? A “public temper tantrum,” eh? That reminded me of this little news item from the Goldsboro News-Argus, February 24, 2005: “Two young men who spoke obscenities after what they thought was an unfavorable decision at a Goldsboro City Council meeting were disciplined Wednesday in Wayne County District Court. Aaron Kornegay, 27, of Beston Road, LaGrange and Nathan Chapman Lean, 20…” Nathan Lean, he knows public temper tantrums!

By publishing this stalker and gutter thug, Salon has heaped new disgrace upon itself. And for Salon, which disgraces itself pretty much every day, that’s really saying something.

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