This week is Banned Books Week. The Banned Books Week website says: “Banned Books Week is an annual event celebrating the freedom to read. Banned Books Week was launched in 1982 in response to a sudden surge in the number of challenges to books in schools, bookstores and libraries. Typically held during the last week of September, it highlights the value of free and open access to information. Banned Books Week brings together the entire book community — librarians, booksellers, publishers, journalists, teachers, and readers of all types — in shared support of the freedom to seek and to express ideas, even those some consider unorthodox or unpopular.”
Yet its list of “the Top Ten Challenged Books of 2017” consists of the nothing genuinely unorthodox or unpopular at all, at least among the Leftist elites. One book is even included because it “was thought to ‘lead to terrorism’ and ‘promote Islam,’ as if those things would make the book unacceptable to the people who run “schools, bookstores and libraries.” The Left has a near-total stranglehold on the educational system, the entertainment industry, the means of communication, and the culture in general, yet Leftists still like to pose as fearless outsiders confronting the establishment. They are the establishment.
If Banned Books Week really wanted to feature books that are considered “unorthodox or unpopular,” it should highlight books by people who are hated by the Leftist intelligentsia that dominates everything: Donald Trump. Alex Jones. Gavin McInnes. Dennis Prager.
And me. I’ve recently been banned from Patreon and GoFundMe, and MasterCard and Discover card won’t process donations to Jihad Watch. It’s clear that I am in their crosshairs, and Muslim Brotherhood-linked Congressman Keith Ellison has demanded that Amazon stop stocking books by people who are blacklisted by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
I wrote The History of Jihad From Muhammad to ISIS as a challenge to the elites’ narrative about jihad and Islam. And it’s clearer every day now that the elites are brooking no challenges to their narrative, and are moving as fast as they can to muzzle them. It’s Banned Books Week: the perfect time to pick up a copy of The History of Jihad From Muhammad to ISIS, while you still can. The establishmentarians who run Banned Books Week won’t tell you this, but I will: the authoritarian Left is working energetically now to ban all dissenting voices, in the run-up to the 2018 elections. Nor will they stop after those elections. Strike a blow for freedom and read a real “unorthodox” book this week: The History of Jihad From Muhammad to ISIS.
gravenimage says
Support Banned Books Week: get Robert Spencer’s The History of Jihad
…………………..
Hear, hear!
And “Banned Books Week”–generally a good idea–has become more and more politicized. It would be *very* surprising to find any even slightly right-of-center book on this list, no matter how ‘challenged’ it had been.
Andy says
Unbelievable,
Mr. Spencer is banned (along with a growing list of truthful freedom fighters) from going to certain countries but in the meantime Canada with it’s open door policies allow hate preachers in!
U.S. Imam Booked to Speak in Toronto Voices Anti Israel prayers
https://circanada.com/2018/09/24/u-s-imam-booked-to-speak-in-toronto-voices-anti-israel-prayers/
Carolyne says
I ordered Mr. Spencer’s book from Amazon. No problem.
Indiana Tom says
Oh heck, just have the Libtards wear brown uniforms, goose step about in circles, carry torches, put books in a pile, and burn them. Gee, it will be like the good old days!
b.a. freeman says
gotta give ’em time, indiana; right now, they still have to wear masks when they’re throwing molotov cocktails. once they can openly do that without fear of arrest (coming soon to a town near each of us), i’m sure the good old days will be back!
Elisha says
Please consider to read this book, written by Bible believing science professors:
https://creation.com/the-creation-answers-book-index
My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge. – Hosea 4:6
StellaSaidSo says
REAL scientists know that ‘Creationism’ is nonsense.
Indiana Tom says
The Evolutionists always come up with Darwinian theories of elimination of unfit species which always results in fewer species. The Evolutionists always have a lot of problems coming up with diversity of species in the first place. Think about it. What are the odds of a male and a female both having a rare and new mutation, finding, each other in the same time period, mating, and having offspring with that mutation?
Carolyne says
UH…..Who are these “REAL Scientists?”
Flavius Claudius Iulianus says
“UK begins ‘resettling’ White Helmets as refugees”
https://www.rt.com/uk/439260-white-helmets-resettled-uk/
Anjuli Pandavar says
I grew up at a time and in a place where books were revered and reading admired. Most people around me had none of the former and were poor at the latter. Many brought me books without knowing what they contained. They were books and I could read. It was their way of changing the world. Many of the books were in Hebrew (from my father’s employer), which I could not read, but their script fascinated me and I pored over them for hours. It was also a time and a place in which many books were routinely banned. To be found with books, any books, in certain circumstances, such as in a police roadblock, immediately made you a suspect: you read books. The chances were you’d be found in possession of a title on the very long list of prohibited books, and if not, then you were hiding them, which meant a raid on your house, or on your parents’ house, or on your sister’s house.
Banned books, of course, were precisely those I especially took the trouble to find (photocopiers were still some years off). The quality of the book did not enter into the equation. If I got hold of it, I read it immediately and passed it on. But there was also a certain cachet attached to owning a banned book. From time to time I found myself in a three-way tussle between my hunger to read, my vanity and my instinct for self-preservation. Whichever way, the act of reading a banned book felt like taking on the entire oppressive machinery of state. I became good at finding hidden meanings, even when there weren’t any. That didn’t matter; the thoughts they triggered might otherwise not have occurred to me. As with the mediaeval scholars — by whom I don’t mean the one-book variety revered by Muslims — when reading cannot be taken for granted, you read everything. I came to value the written word for its own sake, even if it sometimes conveyed arrest warrants, banning orders, prison sentences or government “explanations” for why yet another person died in police detention.
StellaSaidSo says
Great post, Anjuli Pandavar.
Harold Armitage says
How about banning the Koran?
StellaSaidSo says
+1
This could be done, on the basis of its repeated incitement to violence. Geert Wilders advocates this course, and I have some sympathy for his position. On the other hand, if we were to make the Koran compulsory reading, with appropriate attention to the violence and misogyny, the effect might be even more curative. But, alas, I don’t think either scenario is likely to take place any time soon.
Peter Boardman says
Ban the Koran; never! Otherwise how would non-muslims know how peaceful a belief system Islam really is?