Moderate Islam?

American Thinker

Jerry Philipson

Every time anything even marginally critical of Muslims or Islam appears in the media apologists, Muslim or otherwise, respond by saying ‘moderate voices must be heard’ or ‘misconceptions about Islam are widespread’ or ‘Islam is really a religion of peace and tolerance’ or other such platitudes.

These pronouncements are dead wrong. What we must look at is how and why Islam manifests itself the way it does and what we must listen to are the cries of its victims, those that are still alive that is. If we did we would realize that Islam is not a religion of peace and tolerance and that Muslims constantly commit heinous acts in its name everywhere on earth, the United States and Canada included. We would realize that it is in fact not merely religion, it is a completely proscribed way of life which requires true believers to act in ways that are fundamentally at odds with free, democratic, secular, Judeo-Christian, Western societies like ours. We would realize that Islam is expansionist and demands that non believers  submit to its imperatives, with horrific consequences if they don’t. We would realize that the Koran is full of hatred and intolerance and misogyny, that Islam really hasn’t changed since its inception, that its very nature makes change virtually impossible and that the term ‘moderate Islam’ is complete hogwash.

 

Let there be no mistake. The vast majority of Muslims in the West are every bit as peaceful and tolerant in their daily lives as you or I, but they are not true believers or practitioners even if they think they are. They couldn’t be because if they were every single one of them would be out to conquer us and bring us under Islam’s sway. Moderate, peaceful, tolerant, integrated Muslims-absolutely. They are all around us. Moderate, peaceful, tolerant, integrated Islam — no such thing. Every day all over the world people are murdered, maimed, raped, attacked, vilified and humiliated under its aegis and according to its precepts and dictates. We have had 1400 years of this behavior and the evidence is overwhelming and beyond dispute…moderate Islam simply does not exist and never has.

 

Unfortunately, it’s very difficult for ordinary citizens to gain an accurate picture of Islam because the mainstream media is unwilling or unable to show its true colors, out of ignorance, political correctness, fear of retaliation or any number of other such reasons. The media would do us all a huge favor if it did however. Islam is a direct and serious threat to Western civilization in general and must be seen for what it is if we are to keep it from destroying our way of life and forcing us all to live as it requires us to. Including moderate Muslims.

 

With horrific consequences if we don’t.

Think Again: A double standard for Islam

Jerusalem Post

Hate speech laws are applied in West against those critical of Islam, but never against Muslim imams who mock Jewish, Christian infidels.

Islamists everywhere demand respect for Islam, the prophet and the Koran, and threaten murderous mayhem should that demand not be honored. At the same time, they do not hesitate to express their contempt for other religions and their adherents, as well as the system of democratic rights protecting the freedom of religion. Nor are those threats to be taken likely. More than 50 people died in violence triggered by the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s 1989 edict against Salman Rushdie, author of The Satanic Verses, and all those connected with its publication or distribution. Dozens of Europeans are now in hiding or under police protection because of death threats from Muslims. Sadly, the West has to a shocking degree acquiesced in this double standard. The Washington Post removed from its website a cartoon including the words “Where’s Muhammad,” even though it contained no depiction of him; South Park’s producers edit episodes mentioning Islam but not those ridiculing Christianity; Yale University Press deleted all the actual cartoons from a book on the Danish cartoon controversy. Australian preachers were fined for quoting the Koran, and leading Dutch politician Geert Wilders was put on trial for his strident criticism of Islam. Hate speech laws are applied in Europe against those critical of Islam, but never against Muslim imams who mock Jewish or Christian infidels. Even here, Tatiana Susskind was sentenced to two years in jail for posting a cartoon of the face of Muhammad on the body of a pig, but preachers from the Islamic Movement can broadcast what they want about Jews and Judaism. The double standard conveys to the Islamists two dangerous messages. First, violence works; the West is terrorized. Second, Islam is the one true religion: Behold, even Westerners treat it with a deference not shown to Christianity or Judaism. INTELLECTUALS AND cultural elites have played a major role in fostering the West’s acceptance of voluntary dhimmitude by manipulating the level at which the debate takes place whenever it touches issues of Islam. In part, intellectual attitudes are motivated by fear; in part by a refusal to acknowledge a civilizational struggle between the West and expansionist Islam. For some, the frisson of seeing their own bourgeois society under attack contributes to the fun. The recent uproar over the threat of an obscure Florida pastor to burn the Koran provides a classic example of the different ways the debate is framed depending on whether Islam is perceived as the “aggressor” or the “victim.” The Koran burning would undoubtedly have been protected “symbolic speech” under settled First Amendment doctrine. Burning the American flag, another highly charged act, has been protected by the Supreme Court. At the same time, it must be conceded that the Koran burning is highly offensive to Muslims and has no purpose other than to offend. Let’s compare the response to the threatened Koran burning to another recent hot-button issue: the Ground Zero mosque. In discussing the proposed mosque, President Barack Obama focused, or at least claimed to focus, on the impermissibility under the First Amendment of banning only mosques from a particular area. He expressed, or claimed to express, no opinion on the propriety of the project. The issue of the propriety of the project or the implicit message it would convey to the broader Islamic world was beyond the pale of legitimate discussion, proclaimed New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg. He professed to be totally uninterested in the fact the project’s initiator, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, is an advocate for the spread of Islamic law (Shari’a) or that he has assigned America part of the blame for 9/11 or that he initially described the site of the mosque as so close to Ground Zero that debris from one of the hijacked airplanes fell on it. That the building of the mosque will be viewed by Islamists worldwide as an example of Islamic religious structures replacing those of the conquered infidels is irrelevant. Pastor Terry Jones, by contrast, was immediately condemned by Obama (“un-American”), Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (“disgraceful”) and Supreme NATO Commander in Afghanistan Gen. David Petraeus. The latter argued that the Koran burning would endanger allied troops and make the Taliban’s recruiting easier. In short, critics of Jones – just about every single person in America – framed the discussion of his proposed action in terms of its propriety or impact, and ignored its protected status under the First Amendment, while defenders of the Ground Zero mosque talked only of the First Amendment, and ruled out of court issues of propriety or the boost the mosque would give to the Islamist narrative of Islam triumphant. Even more striking is the contrast of the calumny heaped on Jones, with the public discussion of grossest offenses to Christianity. Christians who protested the taxpayer-supported Brooklyn Museum of Art’s display of a picture of Jesus’s mother on a background of buttocks and female genitalia or the use of a National Endowment of the Arts grant to produce a jar with a plastic crucifix in urine (Piss Christ) found themselves pilloried by their cultural betters as philistines and lectured on the privilege of living in a society in which even the most transgressive art can find a public forum. Only transgressive art that might rile notoriously irritable Muslims gets a pass. US Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer seriously entertained the idea, in response to a question from George Stephanopoulos, that Koran-burning might be compared to shouting fire in a crowded theater if Muslims in Afghanistan would go on murderous rampages in response. He thereby treated Muslims as possessed of rage response instinct that completely bypasses all higher brain function. THE DISPROPORTIONATE media attention focused on Jones served the Islamist cause by giving credence to the charge of Islamophobia, which is constantly used to exclude discussion of Islam from the free marketplace of ideas. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, for instance, felt compelled to “apologize to Muslims for the wave of bigotry and simple nuttiness directed at you.” Yet Islamophobia is largely a fiction. Jones, one person in a nation of more than 300 million, did not constitute a wave of anything. Hate crimes against Muslims are exceedingly rare in America – even after 9/11, the Fort Hood massacre, the attempted Times Square bombing and a dozen other foiled terrorist attempts. Hate crimes against Jews and Jewish institutions are eight times as common as those against Muslims. The Western media consistently downplays the scope of Islamic threat, perhaps in an effort to calm its fears. The overwhelming majority of Muslims worldwide are peace-loving fellows, we are assured, and only a handful of bad apples spoil the image of the rest. Ignored are the worldwide network of Saudi-sponsored Wahhabi mosques and the vast number of Muslim Brotherhood-inspired offshoots – not just al-Qaida and Hamas, but groups in Western countries promoting Shari’a as the only legitimate system of law. Endemic problems in virtually the entire Arab and Muslim world are ignored. On a Freedom House scale of freedom (on which seven is the least free) the median for Arab nations is 5.5. For the rest of the world it is 2.5. Whether it is child brides in Gaza, institutionalized selection of dancing pre-pubescent boys as mistresses by older males in Afghanistan or widespread clitoridectomy in much of the Muslim world, the media take a pass. All these phenomena deserve more attention than Jones’s antics. When Khomeini pronounced it the duty of every Muslim to kill Salman Rushdie and all those promoting his book, British intellectuals rallied to his defense. Recently, when Mollie Norris, a cartoonist for a Seattle alternative weekly, had the misbegotten idea of promoting “Draw Muhammad Day,” she was advised by the FBI to change her identity and go underground. Her own paper contented itself with a laconic announcement, “Mollie Norris no longer exists.” The story of an American journalist fearing for her life in America received scant coverage. No wonder Paul Berman titled his recent book on Western responses to Islam The Flight of the Intellectuals. The writer is the director of Jewish Media Resources. He has written a regular column in The Jerusalem Post Magazine since 1997, and is the author of eight biographies of modern Jewish leaders.

The Dogmatic Denial of Reality

from Gates of Vienna

by Baron Bodissey

Our Norwegian correspondent Zylark returns with an essay about the persistent failure of postmodern intellectuals to perceive and understand the world as it is, rather than as they would prefer it to be.
The Dogmatic Denial of Reality
by Zylark

Why many intellectuals miss the point, and many who are not considered intellectuals do not.

Education is a double-edged sword, especially in the social sciences. It is no secret that most higher educational facilities are dominated by the more liberal professors and other like-minded faculty. It is the prevalent culture.

And that is quite fine, in principle. The campus is supposed to be a free zone, where ideas are to be tested on merit, not prejudice. Which requires tolerance, a mindset ready to admit fault, and not least the recognition that nothing is holy, beyond criticism.

It sounds nice, and in the more nature-oriented sciences, this is how it works for the most part. But in the social sciences it does not. Various social sciences have forgotten about reality, and instead got hung up in their own constructed ideal view of existence. They mistake how they want reality to be for how reality really is.

That is how you can find people calling themselves scientists who claim one’s sex is arbitrary to one’s development and identity. That one’s role and identity in society, not least with regards to one’s sex and sexuality is determined according to learned societal stereotypes, not the genes and sex itself and the inherent predispositions inherited with them.

In this view any girl can behave as a boy, and vice versa. Naturally, however, anyone more inclined to following actual evidence (as a proper scientist would) can tell you that there are some very significant differences in the inherent psychological makeup of boys and girls. It is not a coincidence that boys tend to play with cars, and girls with dolls, generally speaking.

This denial of realities is part of a dogma. It goes under the guise of a liberal intellectual mindset best described as postmodern relativism. That is: all ideas have equal validity. This dogma asserts that all basic understandings of reality, and as a continuation morality and ethics, are equal. Boy? Girl? Doesn’t matter.

This is, of course, true in the sense that both sexes have equal worth, and should enjoy equal opportunity. It is not true in the sense that both sexes possess the same interests, however. Obviously, this is not a clear cut dichotomy. It is more a soft-edged overlap. As are most things in nature.

But you do not need a higher degree to know that most girls like to play with dolls, and most boys like to play with cars. You do need a higher degree to say that sex has nothing to do with a choice of favorite toys.

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *
A similar situation obtains with regards to the West and Islam. A basic denial of facts. Various intellectuals and politicians alike assume Islam is just another religion, like those practiced by, say, Buddhists, Hindus, or Christians. Strike one. Next they assume religion is by definition a force for good. Strike two. And finally, strike three, they assume Islam can be tamed. They are very aware of the more feral variations of Islam, but they think in some ideal world, when it encounters tolerance, Islam will be domesticated.

Indeed, some even think that when Islam meets the West here in Europe — and providing we Europeans give up a few hard-won freedoms, all will be nice and honky-dory. As the “peace researcher” Johan Galtung claims:

“If we resist, the Islamic future will be hard rather than soft. Immigration, the large movements of people in this time, will bring this along. No one can stop it. And remember, the foreigners in their time were asked to come here, and they came here for economic and historical reasons that no one can do anything to change.”

And this is a world-renowned “peace researcher”! What he is prescribing is that Western Civilization should roll over and die. To submit. We’ve brought this on ourselves, which is true, but we cannot resist, which is false.

Now, I’ve met Galtung on a number of occasions, and I understand his intellectual position. Indeed, many of his ideas and conflict-resolution models have merit. But only insofar as a few assumptions are met. In essence that there are some commonalities between two conflicting extremities that one can work with to create “a third way”. Not a compromise as such, but rather a new way of working together.

His favorite example is of the financier husband and Buddhist wife, who grow apart due to differing world views and interests. The compromise solution, is for each to do his or her own thing. Spelling divorce in the end. His third way is for the husband and wife to start a Buddhist bookshop. Merging the business interest of the husband and the Buddhist interest of the wife. All fine and good so far.

But I do not quite see how you can merge the “Kill the Jews and subjugate the infidels!” interest of Islam with “let’s all be nice to each other, and make a profit!” tolerance of the West…

Yes, pacifism and dialogue worked with Gandhi and the British empire, but in that case both parties were not that keen on actual violence, for various reasons. And neither party was hell-bent on forcing the other to submit to his ideology. Gandhi advocated the same pacifist approach towards the Japanese during WW2 as they came closer to India and looked like they might threaten the British dominion. How likely is it that if the Japanese had been victorious, India would today be a free country? And how long would Gandhi have lived pressuring Japan rather than the UK?

The fact is that civility works only as long as one’s opponent is civilized. In all other cases, only force will work. There are no negotiating with despotism.

Galtung’s hope lies in a benign version of Islam. Here in Europe we spent a few centuries taming Christianity. I don’t think we have the patience to tame Islam.

And most who live in the free world and see how Islam behaves more or less understand that on instinct. However, some with higher degrees in the social sciences still deny reality. They live in their own ideal world of the imagination.

Living in the real world, keeping one’s mind on it, brings a perspective that academia forgets at its own peril.

Hans-Peter Raddatz: Islamismus ist Islam!

Politically Incorrect

Der Orientalist Dr. Hans-Peter Raddatz hat in einem Interview mit dem Deutschlandfunk erklärt, es gebe entgegen der immer wiederkehrenden gegenteiligen Beschwichtigungsformel sehr wohl den einen Islam. Dabei wirft Raddatz den “Dialogführern“ dieser Republik vor, sie wollten mit ihrem Mantra, es gebe nicht den Islam, von der Tatsache ablenken, dass es einen Kernbestandteil des Islam gibt.

Dieser Kern sei die Scharia. Der orthodoxe Islam, der in der Diskussion gerne mit Islamismus umschrieben werde, sei der Islam selbst. Hat der Islamismus also doch etwas mit dem Islam zu tun?

Hier das Interview im Wortlaut, von dem auch ein Audio-Mitschnitt zur Verfügung steht:

Jürgen Liminski: Die Integrationsdebatte ist mit der Einlassung von CSU-Chef Seehofer zur Begrenzung der Einwanderung von Menschen aus anderen Kulturkreisen wieder aufgeflammt, und zwar, wie das in Deutschland so üblich ist, auf emotional hohem Niveau. Die Sachfrage, die dahinter steht, aber lautet, wie integrationsfähig ist der Islam, denn um diesen Kulturkreis geht es de facto. Darüber wollen wir jetzt sprechen mit Hans-Peter Raddatz, er ist Orientalist und Autor einer ganzen Reihe von Büchern über den Islam, die Türkei, den Iran, das Verhältnis des Islam zum Judentum und so weiter, und er ist jetzt am Telefon. Guten Morgen, Herr Raddatz.

Hans-Peter Raddatz: Guten Morgen, Herr Liminski.

Liminski: Herr Raddatz, der Bürgermeister von Berlin-Neukölln, Heinz Buschkowsky (SPD), sagt, zur Wertschöpfung unserer demokratischen Gesellschaft gehört der Islam zweifelsohne nicht. Dem Islam fehle vor allem Liberalität und Kritikfähigkeit. Stimmt das? Hat er recht?

Raddatz: Im Prinzip stimmt das, denn wie sich inzwischen auch in der größeren Öffentlichkeit herumgesprochen hat, ist der Islam ja nicht nur eine Religion, sondern auch eine Ideologie, und zwar eine Ideologie mit sehr hohem und sehr ausdrücklichem Geltungsanspruch, der zu den bekannten und inzwischen auch hier weitläufig diskutierten Erscheinungsformen wie Ehrenmord und dergleichen führt. Und eine solche Ideologie ist selbstverständlich, wie auch wir das aus eigener Erfahrung in Europa wissen, überhaupt nicht kritikfähig, sondern reagiert sofort und zuweilen auch sehr hart auf Kritik, und insofern muss man Herrn Buschkowsky recht geben.

Liminski: Kann man denn überhaupt von “dem Islam” oder “den Muslimen” sprechen?

Raddatz: Insofern, als es natürlich einen ganz klaren und historisch gewachsenen Kern im Islam gibt, und das ist die sogenannte Scharia. Das ist die unfehlbare Pflichtenlehre des Islam, an die sich jeder gläubige Muslim zu halten hat und so weit es möglich ist auch ihren bis ins einzelne Detail gehenden Vorschriften zu folgen hat. “Den Islam” gibt es in diesem Sinne, den gibt es allerdings nicht im Sinne der sogenannten Dialogführer. Das sind diejenigen, die den Import des Islam nach Deutschland und Europa berufsmäßig betreiben. Nach deren Auslegung gibt es den Islam ja eigentlich nicht, weil er angeblich in tausend Facetten zerfällt. Diese Politik wird natürlich genau deswegen betrieben, um den Blick auf den eigentlichen Islam, den Scharia-Islam zu verhindern.

Liminski: In allen islamischen Ländern gilt das Grundgesetz des Din Wa Daula, der Einheit von Politik und Religion. Ist der Islam in seinen unterschiedlichen nationalen Facetten konsens- und kompromissbereit?

Raddatz: Da sprechen Sie ja genau wieder den zentralen Punkt an. Dieses Konzept Din Wa Daula ist übrigens gar nicht auf islamischem Boden gewachsen, sondern ein Konzept, das durch die westlichen Kolonialisten in den Orient getragen wurde, dort übernommen wurde und dann schließlich einverleibt wurde. Aber die Einheit von Staat und Glaube zeigt es ja, dass wiederum hier im Hintergrund die Scharia steht, und obwohl dieses Prinzip Din Wa Daula den Eindruck suggeriert, dass es hier eine Art westähnliche Teilung zwischen Glaube und Gesellschaft gibt, existiert die nicht, denn wenn man genauer hinguckt, ist bis auf die Ausnahmen von Türkei und Tunesien jeder islamische Machthaber auf die Scharia verpflichtet, er verliert seine Legitimität in dem Moment, wo er sie nicht mehr plausibel vertritt.

Liminski: Welche Teile der Scharia sind denn indiskutabel und über welche könnte man reden?

Raddatz: Grundsätzlich steht eigentlich überhaupt nichts zur Diskussion und es gibt auch keine kompatiblen Gesprächspartner im Islam, die überhaupt die Legitimation hätten, irgendetwas zur Disposition zu stellen. Darum geht es natürlich vordergründig aus westlicher Sicht nicht. Wenn es nicht diesen, dem Islam ungeheuer weit entgegenkommenden Dialog gegeben hätte, sondern es den politischen Willen gegeben hätte, sich selbst zunächst mal hinzustellen und den Muslimen bestimmte Forderungen zu stellen, dann hätte man zwei Forderungen in den Vordergrund stellen müssen, nämlich erstens die Frage, was ist eigentlich das Gebet, was ist die Aufgabe der Moschee, und zweitens, was soll die Verhüllung der Frau, welche Aufgabe hat sie, sie hat nicht nur symbolische Bedeutung, sie hat natürlich ganz konkrete menschenrechtsbehindernde Funktionen. Und was das Gebet betrifft und die Rolle der Moschee, kann man nur sagen, diese beiden Punkte sind absolut unverzichtbar, weil hierin nämlich die ständige Vergewisserung der Muslime im Kampf gegen den Unglauben erfolgt. Das heißt, zumindest im Freitagsgebet wird ständig sich des Propheten Mohammed erinnert, seines Modells von Medina, das seinerzeit den Kampf des Islam gegen den Nicht-Islam in Gang gesetzt hat, und dieses Prinzip, Herr Liminski, gilt bis heute.

Liminski: Aber viele muslimische Frauen sind unverhüllt? Also nicht ganz, aber …

Raddatz: Ja, richtig. Natürlich hat das hauptsächlich zunächst mal der westliche Einfluss auf sich, und zweitens darf man nicht vergessen, dass es natürlich eine Minderheit im Islam gibt, die nicht nur aufgrund des westlichen Einflusses, sondern ganz allgemein aufgrund der allgemeinen weltweiten Säkularisierung, die ja nicht nur vom Westen angestoßen ist, sondern von der Wissenschaftsentwicklung allgemein, nun sich hier auch bei denen, bei dieser Minderheit, sagen wir mal 20 bis 25 Prozent, schätzen die Araber zumindest für sich ein, gerne den drückenden Einfluss der Orthodoxie etwas zurückdrängen wollen. Diese Orthodoxie wird bei uns mit Islamismus umschrieben, oft gerne auch vom Islam getrennt, aber diese Orthodoxie ist der Islam selbst. Das heißt, der Islamismus ist Islam, ist gläubiger Islam, und wenn Sie also die Frage stellen, inwieweit das disponibel ist, kann ich immer nur wiederholen, es ist so weit nicht disponibel, wenngleich man sowohl in Amerika als auch in Europa erste leichte Ansätze der Kritik an der bisher praktizierten Dialogpolitik feststellen kann. Da muss man abwarten, wie das weitergeht.

Liminski: Scharia und Freitagsgebet sind für weite Teile des Islam nicht diskutabel. Das war hier im Deutschlandfunk der Orientalist und Islam-Kenner Hans-Peter Raddatz. Besten Dank für das Gespräch, Herr Raddatz.

Raddatz ist nicht nur bei den Aussagen hinsichtlich des Islam selbst zuzustimmen, sondern auch darin, dass die bisherige Kritik an der „Dialog“-Politik nur als erste leichte Ansätze zu bezeichnen ist. Ein „Dialog“ mit dem antizivilisatorischen Islam kann nicht in der Aufgabe eigener Positionen bestehen. Die durch Mohammed abgegebene Kriegserklärung gegenüber den Ungläubigen – von Raddatz als den zu bekriegenden Nicht-Islam umschrieben – gilt bis heute. Nur weil man gewillt ist, diese Kriegserklärung nicht zur Kenntnis zu nehmen, herrscht noch lange kein Frieden. Zum Krieg muss nur eine Partei entschlossen sein, für den Frieden haben sich beide bzw. alle dauerhaft zu entscheiden. Und wie Wilders richtigerweise unter Verweis auf Bukowsky deutlich macht: Appeaser gewinnen keine Kriege!

 

The Leading Edge of Freedom: How to Support Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff

Citizen Warrior

Sunday, October 24

GEERT WILDERS is well-known to most counterjihadists, but Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff’s case is very similar. Like Geert, she faces trial for reporting factual information about Islam. Her “crime” was to conduct public seminars in which she described Islamic doctrine, quoted from the Quran, and explained the dangers of Islamic encroachment.

Like Geert, Elisabeth has been charged with “hate speech” for her words (read an example of what she actually said). Unlike Geert, however, Elisabeth is a private citizen, a wife, and the mother of a small child. She lacks the major resources necessary to defend herself against the well-funded organs of the state which seek to persecute her.

Elisabeth will go on trial in Vienna on November 23rd, in what is clearly a political action intended to silence anyone who dissents against the prevailing multicultural orthodoxy.

Her European and North American supporters have created Elisabeth’s Voice to ensure she is not silenced. By appealing for financial aid, they intend to ensure that her defense is well-funded. By appealing for publicity, they intend to ensure that her case is well-known, not just in Austria and the rest of Europe, but across the entire Western world.

Americans may think Elisabeth’s plight is uniquely European, and has nothing to do with them. But make no mistake about it: the same repression is on its way to the United States of America. As the recent cases of Molly Norris, Juan Williams, and Derek Fenton demonstrate, free speech may already be taken away by non-juridical means. Dissent is even now being silenced in schools and on college campuses, and politically incorrect expression is cause for dismissal from both public and private employment.

The same types of “hate speech” laws that were used against Elisabeth in Austria are being prepared for the United States through the work of the United Nations. At the initiative of the Organization of the Islamic Conference — the largest voting block in the United Nations — the UN is on the verge of requiring all member states to pass laws criminalizing “the defamation of religions, including Islam.”

Barack Obama has indicated his support for the UN’s proposed resolution. Time is running out for all of us. If we don’t stand up now for people like Geert Wilders, Ezra Levant, Mark Steyn, and Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff, there will be no one to stand up for us later, when our turn comes.

How can you stand up for Elisabeth? Show your support. Contribute to Elisabeth’s defense fund (which is not under her control, and may only be used to pay her lawyers) visit the In Defense of Free Speech website. You can also get updates on her case at that website.

And we can each spend some time publicizing Elisabeth’s case. Write a letter to your local paper. Make comments on blogs. Post something on Facebook about it. Let people know what’s happening. Share the video below; share articles, talk about it to your friends and family. In both Elisabeth’s and Geert’s cases, this is the leading edge of freedom: Either the legal verdicts will be in favor of freedom of speech, or the verdicts will be in favor of limiting freedom of speech to accommodate Islamic sensitivities. Let freedom ring. Let’s make freedom ring!

Watch an interview with Elisabeth.

Read more about Elisabeth’s case: Lawfare in Austria: Is Truth Illegal? Paul Revere Gets the Slammer.

The Beginning of the End of European Multiculturalism

by Soeren Kern
October 21, 2010

The attempt to get native Germans to live peacefully side-by-side with foreigners has not worked. In an unprecedented admission that is sure to transform the debate in Germany (and in Europe as a whole), over uncontrolled mass immigration, especially from Muslim countries, German Chancellor Angela Merkel now concedes that German multiculturalism has “failed utterly.”

Speaking to a meeting of her center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party in Potsdam outside Berlin on October 16, Merkel said: “We are a country which at the beginning of the 1960s actually brought [Muslim] guest workers to Germany. Now they live with us and we lied to ourselves for a while, saying that they will nott stay and that they will have disappeared again one day. That is not the reality. This multicultural approach—saying that we simply live side by side and are happy about each other—this approach has failed, failed utterly.”

Merkel’s sobering comments follow the publication in October of a survey by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, a think tank linked to the center-left Social Democratic Party [SPD], which found that 55% of Germans believe that Arabs are “unpleasant,” and over 33% believe the country is being “overrun” by immigrants. The study also noted that “far-right attitudes” are not isolated at the extremes of German society, but to a large degree “at the center of it.”

The debate over what to do about Germany’s broken immigration system has been simmering for years, but began in earnest in August, when Thilo Sarrazin, a prominent German banker, and also a long-time member of the SPD, published a controversial new book titled “Germany Does Away With Itself.” The book broke Germany’s long-standing taboo on discussing the impact of Muslim immigration by highlighting painful truths about the current state of affairs.

At the time, Merkel sought to distance herself from Sarrazin’s views and called for his dismissal from the German Central Bank. In a September 3 interview with the Turkish daily Hurriyet, for example, Merkel labelled as “ridiculous” Sarrazin’s view that there were too many immigrants, particularly Muslims, in Germany, and that their presence was damaging the country. She also told Germans they must get used to mosques as part of Germany’s changing landscape.

But pressure from within the CDU over integration may now be prompting Merkel to take a tougher line on immigration. Disastrous opinion polls and right-wing dissatisfaction with her perceived “left-wing” conservatism have led to an open discussion about an early replacement for Germany’s first woman leader.

In any event, Sarrazin’s concerns over Muslim integration are resonating with the German population at large, and politicians like Merkel are taking note. Sarrazin’s book has topped the bestseller list on bookseller Amazon’s German website since its publication, and book tour dates across the country are sold out. Polls show broad public support for Sarrazin’s anger that many Muslim immigrants shut themselves off from Germany, do not speak German and do not share the German or Western worldview.

According to a recent survey conducted by TNS Emnid pollsters, around 20% of German voters would back a hypothetical political party led by Sarrazin. Another poll conducted by the mass-circulation Bild am Sonntag shows that 89% of those surveyed say Sarrazin’s arguments are convincing. “For them,” according to Emnid, “Sarrazin is somebody who is finally saying what many are thinking.”

Similar scenarios are playing themselves out across Europe, where political parties with anti-immigration platforms are gaining in popularity and influence — at the expense of traditional political parties, which have steadfastly refused to address the problem of out-of-control immigration, especially from Muslim countries.

Rather than acknowledge the legitimate concerns of millions of European voters — that a large percentage of immigrants are not integrating into European society — Europe’s politically correct ruling elite for years has focused its energy on silencing dissent by branding those who refuse to buy into its multicultural worldview as racial bigots.

Now, however, increasing numbers of European voters (including many on the political left and far-left) are protesting the entrenched paternalism of Europe’s ruling class by moving to the political right in search of solutions to some of Europe’s most intractable (and mostly self-inflicted) problems. Center-right and far-right parties are currently governing in Britain, France, Germany and Italy, and now sit in the parliaments of Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Denmark, Hungary, Latvia, Norway, Slovakia, Sweden, Switzerland and the Netherlands.

This political trend spells big trouble ahead for European multiculturalism. Although the term multiculturalism can be defined in many ways, in contemporary Europe it generally refers to an anti-Western ideology, disguised as liberalism, that encourages people of different (namely non-Judeo-Christian) faiths and cultures to settle in Europe without any expectation of them integrating. In practice, European multiculturalism often fosters an animus against Western values and encourages newcomers in anti-Western behavior, rather than promoting the common values of nationhood.

The rise of anti-immigrant parties across Europe reflects a growing concern that multiculturalism (and its myriad internal contradictions) is destroying traditional European society and must be stopped.

The guardians of European political correctness, who have grown accustomed to decades of instructing ordinary Europeans as to what constitutes acceptable thought, are not looking kindly upon this open act of insubordination. European news media are now portraying the rise of the European right as a nativist reactionary movement whose supporters are unsavory extremists who threaten the stability of Europe. They also claim that the anti-immigrant fervor sweeping Europe is a recent phenomenon, triggered by economic recession and rapidly increasing joblessness.

In truth, however, a sizeable portion of European society has been worried about the consequences of mass immigration for at least a decade, but their concerns have been largely ignored by a European ruling elite that is so pathologically ridden by a collective Western guilt complex that it refuses to sacrifice its sacred ideology of multiculturalism.

Meanwhile, back in Germany, Merkel says that “the demand for integration is one of our key tasks for the times to come.” If she follows through on her declaration, it would mark the beginning of the end of European multiculturalism, which increasingly would take a back seat to efforts to promote integration and assimilation.

It would also mark an important victory for free speech and the rights of ordinary European citizens to decide how they want to live.

Labour: London borough becomes ‘Islamic republic’

Telegraph.co.uk

By Andrew Gilligan

 

Islamic republic? Tower Hamlets, east London (Photo: Dan Kitwood/Getty)

Outside the Wellington Way polling station in Tower Hamlets yesterday, as at many other polling stations in the borough, people had to run a gauntlet of Lutfur Rahman supporters to reach the ballot box. As one Bengali woman voter went past them, we heard one of the Rahman army scolding her for her “immodest dress.”

That incident is perhaps a tiny taste of the future for Britain’s poorest borough now it has elected Mr Rahman as its first executive mayor, with almost total power over its £1 billion budget. At the count last night, one very senior figure in the Tower Hamlets Labour Party said: “It really is Britain’s Islamic republic now.”

For the last eight months – without complaint or challenge from Mr Rahman – this blog and newspaper have laid out his close links with a group of powerful local businessmen and with a Muslim supremacist body, the Islamic Forum of Europe (IFE) – which believes, in its own words, in transforming the “very infrastructure of society, its institutions, its culture, its political order and its creed… from ignorance to Islam.” Mr Rahman has refused to deny these claims.

We have told how the borough’s change from a conventional council leader to a mayoral system came about as a result of a campaign led and financed by these two groups – and how the IFE, in its words, wanted to “get one of our brothers” into the position.

We have described in detail, again without complaint or challenge by Mr Rahman, his deeply problematic two years as council leader until he was removed from that post six months ago, partly as a result of our investigations. After he secured the leadership with the help of the IFE, millions of pounds were channelled to front organisations of the IFE, a man with close links to the IFE was appointed as assistant chief executive of the council despite being unqualified for the position and the secular, white chief executive was forced out. Various efforts were made to “Islamicise” the borough. Extremist literature was stocked in Tower Hamlets’ public libraries.

We have described, once more without complaint or challenge from Mr Rahman, how he signed up entire families of sham “paper” Labour members to win the party’s mayoral nomination – acts which caused him to be sacked as the Labour candidate by the party’s National Executive Committee.

Now, however, Mr Rahman has won as an independent – getting more than double the number of votes of the Labour candidate imposed in his place, Helal Abbas. As mayor, he will have far more power than he had as a council leader. And unlike a council leader, no-one can sack him, except the voters in four years’ time.

We should be clear what this result was, and was not. It was a decisive victory. But it was not much of an endorsement by the borough’s people. Turnout, at 25.6%, was astonishingly low, with most voters (particularly the white majority, and they still are a majority) unaware of, indifferent to or turned off by the process. Lutfur’s 23,000-odd votes are only about 13 per cent of Tower Hamlets’ electorate.

It was not a victory for any sort of democracy. It was the execution of a careful and sophisticated plan by a small, well-financed and highly-organised cabal to seize control of a London borough. It deployed not just volunteers from the IFE and other bodies but also people paid to campaign by Lutfur’s business backers. Someone also paid for tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of copies of the most pernicious literature ever seen in a British election, in which Mr Abbas was falsely smeared as a wife-beater, a bankrupt, a racist and and an insulter of Islam.

Yet even this would probably not have worked without a series of astonishing unforced errors by the Labour Party. Something else this was not, or not really, was Lutfur’s win; it was Labour’s own goal. For the last nine years, there have been deep concerns about IFE and other infiltration, and membership fraud generally, in Tower Hamlets (the Bethnal Green and Bow constituency Labour party more than doubled in size between 2006 and 2008, at a time when Labour membership nationally was sharply falling. Many of the new members have the same names as people we can link to the IFE.)

As a result, Tower Hamlets Labour members are not allowed to select their councillor candidates: it is done centrally, by the London regional office. Yet this safeguard was torn up for the far more important mayoral selection, despite the warnings on this blog and elsewhere that Lutfur’s vote bank would see him selected, as he indeed was.

Having then bravely crossed the Rubicon of sacking Lutfur as their candidate, Labour failed to follow through. Its campaign was slow out of the stocks, allowing him to present himself as a victim, with all the emotional advantage that brought. Above all, Labour seemed afraid clearly to explain why he had been sacked.

I knew the election was lost for Abbas when I saw him on the BBC last week, three times refusing to say why Lutfur had been ditched. The reporter, quite understandably, along with a lot of the Bengali and white electorate, ended up concluding that it was little more than a personality clash between the two men. Most Bengali voters didn’t back Lutfur because they support the IFE – they don’t – but because they believed he had been unfairly treated.

If Labour had spelt out to people the reasons why Lutfur’s sacking was entirely justified; told voters that this election was actually about the continued health of democracy and secularism in Tower Hamlets; and said that it was about the interests of the whole diverse borough versus the interests of Lutfur’s puppetmasters, it might have galvanised enough of those elusive white and Bengali secularist voters to outweigh Lutfur’s block. It wouldn’t have needed many – a few thousand would have done it.

Again and again, Labour people asked me why this story was not playing bigger in the media. I said it was simple: they weren’t giving the media anything to play with. I am confident in writing what I have done about Lutfur because I’ve been working on this story for more than a year. Most journalists, however, aren’t allowed the time to do in-depth research; they have to go with what people are prepared to say in front of their TV cameras or at their press conferences. But though senior figures in Tower Hamlets Labour were happy to speak on background, virtually none would ever go on the record.

The saving grace of last night is as follows. Now that Labour is in opposition on Tower Hamlets, it has at least been given the chance to oppose. The one gain for the party is that it can dissociate itself from, and campaign against, the slow-motion car-crash which Lutfur’s mayoralty is likely to become. Lutfur may well be the Derek Hatton of the 2010s, but unlike Hatton he is no longer Labour’s responsibility. Any thought of making up with Lutfur needs to be resisted – there’s only pain, not gain, there.

Finally, something else which Tower Hamlets is not. Some of my commenters are fond of saying that the borough is an example of “Third World” politics in the UK. There are indeed similarities – but actually the claim is an insult to the Third World. Bangladesh has got to grips with Islamism; the IFE’s Bangladeshi parent, Jamaat-e-Islami, gets about two per cent of the vote in elections there. No Islamist sympathiser in Bangladesh has unfettered control over a £1 billion budget. Bangladesh, in short, has less of a problem with Islamic radicals than Tower Hamlets.

Is stealth jihad behind ground zero mosque?

Washinton Times

Wednesday, August 25, 2010 – Art and Politics by El Marco

The virality of information in this galloping technological age was brought home to me the other day, when I received an e-mail about an article by Bill Kelly in the Washington Times Communities that contained some photographs I shot back in June.

I thought it might be a good idea to elaborate on that story and share more of what I saw and heard on that day.

Consider an interesting historical antecedent. In 1993, a controversy similar to the current one unfolded when residents of a Washington, D.C., suburb sought to use zoning laws to shut down the local mosque, ostensibly on grounds that it was a traffic nuisance.

“Worshipers of many faiths said closing the popular mosque . . . would amount to discrimination against one of the area’s fastest growing religions,” the Washington Times reported at the time.

The mosque in question? None other than the Dar al-Hijra, later to be known as the “9/11 mosque.” So, were the petitioners who sought to shut it down bigots? Or is it that they got a whiff of its extremism, and didn’t like the smell?

Here, of course, the argument will be made that Rauf really is a moderate. And that might well be so — by the standards of his native Kuwait.

But a man who claims to condemn all forms of terrorism yet refuses to call Hamas a terrorist group is not a moderate by American standards, which happen to be the relevant standards when trying to build a mosque two blocks from ground zero.

Abdul Rauf’s supporters will have to choose between defending him on grounds of his alleged moderation (in which case his views are relevant) or on the principle of religious liberty (in which case they’re not). They can’t have it both ways.

Meanwhile, politicians of every stripe are staking out turf or digging foxholes to hide in. One politician who in my opinion rises above the rest, former NYC mayor Rudy Gulliani, strikes at the heart of the issue with these words directed as a challenge to Rauf and his gang:

“This project is divisive. This project is creating tremendous pain for people who’ve already made the ultimate sacrifice. All you’re doing is creating more division, more anger, more hatred…The question here is of sensitivity, of people’s feelings, and are you really what you pretend to be. If you want to claim to be the healer, then you’re not on the side of the person who’s pushing those divisive issues.

“I was the first person on Sept. 11 to step forward in the heat of battle and say, ‘No group blame, do not blame Arabs, it’s a small group’. But the reality is that, right now, if you are a healer you do not go through with this project. If you’re a warrior, you do.”

At 3 p.m. Sept. 11, Geller will lead a second rally in New York against the mosque proposal.

Above: The Freedom Tower slowly rises in New York City.

El Marco distills life and politics into art at Looking at the Left.com and Art and Politics Blog.com Enjoy El Marco’s photography at Looking at the World.com.

Presseerklärung

Presseerklärung ESW

Saarbrücker Islamforscher: “Der Islam ist mehr als eine Religion”

http://www.saarbruecker-zeitung.de/aufmacher/Islam-Islamforscher-Interview-Gerd-Ruediger-Puin-Integration-Religion;art27856,3446432
Saarbrücker Islamforscher: “Der Islam ist mehr als eine Religion”

Kaum jemand kennt das muslimische Denken so gut wie der Saarbrücker Islamforscher Gerd-Rüdiger Puin (69). SZ-Redakteur Thomas Schäfer sprach mit ihm über die von Bundespräsident Wulff entfachte Debatte. Prof. Gerd-Rüdiger Puin ist Koranwissenschaftler an der Saar-Universität.

„Der Islam gehört zu Deutschland“ – was denken Sie über diesen Satz des Bundespräsidenten?

Puin: Naja, wenn der Bundespräsident das sagt, ist es jetzt eben amtlich. Doch das ist reines Wunschdenken. Vielmehr zeigt sich erneut, dass es heute unmöglich geworden ist, gegen diese Art von religiöser Vereinnahmung zu sein. Man glaubt, dass der Islam eine Religion ist. Doch er ist mehr.

Nämlich?

Puin: Der Islam wehrt sich programmatisch gegen die Trennung von Staat und Religion. Das führt dazu, dass uns Vertreter muslimischer Verbände pausenlos Dinge sagen müssen, die wir gerne von ihnen hören. Natürlich sagen die, wir erkennen eure Gesetze an und hacken keinem die Hand ab. Aber warum sagen sie das, wo es für sie doch „Gottesrecht“ ist? Weil es im Moment nicht praktikabel ist. Für deutsche Muslime gilt sozusagen ein Moratorium – bis Deutschland muslimisch ist.

Übertreiben Sie nicht?

Puin: Keineswegs. Das gibt es schon in Europa. Schauen Sie nach Bradford in England. Der Bürgermeister, ein Moslem, hat dort eine Art Mufti-Rat gebildet. Vor jeder Anordnung, die er rausgibt, fragt er die Gelehrten, ob sie mit islamischem Recht vereinbar ist.

Ist es also eher gefährlich, den Muslimen offen die Hand zu reichen?

Puin: Die Kritik an Sarrazin hat gezeigt, dass es sinnlos ist, sich mit Argumenten auseinander zu setzen, die gewisse Defizite auf muslimischer Seite aufzeigen.

Da ist man schnell in der rechten Ecke. Die ganze Debatte ist weltfremd, weil es keine kritische Haltung gegenüber dem Islam in Deutschland gibt. Der Hauptgrund dafür ist, dass keiner weiß, was überhaupt im Koran steht. Dort gibt es kein einziges nettes Wort über die „Ungläubigen“, aber 300 Verse, die ihnen das Schlimmste auf Erden und im Himmel androhen.

Sie empfinden den Islam als Bedrohung?

Puin: Nicht die Muslime, aber den Islam, ja. Mir kann doch niemand erzählen, dass ein Student wie der Attentäter von Hamburg, jemand aus der intellektuellen Elite, seine Taten aus Armut oder Frustration begeht. Vielmehr schaut er irgendwann in den Koran und denkt: Das ist eine Aufforderung an mich. Diese Leute sind bereit, sich in Hochhäuser zu stürzen – und zwar als Mittel des Kampfes gegen die Feinde Allahs.

Aber wollen Sie allen Moslems Bösartigkeit unterstellen?

Puin: Nein, um Gottes Willen. Es gibt Reformbewegungen, die erkennen nur Teile des islamischen Rechts an. Für diese Gruppen zählt nur der Koran und darin auch nur die Teile, die mit der Demokratie vereinbar sind.

Was erwarten Sie von den Muslimen in Deutschland?

Puin: Es ist Zeit, dass sich die Verbände von jenem Islam verabschieden, der das islamische Recht über das weltliche Gesetz stellt. Ich hoffe auch, dass sie ihre Glaubensbrüder in aller Welt missionarisch von der Friedfertigkeit des Islams überzeugen. Dann ist der Islam ein Teil Deutschlands.