WAKE UP LITTLE DARLINGS, WAKE UP

Here's an excellent article written by Bruce Bawer, author of the essential While Europe Slept. Published by City Journal, "An Anatomy of Surrender" is a comprehensive detail of the ongoing voluntary submission of the West to Islamist attitudes and laws which over time will effectively destroy us.

Islam divides the world into two parts. The part governed by sharia, or Islamic law, is called the Dar al-Islam, or House of Submission. Everything else is the Dar al-Harb, or House of War, so called because it will take war—holy war, jihad—to bring it into the House of Submission. Over the centuries, this jihad has taken a variety of forms. Two centuries ago, for instance, Muslim pirates from North Africa captured ships and enslaved their crews, leading the U.S. to fight the Barbary Wars of 1801–05 and 1815. In recent decades, the jihadists’ weapon of choice has usually been the terrorist’s bomb; the use of planes as missiles on 9/11 was a variant of this method.

What has not been widely recognized is that the Ayatollah Khomeini’s 1989 fatwa against Satanic Verses author Salman Rushdie introduced a new kind of jihad. Instead of assaulting Western ships or buildings, Kho meini took aim at a fundamental Western freedom: freedom of speech. In recent years, other Islamists have joined this crusade, seeking to undermine Western societies’ basic liberties and extend sharia within those societies.

The cultural jihadists have enjoyed disturbing success. Two events in particular—the 2004 assassination in Amsterdam of Theo van Gogh in retaliation for his film about Islam’s oppression of women, and the global wave of riots, murders, and vandalism that followed a Danish newspaper’s 2005 publication of cartoons satirizing Mohammed—have had a massive ripple effect throughout the West.

Motivated variously, and doubtless sometimes simultaneously, by fear, misguided sympathy, and multicultural ideology—which teaches us to belittle our freedoms and to genuflect to non-Western cultures, however repressive—people at every level of Western society, but especially elites, have allowed concerns about what fundamentalist Muslims will feel, think, or do to influence their actions and expressions. These Westerners have begun, in other words, to internalize the strictures of sharia, and thus implicitly to accept the deferential status of dhimmis—infidels living in Muslim societies.

Call it a cultural surrender. The House of War is slowly—or not so slowly, in Europe’s case—being absorbed into the House of Submission.

The Western media are in the driver’s seat on this road to sharia. Often their approach is to argue that we’re the bad guys. After the late Dutch sociologist-turned-politician Pim Fortuyn sounded the alarm about the danger that Europe’s Islamization posed to democracy, elite journalists labeled him a threat. A New York Times headline described him as marching the Dutch to the right. Dutch newspapers Het Parool and De Volkskrant compared him with Mussolini; Trouw likened him to Hitler. The man (a multiculturalist, not a Muslim) who murdered him in May 2002 seemed to echo such verdicts when explaining his motive: Fortuyn’s views on Islam, the killer insisted, were “dangerous.”

Perhaps no Western media outlet has exhibited this habit of moral inversion more regularly than the BBC. In 2006, to take a typical example, Manchester’s top imam told psychotherapist John Casson that he supported the death penalty for homosexuality. Casson expressed shock—and the BBC, in a dispatch headlined imam accused of “gay death” slur, spun the controversy as an effort by Casson to discredit Islam. The BBC concluded its story with comments from an Islamic Human Rights Commission spokesman, who equated Muslim attitudes toward homosexuality with those of “other orthodox religions, such as Catholicism” and complained that focusing on the issue was “part of demonizing Muslims.”

In June 2005, the BBC aired the documentary Don’t Panic, I’m Islamic, which sought to portray concerns about Islamic radicalism as overblown. This “stunning whitewash of radical Islam,” as Little Green Footballs blogger Charles Johnson put it, “helped keep the British public fast asleep, a few weeks before the bombs went off in London subways and buses” in July 2005. In December 2007, it emerged that five of the documentary’s subjects, served up on the show as examples of innocuous Muslims-next-door, had been charged in those terrorist attacks—and that BBC producers, though aware of their involvement after the attacks took place, had not reported important information about them to the police.

Press acquiescence to Muslim demands and threats is endemic. When the Mohammed cartoons—published in September 2005 by the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten to defy rising self-censorship after van Gogh’s murder—were answered by worldwide violence, only one major American newspaper, the Philadelphia Inquirer, joined such European dailies as Die Welt and El País in reprinting them as a gesture of free-speech solidarity. Editors who refused to run the images claimed that their motive was multicultural respect for Islam.

Critic Christopher Hitchens believed otherwise, writing that he “knew quite a number of the editors concerned and can say for a certainty that the chief motive for ‘restraint’ was simple fear.” Exemplifying the new dhimmitude, whatever its motivation, was Norway’s leading cartoonist, Finn Graff, who had often depicted Israelis as Nazis, but who now vowed not to draw anything that might provoke Muslim wrath. (On a positive note, this February, over a dozen Danish newspapers, joined by a number of other papers around the world, reprinted one of the original cartoons as a free-speech gesture after the arrest of three people accused of plotting to kill the artist.)

Last year brought another cartoon crisis—this time over Swedish artist Lars Vilks’s drawings of Mohammed as a dog, which ambassadors from Muslim countries used as an excuse to demand speech limits in Sweden. CNN reporter Paula Newton suggested that perhaps “Vilks should have known better” because of the Jyllands-Posten incident—as if people who make art should naturally take their marching orders from people who make death threats. Meanwhile, The Economist depicted Vilks as an eccentric who shouldn’t be taken “too seriously” and noted approvingly that Sweden’s prime minister, unlike Denmark’s, invited the ambassadors “in for a chat.”

The elite media regularly underreport fundamentalist Muslim misbehavior or obfuscate its true nature. After the knighting of Rushdie in 2007 unleashed yet another wave of international Islamist mayhem, Tim Rutten wrote in the Los Angeles Times: “If you’re wondering why you haven’t been able to follow all the columns and editorials in the American press denouncing all this homicidal nonsense, it’s because there haven’t been any.” Or consider the riots that gripped immigrant suburbs in France in the autumn of 2005. These uprisings were largely assertions of Muslim authority over Muslim neighborhoods, and thus clearly jihadist in character. Yet weeks passed before many American press outlets mentioned them—and when they did, they de-emphasized the rioters’ Muslim identity (few cited the cries of “Allahu akbar,” for instance). Instead, they described the violence as an outburst of frustration over economic injustice.

When polls and studies of Muslims appear, the media often spin the results absurdly or drop them down the memory hole after a single news cycle. Journalists celebrated the results of a 2007 Pew poll showing that 80 percent of American Muslims aged 18 to 29 said that they opposed suicide bombing—even though the flip side, and the real story, was that a double-digit percentage of young American Muslims admitted that they supported it. US muslims assimilated, opposed to extremism, the Washington Post rejoiced, echoing USA Today’s American Muslims reject extremes. A 2006 Daily Telegraph survey showed that 40 percent of British Muslims wanted sharia in Britain—yet British reporters often write as though only a minuscule minority embraced such views.

After each major terrorist act since 9/11, the press has dutifully published stories about Western Muslims fearing an “anti-Muslim backlash”—thus neatly shifting the focus from Islamists’ real acts of violence to non-Muslims’ imaginary ones. (These backlashes, of course, never materialize.) While books by Islam experts like Bat Ye’or and Robert Spencer, who tell difficult truths about jihad and sharia, go unreviewed in newspapers like the New York Times, the elite press legitimizes thinkers like Karen Armstrong and John Esposito, whose sugarcoated representations of Islam should have been discredited for all time by 9/11.

Mainstream outlets have also served up anodyne portraits of fundamentalist Muslim life. Witness Andrea Elliott’s affectionate three-part profile of a Brooklyn imam, which appeared in the New York Times in March 2006. Elliott and the Times sought to portray Reda Shata as a heroic bridge builder between two cultures, leaving readers with the comforting belief that the growth of Islam in America was not only harmless but positive, even beautiful.

Though it emerged in passing that Shata didn’t speak English, refused to shake women’s hands, wanted to forbid music, and supported Hamas and suicide bombing, Elliott did her best to downplay such unpleasant details; instead, she focused on sympathetic personal particulars. “Islam came to him softly, in the rhythms of his grandmother’s voice”; “Mr. Shata discovered love 15 years ago. . . . ‘She entered my heart,‘ said the imam.” Elliott’s saccharine piece won a Pulitzer Prize. When Middle East scholar Daniel Pipes pointed out that Shata was obviously an Islamist, a writer for the Columbia Journalism Review dismissed Pipes as “right-wing” and insisted that Shata was “very moderate.”

So it goes in this upside-down, not-so-brave new media world: those who, if given the power, would subjugate infidels, oppress women, and execute apostates and homosexuals are “moderate” (a moderate, these days, apparently being anybody who doesn’t have explosives strapped to his body), while those who dare to call a spade a spade are “Islamophobes.”

The entertainment industry has been nearly as appalling. During World War II, Hollywood churned out scores of films that served the war effort, but today’s movies and TV shows, with very few exceptions, either tiptoe around Islam or whitewash it. In the whitewash category were two sitcoms that debuted in 2007, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s "Little Mosque on the Prairie" and CW’s "Aliens in America." Both shows are about Muslims confronting anti-Muslim bigotry; both take it for granted that there’s no fundamentalist Islam problem in the West, but only an anti-Islam problem.

Muslim pressure groups have actively tried to keep movies and TV shows from portraying Islam as anything but a Religion of Peace. For example, the Council for American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) successfully lobbied Paramount Pictures to change the bad guys in The Sum of All Fears (2002) from Islamist terrorists to neo-Nazis, while Fox’s popular series 24, after Muslims complained about a story line depicting Islamic terrorists, ran cringe-worthy public-service announcements emphasizing how nonviolent Islam was. Earlier this year, Iranian-Danish actor Farshad Kholghi noted that, despite the cartoon controversy’s overwhelming impact on Denmark, “not a single movie has been made about the crisis, not a single play, not a single stand-up monologue.” Which, of course, is exactly what the cartoon jihadists wanted.

In April 2006, an episode of the animated series South Park admirably mocked the wave of self-censorship that followed the Jyllands-Posten crisis but Comedy Central censored it, replacing an image of Mohammed with a black screen and an explanatory notice. According to series producer Anne Garefino, network executives frankly admitted that they were acting out of fear. “We were happy,” she told an interviewer, “that they didn’t try to claim that it was because of religious tolerance.”

Then there’s the art world. Postmodern artists who have always striven to shock and offend now maintain piously that Islam deserves “respect.” Museums and galleries have quietly taken down paintings that might upset Muslims and have put into storage manuscripts featuring images of Mohammed. London’s Whitechapel Art Gallery removed life-size nude dolls by surrealist artist Hans Bellmer from a 2006 exhibit just before its opening; the official excuse was “space constraints,” but the curator admitted that the real reason was fear that the nudity might offend the gallery’s Muslim neighbors.

Last November, after the cancellation of a show in The Hague of artworks depicting gay men in Mohammed masks, the artist, Sooreh Hera, charged the museum with giving in to Muslim threats. Tim Marlow of London’s White Cube Gallery notes that such self-censorship by artists and museums is now common, though “very few people have explicitly admitted” it. British artist Grayson Perry, whose work has mercilessly mocked Christianity, is one who has—and his reluctance isn’t about multicultural sensitivity. “The reason I haven’t gone all out attacking Islamism in my art,” he told the Times of London, “is because I feel real fear that someone will slit my throat.”

Leading liberal intellectuals and academics have shown a striking willingness to betray liberal values when it comes to pacifying Muslims. Back in 2001, Unni Wikan, a distinguished Norwegian cultural anthropologist and Islam expert, responded to the high rate of Muslim-on-infidel rape in Oslo by exhorting women to “realize that we live in a multicultural society and adapt themselves to it.”

The Times described Armstrong’s hagiography of Mohammed as “a good place to start” learning about Islam; in July 2007, the Washington Post headlined a piece by Esposito "Want to understand Islam? Start here."

There's lots more to this essay. We encourage you to read it all.

RUSHDIE'S CRUX OF THE MATTER

The recent controversy over the knighting of Salman Rushdie and the rather predictable Muslim outrage that has followed is discussed in the following article was published by Tehelka in India. It is time Islam and other religions learned to shrug at some offence, says Shoma Chaudhury, one of India's most respected journalists.

This Sword Over My Head is a Good One
IN A MORE innocent time, all it would have deserved were the jokes. So it’s the Queen’s sword that finally caught up with Salman Rushdie—Inshallah, it’s the only sword that will. And sharper jabs in that vein. Or one could have laughed at the increasing and ironic consonances between Naipaul and Rushdie—always polar extremities in any literary argument. Now both knighted. Both critical of political Islam. Both completely adopted by Great Britian.

Instead, the curious incident of Sir Salman Rushdie has typhooned into a big political storm and one is required to have serious views on it. This oughtn’t be the case, but it is. And there are good reasons for it. Rushdie stopped being merely a writer the day the fatwa was issued against him 20 years ago. He became a public phenomenon, a battlefield over which large ideas were fought. He came to represent the right to freedom of speech and expression. A cardinal for any civilised society.

His detractors will say he was an unworthy cause: Satanic Verses was not a good book, and his writing since has been on a declining graph. They will say he is a conceited, self-obsessed man who turned his comparatively secure exile into a PR myth, whereas, as one incensed British columnist points out, others who defended him suffered much worse fates. Hitoshi Igarashi, who translated Satanic Verses into Japanese, was knifed to death in July 1991; Ettore Caprioli, its Italian translator, was seriously injured in a stabbing that same month; and William Nygard, its Norwegian publisher survived an assassination attempt in October 1993.

Which brings one to the nub of the thing. The furore over Rushdie’s knighthood is not centred on his literary merit or his pleasantness quotient. It is about tremendously fundamental debates. The twist is this time the opposition to him comes both from the Islamic world and Britain. The different nature of those oppositions, of course, tells its own story.

In Britian, the carping is mostly about Rushdie’s ingratitude. Some months ago at a festival in Jaipur, as sundry journalists were introduced to the autumnal lion, he growled, “I’ve always admired TEHELKA but it’s never returned the compliment.” He was referring to a TEHELKA story that had been critical of his work when his own columns have praised the paper in the past. That need for returned compliments has come back to haunt him.

When the fatwa was announced, Britain had thrown a security cover over him that cost its taxpayers 10 million pounds over as many years. And though he had lampooned Mrs. Thatcher as the fascist “Mrs. Torture” in the book, she stood by him. The British ambassador was ordered back from Tehran, the Iranian charge d’affaires was expelled, and Scotland Yard instructed to spend whatever it took to keep him safe from avenging swords. This was the mark of a truly civilised society. But when things eased up, instead of staying in the country that had protected him, Rushdie hightailed it to Manhattan. His parting shots denounced Britain for its general provincialism and “backbiting and incestuous” literary culture. New York, he declared, was more worthy of a grand cosmopolite like him.

Justifiably, some of Britain’s cognoscenti haven’t taken well to the new honours being heaped on him and the fact that Rushdie says he’s “thrilled and humbled to receive this great honour”—never mind it’s provincial anachronism. As John Sutherland, a former Booker Prize judge, says with characteristic British restraint: “Rushdie is a supra-national, post-colonial nomad. It’s very hard to say who owns him. Yet now he has pledged himself to the service of the monarch! For the writer of the Satanic Verses, which was extremely rude about England, it’s certainly unusual.”

THE OPPOSITION from the Islamic end, unfortunately, holds no surprises. Religious heads in Kashmir say Britian must apologise as Rushdie’s knighthood has “hurt the sentiments of Muslims across the world.” Some obscure Iranian group has announced a generous bounty on his head. Pakistan has equated the knighting to insulting Islam, and Ijaz-ul-Haq, its minister for religious affairs, has put his foot in it by saying honoring Rushdie is tantamount to justifying suicide bombers. Or something to that broad effect. A hundred odd youth have burned effigies of Rushdie. And Kashmir’s Maulana Mufti Bashiruddin says without irony that a death fatwa issued by him against Rushdie is still valid so the knighthood is “quite shocking”.

It’s important to remember that world media today has a dangerous way of blurring perspective. A hundred youth burning effigies of Rushdie do not the Muslim world make. Nor does Ijaz-ul-Haq or Maulana Bashiruddin or a score of bountyseeking organisations. Yet they do serve to crystallise the heart of the argument.

The most severe of Rushdie’s critics in Britain swear they would still support spending another 10 million to protect him. Because at the heart of the Rushdie debate is this crucial idea: the right to offend against the right to assault.

The freedom of expression debate often gets snarled in questions of how far one should go. It’s time one said it aloud: In a civilised world, the right to offend or, to use the more emotionally charged term, “hurt” anyone’s sentiment, be it Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, Christian or Buddhist, should be inviolable. You can argue the merits and demerits of the offence: is it good art or bad art? Is it in poor taste or does it truly challenge received notions? Does it go too far or does it fall short? You can argue it, but you cannot prohibit it. And you most certainly cannot assault it.

How far should be a matter of personal discretion not physical threat. The spectre of “hurting feelings” cannot curb the fundamental human right to express oneself peacefully. One is tempted to say that the real crisis of Islam—if any—is that it tends to over react to bad art: bad Danish cartoons, bad Bangladeshi writer, and for too long, an overrated supra-national one. Surely a religion and culture as old and glorious as Islam can shrug its shoulder at a little badly-done offence.

If knighting Salman Rushdie is a political act that will drive home that point, more power to its sword.

A MATTER OF TIME

Question: Actually, I thought this Rushdie Knighthood situation would have grown more legs by now and become as widespread as the Danish Cartoons. Any reason why it hasn't?

Answer: Give them a little more time, it takes a while for them to get worked up into a lather. After the Mohammed cartoons in the Jyllands-Poston in September 2005, it took 2 weeks before an estimated 3,500 Muslims in Denmark conducted a somewhat peaceful protest. In November, several European newspapers re-published the images, triggering more protests. The deluge of foul spirits actually didn't began to ramp up until January of 2006, nearly 3 1/2 months later combining with a boycott of Danish goods. Several countries withdrew their ambassadors to Denmark, and widespread protests, some of them violent, flourished across Muslim lands great and small. The protests continued in February. In Damascus, Syria, both the Norwegian embassy and a building containing the Danish, Dutch, and Chilean embassies were stormed and set on fire by protesters. In Beirut, thousands of people protested on the streets, and the Danish General Consulate was stormed and set on fire. By March of 2006, at least 139 people died primarily during riots stemming from protests.

Thanks, Mackie, I needed that..

WE MUST AWAKEN!

There are children of light and there are children of darkness, and this has nothing to do with skin color, or even the content of one's character, as Martin Luther King once put it, for even character is measured against a specific set of values. And it is values we are discussing here. The gist of Western values versus the gist of Islamic values.

The coordinator of the Centre for the Protection of Freedom of Conscience and Religion (DEVAMM) in Azerbaijan it seems is not so keen on Salmon Rushdie or the Queen's freedom of conscience in knighting him this past week.

“Such measures can be the cause of the strengthening aggression of the West against Islam. They provoke Muslims. Muslims should be very careful, watchful and cold-blooded," says Ilqar Ibrahimoglu, the coordinator.

This comment is par for the course. In every corner of the planet wherever Muhammadans are provoked they go on a killing spree. Sometimes as individuals. Sometimes as a mob. Which begs the question: do Muslims ever wonder about how their own self-righteous aggression is provoking the West?

In January 1861, James Russell Lowell said of the slave holders in the Old South: "What they demand of us is nothing less than that we should abolish the spirit of the age. Our very thoughts are a menace."

For years the Slaveocracy attempted to silence all criticism of slavery (the "gag rules") in congress and in society in general. They wanted all critical thinking re their belief-system banned. They demanded their culture be respected and not subjected to critical thinking. It was no exaggeration when Lowell said of them "Our very thoughts are a menace". That was the real basis of the Civil War.

What Lowell said applies to Islam today. They cannot tolerate critical thinking. However, the bumper-sticker "Islamophobia" response to critical thinking of Islam is wearing thin among unbelievers (and even with many Muslims). Freedom is about the mind. "Our very thoughts are a menace" to the Azeri Muslim leader and Muslims like him. That's the issue.