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.

DENMARK EVACUATES TWO EMBASSIES

THE DANISH FOREIGN MINISTRY announced today that it has evacuated its staff from embassies in Algeria and Afghanistan due to violent threats from the so-called Religion of Peace after newspapers reprinted a cartoon depicting the Muslim prophet Muhammed. Embassy employees have been moved to secret locations in both countries' capitals but continue to work, Foreign Ministry spokesman Erik Laursen said.

The announcement comes after Danish intelligence officials warned of an "aggravated" terror threat against Denmark since newspapers in the country in February of a cartoon depicting the Prophet Muhammad.

The warning specifically singled out North Africa, the Middle East, Pakistan and Afghanistan. The threat "is so concrete that we had to take this decision," Laursen told The Associated Press. "The decision is based on intelligence," he said, declining to elaborate....

It occurs to us here at The Bellicose Augur that if a host government cannot guarantee the security of an embassy in its capital city it should be shut down and its people evacuated until such time as there is a functioning government. Perhaps if all Western governments wised up and took similar action in Islamic countries this strength of conscience might gain their attention. It is an abomination to world peace that Muslim governments continue to coddle the street radicals while pretending to be on the side of law and order.

By the way, check out the riveting cartoonist whose work is posted above and below.

Let's clarify why we believe all communication with Arab supremists falls short, and should be abandoned, as communication perpetually lost in translation. Here are the words of Bassam Tibi, Muslim scholar of jihad:

‘At its core, Islam is a religious mission to all humanity. Muslims are religiously obliged to disseminate the Islamic faith throughout the world. "We have sent you forth to all mankind" (Q. 34:28). If non-Muslims submit to conversion or subjugation, this call (da’wa) can be pursued peacefully. If they do not, Muslims are obliged to wage war against them. In Islam, peace requires that non-Muslims submit to the call of Islam, either by converting or by accepting the status of a religious minority (dhimmi) and paying the imposed poll tax, jizya. World peace, the final stage of the da’wa, is reached only with the conversion or submission of all mankind to Islam…Muslims believe that expansion through war is not aggression but a fulfillment of the Qur’anic command to spread Islam as a way of peace. The resort to force to disseminate Islam is not war (harb), a word that is used only to describe the use of force by non-Muslims. Islamic wars are not hurab (the plural of harb) but rather futuhat, acts of “opening” the world to Islam and expressing Islamic jihad. Relations between dar al-Islam, the home of peace, and dar al-harb, the world of unbelievers, nevertheless take place in a state of war, according to the Qur’an and to the authoritative commentaries of Islamic jurists. Unbelievers who stand in the way, creating obstacles for the da’wa, are blamed for this state of war, for the da’wa can be pursued peacefully if others submit to it."

Wow! The Qu'ran and its loathsome Arabic—dualistic language device in dealing with the tragically dhimmi West that would send shudders down the formidable British spine of George Orwell.

MOST IMPORTANT ARTWORK OF NEW CENTURY

AARHUS, DENMARK - Kurt Westergaard is in hiding from Islamic militants who want him dead. Now, the Danish cartoonist says he's ready to part with the source of his travails, a small ink sketch of the Prophet Muhammad with a bomb in his turban. But first there is the ticklish question of price.

"I would like to think that it has some value," says Mr. Westergaard, the 72-year-old creator of one of the world's most famous cartoons and one that inflamed Muslims world-wide. "It is a symbol of democracy and freedom of expression. I think I should have a little money for this," he says.

The drawing is locked in a bank vault while the cartoonist shuttles between temporary havens the Danish secret police have found for him around this blustery port city. His is by far the best known of 12 Muhammad-related cartoons published in September 2005 by Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten. But how do you fix the value of something that auction houses won't touch, that museums won't hang on their walls and that still inspires murderous passions?

Two weeks ago, Danish authorities said they had foiled a plot to kill Mr. Westergaard in his home. Seventeen Danish newspapers, outraged and eager to show solidarity, reprinted his drawing. Muslims again took to the streets. Iran and others demanded an apology. "I always had a feeling this cartoon crisis would not end," says Mr. Westergaard. "Now I know." [...]

Some Muslims here want the bomb-in-a-turban drawing destroyed. Salah Suleiman, an activist in a mosque that helped whip up the fury over it in early 2006, delights in the artist's troubles and says no amount of money can save him from God's wrath: "He is living like a rat.... He is living in hell already."

Ah, the voice of love and piety.

Mr. Westergaard's wife, a retired kindergarten teacher, has also suggested destruction, by selling the cartoon to a wealthy Arab who "can then burn it in the central square in Mecca." Mr. Westergaard says he likes the idea of getting money from an oil sheik but would prefer the cartoon stay intact and in Denmark.

Mr. Westergaard says he never intended his drawing to rile Muslims, only to mock extremists who push a deformed reading of their faith. But while arguments rage over whether his cartoon is intolerably offensive or an emblem of free speech, there's no doubt of the prominence it has achieved. Though shunned by most major U.S. publications, it has been reprinted widely in Europe, plastered across the Internet and put on T-shirts...

Flemming Rose, culture editor of the Danish paper that first ran the cartoon, compares it to a famous photo of Che Guevara in a beret and to Andy Warhol's pop-art portrait of Marilyn Monroe. "It is a great cultural icon of the 21st century," he says.

Mr. Lerche, the auctioneer, says it's "pure guesswork" what Mr. Westergaard's drawing is worth. A less-famed Muhammad cartoon sold for around $2,900 in an Internet auction, but that was in late 2005, before the global uproar. The artist in that case donated the cash, which came from an anonymous buyer, to earthquake relief in Pakistan.

In an event last year at the Reagan Library in California, Mr. Rose, the Danish culture editor, saw the cartoons' market value. He autographed posters featuring his newspaper's original cartoon edition, which sold out in minutes for $1,000 apiece.

Money has played a role on the other side of the barricades, too. When Muslims started burning Danish flags and ransacking Danish property in early 2006, extremists joined in a bidding war to get Mr. Westergaard killed. The bounties they offered ranged from a new car to a million dollars.

The cartoonist continued going to work at his small newspaper office, piled with old papers and empty coffee cups. But last November, the danger became real. Denmark's security service uncovered a group it said had diagrams of Mr. Westergaard's house and apparently planned to slit his throat as he slept.

The service offered to send him and his wife on a Caribbean cruise. He declined. "I'm an old man with a stiff neck. I can't bow my head to anyone," he says. Police offered a guard dog. His wife didn't like the idea....

EUROPEAN SPINE IS CELEBRATED

Newspapers across Europe Wednesday reprinted the controversial cartoon of the Islamic prophet Mohammed that sparked worldwide protests two years ago. These cartoons provoked widespread outrage in the Muslim world two years ago where many innocent lives were lost. The move came one day after Danish authorities arrested three people allegedly plotting a "terror-related assassination" of Kurt Westergaard, the cartoonist behind the drawing.

Berlingske Tidende, was one of the newspapers involved in the republication by newspapers in Denmark. It said: "We are doing this to document what is at stake in this case, and to unambiguously back and support the freedom of speech that we as a newspaper always will defend," in comments reported by The Associated Press.

Newspapers in Spain, Sweden and the Netherlands also republished the drawing Wednesday as part of their coverage of Tuesday's arrests. The image, by Morgenavisen Jullands-Posten cartoonist Westergaard, was one of 12 cartoons about the Islamic mountebank originally published in September 2005. Westergaard's cartoon depicted the seventh century Arab warlord wearing a bomb as a turban with a lit fuse.

The artist himself is quoted as recently saying, "I have turned fear into anger and resentment." Yes, perhaps. And in this case, that's a good thing, a very good thing.

INTERVIEW WITH ROBERT SPENCER

While I have little truck with Mr. Pat Robertson's whose evangelical and extracurricular follies, in my opinion, are too many and too diverse to list here, I do harbor a certain measure of respect for the person and the scholarly work of Robert Spencer, who has authored several books and operates the Jihad Watch website, a valuable resource to this Bellicose Augur. Here is an interview with Spencer conducted during the February '06 "cartoon rage" then whipping across the globe as the Islam street violently protested the publishing of a set of political cartoons in the major newspaper of Denmark.
Suffice it to say, now that I am beginning to utilize the YouTube phenomenon more regularly as a material resource, other dated but still critically important interviews and videos will find a place in this blog. As a closing comment however, I would like to say that I found it both humorous and frankly inspiring as Robertson, when introducing Spencer's book, stumbled over the title in speaking of "The Politically CORRECT" Guide To Islam.

Frankly, all infidels, and that includes Jews, Christians, hindus, Buddhists, Zoroastrians, pagans, and atheists should get to know what the Islam thinks about Christianity and its views on Islamic eschatology. Whether an accident of history or a carefully scripted response to "those people of the book" by some human or supernatural intelligence, it is a twisted version taken straight from the Bible.

THE CONTINUING FOLLY OF MORAL EQUIVALENCY

Why is it that when the hatred and intolerance that are the very essence of Islamic theology are exposed and discussed, those who participate are labeled "haters"? This is an illogical method of reasoning, resting on the foundation that should everyone just ignore the hate that oozes from Muslims and Islam, that generalized goodwill will mitigate the Islamic intensity and make it disappear.

Do people actually reside in the West who believe that hate and evil can be eradicated with kindness and love? Other than in the words of Jesus Christ I have never heard such idealism ushered into a play for reality, but now the Far Left in the West, of course, quite sturdy in their opinions without need of any religion, now spoofs us, and taunts us into believing the unreliable. The real world is not and will never be the multicultural utopia of these social deconstructionists' dreams, and Muslims want no part of such a world. They want a monocultural world, an Islamic world, a hardcore totalitarian structure which they would impose on all of us tomorrow if only they had the corporeal power to do it. Even CAIR has acknowledged this dream.

Islam creates and sustains the most insidious, inexorable, intractable hatred imaginable, an evil that most people of the contemporary Western mindset cannot imagine, much less comprehend. To acknowledge this takes a certain amount of courage because it means that conflict and self-defense are inevitable. Self-preservation requires constant diligence and close scrutiny of Muslims, most of whom are our enemies. If self-preservation and self-defense are now considered immoral, yes, we're guilty, but then so are the Muslims who fight tooth, nail, and children with bombs to preserve and extend their own dark sensibilities.

In addition to the remarkable congruence between Islam and many of the more extreme kinds of 'cult' groupthink, between Islam and organized crime 'families' (e.g. the Chinese Triads, or the Mafia) there are many clear symptoms of deep-rooted sociopathy—Mohammed's own sociopathy, perhaps, apoptheosized by religious decree as the perfect man and the perfect model for man. And woman, well, that requires a whole other set of inhumane formulas, and Islam does not flinch from the task.

For the benefit of those who don't have time to trawl the archives, let's draw attention to M. Scott Peck's chilling book 'People of the Lie' (1988). He is talking about evil people generally, but much of his analysis is directly relevant to our present encounter with Islam, the jihadists and their spin-masters. It also accounts remarkably well for the documented characteristics of all Islamised societies and their relationships with their unfortunate non-Muslim minorities and non-Muslim neighbours.

Among other things Peck stresses the pathological narcissism of truly evil people—they persistently reject both self-knowledge and external criticism. He notes: "evil people, refusing to accept their own failures, actually desire to project their evil onto others".

Page 82: "A predominant characteristic of the behaviour of those I call evil is scapegoating. BECAUSE IN THEIR HEARTS THEY CONSIDER THEMSELVES ABOVE REPROACH, THEY MUST LASH OUT AT ANYONE WHO DOES REPROACH THEM. THEY SACRIFICE OTHERS TO PRESERVE THEIR SELF-IMAGE OF PERFECTION".

Reminded of anything, folks? Pope rage, cartoon rage, apostasy and other draconian blasphemy laws? Peck stresses that the truly evil personality also 'creates confusion' because it lies consistantly to itself and others—hence the title of his book, People of the Lie.

A key observation: "I have learned nothing in 20 years that would suggest that evil people can be rapidly influenced by any means other than raw power. They do not respond, at least in the short run, to either gentle kindness or any form of spiritual persuasion with which I am familiar."

The susceptibility of the average person to ideas of moral equivalence is truly a sign of intellectual decadence. The conditions under which one could truly say two antagonists are morally equivalent seem to me to be much more rare than the opposite conditions, under which one of the antagonists would have to be considered the morally superior.

Compare moral standing to the system of accounting and ask yourself how frequently it happens that two distinct businesses have the same exact debits and credits in their accounting statements? Pretty rarely. Well, that's how frequently true moral equivalence can be asserted between two antagonists.

The intellectual decadence consists of asserting that the "exception" (true moral equivalence) is the "rule".