Jihad no Perversion They Follow Qur'an Exactly

IT IS NOT RADICAL ISLAMISTS BUT ISLAM ITSELF THAT THREATENS US.

President Obama this week once again called Islam "a great religion" which has been "distorted" by a small number of "extremists" to justify committing acts of violence against the West.

But the Qur'an (or Koran) itself, the holy book of Islam, contains over 100 verses calling for violence against Christians and Jews. To give just one example, Sura 9:5 says, "Slay the idolaters wherever you find them."


During a panel discussion sponsored by the Hudson Institute last January, retired Army Lt. Colonel Allen West, who did combat duty in Iraq, responded to a Marine who asked the question, how do you answer people who say that terrorists are following a "warped" version of Islam?

The panel consisted of a number of former military personnel, who fumbled around tying to answer the question. Col. West finally stepped forward answered the question directly and truthfully. Listen to the words of a former military man who understands the nature of the enemy we face:


Notice again Col. West's straightforward assessment: "This is not a perversion. They are doing exactly what this book (i.e., the Qur'an) says."

Pope Calls for Repeal of Islamic Blasphemy Laws

The Pope has called for a ban on the brutal and inhumane sharia. he seeks a ban on the blasphemy laws (know as "islamophobia" in the West.) Christians are being slaughtered, ethnically cleansed, in Muslim countries under the guise of "dont not insult Islam."

After last week's assassination of Pakistan's Governor Salaam Taseer critical of Islamic blasphemy laws, the jihadi was showered with rose petals. Taseer had spoke out in defense of a Christian woman sentenced to death for blasphemy and calling for the law to be struck down. Muslims went berserk. His assassin, Malik Mumtaz Hussein Qadri, has been hailed as a hero by many in Pakistan.

Tens of thousands of Muslims marched in Pakistan's largest city in support of Islamic law, support for blasphemy laws. Death for blasphemers is Islamic law and cannot be changed. That is Islamic law. Any attempt to reinterpret or reform Islam is "hypocrisy" ...... also punishable by death. Last month, five Christians were murdered in a week under Pakistan's blasphemy law.

Islamic countries have used blasphemy laws to oppress, annihilate and subjugate non-Muslims for centuries. A Muslim only has to make the accusation. Last month, a Doctor was charged with blasphemy merely for throwing out a business card of a man who shares the name of Islam's prophet, Muhammad.Asia Bibi, a Christian woman, was sentenced to death last month for insulting Islam. The law is often used to settle grudges, persecute minorities and fan the Islamic devout.

Salman Taseer's daughter Sara: "This is a message to every liberal to shut up or be shot"
Atlas Shrugs

Who is Jared Lee Loughner?

Not only gun rights, but new "hate speech" laws, violations of privacy laws, and increased targeting by DHS.

If the shooter turns out to be an illegal immigrant, those same media outlets will paint the person as a victim of his circumstances and gloss over the “elephant in the room” that is the lack of real security at our nation’s borders.

If the shooter turns out to be an Islamic extremist, they will downplay his religious affiliations and spin the Muslim shooter’s actions as criminal but not an act of terrorism.

Of course, other possibilities exist.

Islam on Capitol Hill

Narrated Abu Huraira:
Allah's Apostle said, "By Him in Whose Hands my soul is, son of Mary (Jesus) will shortly descend amongst you people (Muslims) as a just ruler and will break the Cross and kill the pig and abolish the Jizya (a tax taken from the non-Muslims, who are in the protection, of the Muslim government). Then there will be abundance of money and no-body will accept charitable gifts.

Yes, in Islam Jesus will come back at the end of the world, break all the crosses and Islamize the world. I am serious. This is the belief in Islam.

Abraham, Isaac, Noah, Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad were all Muslims. Don't gag. Moe was the final prophet.

Check out their logo, it's so Obama.

More on this:

I'm a Christian pastor in Connecticut and was intrigued and grateful to see your report on the Muslims on Capitol Hill. It is so much more ominous than it might seem to the casual observer

Many people do not know that this Muslim version of the return of Jesus features very heavily in their end-times beliefs. Many people have learned in recent years about their belief in the coming Mahdi, but less well known is the concept they have of Jesus returning, whom they call Isa, and who takes a subservient role to the Mahdi.

According to them this version of Jesus abolishes the jizya tax - meaning it is no longer accepted in lieu of a conversion to Islam. Supposedly they wage war against the Jews and Christians together. I know that you more than most can easily surmise what the idea of "Jesus, the Messiah of Jerusalem" would mean from an Islamic perspective.

Wellesley, Massachusetts Public School Students Learn to Pray to Allah

This may seem off topic, but once you see the connection to anti-Semitism and 'Palestinian' terror groups, it's really not.

In late May of 2010, Wellesley, Massachusetts public middle school students took a field trip to the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center - a controversial Saudi-funded mega-mosque run by the Muslim American Society of Bostn. There, the students were separated by gender and the boys were asked to join the Muslim adults in their prayer. Several of the public school boys took part.
By the way, the mosque is in Roxbury, Mass., which was once the center of Jewish life in the Boston area.

UPDATE SUNDAY 11:30 AM

Wellesley's superintendent of schools has apologized for the incident (Hat Tip: Ace of Spades via Twitter).

One of the questions that bothers me is why it took four months for anyone to think that this was wrong. Here's their explanation:

Wong said prior to the video being released her department hadn’t received complaints regarding the field trip though one family declined to allow their child on the trip.

“Apparently someone wasn’t happy and it just took some time for it to come back to us," she said.

That sounds awfully suspicious to me. And apparently they did know about the 'prayer session' beforehand, but claimed not to have received complaints about it.

Following the incident, Wong said she teachers were told students shouldn’t have been allowed to pray.

“We’re giving better guidance to our teachers. I don’t know if they’ll do [the field trip] differently but it won’t necessarily be because of this,” she said. “I support the field trip, I support them being able to go to observe; I do think allowing kids to participate in the prayer crossed the line.”

Hmmm.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem

Afghans Protest Quran Burning

Livid over a Florida pastor's plans to burn Qurans on the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, hundreds of angry young Afghans flooded the streets of Kabul Thursday to protest. Chanting "Quran is our law," and "Muhammad is our leader," the protesters threw rocks at posters encouraging Afghan citizens to vote in its parliamentary elections and set an effigy on fire. Afghan police have had trouble containing the chaos. Islamic clerics also reported a protest in an area just outside the Bagram air base. While several Afghan clerics are appreciative that so many American politicians—including President Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Sarah Palin—have denounced plans to burn Qurans, protests are expected to continue across Afghanistan as the Saturday event in Florida draws near. Cleric Abdul Hadi Rostaqi told the Associated Press that if the church goes through with the burning, Afghans will stage a large anti-American protest in Mazar-e Sharif. Said Enayatullah Balegh, a Muslim cleric who teaches Islamic law at Kabul University: "People expressed their anger, their frustrations, and they said they're going to be defending the holy Quran," he said. "And they promised to take action."
Washington Post
After years of hearing about US freedom, the Afghans can't get the First Amendment.

Apostasy from Islam

Here is apostasy from Reliance of the Traveller:

• *2*Chapter O8.0: Apostasy from Islam (Ridda) @(O: Leaving Islam is the ugliest form of unbelief (kufr) and the worst. It may come about through sarcasm, as when someone is told, ``Trim your nails, it is sunna,'' and he replies, ``I would not do it even if it were,'' as opposed to when some circumstance exists which exonerates him of having committed apostasy, such as when his tongue runs away with him, or when he is quoting someone, or says it out of fear.) @O8.1
• When a person who has reached puberty and is sane voluntarily apostatizes from Islam, he deserves to be killed. @O8.2
• In such a case, it is obligatory for the caliph (A: or his representive) to ask him to repent and return to Islam. If he does, it is accepted from him, but if he refuses, he is immediately killed. @O8.3
• If he is a freeman, no one besides the caliph or his representative may kill him. If someone else kills him, the killer is disciplined (def: o17) (O: for arrogating the caliph's prerogative and encroaching upon his rights, as this is one of his duties). @O8.4
• There is no indemnity for killing an apostate (O: or any expiation, since it is killing someone who deserves to die). @O8.5
• If he apostatizes from Islam and returns several times, it (O: i.e. his return to Islam, which occurs when he states the two Testifications of Faith (def: o8.7(12) ) ) is accepted from him, though he is disciplined (o17). @O8.6
• (A: If a spouse in a consummated marriage apostatizes from Islam, the couple are separated for a waiting period consisting of three intervals between menstruations. If the spouse returns to Islam before the waiting period ends, the marriage is not annulled but is considered to have continued the whole time (dis: m7.4).

Obama: "My Muslim Faith"

This is devastating news, and yet no media is covering it. A stealth jihad on the White House. Remember, during his campaign, I and others were excoriated for using Obama's middle name. We were accused of implying he was a crypto-Muslim. We could not discuss his background, his Islamic schooling, his ties to Islam. However, I have meticulously documented his Muslim background in my soon-to-be-released book: The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration's War on America (buy it now).

It became all too clear after his election how proud he was of his Muslim name, background and family. He made this plain when he gave his very first interview to Muslim media and boasted of these things. But bear in mind, it was verboten to speak of such things during the presidential campaign. That was the level of deceit and obfuscation and taqiya.

Al-Tabari's (d. 923) famous tafsir (exegesis of the Koran) is a standard and authoritative reference work in the entire Muslim world. Regarding 3:28, he writes: "If you [Muslims] are under their [infidels'] authority, fearing for yourselves, behave loyally to them, with your tongue, while harboring inner animosity for them. … Allah has forbidden believers from being friendly or on intimate terms with the infidels in place of believers — except when infidels are above them [in authority]. In such a scenario, let them act friendly towards them." Regarding 3:28, Ibn Kathir (d. 1373, second in authority only to Tabari) writes, "Whoever at any time or place fears their [infidels'] evil may protect himself through outward show." As proof of this, he quotes Muhammad's close companion, Abu Darda, who said, "Let us smile to the face of some people [non-Muslims] while our hearts curse them"; another companion, al-Hassan, said, "Doing taqiyya is acceptable till the Day of Judgment [i.e., in perpetuity]. Source: "War and Peace - and Deceit - in Islam" by Raymond Ibrahim

Obama is a boldfaced liar. Why? Why lie if you have nothing to hide?

Of course, if Obama believes himself a Muslim, it was taqiya -- deception or lies to advance Islam. Which he performed brilliantly during his election: he lied with brazen contempt. And clearly his Islamic Jew-hatred is made painfully clear in his stunning rebuke of Israel.

Is it any wonder that his counter terror adviser speaks arabic, calls Jerusalem al quds and calls jihad a "legitimate tenet of Islam"?

Adul Gheit claimed Obama told the Arabs to show patience. Obama promised that once he overcame some domestic issues, like the Health care reform, he would show the Muslim World how to deal with Israel.
Atlas Shrugs

Gassing Girls for Denying God

NUCLEAR, BIOLOGICAL AND CHEMICAL WEAPONS

May 10, 2010: Recently, 17 students at a Kabul, Afghanistan, girls high school fell ill and had to be hospitalized, along with several teachers. Doctors at the hospital agreed that it was some kind of poison, but have not been able to identify it yet. All the victims smelled something odd when they got to school, then fell ill, with some of the students losing consciousness. This is the second such incident at this school, and there was a similar attack at a girls high school further north. The Taliban have been known to attack girls schools, including injuring or killing students with gunfire, explosives and, in at least one case, acid thrown into the faces of students. Now it appears that poison gas has been added to the Taliban arsenal.

The Taliban do not believe in education for girls (which they believe is forbidden by Islam), but do believe in chemical weapons (which they do not believe is forbidden by Islam). When the Taliban ran Afghanistan in the late 1990s, they hosted al Qaeda, and al Qaeda set up a chemical warfare research facility. If the Taliban are using some kind of poisonous chemical for these attacks, they could have gotten them from their better educated friends in al Qaeda. American military personnel collected air and soil samples from the schools, but have not announced any results yet.
Atlas Shrugs

Islamic Hegemony in the West

Geert Wilders
"I believe that Islam is not compatible with our Western way of life. Islam is a threat to Western values. The equality of men and women, the equality of homosexuals and heterosexuals, the separation of church and state, freedom of speech, they are all under pressure because of islamization. Ladies and gentlemen: Islam and freedom, Islam and democracy are not compatible. It are opposite values.

No wonder that Winston Churchill called Adolf Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf’ “the new Quran of faith and war, turgid, verbose, shapeless, bur pregnant with its message”. As you know, Churchill made this comparison, between the Koran and Mein Kampf, in his book ‘The Second World War’, a master piece, for which, he received the Nobel Prize in Literature. Churchill’s comparison of the Quran and ‘Mein Kampf’ is absolutely spot on. The core of the Quran is the call to jihad. Jihad means a lot of things and is Arabic for battle. Kampf is German for battle. Jihad and kampf mean exactly the same.

Islam means submission, there cannot be any mistake about its goal. That’s a given. The question is whether we in Europe and you in Britain, with your glorious past, will submit or stand firm for your heritage.

We see Islam taking off in the West at an incredible pace. Europe is Islamizing rapidly. A lot of European cities have enormous Islamic concentrations. Paris, Amsterdam, Brussels and Berlin are just a few examples. In some parts of these cities, Islamic regulations are already being enforced. Women’s rights are being destroyed. Burqa’s, headscarves, polygamy, female genital mutilation, honour-killings. Women have to go to separate swimming-classes, don’t get a handshake. In many European cities there is already apartheid. Jews, in an increasing number, are leaving Europe."

Islam Incompatible with Christianity

Losing our Spines to Save Our Necks

Losing Our Spines to Save Our Necks

This article is too long and somewhat tedious. Sam Harris wanted to present this in a much broader form. Almost everyone was too afraid to publish it. Nearly all of us are spineless when push comes to shove.

Losing Our Spines to Save Our Necks

Sam Harris, HuffPost

Geert Wilders, conservative Dutch politician and provocateur, has become the
latest projectile in the world's most important culture war: the zero-sum
conflict between civil society and traditional Islam. Wilders, who lives under
perpetual armed guard due to death threats, recently released a 15 minute film
entitled Fitna ("strife" in Arabic) over the internet. The
film has been deemed offensive because it juxtaposes images of Muslim violence
with passages from the Qur'an. Given that the perpetrators of such violence
regularly cite these same passages as justification for their actions, merely
depicting this connection in a film would seem uncontroversial. Controversial
or not, one surely would expect politicians and journalists in every free
society to strenuously defend Wilders' right to make such a film. But then one
would be living on another planet, a planet where people do not happily
repudiate their most basic freedoms in the name of "religious sensitivity."

Witness the free world's response to Fitna: The Dutch government
sought to ban the film outright, and European Union foreign ministers publicly
condemned it, as did UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. Dutch television refused
to air Fitna unedited. When Wilders declared his intention to release
the film over the internet, his U.S.
web-host, Network Solutions, took his website offline.

Into the breach stepped Liveleak, a British video-sharing website, which
finally aired the film on March 27th. It received over 3 million views in the
first 24 hours. The next day, however, Liveleak removed Fitna from its
servers, having been terrorized into self-censorship by threats to its staff.
But the film had spread too far on the internet to be suppressed (and Liveleak,
after taking further security measures, has since reinstated it on its site as
well).

Of course, there were immediate calls for a boycott of Dutch products
throughout the Muslim world. In response, Dutch corporations placed ads in
countries like Indonesia,
denouncing the film in self-defense. Several Muslim countries blocked YouTube
and other video-sharing sites in an effort to keep Wilders' blasphemy from
penetrating the minds of their citizens. There have also been isolated protests
and attacks on embassies, and ubiquitous demands for Wilders' murder. In Afghanistan, women in burqas could be seen
burning the Dutch flag; the Taliban carried out at least two revenge attacks on
Dutch troops, resulting in five Dutch casualties; and security concerns have
caused the Netherlands to
close its embassy in Kabul.
It must be said, however, that nothing has yet occurred to rival the ferocious
response to the Danish cartoons.

Meanwhile Kurt Westergaard, one of the Danish cartoonists, threatened to sue
Wilders for copyright infringement, as Wilders used his drawing of a bomb-laden
Muhammad without permission. Westergaard has lived in hiding since 2006 due to
death threats of his own, so the Danish Union of Journalists volunteered to
file this lawsuit on his behalf. Admittedly, there is something amusing about
one hunted man, unable to venture out in public for fear of being killed by
religious lunatics, threatening to sue another man in the same predicament over
a copyright violation. But it is understandable that Westergaard wouldn't want
to be repeatedly hurled at the enemy without his consent. Westergaard is an
extraordinarily courageous man whose life has been ruined both by religious
fanaticism and the free world's submission to it. In February, the Danish government
arrested three Muslims who seemed poised to murder him. Other Danes unfortunate
enough to have been born with the name "Kurt Westergaard" have had to
take steps to escape being murdered in his place. (Wilder's has since removed
the cartoon from the official version of Fitna.)

Wilders, like Westergaard and the other Danish cartoonists, has been widely
vilified for "seeking to inflame" the Muslim community. Even if this
had been his intention, this criticism represents an almost supernatural coincidence
of moral blindness and political imprudence. The point is not (and will never
be) that some free person spoke, or wrote, or illustrated in such a manner as
to inflame the Muslim community. The point is that only the Muslim community is
combustible in this way. The controversy over Fitna, like all such
controversies, renders one fact about our world especially salient: Muslims
appear to be far more concerned about perceived slights to their religion than
about the atrocities committed daily in its name. Our accommodation of this
psychopathic skewing of priorities has, more and more, taken the form of craven
and blinkered acquiescence.

There is an uncanny irony here that many have noticed. The position of the
Muslim community in the face of all provocations seems to be: Islam is a
religion of peace, and if you say that it isn't, we will kill you. Of course,
the truth is often more nuanced, but this is about as nuanced as it ever gets:
Islam is a religion of peace, and if you say that it isn't, we peaceful Muslims
cannot be held responsible for what our less peaceful brothers and sisters do.
When they burn your embassies or kidnap and slaughter your journalists, know
that we will hold you primarily responsible and will spend the bulk of our
energies criticizing you for "racism" and "Islamophobia."

Our capitulations in the face of these threats have had what is often called
"a chilling effect" on our exercise of free speech. I have, in my own
small way, experienced this chill first hand. First, and most important, my
friend and colleague Ayaan Hirsi Ali happens to be among the hunted. Because of
the failure of Western governments to make it safe for people to speak openly
about the problem of Islam, I and others must raise a mountain of private funds
to help pay for her round-the-clock
protection. The problem is not, as is often alleged, that governments
cannot afford to protect every person who speaks out against Muslim
intolerance. The problem is that so few people do speak out. If there were ten
thousand Ayaan Hirsi Ali's, the risk to each would be radically reduced.

As for infringements of my own speech, my first book, The End of Faith,
almost did not get published for fear of offending the sensibilities of
(probably non-reading) religious fanatics. W.W. Norton, which did publish the
book, was widely seen as taking a risk--one probably attenuated by the fact
that I am an equal-opportunity offender critical of all religious faith.
However, when it came time to make final edits to the galleys of The End of
Faith, many of the people I had thanked by name in my acknowledgments
(including my agent at the time and my editor at Norton) independently asked to
have their names removed from the book. Their concerns were explicitly for
their personal safety. Given our shamefully ineffectual response to the fatwa
against Salman Rushdie, their concerns were perfectly understandable.

Nature, arguably the most influential scientific journal on the
planet, recently published a lengthy whitewash of Islam (Z. Sardar "Beyond
the troubled relationship." Nature 448, 131-133; 2007). The
author began, as though atop a minaret, by simply declaring the religion of
Islam to be "intrinsically rational." He then went on to argue, amid
a highly idiosyncratic reading of history and theology, that this rational
religion's current wallowing in the violent depths of unreason can be fully
ascribed to the legacy of colonialism. After some negotiation, Nature also agreed to publish a brief response from me. What readers of my letter to
the editor could not know, however, was that it was only published after
perfectly factual sentences deemed offensive to Islam were expunged. I
understood the editors' concerns at the time: not only did they have Britain's suffocating libel laws to worry about,
but Muslim physicians and engineers in the UK had just revealed a penchant for
suicide bombing. I was grateful that Nature published my letter at
all.

In a thrillingly ironic turn of events, a shorter version of the very essay
you are now reading was originally commissioned by the opinion page of Washington
Post and then rejected because it was deemed too critical of Islam. Please
note, this essay was destined for the opinion page of the paper, which had
solicited my response to the controversy over Wilders' film. The irony of its
rejection seemed entirely lost on the Post, which responded to my
subsequent expression of amazement by offering to pay me a "kill
fee." I declined.

I could list other examples of encounters with editors and publishers, as
can many writers, all illustrating a single fact: While it remains taboo to
criticize religious faith in general, it is considered especially unwise to
criticize Islam. Only Muslims hound and hunt and murder their apostates,
infidels, and critics in the 21st century. There are, to be sure, reasons why
this is so. Some of these reasons have to do with accidents of history and
geopolitics, but others can be directly traced to doctrines sanctifying
violence which are unique to Islam.

A point of comparison: The controversy of over Fitna was
immediately followed by ubiquitous media coverage of a scandal involving the
Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (FLDS). In Texas, police raided an
FLDS compound and took hundreds of women and underage girls into custody to
spare them the continued, sacramental predations of their menfolk. While
mainstream Mormonism is now granted the deference accorded to all major
religions in the United
States, its fundamentalist branch, with its
commitment to polygamy, spousal abuse, forced marriage, child brides (and,
therefore, child rape) is often portrayed in the press as a depraved cult. But
one could easily argue that Islam, considered both in the aggregate and in
terms of its most negative instances, is far more despicable than
fundamentalist Mormonism. The Muslim world can match the FLDS sin for
sin--Muslims commonly practice polygamy, forced-marriage (often between
underage girls and older men), and wife-beating--but add to these indiscretions
the surpassing evils of honor killing, female "circumcision,"
widespread support for terrorism, a pornographic fascination with videos
showing the butchery of infidels and apostates, a vibrant form of anti-semitism
that is explicitly genocidal in its aspirations, and an aptitude for producing
children's books and television programs which exalt suicide-bombing and depict
Jews as "apes and pigs."

Any honest comparison between these two faiths reveals a bizarre double
standard in our treatment of religion. We can openly celebrate the
marginalization of FLDS men and the rescue of their women and children. But,
leaving aside the practical and political impossibility of doing so, could we
even allow ourselves to contemplate liberating the women and children of
traditional Islam?

What about all the civil, freedom-loving, moderate Muslims who are just as
appalled by Muslim intolerance as I am? No doubt millions of men and women fit
this description, but vocal moderates are very difficult to find. Wherever
"moderate Islam" does announce itself, one often discovers frank
Islamism lurking just a euphemism or two beneath the surface. The subterfuge is
rendered all but invisible to the general public by political correctness,
wishful thinking, and "white guilt." This is where we find sinister
people successfully posing as "moderates"--people like Tariq Ramadan
who, while lionized by liberal Europeans as the epitome of cosmopolitan Islam,
cannot bring himself to actually condemn honor killing in round terms (he
recommends that the practice be suspended, pending further study). Moderation
is also attributed to groups like the Council on American-Islamic Relations
(CAIR), an Islamist public relations firm posing as a civil-rights lobby.

Even when one finds a true voice of Muslim moderation, it often seems
distinguished by a lack of candor above all things. Take someone like Reza
Aslan, author of No God But God: I debated Aslan for Book TV on the
general subject of religion and modernity. During the course of our debate, I
had a few unkind words to say about the Muslim Brotherhood. While admitting
that there is a difference between the Brotherhood and a full-blown jihadist
organization like al Qaeda, I said that their ideology was "close enough"
to be of concern. Aslan responded with a grandiose, ad hominem attack saying,
"that indicates the profound unsophistication that you have about this
region. You could not be more wrong" and claiming that I'd taken my view
of Islam from "Fox News." Such maneuvers, coming from a polished,
Iranian-born scholar of Islam carry the weight of authority, especially in
front of an audience of people who are desperate to believe the threat of Islam
has been grossly exaggerated. The problem, however, is that the credo of the
Muslim Brotherhood actually happens to be "Allah is our objective. The
Prophet is our leader. The Qur'an is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the
way of Allah is our highest hope."

The connection between the doctrine of Islam and Islamist violence is simply
not open to dispute. It's not that critics of religion like myself speculate
that such a connection might exist: the point is that Islamists themselves
acknowledge and demonstrate this connection at every opportunity and to deny it
is to retreat within a fantasy world of political correctness and religious
apology. Many western scholars, like the much admired Karen Armstrong, appear
to live in just such a place. All of their talk about how benign Islam
"really" is, and about how the problem of fundamentalism exists in
all religions, only obfuscates what may be the most pressing issue of our time:
Islam, as it is currently understood and practiced by vast numbers of the
world's Muslims, is antithetical to civil society. A recent poll showed that thirty-six
percent of British Muslims (ages 16-24) believe that a person should be killed
for leaving the faith. Sixty-eight percent of British Muslims feel that their
neighbors who insult Islam should be arrested and prosecuted, and seventy-eight
percent think that the Danish cartoonists should have been brought to justice.
And these are British Muslims.

Occasionally, however, a lone voice can be heard acknowledging the obvious.
Hassan Butt wrote in the Guardian:

When I was still a member of what is probably best termed the British Jihadi
Network, a series of semi-autonomous British Muslim terrorist groups linked by
a single ideology, I remember how we used to laugh in celebration whenever
people on TV proclaimed that the sole cause for Islamic acts of terror like
9/11, the Madrid bombings and 7/7 was Western foreign policy. By blaming the
government for our actions, those who pushed the 'Blair's bombs' line did our
propaganda work for us. More important, they also helped to draw away any
critical examination from the real engine of our violence: Islamic theology.

It is astounding how infrequently one hears such candor among the public
voices of "moderate" Islam. This is what we owe the true moderates of
the Muslim world: we must hold their co-religionists to the same standards of
civility and reasonableness that we take for granted in all other people. Only
our willingness to openly criticize Islam for its all-too-obvious failings can
make it safe for Muslim moderates, secularists, apostates--and, indeed,
women--to rise up and reform their faith.

And if anyone in this debate can be credibly accused of racism, it is the
western apologists and "multiculturalists" who deem Arabs and Muslims
too immature to shoulder the responsibilities of civil discourse. As Ayaan
Hirsi Ali has pointed out, there is a calamitous form of "affirmative
action" at work, especially in western Europe, where Muslim immigrants are
systematically exempted from western standards of moral order in the name of
paying "respect" to the glaring pathologies in their culture. Hirsi
Ali has also observed that there is a quasi-racist double-think on display
whenever western powers trumpet that "Islam is peace," all the while
taking heroic measures to guard against the next occasion when the barbarians
run amok in response to a film, cartoon, opera, novel, beauty pageant--or the
mere naming of a teddy bear.

Have you seen the Danish cartoons that so roiled the Muslim world? Probably
not, as their publication was suppressed by almost every newspaper, magazine,
and television station in the United
States. Given their volcanic
reception--hundreds of thousands of Muslims rioted, hundreds of people were
killed--their sheer banality should have rendered these drawings
extraordinarily newsworthy. One magazine which did print them, Free Inquiry (for which I am proud to have written), had its stock banned from every Borders
and Waldenbooks in the country. These are precisely the sorts of capitulations
that we must avoid in the future.

The lesson we should draw from the Fitna controversy is that we
need more criticism of Islam, not less. Let it come down in such torrents that
not even the most deluded Islamist could conceive of containing it. As Ibn
Warraq, author of the revelatory Why I Am Not a Muslim, said in
response to recent events:

It is perverse for the western media to lament the lack of an Islamic
reformation and willfully ignore works such as Wilders' film, Fitna.
How do they think reformation will come about if not with criticism? There is
no such right as 'the right not to be offended; indeed, I am deeply offended by
the contents of the Koran, with its overt hatred of Christians, Jews,
apostates, non-believers, homosexuals but cannot demand its suppression.

It is time we recognized that those who claim the "right not to be
offended" have also announced their hatred of civil society.