Wednesday, August 31, 2011

Summer fun in Iran-not!


Iran's Wet Blankets Put a Damper on Water-Park Fun

WSJ

Authorities in authoritarian Iran have determined the latest threat to the Islamic Republic: squirt guns.

Agents of the regime fanned out across Tehran late last month to question toy store owners about whether the fake guns had been imported from America. Nope: made right in Iran or imported from China.

Why all this fuss? A water fight among playful youth at a water park.

After heeding a call on Facebook, a group of nearly 800 young men and women were among those who showed up at the park. They were surprised to find others there eager to drench anyone in sight.

They chased strangers around a giant water fountain, screaming and laughing as they splashed each other with water from toy guns, bottles and plastic bags.

"We had a blast. It was a rare chance for boys and girls to hang out in a public place and have fun," said Shaghayegh, a participant who did not want her last name to be used. Among Iranian authorities, the fun and games triggered a different reaction. Police raided the park, engaging in a four-hour cat-and-mouse game with the youth, who turned their squirt guns on the cops and threw plastic bags full of water on the policemen's heads, according to participants and media reports.
Water Wars in Tehran

View Slideshow
[SB10001424053111903392904576512830281592942]
TehranLive

Young Iranian men and women gathered for a day of water war fun at Tehran's new Water and Fire park.

Finally, park authorities cut off the water, rounded up dozens of young men and women, and dragged them to jail. Tehran's police chief vowed to crack down and warned that similar water-war events were planned in other cities.

While flash mobs have become a serious concern elsewhere—including London's recent riots—such organized fun, in most parts of the world, would be regarded as yet another youthful rite of passage.

But that doesn't apply in Iran, where a seemingly innocent gathering, especially one that involves men and women interacting, can be cast as a decadent rebellion against the government.

"These events are a disgrace to our revolution. Our security forces and judiciary must stop the spreading of these morally corrupt actions," said conservative lawmaker Hossein Ibrahimi, according to official media.

Although the water wars and the government response have a comically absurd quality, the recent tension shows how fearful the regime is of its young.

Iran is one of the world's youngest countries, with 65 percent of its 75 million people under the age of 30. The Islamic Republic imposes strict social codes that call for segregation of sexes in school and some public spaces and demands a conservative demeanor from citizens.

Authorities are particularly sensitive to events organized through social-networking sites in light of the pro-democracy Arab Spring uprisings where youth mobilized through Facebook and toppled governments.

Fars News Agency, affiliated with Iran's Revolutionary Guards, blamed Zionists and Americans for corrupting the minds of the youth and coaxing them into water parks.

Pictures of the young women, their tight coats and colorful scarves drenched, squirting water at young men in wet, tight T-shirts surfaced on websites and newspapers, creating an uproar that reached the parliament.

The water wars have become a ripe subject for jokes in Iran.

"What kind of a country do we have? Even a water gun can shake its foundations?" writes a reveler named Ashkan on his Facebook page.

Security forces are hunting organizers and participants of the water episode through their Facebook accounts and have detained some of their friends. The Facebook page for Water Wars in Tehran has over 19,000 members and 22 local chapters for cities across Iran, including conservative small cities like Marageh.

Earlier this month, police arrested the administrators of the Facebook page for Shiraz Water Wars, and 17 young men and women who were playing in a water park in the southern coastal city of Bandar Abbas were detained, according to media reports. Authorities also paraded young people on television, forcing them to confess—a move typically reserved for political detainees.

"Police will deal forcefully with park violators who are threatening the security and peace of our society," Tehran police chief Hussein Sajedina said.

Farzan, a 22-year-old university student who was one of the organizers of the Tehran water war, says police tracked him down through Facebook and raided his house in the middle of the night. He was arrested, held for three days and beaten up, he says. He has a court case pending.

Shaghayegh, who escaped the park, received a call from national security police earlier this month and went to Vozarra detention center in Tehran where she says she was held and interrogated all day. She was released after a written pledge not to participate in any more water wars.

Young Iranians say although the event started out as innocent fun, it has now turned political. They are vowing to challenge them with more events.

A nationwide water war is scheduled for Friday, after the end of the fasting month of Ramadan.

Some toy stores have suspended selling toy guns, which go for between $25 and $35, until the scandal subsides despite an increase in demand.

"Every day I have dozens of young people coming in to the shop asking for water guns," said one shopkeeper at a toy store in downtown Tehran. "Our youth won't give up this easily."

Comment: This is what their kind of Islam does to its people-be aware!

How to Cure Islamophobia with Islamo-Fear

Bill Warner

There is a sudden rash of Islamophobia according to many so-called civil rights organizations. www.americanprogress.com has a new report out called, Fear, Inc. In it they define Islamophobia as an exaggerated fear, hatred, and hostility toward Islam and Muslims that is perpetuated by negative stereotypes and ignorance …

Let’s get this straight—fear is good. Any combat veteran will tell you that fear can save your life. When soldiers perform a heroic act, they were afraid while they were being a hero. [My step-father was a combat veteran WWII in the South Pacific and did three landing invasions. He said that if you were not afraid in combat, you were crazy and a danger to all men.] Many people feel that fear is bad and needs to be denied. But, fear directs our attention to threats, and there are very real threats to our well being. Fear lets us tap our inner core of strength. Fear, like love, is good. Just as there are bad forms of love, like clinging and attachment, there is a bad form of fear—a phobia. A phobia is caused by imagined threats. A phobia is a neurosis and a disease of the mind and emotions. A phobia takes us away from reality, into our imagination; fear focuses us on reality. Here we have the key to curing this phobia, deal with the reality of the situation.

The reality we need to know is Islam;
after all, that is what the phobia is about. It is odd, but very few people can even define Islam. Exactly and precisely, what is Islam, what is its doctrine? The definition of Islam is found in the declaration of Islam, the Shahada: There is no god but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet. But the Shahada is not only what you say to become a Muslim, it is the totality of Islam. It is agreed to by 100% of all Muslims as being true and points us to a complete Islam.

Allah is in the Koran which tells the world to live exactly like Mohammed. Luckily, there is a vast world of texts that tell us precisely what Mohammed did. Mohammed is found in the Sira (his sacred biography), and his traditions, the Hadith. Koran, Sira and Hadith are about Allah and Mohammed and this Trilogy defines Islam.

If it is in the Trilogy, it is Islam. Period. There is nothing else to read to know the complete foundation of Islam. Everything else Islamic is a comment on the Trilogy. Nothing can go beyond it, because it is complete, perfect, universal and final. That is the textual doctrine of Islam.

Why so much fuss to establish what Islam is? Simple, Islam and its apologists maintain that there is no doctrine and that even if there were a doctrine, a Kafir (non-Muslim) cannot know it. Islam wants you to believe that Islam is what a Muslim tells you. But, the only Muslims you want to listen to are Mohammed and Allah. Because once you know Mohammed and Allah, you will discover that the Muslims talking to you are only telling you half of the truth. Mohammed and Allah will tell you the whole truth and nothing but the truth. You can take Mohammed and Allah to the Sharia bank.

Since the Muslims claim that Islamophobia is caused by negative stereotypes, you have the cure because Mohammed and Allah define Islam. So, listen to the doctor, the next time you feel an attack of Islamophobia coming on, take one Allah and one Mohammed and contemplate their message of submission and dualism. If the Islamophobia does not pass immediately, then take some Sharia that deals with women’s rights, dhimmis (non-Muslims who serve Islam), Kafirs and jihad. That will knock the Islamophobia right out of you. If you are still feeling a little ill, then read the history of jihad over the last 1400 years and the deaths of 270 million Kafirs. That phobia caused by ignorance will pass and you will be brought back to the reality of Islamo-fear, the firm grip on reality.

Final Battle



Muslim apocalyptic movements like al-Qaida, Hamas, Hezbollah, and other jihadi groups are winning an information war that the West barely recognizes exists

By Richard Landes | Aug 31, 2011 7:00 AM

When I first heard in the mid-1990s about the dreams of some jihadis and Islamists to have the green flag of Islam waving over the White House and the queen of England wearing a burka, I, like so many other Western liberals, thought that these were ludicrous fantasies. But as a student of apocalyptic millennialism, I understood that however silly such beliefs might sound to outsiders, they can have devastating consequences.

Millennialists, from stone-age cargo cults to the Pharaoh Akhenaten’s monotheistic revolution in Egypt around 1350 BCE to modern secular movements including the French Revolution, Marxism, Communism, and Nazism, all imagine that in the future the world will transform from a society in which evil, corruption, and oppression flourish and the good suffer into a world without suffering and pain. The term “apocalyptic” refers to the experiences and behavior of those who believe that this millennial transformation is imminent. In my new book, Heaven on Earth, I focus on two major developments in apocalyptic movements: The first concerns those rare moments when a previously low-volume apocalyptic discourse successfully enters the public sphere and, despite its outlandish claims, wins zealous, open, converts, and the second concerns the inevitable disappointment that greets all such movements, including those that succeed in taking power and implementing their plans for perfecting the world. Of the most dangerous such movements to jell are those I call “active cataclysmic” ones that believe that only vast destruction can pave the way to the new world, and that they are the agents of that violence. Such movements have killed tens of millions of people (often their own people) before their raging fires burned out.

Unholy Anger

One of Obama’s top advisers on Afghanistan reviews two new books on Osama Bin Laden and the U.S. approach to al-Qaida that put Israel at the center of the conflict

Two key laws of apocalyptic dynamics became relevant in assessing Muslim apocalyptic expectations, even the most curious ones attached to the advent of the year 2000: First, one person’s messiah is another’s antichrist; and, second, wrong does not mean inconsequential. Muslims observing messianic Christians and Jews who wanted to rebuild the Temple where the Dome of the Rock stands in the year 2000 predicted the Dajjal, the Muslim version of the antichrist, for that year. And given the active cataclysmic fantasy involved—“We, Allah’s agents, must destroy much of the word to save it”—I understood how devastating it might be if this movement spread, no matter how wrong it might seem to secular people in the West.

When I first began to familiarize myself with this phenomenon, I was primarily worried that organizations like al-Qaida, Hamas, Hezbollah, and other jihadi and mujahedin movements might gain support in the Muslim world and cause damage both to fellow Muslims and to “infidels” around the world. But I did not for a moment imagine that these hateful and paranoid apocalyptic tropes—the very opposite of the notions of peace, equality, openness, and tolerance that Western progressives prized—would win supporters and allies among even the most progressive elements of the Western public sphere. Neither I nor, I suspect, the men who wrote Hamas’ genocidal charter in 1988 expected Western infidels to march in European capitals with Hamas’ flag, shouting “We are Hamas,” as protesters did in London, Athens, Paris, and Madrid in 2009.

In the course of the last decade, the Western public sphere has seen two major developments that systematically increased the strength of global jihad: on the one hand the adoption of some of the most vicious jihadi discourse—in particular the new anti-Semitism in the guise of anti-Zionism—and on the other, the equally strident attacks, often by non-Muslims, on those who try to identify the Islamic sources of the problem as hate-mongering Islamophobes. The result has been an undreamed-of success for jihadis over the past decade in a cognitive war that Westerners scarcely recognize.

***

Most Westerners greet the news of a global jihad against the West with derision. The vast asymmetry between Muslim and Western military forces makes any such ambition seem like a bad joke. Thus when Osama Bin Laden declared war on the United States in 1998, the Western news media scarcely mentioned it, and few even noticed. And if we outsiders ignored the battlefield jihad, we also failed to note that the jihadis were aware of their disadvantage on the battlefield and had chosen to conduct their major campaign against the West in a very different theater of war.

Cognitive warfare aims to paralyze the will of the enemy to resist attack, to maneuver that enemy into adopting vulnerable positions, and eventually to get him to give up in a conflict. In cognitive warfare, real violence (such as terror attacks) are adjuncts to the mental conflict, and the targets of such warfare are large audiences both among populations at home (recruitment and mobilization) and, still more significantly, among the enemy (paralysis). The advent of television, for example, with its highly emotive power, played a key role in the cognitive war the Vietcong successfully conducted against the United States in Vietnam.

Of course, such a line of action seems almost as unlikely to succeed as the military option. Jihadi Islam embraces values that by the normal standards of the Western public sphere are simply grotesque—misogyny, oppressive theocracy, homophobia, hate-mongering, and genocide. Yet as a collection of civil polities that prize peaceful conditions and positive-sum relations, in which public opinion has a great deal of influence on political decisions, the West is particularly vulnerable to a campaign based on appealing to our commitment to human rights, justice, and peace and against prejudice, racism, and intolerance. If jihadis can convince us—their target population—that by our standards we are in the wrong, that to think ill of them is a form or racism, or Islamophobia, then they can drain us of the will to resist and the awareness that we need to resist something.

One the most important dimensions of their cognitive war is to get infidels, even without being conquered, to behave according to the restrictions of Islam. Among the most important impositions we have seen of this phenomenon—one whose violation immediately removes any protection from harm from the head of the blasphemer—is the absolute prohibition on criticizing Allah or his prophet. Thus, a major battlefield of the cognitive war between jihadis and the West concerns tolerance for criticism of the other. Here, as elsewhere, the jihadis strive for asymmetry: Even as they criticize us virulently, how dare we criticize them?

Normally, the West would have won this fight hands down. Tolerance applies to all, and for freedom of expression and public criticism to exist one must develop a thick skin and renounce honor violence—shedding someone’s blood for the sake of saving face.
Yet the major players in our public sphere—the news media, pundits, academic experts, and even strategic policy thinkers—have systematically folded when faced with an aggressive assault from radical Islam. A number of factors can help us understand how this startling reversal came about—post-colonial guilt, moral relativism and narcissism, intimidation and cowardice, radical agendas, media malfeasance—but all of them profit from being understood in terms of a larger millennial framework.

Essentially, an apocalyptic millennial movement has declared war on the West and been able to conduct cognitive warfare on our home turf—partly because we don’t recognize the nature of the foe, partly because we are so committed to the rules and values of civil society that we have difficulty even acknowledging that a state of war exists. Most of us are too secular to appreciate the beliefs involved. And as a result of this ignorance, we misidentify and badly analyze the phenomenon in question.

***

Unholy Anger

One of Obama’s top advisers on Afghanistan reviews two new books on Osama Bin Laden and the U.S. approach to al-Qaida that put Israel at the center of the conflict

Western purveyors of news are, of course, a strategic target for jihadi cognitive warriors: Journalists are the main shapers of Western public opinion, and, it turns out, they are highly susceptible to intimidation and manipulation. As a result, the mainstream news media have, surely unwittingly but nonetheless consistently, played a crucial role in mainstreaming jihadi themes in the Western public sphere, even as they disguise the source and nature of these themes. A study of perhaps the single most powerful attack in the cognitive war of global jihad and its aftermath offers a detailed insight into the ways in which this has occurred. It illustrates the weaknesses of our media, as well as the critical but obscured relationship between jihad and the so-called Israel problem.

On Sept. 30, 2000, France2 Television ran a story about Muhammad al Durah, a 12-year-old boy who, along with his father, was pinned down in a cross-fire between Israeli and Palestinian forces at Netzarim Junction in the Gaza Strip. “The target of fire from the Israeli position, the boy was killed and the father badly wounded,” veteran French journalist Charles Enderlin reported. Enderlin distributed the footage to all his colleagues for free, and this story ran around the world in hours.

The impact in the Arab world was immediate: Arab riots in Israel, world-wide indignation, accusations of deliberate murder. Al Jazeera and PA TV ran the footage repeatedly. PA technicians inserted a brief clip of an Israeli soldier firing rubber bullets at Arabs rioting over al Durah into the footage, so that it looked like the Israeli had targeted and deliberately killed the boy. The invented footage became a major tool of incitement for the nascent intifada that targeted Israeli civilians on both sides of the Green Line and reached a climax in the October 12 Ramallah lynching of two Israeli reservists by a mob who literally tore their bodies apart and dragged the parts through the city shouting, “Revenge for the blood of Muhammad al Durah.”

The actual evidence, however, posed serious problems for the explosive narrative of deliberate child-murder. The footage, closely examined, contradicted every detail of the claim that Israel had killed the boy “in cold blood,” as a France 2 photographer put it, from the alleged “forty minutes of [Israeli] bullets like rain” (rather, there were only a few bullets one could identify in the brief footage, all from the Palestinian side), to the 20-minute-long death from a fatal stomach wound (no sign of blood on the ground), to the murdered ambulance driver (no evidence), to the dead boy (who moves quite deliberately in the final scene, which Enderlin cut for his broadcast).

Moreover, the al Durah footage was only the most spectacular example of a widespread practice among Palestinian cameramen of staging scenes that illustrate their framing of the conflict: the Palestinian David vs. the Israeli Goliath. Indeed, over the years, Palestinians have created a veritable cinematic industry—Pallywood—of staged scenes that Western news agencies regularly pass on to an unsuspecting public. When historians look back in future generations, the failure of the mainstream news media to catch this badly executed hoax, even a decade after its occurrence and years after the evidence was available, will stand as one of the most astonishing failures of 21st-century journalism.

In turn, the al Durah footage was merely one episode in a long-standing cognitive war Palestinians have conducted against the Israelis with growing success since the Lebanon War of 1982. A representative of PATV revealed the cognitive warrior’s mindset as he explained why they spliced in the footage of the Israeli soldier in order to make the accusation of deliberate murder: “These are forms of artistic expression, but all of this serves to convey the truth. … We never forget our higher journalistic principles to which we are committed of relating the truth and nothing but the truth”—in other words, weaponizing a lethal narrative in order to demonize our enemy however much such an action might violate every principle of professional journalism.

Talal abu Rahmeh, the cameraman who shot the staged scene, boasted that he too was a warrior in the struggle of his people. When caught in a lie about having collected Israeli bullets from the scene in an interview, he explained unapologetically, “We have our secrets. We can’t give anything, just everything.” For Palestinian “journalists,” news was a theater of war. Western journalists acknowledged this even as they broadcast these lethal narratives to their publics at home: “They’re the weapons of the weak,” one French journalist explained of the broadcasts.

Indeed, the al Durah footage was such a powerful image that it became not merely an emblem for the Palestinians but, through Al Jazeera’s constant use of the image, a symbol for the entire Muslim world. Within months of the incident, Osama Bin Laden, who had declared jihad on the United States only two years earlier, featured the Palestinian conflict and specifically al Durah in a global recruiting video. Bin Laden immediately understood the value of the footage not only as a lethal narrative aimed at Israel but also at its supporters, like the United States, or those who failed to avenge the boy’s “death,” meaning cowardly Arab leaders. “In killing this boy, the Israelis killed every child in the world,” as Osama Bin Laden is said to have put it.

Paris, October 2000.
Francois Guillot/AFP/Getty Images

Like the medieval blood libel, the story of the deliberate murder of an innocent Muslim child was framed as a symbol of cosmic Jewish malevolence. Far from exercising any kind of due diligence, the European media ran the footage almost as frequently as Arab media, mainstreaming the longstanding Palestinian claim that the Israelis were the new Nazis. Within a week of its first appearance, demonstrators across the Western world massed in the streets to protest Israeli “murder,” some of them carrying signs equating the Star of David with the Nazi swastika and others carrying the banners of terrorist organizations like Hamas. The fact that Western viewers are hardly surprised by such images anymore is a measure of the success of a larger campaign of cognitive warfare by a millennial cult, whose dreams of the end of days may be preposterous but who pose a clear and continuing danger to Western democratic values and practices.

Israel became openly reviled. One diplomat referred to the Jewish state as that “shitty little country,” and more than one prominent world figure compared Israel to the Nazis. It was as if the restraints on criticizing Israel placed on Europeans since the Holocaust had been lifted. As one respected anchorwoman for Europe1 put it: “This death annuls, replaces, erases the picture of the boy in the Warsaw Ghetto.” In other words, al Durah was a get-out-of-Holocaust-guilt-free card.

Here we see the diabolic genius of the jihadi cognitive war against the West. Having borrowed extensively from the depraved archive of Western anti-Semitism, jihadis played on the scarcely repressed anti-Semitism of the West and reintroduced it via anti-Zionism. Even as Europeans insisted that anti-Zionism was not the same as anti-Semitism, they used anti-Zionism to free themselves of the restraints that decent guilt about the Holocaust had placed on their desire to heap abuse on Jews: Hatred of Israel, they claimed, had nothing to do with Jews, even as Israel’s behavior showed that Jews with power were no better than Nazis.
Swept with a wave of moral Schadenfreude, European audiences eagerly devoured the lethal narratives the Palestinians fed their press about an evil Israel. The blood libel worked: For many, Israel was above all a serial murderer of children. In 2007, when I gave a talk in Budapest about Muhammad al Durah, one of the organizers interrupted my presentation to insist that, “Everyone knows that the Israelis kill Palestinian children every day.” The same year, Canadian pro-Palestinian activist Mary Hughes-Thompson, who to this day recalls the importance of what she called seeing Muhammad al Durah “shot and killed before my very eyes,” wrote: “It’s … horrifying to know that Palestinian children are killed every day by bombs and bullets from Israeli occupation forces.” In the cognitive war, the al Durah lethal narrative was a nuclear bomb; while the explosion has died down, we’re still breathing in the radioactive waste.

***

Western journalists, especially Europeans, made three critical mistakes in their handling of the al Durah episode. First, even as they rejected any narrative supportive of Israel as unreliable “communautarisme,” or partisanship, they embraced any Palestinian lethal narrative no matter how incredible. Second, they represented the Palestinian hostility to Israel as that of a secular, national liberation movement hostile only to Israel rather than an Arab-Muslim jihad in search of honor lost on a global scale. Third, they therefore assumed that by siding with the Palestinians, they would gain their favor. Instead, as the Arab-Muslim street that took root in Europe in the last decade has illustrated, European infidels were every bit the target of jihadi malevolence.

Unholy Anger

One of Obama’s top advisers on Afghanistan reviews two new books on Osama Bin Laden and the U.S. approach to al-Qaida that put Israel at the center of the conflict

Thus, as European journalists replayed endlessly the images of al Durah and reported every Palestinian claim that the Israelis murdered children, the journalists had no idea that they were waving the flag of jihad in front of their own Muslim immigrant populations, and no idea that they too were the target of jihadi hatred. In 2002, in response to unconscionably irresponsible reports from the European press about a massacre of hundreds if not thousands of innocent Palestinians in Jenin, self-styled progressives poured into the streets in support of the very terrorism that had prompted the Israelis to defend themselves. As Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci wrote at the time:

In Italy there [is] a procession of individuals dressed as suicide bombers who spew vile abuse at Israel, hold up photographs of Israeli leaders on whose foreheads they have drawn the swastika, incite people to hate the Jews.

After all, at this point, the only victims of suicide bombing were Israelis and Americans, both (still) the objects of astonishing European hostility. And yet, in so doing, Europeans both fueled the worst of the intifada and prepared their own paralysis in the face of jihadi threats. Suicide bombings, and the threat of them, have blighted, and will likely continue to, the new century. As a French friend told me in 2003: “The Arabs act as if they have a knife to our throat, and we act as if they did.” And that invisible knife was suicide terror.

Throughout this process, the press played a key role, both by concealing the genocidal incitement of the Palestinians (and other jihadi forces) and by broadcasting every lethal narrative produced by Pallywood. Thus al Durah triggered a wave of violence and vituperation against the Jews in Europe, and the very press that broadcast the false footage fell silent when it came to reporting its real effects. Anyone who had the nerve to denounce this explosion of Muslim anti-Semitism was tarred as a Zionist Islamophobe.

When Charles Enderlin, the reporter for France2, saw the footage his cameraman had sent him, if instead of rushing to broadcast and sharing it freely with his colleagues, he had exercised due diligence, fired Talal for faking the footage, and had run an article on Palestinian incitement via fake “reporting,” the Second Intifada would have had a very different trajectory. When European elites, hit with a wave of anti-Semitic speech and deeds by their Muslim populations in response to al Durah and similar reporting from the intifada, if instead of excusing it as an understandable response to Israeli crimes and concealing its full force from the public, had instead responded by making clear how unacceptable such behavior is in a civil society, the wave of European Islamic aggression might also have had a different career. Instead, the apocalyptic fires of genocidal hatred were stoked, often by people who thought they were advocates for peace.

Lest one think this was merely a problem of European anti-Zionism (coupled with its twin brother, anti-Americanism), consider the emblematic response of the New York Times to the problem of Palestinian incitement. The day after the savage lynching in Ramallah, two key events occurred: The Israelis in retaliation bombed a Palestinian radio station because, according to the IDF, the broadcaster was guilty of the same kind of genocidal incitement that led to the atrocities in Rwanda less than a decade previously. The same day, PATV broadcast a sermon by Sheik Ahmad Abu Halabiya live from Gaza:

The Jews are the Jews. Whether Labor or Likud, the Jews are Jews. They do not have any moderates or any advocates of peace. They are all liars. They must be butchered and must be killed. … It is forbidden to have mercy in your hearts for the Jews in any place and in any land. Make war on them any place that you find yourself. Any place that you meet them, kill them.

New York Times reporter William Orme came to investigate the Israeli claim of incitement as a major contributor to Palestinian violence. After giving ample and unchallenged space to a Palestinian spokesman who insisted, in an allusion to al Durah, that “we have no fabricated pictures, and no fabricated stories,” and that Israelis think anything is incitement, Orme offered this quote as his only example of Palestinian incitement:

Israelis cite as one egregious example a televised sermon that defended the killing of the two soldiers. “Whether Likud or Labor, Jews are Jews,” proclaimed Sheik Ahmad Abu Halabaya in a live broadcast from a Gaza City mosque the day after the killings.

One could excuse the uninformed reader for sympathizing with the Palestinian claim that the Israelis are hyper-sensitive.

Those aware of the full text might have difficulty imagining how this is not news fit to print. Unfortunately, this censored statement constitutes just one example of a vast industry of hatred and incitement to violence that characterizes the most aggressive forms of apocalyptic jihadi Islam not only in Palestinian circles but the Muslim world over. And Orme’s silence has been the rule, not the exception, in mainstream media coverage of both the Arab-Israeli conflict and global jihad since 2000.

***

Ultimately, Orme himself must explain his lacuna (which, so far, he has refused to do). I suspect that it has something to do with a widespread sentiment among journalists and intellectuals that if you broadcast such information, you put wind in the sails of the right-wing warmongers. The less said, the better.

Alas, from the perspective of cognitive warfare against an apocalyptic millennial foe, such a silence is wind in the sails of genocidal warmongers. And when joined to a systematic mainstreaming of jihadi lethal narratives into our information system as news, those winds wax ever stronger.

When will we stop losing, and even start winning, a cognitive war we should have won from the beginning? When will we use weaponry we have—like the jihadis’ honor-shame sensitivities—instead of allowing jihadis to bully the West into backing down for fear of provoking them? It’s entirely a matter of imagination and will. This one really is in our hands. And it begins with a prise de conscience. As Stuart Green, the author of Cognitive Warfare and the Role of the Media, remarks, “You can’t win the Battle of Midway if you don’t know you’re in a battle.”

Richard Landes, a professor of history at Boston University, blogs at The Augean Stables. His new book, Heaven on Earth: The Varieties of the Millennial Experience treats a variety of apocalyptic movements, including global jihad.

Obama's words aren't enough

Asaf Romirowsky

The ongoing turmoil in Syria is stirring a great deal of apprehension in Israel that is even greater than its hand-wringing over Egypt's recent regime change. Unlike Israel and Egypt, Israel and Syria have no peace agreement, and Syria, with a large armory of sophisticated weapons, is one of Israel's fervent enemies.

Over the past few weeks President Bashar Assad, like his father Hafez Assad, has once again shown the world what Syrian brutality is all about. He ordered Syrian troops backed by tanks to the towns of Talkalakh, Daraa, Baniyas and Homs to quell anti-regime protests by killing innocent civilians in the streets.

In February 1982, Hafez Assad acted in a similar manner when he sent the Syrian army into Hama, adopting a scorched-earth policy against the residents of the town in order to quash a revolt by the Sunni Muslim community against his regime. The estimate of the dead reached approximately 40,000 according to the Syrian Human Rights Committee. Syria has long presented a serious quandary for the Middle East, US foreign policy and for Israel. With its mix of competing religious and ethnic groups, radical ideologies and political repression - it is a 72,000-square-mile time bomb waiting to go off.

This reality has become increasingly self-evident since Bashar Assad took over in 2000. With no real political aspirations, Bashar was not groomed to be the next leader. It was only after the death of his brother, Basil, in a car accident that Bashar was called back to Syria in 1994 from his studies in London, in order to continue the Assad blood line. He was put on the fast track to the Syrian throne while learning the art of dictatorship, which in turn became his playbook for governing.

Syria's radicalism is unique as it grows out of the regime's necessity to validate its own existence. It is a minority dictatorship of a small non-Muslim minority that offers neither freedoms nor material benefits. It requires demagoguery, scapegoating of the US and Israel, looting from Lebanon and an Iraq influx - all of which serving to make up the regime's raison d'être.
Big fan of Islamism

Consequently, Assad is one of the biggest supporters of Islamism in the region despite running a secular Arab regime. As we have witnessed over the past months, he tactfully uses this support of Islamism to mobilize animosity towards the US and Israel, in a bid to divert attention from his internal problems of corruption, failing economy and lack of civil rights.

Israelis have not forgotten the lessons of 1973 and have no intention of repeating the mistakes made 38 years ago when it comes to the Syrian threat to their survival. The Yom Kippur War was Israel's Pearl Harbor and claimed the lives of nearly 3,000 IDF soldiers. As such, it is a safe bet that Israel of 2011 would take any steps necessary to ensure her qualitative military edge on the northern border as illustrated by her attack on Syria's al-Kibar nuclear facility in 2007.

Moreover, Syria's ties with Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah validate Israel's ongoing concerns on the northern border. In contrast, Bashar believes that it is his defiance of Washington and disdain for Israel that will strengthen his position at home in conjunction with closer ties with Iran, Hezbollah and al-Qaeda.

Nonetheless, many sitting and former elected officials in Washington such as Nancy Pelosi, Arlen Specter and Jimmy Carter have repeatedly gone to pay homage to Assad, naively believing that their presence will make Assad more open to the West.

In the final analysis, Syria under Bashar Assad represents a greater threat to regional instability than it did under Hafez Assad, specifically because it is so unpredictable. This should indicate to Washington that just saying it's time for Bashar Assad to step down will hardly be enough.

You Can’t Spell “Chutzpah” Without “PA” (Palestinian Authority)

Barry Rubin

The Palestinian Authority (PA) has refused to condemn an attack on Israel from Egypt by an al-Qaida affiliate group that killed eight Israelis. The PA is also going to the UN to get support for a unilateral declaration of independence that violates every agreement it reached with Israel since 1993. The PA leader, Mahmoud Abbas, has said that even if Palestinians get an independent state they will continue to demand that millions of Palestinian Arabs must be allowed to go live in Israel so they can turn that into a Muslim Arab state.

Oh, and even when the PA declares that it is a Muslim Arab state (as it says in the PA Constitution) that it will refuse to recognize Israel as a Jewish state. And on September 20, the PA is organizing massive anti-Israel demonstrations that will probably lead to violence. Did I mention that the PA is currently in partnership with Hamas—even though that isn’t working out so well—which regularly attacks Israel with rockets and mortars, as well as declaring that it’s going to kill all the Jews?
But, wait! The PA needs money! So what does it do? Why, of course it goes to Israel and asks for money! Specifically, it requested that Israel move up the turnover of the $105 million in tax revenues Israel has collected on imports. Not just pay the money, mind you, but pay it sooner than required! The PA took out a short-term bank loan on the assumption that this would happen since Israeli civil servants in the finance and defense ministries recommended it be done. Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz said, “No.”

The nerve! Now, according to previous agreements that Israel and the PA have made, Israel is supposed to give the money. But it is under no obligation to give the money ahead of schedule. Moreover, the PA is denouncing these same agreements which require, for example, that the PA stop incitement to murder Israelis; arrest those planning to commit terror attacks or who have done so; and negotiate in good faith toward a compromise peace.

The PA wanted to pay salaries for its personnel (including those in prison for murdering Israelis and for those living in the Gaza Strip, whose payment would pump money into the Hamas-ruled statelet that is attacking Israel on a regular basis).
And one might ask what has happened to the billions of dollars in international aid, a higher per capita payment than any other political entity has received in the history of the planet earth?

Let me dramatize the situation for you:
Hi! I know I’m in partnership with a group at war with you; am inciting my people and teaching my children to murder you, am refusing to negotiate with you, have stolen most of the money I’ve received in foreign aid, which is why I’m broke, am rejecting and breaking the agreements on which your obligation to pay me rest; am going to the UN to get international sanction for breaking the previous agreements; am lying about you every day (a PA minister has just accused Israel of stealing organs); am seeking an outcome in which I can then wipe you off the map; and using the money you would be giving me to pay people who have murdered your citizens….
BUT can you move up your payment of money to me as a favor?
This is the absurdity of the Israel-Palestinian issue, whose reality is never reflected in the Western mass media.


Professor Barry Rubin, Director, Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center http://www.gloria-center.org
The Rubin Report blog http://rubinreports.blogspot.com/
He is a featured columnist at PJM http://pajamasmedia.com/barryrubin/.
Editor, Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal http://www.gloria-center.org
Editor Turkish Studies,http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~db=all~content=t713636933%22

Harriet Sherwood inadvertently shows that a Palestinian state wouldn’t end the conflict

Adam Levick

One of the reasons why most Israelis are skeptical that Palestinians don’t truly desire peace with Israel is their insistence that any agreement which results in “two states for two peoples” wouldn’t abrogate the “right of return” for millions of Palestinians whose parents, grandparents, or even great-grandparents may have once lived within the borders of Israel.

While, intuitively, you’d think that “Palestinians” living in Syria, Lebanon, and elsewhere would be encouraged to emigrate to the new Palestinian state, or finally be given citizenship in their country of residence, even the most “moderate” Palestinian leaders insist that any final agreement allow for an influx of millions of Palestinian Arabs into Israel – thus destroying, demographically, the only Jewish state that exists, or will ever exist. Harriet Sherwood’s most recent post, “Palestinian state could leave millions of refugees with no voice at the UN“, (curiously placed in the less frequented “Palestinian Territories” section of the Guardian site and not in the Israel section) is an exquisite example that Zionists who are skeptical that the creation of a Palestinian state wouldn’t necessarily end the conflict are justified in their concerns.

Sherwood writes:

“If the bid [for Palestinian statehood] succeeds, UN representation of the Palestinian people would shift from the global Palestinian Liberation Organisation – currently recognised as the “sole and legitimate representative” of all Palestinians around the world – to the envoy of a state based in the West Bank and Gaza. Millions of Palestinian refugees who live in the diaspora could be “accidentally disenfranchised”, according to a seven-page legal opinion by Guy Goodwin-Gill. [emphasis mine]

So, Arabs who claim Palestinian lineage currently living in “refugee camps” in countries like Syria and Lebanon, who, for some reason, have never been granted citizenship in those countries, would no longer be deemed “refugees” and thus would lose their moral and legal claims against Israel.

But, it gets better:

“Goodwin-Gill, a professor of international law at Oxford, concludes “the interests of the Palestinian people are at risk of prejudice and fragmentation”. Palestinians in the diaspora risk losing “their entitlement to equal representation … their ability to vocalise their views, to participate in matters of national governance, including the formation and political identity of the state, and to exercise the right of return.” [emphasis mine]

Thus, the creation of a Palestinian state wouldn’t empower such Palestinian Arabs to emigrate to, and become citizens of, the new independent state of Palestine – thus granting them the “ability to vocalise their views, to participate in…national governance, including the formation and political identity of the [Palestinian] state” - but would deny them their status as victims of Israeli expulsion.

Of note, Goodwin Gill’s opinion “was commissioned by Karma Nabulsi, a former PLO representative and now an Oxford professor” and CiF commentator.

Sherwood continues:

“[Nabulsi] called for clarity from the PLO in its response to the legal opinion and for reassurances to Palestinian refugees in the diaspora that their “core rights” of representation and the right of return would remain untouched. [emphasis mine]

If you needed any more proof that a two-state solution wouldn’t necessarily end the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, this is it.

Unlike hundreds of millions of refugees throughout the world since the end of WWII (including roughly 850,000 Jewish refugees from Arab lands) who have emigrated and been assimilated into other countries, Palestinians still insist on an immutable status of “refugee” – and the “right” to “return” to a country which most have never stepped foot in and whose influx would mean the end of Jewish sovereignty in the Middle East.

What Goodwin-Gill and Nablusi are saying is that the conflict will never cease to exist until Israel ceases to exist.

Rollback the Muslim Brotherhood


Frank Gaffney

In recent weeks, we have been put on notice repeatedly: Absent a fundamental course correction, America will go the way of Europe and others before it, succumbing to an insidious totalitarian doctrine known as shariah whose purpose, in the words of its prime practitioners - the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) - is to "destroy Western civilization from within."

Hurricanes, earthquakes and fiscal crises are preoccupations of the moment. Unless we heed the warnings being issued by three of our most brilliant strategic thinkers, Mark Steyn, Bat Ye'or and Andrew McCarthy, however, we risk an irreversible national calamity.

Each of these authors has published in the past month powerful alarums about the steady erosion of the West's societies, governing institutions and freedoms at the hands of shariah's adherents and their enablers on the left.

Mark Steyn released After America: Get Ready for Armaggedon, a much-awaited sequel to his best-seller, America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It. Bat Ye'or - who popularized the terms "Eurabia" and "dhimmitude" to describe what is befalling the Europeans at the hands of those seeking, in accordance with shariah, tosubjugate all non-believers as enslaved "dhimmis" - published Europe, Globalization and the Coming Universal Caliphate. And just last week, Andy McCarthy, author of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America, wrote a brilliant column for National Review Online, "Losing Malmo, and Brussels and Rome and Amsterdam."A consistent theme of these three important works is that we run grave risks in taking for granted the permanence of a world order dominated by liberal democracies and led by the United States. Yet, we are doing so even as evidence accumulates that Islamists, led by the Muslim Brotherhood and the 57-member Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), are making steady strides towards their goal of establishing a new, transnational order. They would have it take the form of a global "Caliphate," in which the world will be ruled in accordance with shariah.

Sounds crazy? It may be. But if history teaches us anything, it is that determined, disciplined and ruthless people can do incalculable harm to others in the pursuit of crazy, supremacist goals.

What is truly crazy, though, is the role being played today by "progressive" elites that doing today what they have done in the face of totalitarians of the past: facilitating the latters' frightening ambitions. I have had the privilege of interviewing each of these three authors over the past few weeks on Secure Freedom Radio and the message could not be more clear: We persist in such behavior at our extreme peril.

Of particular concern is the corrosive effect of the phenomenon known by such names as "transnationalism," "multiculturalism" and "globalization." For many in Europe, it has become effectively a new religion, contributing to the precipitous decline of Christianity. To paraphrase Karl Marx, this post-modern, post-national program provides a kind of opiate that numbs the masses to the dangers of acquiescing to the Muslim Brotherhood's "civilization jihad."

European nations are now increasingly reaping the whirlwind thus sown. Of particular concern are what are known as "no-go zones" - areas where the authorities dare not enter. These are becoming increasingly common across the continent and in the U.K. as Muslim-populated enclaves apply shariah law and drive out those who do not conform. These zones are the direct result of accommodations made in the name of "diversity" and "sensitivity" to Islamic religio-cultural norms, read the supremacist doctrine of shariah. European leaders are beginning publicly to renounce such practices but their governments have yet to act accordingly.

Make no mistake. If we fail to heed the warnings of Mark Steyn, Bat Ye'or and Andy McCarthy, a similar fate awaits us. Already, the U.S. government has been engaged in serial acts of appeasement of Muslim Brotherhood fronts and other shariah-adherents. These include: a Director of National Intelligence who admits to relying on such groups to provide "advice, counsel and wisdom" about "extremists" in their midst; White House direction that all government-funded counter-terrorism training will be conducted in accordance with direction of a Department of Homeland Security deeply compromised by the Brotherhood; a new Obama "strategy" for local law enforcement that requires "partnering" with what amount to enemy front organizations; and a Hillary Clinton-engineered initiative with the OIC aimed at curbing expression that can have negative "consequences" for Muslims.

In the face of such folly, Members of Congress and private citizens are striving not merely to halt these and other examples of reckless official "engagement" with the Muslim Brotherhood; they are beginning to roll back the MB. With the leadership of two freshmen congressmen, Reps. John Duncan (R-SC) and Paul Gosar (R-AZ), the House of Representatives has adopted amendments aimed at denying any taxpayer funding to the Brotherhood. These and similar initiatives by citizens across the nation are being profiled at a new website sponsored by the Center for Security Policy: TheRollback.org. Their stories serve as a powerful inspiration and as impetuses for similar efforts by others.

It is past time for Americans to awaken to the danger posed by shariah and its adherents. We can no longer ignore the inroads made by these forces into Western civilization's European flank. And we certainly cannot delude ourselves into believing that our homeland will remain immune from their predations as long as we persist in the same sorts of appeasement that have brought our friends and allies across the Atlantic to their present, parlous state.

FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributor Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. is President of the Center for Security Policy, a columnist for the Washington Times and host of the syndicated program, Secure Freedom Radio, heard in Washington on weeknights at 9:00 p.m. on WRC 1260 AM.

The Madness of King Gore the Second


Sultan Knish

They say that everyone talks about the weather, and no one ever does anything about it-- but since the mid-1980's we've been expected to do things about it. Two generations of children have grown up with the mantra that putting the empty soda in the right trash can is all that stands between them and the destruction of the planet, not to mention all the dead dolphins, paddling polar bears and crying indians.

There are just too many people, we're told, and too many of them are buying things and eating things and living too long. And all that is killing the planet. Sure you can guzzle Fair Trade coffee until your face turns green, bike to work until you're sterile and smugly lecture everyone else on the importance of saving the planet-- but no matter what you do, you're coughing up carbon into the air like a defective air conditioner. To get some perspective on this, let's visit Tokyo, one of the major centers of the global economy, (not literally of course, because that's just too expensive) home of the Japanese royal family and the largest metropolitan area on the planet. When Hollywood writers imagine what the world will look like in 2282 or 5692 or some other random collection of numbers that leads to a world where everyone wears silver spandex and is rebelling against a totalitarian government, they usually use Tokyo as a model of the terrible future of flying cars, soulless skyscrapers and genetic scans that we're bound for.

And how big is the Tokyo metropolitan area? About 5,000 square miles, which takes up a lot of room in the 197 million square mile surface area of the planet. Imagine a wart on an ant that's living under the sink of your twenty room mansion, and you get some idea of the significance of the largest city we have in relation to the planet itself.

Every now and then some environmentalists insist that the planet is alive and angry at us, but if it were alive, it would notice us as about as much as you notice the mites on your skin. And then imagine the mites holding seminars worried about their impact on your epidermal layer, warning that if any more dead skin flakes off, it could be the end.

But environmentalism really isn't about the environment-- it's about the environmentalists. Watch the tree-hugger who warns that if we don't shape up, we'll be living in a wasteland of used tires and toxic fumes, take a jet to wherever he wants to go. Or the celebrity who proposes that we save the planet by drinking rat's milk, drive off in a gas guzzling car.

Most of all though, it's about Albert Gore the Second, the insecure boy who grew up to be an insecure man. The thing about Gore is that he tends to lose his mind when he experiences a setback. After losing the election to Bush, he grew a beard, became a mad hermit and emerged only to offer his insights on journalism based on the plum position of a senator's son on an army paper back in Vietnam.

Now Al Gore is losing it again because people have stopped paying attention to his cult because they're too busy waiting in line to collect their unemployment checks. His outbursts and crazy rants are cries for help from a man with serious mental problems who tried to submerge his neurosis in politics. And they're being ignored by a party that decided he was a millstone around their necks, the last time he became a running joke.

It may be the fate of most modern vice presidents to become jokes. Certainly it's been the case since after the Reagan Administration, which was saddled with George H.W. Bush, a man whom not even a lineup of angry liberal comedy writers could mold into anything humorous. And while Biden is the reigning gaffe champion of America, China and parts of the North Pole, he has never managed to take a single line and turn it into a national punchline for three years running.

"I invented the internet." It was that scent of hubris that would stick with Gore. The uncomfortable man, standing stiffly next to more affable politicians. The man who would rather be thought a nerd, than be known for the nobody that he was. The scion of a clan who was unable to live up to his family's expectations. Who inherited power, but had no idea what to do with it.

The internet would never belong to Gore the Second, but the environment briefly did. Gore had latched on to the environment, not because he knew anything about it, but because he knew that hardly anyone did. It was a perfect pose for a man who had nothing to offer, a subject that everyone pretended to care about, but no one knew anything about. And it was the subject that he turned to again after the dreaded electoral college turned him down.

The environment made Gore relevant again and it helped make him wealthy. Suddenly the stiff man was the prom king of Gaia High School and everyone wanted him to sign their hockey graph. But the environment is also a cruel mistress, no sooner do you bring out a line of biodegradable dish towers which go to help train Guatemalan farmers to grow sustainable coffee beans, than people stop paying attention to you all over again.

For celebrities, the environment is a part time gig, twenty minutes posing in front of a green screen on which a grim vision of smokestacks spewing pollutants into the air will be added in editing, and then jet on to France where they're having a film festival to celebrate the works of the only expat American director in Paris who didn't molest any children.

But for Al, the environment was his only gig. It will be a desperate Rotary Club that pays him to talk about changing economic conditions or doing business in China. Gore's way of doing business in China is not exactly accessible to anyone who doesn't have a hall pass to the Oval Office anyway. The environment is the only reason anyone has paid attention to him. And that's going away now.

Like some evil spirit who shrivels up and blows away when people don't pay attention to him, Gore is turning shriller as an act of desperation. A prolonged cry of why isn't anyone paying attention to the environment, when what he really means is why isn't anyone paying attention to me.

Recently Gore proposed that we start treating people who don't believe that humanity is destroying the planet like racists. If he means like, Albert Gore the First, who voted against the Civil Rights Act, then we would elect them to the Senate and then name a highway after them.

This pathetic outburst followed a Rolling Stone editorial and an obscenity laced tirade all on the same theme-- those damned deniers who question that fraudulent science that was on the verge of carving up American industry to benefit Wall Street and the Green Mafia. But Gore is wrong about this being the fault of Global Warming critics. It's not the critics that tanked his cause, it's Obama and the economy.

Gore's second coming was a matter of good timing. An Inconvenient Truth was part of a liberal surge that took Congress and neutered the Bush Administration. While Obama waited backstage, lighting up a blunt and practicing his teleprompter face-- the new wave lacked a public figure and a message besides Iraq. Al Gore provided both.

The Democratic Party did not expect to ride the green horse to the White House, but it was one of a series of causes that welded together a liberal coalition and made the next few years seem less like the pig party that it actually was. But Gore's star faded, as Obama's star rose. In the new party of the cult of personality, there was only room for one star, and it wasn't an overweight aging man who had already embarrassed the party once.

Gore's intent seriousness concealed his basic lack of ideas, it was the one trick he had picked up over the years, and that seriousness could also be confused with integrity. A man this awkward and serious had to be sincere, was the takeaway. But Gore's post-election meltdown had already revealed how little there was to the fake Jimmy Carteresque sincerity and the pompous pseudo-religiosity, and how many missing windows there were in the mansions of his cranium.

The latest batch of meltdowns is just another reminder of what Gore is, an insecure man drawn to a limelight that he can never told. But it is also a reminder of the sort of man who is drawn to the green and the motives for it.

Environmentalism promotes grandiosity, the idea that man shapes the environment, rather than the other way around as science had always held. There is nothing scientific about the notion that human industry is dooming the planet-- it is a wholly apocalyptic belief that makes use of twisted science to promote a grandiose notion.

The Flying Global Warming Monster is a religion, but is a faith in the absence of faith. Liberal theology does not provide its own apocalypses, but liberal activists have stepped into the breach to manufacture a manmade apocalypse. A disaster with its own prophets and rituals to propitiate the Flying Global Warming Monster who lurks in the sky and will raise surface temperatures by one tenth of a fourth of a degree if we do not begin using reusable cloth bags.

Al Gore, with his latent interest in theology, was always drawn to the ecclesiastical role, his equine features with their look of placidly serious idiocy perfect for looking down his hawk nose at people and nodding in all the right places. But instead he followed the family business to its end, and like a phoenix rising from Montecito, reinvented himself as the figurehead of his own church, preaching against the apocalyptic sunburn and the rising tide, while taking a cut of the Cap and Trade profits.

It was a good time to be Gore, but now it's over. What Obama didn't do to overshadow him, the economy has. When times are good, then people are ready to dump money on all sorts of silly things, including the crazy belief that the thriving polar bear population is about to vanish because there are too many cows in Wyoming. But when times are bad, then the doomsayers had better step up their act. Armageddon is scary, but being out of work is even more frightening and leaves folks with less money to drop in Reverend Gore's green biodegradable plate after services.

Gore reinvented himself once, but he's not ready to do it again, instead like a man about to lose the woman of his dreams, he's panicking and behaving in a way that makes the country want to file a restraining order against him. The Madness of King Gore the Second is back, as the national madness for the environment fades into the shadow of the old fads. The nation is putting aside foolish things and climate change tops the list. Gore the Second raves from his multi-monitor setup in Montecito. Long may he rave.

The Rise of Islamic No-Go Zones


Mark Tapson

Three and a half years ago, one of the Church of England’s most senior bishops, Pakistani-born Michael Nazir-Ali​, warned that Islamic extremists had created “no-go”areas across Britain too dangerous for non-Muslims to enter. His politically incorrect concern sparked a firestorm of denial and criticism. The Muslim Council of Britain, for example, dismissed it as the Bishop’s “frantic scaremongering” and “intolerance,” and scoffed,

We wouldn’t allow “no-go” areas to happen. I smell extreme intolerance when people criticise multiculturalism without proper evidence of what has gone wrong.

Well, the evidence of how multiculturalism “has gone wrong” is in. This week Soeren Kern at the Hudson Institute documented the proliferation of such no-go zones throughout Europe – autonomous Islamic “microstates” under Sharia rule (having rejected their host countries’ legal systems), where non-Muslims must either conform to the cultural, legal, and religious norms of fundamentalist Islam or expect to be greeted with violence. As Daniel Pipes puts it, “a more precise name for these zones would be Dar al-Islam” – the House of Islam, or the place where Islam rules. England, Sweden, Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands – in every European country with a large Muslim immigrant population, the story is the same: Islamic supremacists refuse to assimilate into the Western melting pot; instead they carve out a foothold in a neighborhood, and then, through intimidation or outright violence, push out the infidels whose failed secular values are no longer acceptable. Even public services such as police, firefighters and ambulances are often driven out of such neighborhoods with stones, bottles or bullets. Lacking the political and cultural will to assert control in areas that in some cases have become urban war zones, the authorities have simply retreated and abandoned them. As Germany’s Chief Police Commissioner Bernhard Witthaut confesses,

In these areas crimes no longer result in charges. They are left to themselves. Only in the worst cases do we in the police learn anything about it. The power of the state is completely out of the picture.

In Britain, where there are already as many as eighty-five Sharia courts in operation, an Islamist group called Muslims Against the Crusades has launched an ambitious campaign to turn twelve British cities into independent Islamic states, including Birmingham, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, and what the group calls “Londonistan.” In the Tower Hamlets in East London – or as the Muslims there refer to it, “the Islamic Republic of Tower Hamlets” – imams known as the “Tower Hamlets Taliban” issue death threats to unveiled women, and gays are attacked by gangs of young Muslim men. The neighborhood has been littered with leaflets announcing, “You are entering a Sharia controlled zone. Islamic rules enforced.” It was in East London, remember, that the Islamist Abu Izzadeen challenged former Home Secretary John Reid by saying: “How dare you come to a Muslim area?”

In France, there are an astonishing 751 so-called Sensitive Urban Zones (ZUS). “Sensitive” indeed: the nature of the ZUS, and chaos like the nightly burning of cars in Paris, are topics that the French media largely downplay to avoid accusations of racism or Islamophobia – hence, for example, their generic description of the immigrant gangs running wild in Paris Métro stations as “youth.”

An estimated (as of 2004) five million Muslims live in these ZUS, and there is barely a single French city that lacks at least one. In Paris and other French cities with a high percentage of Muslim populations, like Lyons, Marseilles and Toulouse, thousands of Muslims make their presence felt by blocking streets and sidewalks for Friday prayers. Some mosques have begun broadcasting sermons and chants of “Allahu Akbar” via loudspeakers into the streets. Local authorities sit on their hands rather than confront this “occupation without tanks or soldiers,” because they are afraid of the situation escalating into violence in the streets.

The Dutch government has released a list of forty “no-go” zones in the Netherlands. In Brussels, Belgium, which is twenty percent Muslim, police have to patrol with two police cars, to watch each other’s back. And yet the multiculturalist mindset is so deeply entrenched in Europeans that it is the police who are expected to avoid offending cultural sensitivities: officers, for example, who frequently are targeted with rocks by Muslim youth, have been ordered not to drink coffee or eat in public during the Islamic month of Ramadan.

Your Ad Here

In Sweden, which an imam there has labeled “the best Islamic state,” whole patches of the city of Malmö – which is more than twenty-five percent Muslim – are no-go zones. There and in Gothenburg, Muslim teenagers have been burning cars, attacking emergency services, throwing.stones at patrolling officers and temporarily blinding them with green lasers.

And where such zones have not been officially established, the process is underway. In Italy, for example, Muslims have been commandeering Rome’s Piazza Venezia for public prayers. In Bologna, Muslims have repeatedly threatened to bomb the San Petronio cathedral because it contains a fresco which depicts the Islamic prophet Mohammed being tormented in hell.

These dangerous enclaves are, the Hudson Institute’s Kern writes, “the byproduct of decades of multicultural policies that have encouraged Muslim immigrants to create parallel societies and remain segregated rather than become integrated into their European host nations.” Indeed, as the scholar of Islam Robert Spencer has put it, what the Islamic supremacists want is not merely a place at the table – equal rights under the law, as previous minority groups have sought in civil rights movements – but their own separate table, utterly distinct from the manmade laws of infidels.

European 'No-Go' Zones for Non-Muslims Proliferating

Soeren Kern

Islamic extremists are stepping up the creation of "no-go" areas in European cities that are off-limits to non-Muslims.

Many of the "no-go" zones function as microstates governed by Islamic Sharia law. Host-country authorities effectively have lost control in these areas and in many instances are unable to provide even basic public aid such as police, fire fighting and ambulance services.

The "no-go" areas are the by-product of decades of multicultural policies that have encouraged Muslim immigrants to create parallel societies and remain segregated rather than become integrated into their European host nations.

In Britain, for example, a Muslim group called Muslims Against the Crusades has launched a campaign to turn twelve British cities – including what it calls "Londonistan" – into independent Islamic states. The so-called Islamic Emirates would function as autonomous enclaves ruled by Islamic Sharia law and operate entirely outside British jurisprudence.

The Islamic Emirates Project names the British cities of Birmingham, Bradford, Derby, Dewsbury, Leeds, Leicester, Liverpool, Luton, Manchester, Sheffield, as well as Waltham Forest in northeast London and Tower Hamlets in East London as territories to be targeted for blanket Sharia rule.In the Tower Hamlets area of East London (also known as the Islamic Republic of Tower Hamlets), for example, extremist Muslim preachers, called the Tower Hamlets Taliban, regularly issue death threats to women who refuse to wear Islamic veils. Neighborhood streets have been plastered with posters declaring "You are entering a Sharia controlled zone: Islamic rules enforced." And street advertising deemed offensive to Muslims is regularly vandalized or blacked out with spray paint.

In the Bury Park area of Luton, Muslims have been accused of "ethnic cleansing" by harassing non-Muslims to the point that many of them move out of Muslim neighborhoods. In the West Midlands, two Christian preachers have been accused of "hate crimes" for handing out gospel leaflets in a predominantly Muslim area of Birmingham. In Leytonstone in east London, the Muslim extremist Abu Izzadeen heckled the former Home Secretary John Reid by saying: "How dare you come to a Muslim area."

In France, large swaths of Muslim neighborhoods are now considered "no-go" zones by French police. At last count, there are 751 Sensitive Urban Zones (Zones Urbaines Sensibles, ZUS), as they are euphemistically called. A complete list of the ZUS can be found on a French government website, complete with satellite maps and precise street demarcations. An estimated 5 million Muslims live in the ZUS, parts of France over which the French state has lost control.

Muslim immigrants are taking control of other parts of France too. In Paris and other French cities with high Muslim populations, such as Lyons, Marseilles and Toulouse, thousands of Muslims are closing off streets and sidewalks (and by extension, are closing down local businesses and trapping non-Muslim residents in their homes and offices) to accommodate overflowing crowds for Friday prayers. Some mosques have also begun broadcasting sermons and chants of "Allahu Akbar" via loudspeakers into the streets.

The weekly spectacles, which have been documented by dozens of videos posted on Youtube.com (here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here), and which have been denounced as an "occupation without tanks or soldiers," have provoked anger and disbelief. But despite many public complaints, local authorities have declined to intervene because they are afraid of sparking riots.

In the Belgian capital of Brussels (which is 20% Muslim), several immigrant neighborhoods have become "no-go" zones for police officers, who frequently are pelted with rocks by Muslim youth. In the Kuregem district of Brussels, which often resembles an urban war zone, police are forced to patrol the area with two police cars: one car to carry out the patrols and another car to prevent the first car from being attacked. In the Molenbeek district of Brussels, police have been ordered not to drink coffee or eat a sandwich in public during the Islamic month of Ramadan.

In Germany, Chief Police Commissioner Bernhard Witthaut, in an August 1 interview with the newspaper Der Westen, revealed that Muslim immigrants are imposing "no-go" zones in cities across Germany at an alarming rate.

The interviewer asked Witthaut: "Are there urban areas – for example in the Ruhr – districts and housing blocks that are "no-go areas," meaning that they can no longer be secured by the police?" Witthaut replied: "Every police commissioner and interior minister will deny it. But of course we know where we can go with the police car and where, even initially, only with the personnel carrier. The reason is that our colleagues can no longer feel safe there in twos, and have to fear becoming the victim of a crime themselves. We know that these areas exist. Even worse: in these areas crimes no longer result in charges. They are left 'to themselves.' Only in the worst cases do we in the police learn anything about it. The power of the state is completely out of the picture."

In Italy, Muslims have been commandeering the Piazza Venezia in Rome for public prayers. In Bologna, Muslims repeatedly have threatened to bomb the San Petronio cathedral because it contains a 600-year-old fresco inspired by Dante's Inferno which depicts Mohammed being tormented in hell.

In the Netherlands, a Dutch court ordered the government to release to the public a politically incorrect list of 40 "no-go" zones in Holland. The top five Muslim problem neighborhoods are in Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Utrecht. The Kolenkit area in Amsterdam is the number one Muslim "problem district" in the country. The next three districts are in Rotterdam – Pendrecht, het Oude Noorden and Bloemhof. The Ondiep district in Utrecht is in the fifth position, followed by Rivierenwijk (Deventer), Spangen (Rotterdam), Oude Westen (Rotterdam), Heechterp/ Schieringen (Leeuwarden) and Noord-Oost (Maastricht).

In Sweden, which has some of the most liberal immigration laws in Europe, large swaths of the southern city of Malmö – which is more than 25% Muslim – are "no-go" zones for non-Muslims. Fire and emergency workers, for example, refuse to enter Malmö's mostly Muslim Rosengaard district without police escorts. The male unemployment rate in Rosengaard is estimated to be above 80%. When fire fighters attempted to put out a fire at Malmö's main mosque, they were attacked by stone throwers.

In the Swedish city of Gothenburg, Muslim youth have been hurling petrol bombs at police cars. In the city's Angered district, where more than 15 police cars have been destroyed, teenagers have also been pointing green lasers at the eyes of police officers, some of whom have been temporarily blinded.

In Gothenburg's Backa district, youth have been throwing stones at patrolling officers. Gothenburg police have also been struggling to deal with the problem of Muslim teenagers burning cars and attacking emergency services in several areas of the city.

According to the Malmö-based Imam Adly Abu Hajar: "Sweden is the best Islamic state."

The Truthophobes

Joseph Klein

The far Left George Soros-funded Center for American Progress (CAP) has been busy of late trying to “expose” those evil hatemongering “Islamophobes” and their enablers who have the audacity to tell the truth about Sharia law and Islamic ideology. CAP’s most recent publication in this regard is entitled “Fear, Inc.,” which claims that a “small, tightly networked group of misinformation experts” has been “spreading myths and lies about Islam.”The uncredentialed authors of “Fear, Inc.” – all part of the Center for American Progress rather than outside experts on Islam – are truthophobes. They seek, in their words, to “marginalize” such people as Nonie Darwish​, a woman raised as a Muslim who lived in Egypt under the yoke of Sharia law for thirty years and has provided first-hand accounts of its brutality.

Other articles on this site have already demonstrated the shoddiness, illogic and outright untruths permeating “Fear, Inc.” I am not going to repeat the obvious. Instead, I want to focus on what one of the world’s leading Islamic scholars says about Sharia law, which is far closer to how the so-called Islamophobes who are the targets of CAP’s invective describe Sharia than to the CAP authors’ idealized version.

In “Fear, Inc.,” the authors describe Sharia as nothing more than the “Muslim religious code,” focusing on “charitable giving, prayer, and honoring one’s parents—precepts virtually identical to those of Christianity and Judaism.”

In a previous CAP publication entitled “Understanding Sharia Law Conservatives’ Skewed Interpretation Needs Debunking,” written by two of the same Center for American Progress authors who participated in writing “Fear, Inc.,” Sharia is described as “personal religious law and moral guidance for the vast majority of Muslims.” The “core values” of Sharia, say the authors, are “theological and ethical and not political” and are “in harmony with the core values at the heart of America.”

To see if this benign characterization of Sharia can possibly be true, I consulted the writings of one of the most prominent Muslim scholars in the world today, Shaykh Yusuf al-Qaradawi. He is listed as fourteenth out of 500 of the world’s influential Muslim figures, according to the most recent study released by the Royal Islamic Strategic Studies Center and the Prince Al-Waleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University.

Your Ad Here

A Foreign Policy Magazine reader poll on the “the world’s top 100 public intellectuals,” posted on a blog edited by one of the “Fear, Inc.” authors, Wajahat Ali, confirmed Qaradawi’s high standing. Based on 500,000 votes cast, Qaradawi came in third.

Qaradawi, the spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood​, was one of the scholars who endorsed the 2004 “Amman Message,” a document the CAP authors rely on to show what they called “the dynamic, interpretive tradition of Islam in practice.”

Does Qaradawi agree with the CAP authors’ description of Sharia as “not political” and “in harmony with the core values at the heart of America”? Not a chance. As he explains in his book, “Al-Din wal-Siyasa” (Religion and Politics), all Islamic scholars agree that Sharia embraces the law, the state, religion and politics:

The Islamic shari’ah governs all of the actions of those who are obligated (to it). There is no act or occurrence which exists without a corresponding ruling from one of the five shari’ah rulings (obligatory, recommended, prohibited, reprehensible, or permitted). This has been confirmed by fundamentalists and scholars from every faction and school of thought associated with Islam… Whoever reads the books of the Islamic shari’ah, I mean the books of Islamic jurisprudence, in its different schools of thought, will find that they comprise all of the affairs of life, from the jurisprudence of purity, to that of the family, society, and the state. This is very clear for every elementary student, not to mention those in the world who are more capable.

Moreover, Qaradawi said that Sharia is not a pick-and-choose menu, as CAP’s authors would have us believe. Islam “rejects the partitioning of its rulings and teachings,” he declared. Nor is Sharia an ever evolving religious guidepost for human behavior, subject to change by human beings. “Shariah cannot be amended to conform to changing human values and standards,” said Qaradawi.

This prominent Islamic scholar also minced no words in discussing the Islamic obligation of charitable donations (zakat) and the Islamic prohibition of blasphemy, which are part of Sharia. He characterized charitable donations as “jihad with money, because God has ordered us to fight enemies with our lives and our money.” As for criticisms of Islam or its prophet, he called for “an international resolution criminalizing any insult to any religion.” (Sources: BBC Panorama, and IslamOnline.net, respectively.)

These ideas do not seem to match up with the CAP authors’ assertion that Sharia is consistent with “the core values at the heart of America” – at least not the American core values that most of us were brought up to believe.

In sum, Qaradawi’s description of Sharia sounds much closer to the way that Frank Gaffney​’s Center for Security Policy, one of CAP’s targets for condemnation, has described Sharia in its book “Sharia: The Threat To America”:

[A] “complete way of life” (social, cultural, military, religious, and political), governed from cradle to grave by Islamic law… Shariah is, moreover, a doctrine that mandates the rule of Allah over all aspects of society.

The Center for Security Policy book quoted Qaradawi as a source for its analysis of Sharia, in addition to quoting extensively from the Koran and other primary Islamic texts. The CAP authors avoided any mention of Qaradawi, and did not quote from the Koran or any other primary Islamic texts to support their thesis. Are they prepared to say that Qaradawi is not really a legitimate scholar of Islam venerated in the Muslim world after all? Even worse, do they think that Qaradawi’s views on Sharia are falsehoods, perhaps proving that he is somehow secretly part of the Islamophobic network whom they accuse of making things up about Sharia? Or are they simply hiding the truth, which is what truthophobes do?

The trouble with being a truthophobe is that you always have to worry about whether what you have said in the past will come back to haunt you. One of the authors of “Fear, Inc.” and the CAP Sharia report denying that Sharia had anything to do with political matters is Wajahat Ali. He must have forgotten what he wrote back in January 2009 concerning “political Islamists,” whom he said included the Muslim Brotherhood​. Ali cited approvingly Shadi Hamid, a senior fellow at Stanford University, who distinguished between “mainstream practicing Muslims” engaging in the political arena, voting like other Americans citizens based on their candidates respective platforms, and “political Islamists” who have “a passionate desire to implement sharia law.” Wajahat Ali went on to say that such political Islamists were not to be lumped together with violent groups such as al-Qaeda.

Your Ad Here

Whether he realized it or not, Ali was helping to make Frank Gaffney’s point that focusing too much attention on al-Qaeda distracts us from the broader efforts of political Islamists seeking to implement Sharia law through the existing system.

That’s not all. Back in March 2008, Ali interviewed Professor John L. Esposito regarding the results of a global Gallup poll of Muslims to determine their thoughts and attitudes on a wide range of subjects. While commenting on the relatively high education and income levels of “politically radicalized Muslims,” Ali remarked: “Islam must in some way inherently cause or inspire the violence, right?”

After Esposito rejected that theory, Ali nevertheless returned to this theme without ascribing it to any fringe group of so-called Islamophobes: “We see terrorists in Europe, in Latin America, in Asia, yet this overwhelming brand of suicide bombing and terror networking, if you will, runs rampant throughout Muslim regions. Isn’t this more proof of an inherently dangerous religion; that something exists within this religion that causes the violence?”

Perhaps the next report that the Center For American Progress puts out on their specter of a network of Islamophobes should include Ali himself as one of the so-called “validators” referred to in “Fear, Inc.”

Here is the Aga Khan/Rick Perry curriculum: Scrubbed from the web, cache scrubbed from Google Search

Jihad Watch

One of the oddest and most telling aspects of this Rick Perry/Aga Khan curriculum controversy is that when Pamela Geller and I started writing about the curriculum, it was scrubbed from the web. Now it has been scrubbed from the Google cache, as I noted here. This is highly suspicious, and gives the lie to those who claim that the curriculum material was actually innocuous, or that we weren't actually discussing the actual curriculum material, or that we were discussing curriculum material that was only used by a few Texas teachers at best. Clearly we had the right stuff, and clearly it was bad, and clearly Perry's people knew it was bad, and that is why it is gone now.

But Pamela Geller has screenshots of it all, as well as the full text, here.

When Geller and I first started criticizing the Rick Perry/Aga Khan curriculum on Islam for Texas schools, the reFirst, defenders of Perry such as David Stein and Ace of the Ace of Spades blog claimed that what we had wasn't the curriculum at all, and presented what they said was actually the curriculum. This turned out to be false, as I explained here: they were presenting one teacher's lesson plan as the official curriculum, while what we were presenting was actually the official material, developed by the Aga Khan Foundation (AKF) and UT-Austin in a partnership known as the Muslim Histories and Cultures Program (MHC) and proudly announcing that it was the fruit of "Governor Rick Perry's desire to better educate Texas teachers on Muslim topics." It also says that "Governor Perry was instrumental in getting this program off the ground."

Neither Stein nor Ace nor any of those who have echoed their false claims have ever admitted that they were not working from the actual curriculum, and passing off as the official curriculum something that was not remotely that.

Second, as my old friend Bryan Preston claims here, many asserted that the curriculum -- the real one, that we presented -- wasn't so bad anyway, or as Bryan says, "I don’t think it’s a dawah." Preston also downplays the connection of Rick Perry to the curriculum, which I have shown in the quotes above. Dawah is Islamic proselytizing, and it takes many forms. In Methodology of Dawah by Shamim A. Siddiqi, a book that is designed to teach Muslims how to convert people to Islam, Siddiqi tells Muslims to present Islam in a "concocted or abbreviated form" and only introduce them to "the revolutionary aspect of Islam" after they convert.

Concocted = made up. Abbreviated = things are cut out. And that is just what the Perry/Aga Khan curriculum does: it presents a fantasy benign Islam, with all the violent and oppressive bits cut out. Here are some of the elements of the program that show it to be a whitewash of Islam:

Session One

* The main reading is from Carl Ernst’s Following Muhammad, the first three chapters. This book whitewashes Muhammad, saying that he “was, by all accounts, a charismatic person known for his integrity” (p. 85). Muhammad’s exhortations to make war against unbelievers, his multiple marriages and child marriage, and other negative aspects of his biography are explained away or ignored entirely.
* The curriculum directs participants to “consider Carl Ernst’s statement, ‘It is safe to say that no religion has such a negative image in Western eyes as Islam.’” Then it asks them: “Why is this so? How have political and economic relationships between the Middle East and Western Europe and the United States impacted perceptions of Islam, in the past and the present? How have they impacted perceptions of the ‘West’ among Muslims?” Note that participants are guided to see the “negative image” of Islam as the result of “political and economic relationships between the Middle East and Western Europe and the United States.” No hint is given of the possibility that Islam might have a “negative image” in the West because of jihad conquests, institutionalized oppression of women and non-Muslims, and the like.
* The curriculum quotes Edward Said, who ascribed all critical discussion of Islamic jihad and Islamic supremacism to racism and neo-colonialism, as warning that one should speak of “Islams rather than Islam,” and warns that in dealing with Islam “one has entered an astoundingly complicated world.” This invocation of Islam’s complexity is frequently used to discourage those who point to the Qur’an’s violent passages and Muhammad’s exhortations to warfare as evidence of Islam’s bellicose intentions. Yet Islamic jihadists routinely refer to this material with no hesitation based on Islam’s “complexity.”

Session Two

* Readings for the session entitled “Muhammad through History” include Celebrating Muhammad: Images of the Prophet in Popular Muslim Poetry and The Miraculous Journey of Mahomet. It notes, correctly, that “for millions of Muslims around the world, the Prophet Muhammad has become the paradigm, or role model, who is worthy of being emulated.” However, there is no hint whatsoever of how Muhammad, as a model to be emulated, has inspired jihad warriors and terrorists.
* The common Islamic apologetic claim that Islam inspired all the greatest achievements of Western Judeo-Christian civilization appears in the assertion that “there is strong evidence to suggest that Muslim poetic accounts of the mi’raj, reaching Europe through the Arab courts in medieval Spain, inspired the Italian writer Dante to compose his famous work, The Divine Comedy.” No mention is made of how Dante placed Muhammad in hell as a false prophet.

Session Three

* This session on the Qur’an makes no mention whatsoever of the elements of the Qur’an that exhort Muslims to hate unbelievers and make war against them (98:6; 48:29; 47:4; 2:191; 4:89; 9:5; 9:29: 9:123; etc.) The text used is Michael Sells’s Approaching the Qur’an: The Early Revelations, which doesn’t even include the sections of the Qur’an that most directly and emphatically call for violence against non-Muslims.
* The curriculum makes sure to point out that “believers point to this very perfection of the text as the proof of the prophethood of Muhammad,” and that “for many, the notion that the Qur’an is inimitable, that is, no human could possibly have produced anything so perfect, proves that it had to be God who revealed this message to Muhammad.” But it makes no mention of the text’s designation of non-believers as “the most vile of created beings” (98:6), the warlike passages noted above; its call to beat disobedient women (4:34) and the like.

Session Four

* This second session on the Qur’an tells participants to “discuss the role of the Qur’an in providing direction for an ethical life.” Here again, no mention is made of the ways in which Islamic jihadists use the Qur’an’s teachings to justify violence against and the subjugation of unbelievers.
* The curriculum lists eight central themes of the Qur’an. Although there are well over 100 Qur’an verses exhorting believers to jihad warfare, jihad does not make the list.

Session Five

* This session on the Sunni/Shi’ite split and other sects in Islam fails to mention one salient point: Islamic law calls for the execution of heretics and apostates; this law has been the foundation for an extraordinary amount of bloodshed between adherents of various Muslim sects throughout history and today.

Session Six

* This session dismisses as a “misconception” the idea that “Islam forbids music and representational art.” It does not explain why so many Muslims, including the Taliban who destroyed the Bamiyan Buddhas, came to hold this “misconception.”

Session Seven

* Participants are asked, “What conditions in Baghdad encouraged such a vast array of discoveries and inventions?” But the readings give no hint of the fact that Jews and Christians in Baghdad actually accounted for the great majority of these inventions. See here for a full explanation.
* Participants are also asked: “Why was there such an abundance of inventions and discoveries attributed to Muslims in Medieval times but not today?” This question guides students toward a discussion of the trumped-up and manipulative modern concept of “Islamophobia.”
* The curriculum states: “The religion that the Prophet Muhammad preached provided his followers an ethical and moral vision for leading a life of righteousness.” Again, no mention is made of Muhammad’s exhortations to hate and violence, his child marriage (which many Muslims consider exemplary behavior and imitate it), and the like.
* The curriculum states: “Jews, Christians and Zoroastrians, who were subjects of new Arab rulers, could maintain their religious practices provided they paid jizya, a tax in tribute in lieu of military service.” It gives no hint of the institutionalized discrimination and humiliation that this dhimmi status involved.
* The curriculum quotes Maria Rosa Menocal, the modern scholar most responsible for the myth of a tolerant, pluralistic Muslim Spain. It also discusses this tolerant Muslim Spain as a fact. In reality, however, Jews and Christians had a humiliating second-class status in Muslim Spain. When one Muslim ruler appointed a Jew as a local governor in Granada in 1066, the Muslims rioted and murdered four thousand Jews. The curriculum doesn’t mention any of that.

Session Eight

* The readings for this session again include Carl Ernst’s Following Muhammad, as well as John Esposito’s The Straight Path. Both are highly apologetic, one-sided works that give the reader little idea why Muslims would wage jihad or commit violence in the name of Islam. No works of other perspectives are included.
* The curriculum blames the restriction of rights of Muslim women on European colonialism, ignoring the many Islamic texts and teachings that restrict women’s rights.

Session Nine

* The participants are again directed to read Carl Ernst and John Esposito, as well as another modern-day non-Muslim Islamic apologist, Charles Kurzman. No works of differing perspectives are presented.

Don't believe me? Fine. Examine the material for yourself here.
Posted by Robert on August 30, 2011 6:07 AM | 67 Comments
del.icio.us | Digg this | Email | FaceBook | Print | Tweet
Categories:

* Useful idiots,
* academia

Comments to article:67 Comments
Author Profile Page Buraq | August 30, 2011 6:13 AM | Reply

There are several posters on JW who will have to eat their words! Perry has been extremely naive, at best!
Author Profile Page Poosh | August 30, 2011 6:18 AM | Reply

This is straight forward leftist/liberal propaganda as well (note the attacks on European imperialism), which figures as it's being taught in a university I assume. What on earth is Perry doing advocating such blatant pro-Islamic rubbish AND leftist accounts of history? This isn't just a whitewash of Islamic history and a program of creating myths - it's also a leftist piece of work as well. Note carefully some of the themes.

Perry seems to be both naive and ignorant - and a pawn in this case.
Author Profile Page jewdog | August 30, 2011 6:25 AM | Reply

It's not Rick Perry that people need for the nomination, it's Katy - an understandable mixup - I do it all the time.
Author Profile Page Active Listener | August 30, 2011 6:41 AM | Reply

Thanks Robert for identifying this situation and making us all aware that this material has been compiled and used in a public education setting. I live in a jurisdiction with a large number of the Aga Khan's followers, and wouldn't be surprised if this same set of materials (or a localized variant of it) isn't being referenced for what is being presented to my own children in the public school system. However, now being forewarned, I will be able to provide my children with some key questions to ask, should they find themselves presented with these lessons, so their teachers and their fellow students will become aware of some of the more "sensitive" aspects of these topics.
Author Profile Page duh_swami | August 30, 2011 6:44 AM | Reply

I notice the student is not encouraged to read Quran and come to their own conclusion...This is brain washing, pure and simple...If Perry goes for that, what else would he go for as POTUS?
Author Profile Page wildjew replied to comment from duh_swami | August 30, 2011 7:11 AM | Reply

Unfortunately it does not seem likely Perry will be asked any tough questions in relation Islam and the jihad, so long as we have this growing cadre of conservative Perry-defenders coming to the fore including, David Stein, Bryan Preston, Erick Erickson and sadly Daniel Pipes, Frank Gaffney, etc. I understand the passion inherent in Obama's defeat November 2012 - I share that passion - but at what cost?
Author Profile Page KrazyKafir | August 30, 2011 7:11 AM | Reply

Anyone who aligns him/herself with Islamists in order to advance their political career does not have America's best interest in their heart. They're cheap dhimmis. There are plenty of Conservative candidates to choose from who would never, ever, do that. It is a fatal flaw and freedom fighters that ignore that flaw betray themselves, and the cause of freedom.
Author Profile Page Kinana of Khaybar | August 30, 2011 7:11 AM | Reply

A history of the U.S.A. that did not include a discussion of slavery would rightly be regarded as a whitewash, to say the least. The Perry/Aga Khan curriculum has a supposed history of Islam that does not include discussion of slavery. It's a whitewash. And what is does include is standard apologetic pro-Islamic fare. It is indistinguishable from da'wa. It also conforms to Islamic law, in that Islam, Muhammad, and "Allah" are never subject to critical scrutiny.
Author Profile Page Poosh | August 30, 2011 7:15 AM | Reply

I see no evidence that Perry is anything other than naive and stupid. Again, notice the clear leftist agenda there, i.e "the white man" is to blame for every ill in the world. That's text book teaching at many unis. Why would Perry personally oversee something that advocated leftist propaganda? Stupidity and ignorance (in both senses) can be the only answer - not complicity.
Author Profile Page exsgtbrown | August 30, 2011 7:22 AM | Reply

Mr Perry could have a problem if his opponents pursue his questionable support for this material...but they won't...probably because they don't know squat about Islam either...
Author Profile Page jewdog | August 30, 2011 7:23 AM | Reply

Just what we need: Another Islam-is-the-religion-of-peace nudnik from Texas. Yahooooooooo!
Author Profile Page wildjew replied to comment from Poosh | August 30, 2011 7:26 AM | Reply

At what point does stupidity and ignorance become complicity? Can the leader of the free world afford to be stupid and ignorant. My first reaction to Politico's (Jonathan Martin's) lead story yesterday, "Is Rick Perry Dumb?" was, this is a pretty dumb question.

You are saying Martin is right. Perry is indeed dumb.
Author Profile Page wildjew | August 30, 2011 7:32 AM | Reply

This was written to ancient Israel by the prophet Isaiah. Maybe it applies to the U.S. today.

Isa 56:9 All you beasts of the field, come to devour, All you beasts in the forest.

His watchmen [are] blind, They are all ignorant; They [are] all dumb dogs, They cannot bark; Sleeping, lying down, loving to slumber.

Isa 56:11 Yes, [they are] greedy dogs [Which] never have enough. And they [are] shepherds Who cannot understand; They all look to their own way, Every one for his own gain, From his [own] territory.
Author Profile Page yeaborg | August 30, 2011 7:54 AM | Reply

Politicians are motivated by votes. Media executives are motivated by ratings. And the average voting citizen of the good 'ol existential materialist USA is motivated by trying to keep his/her mortgage paid and getting the kids through school in a stagnant economy. Until it decides to get a Koran and study it, the American electorate will to listen to whichever "expert" they are the most "comfortable" with. 9/11 was not sufficient to move us from Chamberlain to Churchill, and I'm afraid this religious duplicity isn't gonna register with Joe Sixpack either. Hope I'm wrong.
Author Profile Page Courreges W | August 30, 2011 7:56 AM | Reply

I was shocked to see Daniel Pipes diss Geller and defend Perry.

Oh, I get it now, Textbooks - any of the problems with Islam? IT'S ALL EUROPE'S FAULT! Oh, I bet I get an A on my test now, right?
Author Profile Page tanstaafl | August 30, 2011 8:17 AM | Reply

And that's taquiyya, taquiyya and taquiyya. If it advances the cause of Islam, it is halal. If governor Perry is a willing accomplice to this, he would pursue a foreign policy not that different than from our last two dhimmi presidents.

The next president has to be a candidate that is truly aware of the threat of Islam.
Author Profile Page Jaladhi | August 30, 2011 8:22 AM | Reply

If Americans go for Perry in 2012 like they did for Obama in 2008, they will simply prove once again - "fool me once shame on you , fool me twice shame on me!"
Author Profile Page Citizen K | August 30, 2011 8:57 AM | Reply

Robert,

You have failed to address the following:

SAISD is one of over 1000 Independent School Districts in Texas. What about the other 1000 or so?

The State Board of Education is run by 1 appointed official (chair) and 15 elected officials who vote on CORE curriculum.

In Sept. of 2010 the State Board did rule out utilizing some of the muzzie stuff. There also was an election in 2010 which purged the State Legislature of MANY liberals and is now 2/3 GOP. The State Legislature set new curriculum for the upcoming year.

The "cached" info FOR ONE QUITE LIBERAL INNER CITY SCHOOL DISTRICT out of over 1000 had to change the curriculum, due state law between end of the 2010/2011 school year and for the 2011/2012 school year and would have been deleted old info.

How much is Ed Rollins paying you people? Without addressing questions posted of you over and over. IT BEGS THE QUESTION.

You may well be on some sort of scent, but obviously barking up the wrong tree and completely unwilling to admit it.

I'm done with Jihad Watch as you have totally discredited your previous excellent work.

I may be back to lurk from time to time, but until you address the questions posed of you and your partner Geller sufficiently. You are not credible.

Until that time http://thearmyyouhave.com/The_Army_You_Have/Retracto_files/Retracto%20the%20Correction%20Alpaca.mp3
Author Profile Page wildjew replied to comment from Jaladhi | August 30, 2011 9:00 AM | Reply

Millions of Americans will vote for Perry if he is the nominee -- irrespective of his Muslim-outreach -- even those who swore they would never vote for the lesser of the evils. Americans will vote for the Republican nominee because of the economy among other reasons.
Author Profile Page Eastview replied to comment from Kinana of Khaybar | August 30, 2011 9:00 AM | Reply

I noticed the absence of any mention of slavery, too, Kinana of Khaybar. Very damning.

One would think that by now it should have occurred to Rick Perry (and Michele Bachmann, and Mitt Romney, and Sarah Palin, and hopeless Ron Paul) that they need to spend some quality time investigating the history of Islam, with particular attention paid to its supremacist claims.

Although knowing something about Islam's theological stance is necessary, especially its claims relative to other religions, more urgently needed in order to assess this curriculum is a clear understanding of the distortions of history advanced as truth by its apologists. As with all Muslim's (I have yet to see a counterexample), the Aga Khan exaggerates Islam's positive contributions to the affairs of the world and whitewashes its destructiveness.

Robert, thank you for keeping this story alive. It's one that needs a thorough airing. Care to share with us exactly how you managed to retrieve the curriculum from the online black hole into which it had been thrown?
Author Profile Page undaunted | August 30, 2011 9:04 AM | Reply

Well researched and well said, Robert.

My original thought when this came out was that it was ill-advised for Pamela to make an issue of it. I was wrong.

Thanks for your leadership.
Author Profile Page sean | August 30, 2011 9:04 AM | Reply

And similar taqiyya is being taught to kuffar kids EVERYWHERE that these creeps are allowed to infiltrate the educational system: http://crombouke.blogspot.com/2010/01/islamic-infiltration-and-subversion-of.html