Apes, Pigs, and F-16s

Via-NRO

When you arm Islamists, you become a willing participant in your own undoing.

By Andrew C. McCarthy

When Mohamed Morsi dehumanizes Jews as “the descendants of apes and pigs,” there’s an elephant in the room. We find it here:

Those who incurred the curse of Allah and His wrath, those of whom some He transformed into apes and swine, those who worshipped evil — these are many times worse in rank, and far more astray from the even Path!

You see, Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood mahoff–turned–president did not conjure up the apes-and-pigs riff on his own. When Morsi fulminates that Muslims “must not forget to nurse our children and grandchildren on hatred towards those Zionists and Jews, and all those who support them,” he is taking his cues straight from the Koran. Or rather, from the Holy Koran, as “progressive” American politicians take pains to call it in the off hours from their campaign to drive every last vestige of Judeo-Christian culture from the public square.

The excerpt above is not from the Life and Times of Mohamed Morsi. It originates with that other Mohammed. Specifically, it is Sura 5:60 of the Koran, the tome Muslims take to be the immutable, verbatim commands of Allah, as revealed to the prophet. And as Andrew Bostom illustrates (with a disquieting amplitude of examples), the verse is not an outlier. It states an Islamic leitmotif.

Contrary to the fairy tale weaved by apologists for Islamists on both sides of America’s political aisle, Jew hatred is not a pathogen insidiously injected into Islam by the Nazis (with whom Middle Eastern Muslims enthusiastically aligned). Nor did the ummah come by it through exposure to other strains of anti-Semitism that blight the history of Christendom. Jew hatred is ingrained in Islamic doctrine. Consequently, despite the efforts of enlightened Muslim reformers, Jew hatred is — and will remain — a pillar of Islamist ideology.

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In His Own Words

"I have known Islam on three continents before coming to the region where it was first revealed. That experience guides my conviction that partnership between America and Islam must be based on what Islam is, not what it isn't. And I consider it part of my responsibility as president of the United States to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear."

President Barack Obama
Cairo Egypt
June 4, 2009

Toon

Via-IBD

Obama on Recent Middle East Violence: 'Bumps in the Road'

Via-The Weekly Standard

Please, No More Apologies For Free Speech

Via-The Corner<

By Victor Davis Hanson

This week amid the theatrics at the United Nations, let us hope that President Obama and his lieutenants do not persist with the ongoing administration de facto apologies for the views of a crude American filmmaker, and instead try to explain to the world the singular American commitment to free expression, which always eventually proves to be a commitment to unpopular and often repelling expression.

What has been especially galling about Secretary of Clinton’s chronic hedging, and the apologies aired on Pakistani television, are—other than the abject fear of Islamists— two salient facts. One, the Middle East — not its individuals, but its official government-sponsored and subsidized television, radio, press, and film — routinely demonizes and defames Christians, Jews, and Americans in the worst sort of way. Let us be spared from the sanctimonious boilerplate, for example, from a Prime Minister Erdogan, who has presided over a surge of Turkish anti-Semitic, anti-Christian, and anti-American television shows and popular films, many of them with the de facto aid of the Turkish government.

Rejecting the Spark-and-Fire Metaphor

Via-CITY

JENS-MARTIN ERIKSEN AND FREDERIK STJERNFELT

The West must learn to see Islamist violence as intentional, not spontaneous.


In the current Mohammed film crisis, certain patterns repeat themselves from the crisis over the Danish cartoons six years ago. In both cases, Middle East Islamists seized on a marginal piece of anti-Islam criticism to put pressure on the West—and on more moderate forces in their own countries.

The Western reaction is also familiar, particularly in its understanding of the Middle East as a bonfire waiting to happen and criticism of Islam as the spark that ignites it. Descriptions of the YouTube film (a trailer, actually) that “sparked protests in many Muslim countries”—as the New Yorker put it in a typical formulation—rely on this false metaphor. It suggests that the protests are spontaneous occurrences that would not have come about without such a spark, and that the demonstrating Muslims are primitive savages governed by passion, not responsible for their own actions. The only parties with control over their actions are the filmmakers.

We should have learned a few things from the Danish cartoon episode. No less than four months elapsed between the cartoons’ publication in September 2005 and the unrest that began in January 2006. The laborious task of machinating such a crisis required journeys by Danish imams in the Middle East, meticulous planning by the Organization of the Islamic Conference, strenuous political pressure from Egyptian foreign secretary Abdul Gheit and Danish ambassador Mona Omar Attia, numerous incendiary speeches from leading Islamists, and much more. In 2006, the spark-and-fire metaphor obscured such planning, just as it does today.

Islamic Exceptionalism

Via-Townhall

Brent Bozell

The "enlightened" who claim a firm grip on the steering wheel of Western civilization see the future through a lens in which man becomes ever more perfectible as outdated religious creeds fade away. And thus the irony. For all the contempt these cosmopolitans show for religion, there is one faith beyond public rebuke. Call it Islamic exceptionalism.
Public Enemy No. 1 right now is the man who made a ridiculously shoddy YouTube video titled "The Innocence of Muslims." This man and his so-called "film" have been blamed with a very broad brush for every riot and protest across the Mideast.

It is all so ... impossible. This video sat unwatched for months until an Egyptian television station decided to promote it as some kind of global insult. Not you, not anyone you know and not anyone they know ever heard of this. But when the "Arab street" decided to stage riots outside American embassies, our government derided "continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims -- as we condemn efforts to offend believers of all religions."

Susan Rice, our ambassador to the United Nations, even wrongly blamed the terrorist attack that killed our ambassador and three others in Libya on the video. She told ABC News it was "a direct result of a heinous and offensive video that was widely disseminated, that the U.S. government had nothing to do with, which we have made clear is reprehensible and disgusting."

The Obama administration asked YouTube to review whether it should be censored, since it may have violated the website's terms of service. Its maker was publicly outed and dragged by a posse of armed cops into a "voluntary" session with his federal probation officers in Los Angeles.

This is the exact opposite of the way the so-called "progressive" elites usually toast the eviscerators of religion in Hollywood and Manhattan.

Rather than condemn attacks on all religions as "reprehensible and disgusting," they usually honor the courage of the artist who put ants on Christ's crucifix, or sinks it in a vial of urine, or smears dung on an image of the Virgin Mary. As part of their arrogant dance on behalf of "artistic freedom," the cosmopolitans not only insist these artists are to be honored, but they demand and expect Christian taxpayers to subsidize them.

As a carpet-bagging candidate for a U.S. Senate seat in New York in 1999, Hillary Clinton was no Profile in Outrage. After several days of silence after Chris Ofili's dung-smeared Virgin Mary hit the fan when it was displayed at the taxpayer-funded Brooklyn Museum, Mrs. Clinton announced, "Our feelings of being offended should not lead to the penalizing and shutting down of an entire museum."

Last year, the AP reported Mrs. Clinton attended a showing of "The Book of Mormon" on Broadway from the strenuously religion-bashing "South Park" creators, apparently without holding a press conference before or after the musical to declare "We condemn efforts to offend believers of all religions."

Islamic exceptionalism really showed its ugly head when the elites started arguing in national newspapers that the video creator should be jailed. On September 13, USA Today put forward religion professor Anthea Butler to declare she wouldn't have jailed the makers of "The Last Temptation of Christ," but she would jail the anti-Muslim director because he "indirectly and inadvertently inflamed people half a world away, resulting in the deaths of U.S. Embassy personnel."

That's not only factually untrue, since we've learned the Libya attack had nothing to do with YouTube. It grants Muslim radicals a permit to jail any artist they feel has insulted Islam. And what of the millions of Christians insulted by that hideous Jesus movie?

Even so-called journalists have supported censorship. Sarah Chayes, NPR's past Paris Bureau Chief for six years, wrote in the Los Angeles Times on September 18 that his video was "not, arguably, free speech protected under the U.S. Constitution" because it inflames radicals half a world away. In her long experience in Afghanistan, she has seen Pakistani radicals use any "pretext" for riots -- and she wants those "pretexts" removed from the Internet.

She calls the video "speech that is deliberately tailored to put lives and property at immediate risk." Like many Islamic exceptionalists, she claimed "heightened volatility" in the Mideast demands a crackdown: "such provocation is certainly irresponsible -- and reveals an ironic alliance of convenience between Christian extremists and the Islamist extremists they claim to hate."

One satirist put this hyperbole in perspective. Fouad Ajami recounted a mock Twitter statement by Syrian dictator Bashar Assad, presently butchering his Muslim subjects. "Wow, it's good that I've been killing women and children. It's good I've been shelling mosques," said the fake tweet. "Imagine what would have happened had I made an anti-Muslim video. They would have really come after me."

Shame

Via-PJ Media



The people who booed the God of love, now rush to the defense of a hateful Allah. The people who pissed on the Christ of redemption, now bewail the hurt feelings of a damnable Islam. The people who denounced the death of civil liberties under the Patriot Act, now make rationalizations as brown-shirted cops drag a man from his home at midnight for the crime of posting a video on YouTube.

I’m sorrowful, but I confess I’m not surprised.

read here

The Unreported Merkel

Via-The American Spectator

By Samuel Gregg

It's not often senior European political leaders make politically-incorrect statements, but Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel has recently made a habit of it. The subject has been the touchy question of Muslim immigration and the challenges it poses for European identity. Not only has Merkel upset the European political class (especially the Left and the Greens) by saying what everyone knows -- that multiculturalism has "utterly failed" -- but she also argued that the issue was not "too much Islam" but "too little Christianity."

"We have too few discussions about the Christian view of mankind," Merkel claimed in a recent speech. She then stressed that Germany needs to reflect more upon "the values that guide us, about our Judeo-Christian tradition." It was one way, Merkel maintained, of bringing "about cohesion in our society."

On one level, Merkel is surely stating the blindingly obvious. How can Europeans ask Muslim immigrants to integrate into European society and respect European values without Europeans themselves being clear in their own minds about what values are at the core of European identity and where these values come from?

And as much as significant portions of European society would like to deny it, it's simply a historical fact that the idea of Europe and European values such as liberty, equality before the law, and solidarity did not suddenly appear ex nihilo in the late 17th century with the various Enlightenments. Central to the formation of European identity and such values was the synthesis of Athens, Rome, and Jerusalem achieved by Christianity following the Roman Empire's collapse in the West in 476 A.D.

Indeed there's plenty of evidence that the antecedents of most of the various freedoms and genuine achievements of the various Enlightenments are to be found in Christianity. There is increasing recognition, for example, that the idea of human rights was first given concrete expression by medieval canon lawyers.

Yet it is hardly a secret that the Judeo-Christian heritage sits very loosely on many European societies. We find this in a type of secular-fundamentalism -- exemplified by Spain's current Socialist government -- that has become fashionable among sections of the European Left. But the ambiguity also manifests itself in the persistence of historical legends that diminish, distort, and denigrate Christianity's contributions to European civilization.

A good example is the mythology of the so-called "Dark Ages" that permeates popular and elite discussion of European history. Most of the moral, political, and legal foundations of modern market economies, for instance, were established in Europe well before the 16th century. Likewise the scientific method was born in the Middle Ages. Medieval thinkers such as Albertus Magnus made crucial contributions to the development of the natural sciences. Yet despite these facts, many persist in claiming that market economies are essentially a post-Enlightenment phenomenon, or that Christianity is essentially "anti-science."

But the problem is not only with secular opinion. Since the 1950s, many European Christians have gradually reduced their Christian faith to a vacuous humanitarianism worthy of the best EU-funded NGO. One difficulty with "liberal Christianity" (or whatever's left of it) is that it isn't especially interested in affirming any Christian values that go beyond sentimental platitudes about tolerance and equality which are routinely emptied of any specific Christian content. It's goodbye Thomas Aquinas, hello John Rawls.

This makes it even more ironic that increasing numbers of secular European thinkers believe Europe can only reinvigorate its distinct identity and values through reengaging its Judeo-Christian heritage. This is certainly the conclusion of one of Germany's most prominent intellectuals, Jürgen Habermas.

A self-described "methodological atheist," Habermas has been insisting for some time that Europe no longer has the luxury of wallowing in historical denial. As Habermas wrote in his 2006 book, A Time of Transitions: "Christianity, and nothing else [is] the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy, the benchmarks of western civilization. To this day we have no other options. We continue to nourish ourselves from this source. Everything else is postmodern chatter."

It follows that any serious discussion of Europe's Christian values in the context of contemporary immigration and identity debates will require many Europeans to go beyond their often-truncated understandings of European history and Christianity. There's something paradoxical about this being facilitated by the increasing numbers of Muslims living in Europe. But such an engagement is arguably being made even more urgent by the economic reality that Europe will need even more immigrants if its present demographic winter persists for any significant period of time.

What Chancellor Merkel herself understands by "the Christian view of mankind" was not clear from her remarks. Nor is it evident that particular Christian ideas are always compatible with some Muslim positions. Despite all the interfaith chatter to the contrary, there are some fundamental theological differences between Christianity and Islam, many of which have implications for subjects ranging from religious liberty to the nature of the state. Merkel, however, is undoubtedly correct to insist that any discussion of immigration in Europe should involve Europeans worrying a little less about Islam and paying far more attention to knowing the truth about their own heritage and Christianity's place in it.

The truth doesn't just set us free. There's no future without it.

Holder Strikes Out in First Gitmo Civilian Trial

Via-Pajamas Media

Ahmed Ghailani, a key figure in the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Africa, was cleared by a jury of 276 murder and attempted murder counts.

by Clarice Feldman

The position of attorney general is one of the most important slots in the executive branch of the government. One of the key responsibilities of the attorney general is to prevent the president from violating the law. Another of his responsibilities is to act as a check on the president’s more fanciful notions about the law and what it can and should accomplish.

Because Attorney General Eric Holder shares with President Obama the notion that there is something wrong about military tribunals and something far better about trying captured suspected terrorists in civilian criminal courts which operate under far more rigid rules of evidence, he has flopped in suggesting Khalid Sheikh Mohammed should be tried in Manhattan criminal court, something no sane New York politician will agree to.

Just days ago, the administration seemed to indicate that it recognized that the trial in New York wasn’t feasible. It still looked down on the notion of a military tribunal. The suggestion was that the administration wouldn’t try Mohammed at all — but simply hold him in indefinite detention:

Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, will probably remain in military detention without trial for the foreseeable future, according to Obama administration officials.

The administration has concluded that it cannot put Mohammed on trial in federal court because of the opposition of lawmakers in Congress and in New York. There is also little internal support for resurrecting a military prosecution at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The latter option would alienate liberal supporters.

The administration asserts that it can hold Mohammed and other al-Qaeda operatives under the laws of war, a principle that has been upheld by the courts when Guantanamo Bay detainees have challenged their detention.

How holding people for years without any trial (or even after they’ve been acquitted by a civilian jury) is fairer than a military tribunal, I cannot say. The article also says that Obama will make the final decision, so he may simply be hoping to run out the clock , thinking that when he’s re-elected he’ll be in a better position to force an unpopular civilian trial over the objection of local politicians. Or he may just be paralyzed with indecision, as he so often dithers on matters of great importance.

NAPOLITANO: THE BALL’S IN MY COURT NOW

Via-Ann Coulter.com

Ann Coulter

After the 9/11 attacks, when 19 Muslim terrorists -- 15 from Saudi Arabia, two from the United Arab Emirates and one each from Egypt and Lebanon, 14 with "al" in their names -- took over commercial aircraft with box-cutters, the government banned sharp objects from planes.

Airport security began confiscating little old ladies' knitting needles and breaking the mouse-sized nail files off of passengers' nail clippers. Surprisingly, no decrease in the number of hijacking attempts by little old ladies and manicurists was noted.

After another Muslim terrorist, Richard Reid, AKA Tariq Raja, AKA Abdel Rahim, AKA Abdul Raheem, AKA Abu Ibrahim, AKA Sammy Cohen (which was only his eHarmony alias), tried to blow up a commercial aircraft with explosive-laden sneakers, the government prohibited more than 3 ounces of liquid from being carried on airplanes.

All passengers were required to take off their shoes for special security screening, which did not thwart a single terrorist attack, but made airport security checkpoints a lot smellier.

After Muslim terrorist Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab of Nigeria tried to detonate explosive material in his underwear over Detroit last Christmas, the government began requiring nude body scans at airports.

The machines, which cannot detect chemicals or plastic, would not have caught the diaper bomber. So, again, no hijackers were stopped, but being able to see passengers in the nude boosted the morale of airport security personnel by 22 percent.

After explosives were inserted in two ink cartridges and placed on a plane headed to the United States from the Muslim nation of Yemen, the government banned printer cartridges from all domestic flights, resulting in no improvement in airport security, while requiring ink cartridges who traveled to take Amtrak.

So when the next Muslim terrorist, probably named Abdul Ahmed al Shehri, places explosives in his anal cavity, what is the government going to require then? (If you're looking for a good investment opportunity, might I suggest rubber gloves?)

Last year, a Muslim attempting to murder Prince Mohammed bin Nayef of Saudi Arabia blew himself up with a bomb stuck up his anus. Fortunately, this didn't happen near an airport, or Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano would now be requiring full body cavity searches to fly.

You can't stop a terrorist attack by searching for the explosives any more than you can stop crime by taking away everyone's guns.

In the 1970s, liberal ideas on crime swept the country. Gun owners were treated like criminals while actual criminals were coddled and released. If only we treated criminals with dignity and respect and showed them the system was fair, liberals told us, criminals would reward us with good behavior.

As is now well known, crime exploded in the '70s. It took decades of conservative law-and-order policies to get crime back to near-1950s levels.

It's similarly pointless to treat all Americans as if they're potential terrorists while trying to find and confiscate anything that could be used as a weapon. We can't search all passengers for explosives because Muslims stick explosives up their anuses. (Talk about jobs Americans just won't do.)

You have to search for the terrorists.

Fortunately, that's the one advantage we have in this war. In a lucky stroke, all the terrorists are swarthy, foreign-born, Muslim males. (Think: "Guys Madonna would date.")

This would give us a major leg up -- if only the country weren't insane.

Is there any question that we'd be looking for Swedes if the 9/11 terrorists, the shoe bomber, the diaper bomber and the printer cartridge bomber had all been Swedish? If the Irish Republican Army were bombing our planes, wouldn't we be looking for people with Irish surnames and an Irish appearance?

Only because the terrorists are Muslims do we pretend not to notice who keeps trying to blow up our planes.

It would be harder to find Swedes or Irish boarding commercial airliners in the U.S. than Muslims. Swarthy foreigners stand out like a sore thumb in an airport. The American domestic flying population is remarkably homogenous. An airport is not a Sears department store.

Only about a third of all Americans flew even once in the last year, and only 7 percent took more than four round trips. The majority of airline passengers are middle-aged, middle-class, white businessmen with about a million frequent flier miles. I'd wager that more than 90 percent of domestic air travelers were born in the U.S.

If the government did nothing more than have a five-minute conversation with the one passenger per flight born outside the U.S., you'd need 90 percent fewer Transportation Security Administration agents and airlines would be far safer than they are now.

Instead, Napolitano just keeps ordering more invasive searches of all passengers, without exception -- except members of Congress and government officials, who get VIP treatment, so they never know what she's doing to the rest of us.

Two weeks ago, Napolitano ordered TSA agents to start groping women's breasts and all passengers' genitalia -- children, nuns and rape victims, everyone except government officials and members of Congress. (Which is weird because Dennis Kucinich would like it.)

"Please have your genitalia out and ready to be fondled when you approach the security checkpoint."

This is the punishment for refusing the nude body scan for passengers who don't want to appear nude on live video or are worried about the skin cancer risk of the machines -- risks acknowledged by the very Johns Hopkins study touted by the government.

It is becoming increasingly obvious that we need to keep the government as far away from airport security as possible, and not only because Janet Napolitano did her graduate work in North Korea

Some Context on the Wilders Case

Via-NRO

By Nina Shea

Geert Wilders is the latest in a lengthening roster of Europeans who have been criminally prosecuted for criticizing Islam. Under the slogans of stopping “Islamophobia” and banning “defamation” or “insult” of Islam, for two decades a concerted demand has been made for the West to enforce Islamic blasphemy rules, as is customary in certain member states of the Organization of the Islamic Conference.

The Netherlands has been among the many EU states struggling to comply. In the name of liberalism, it has enacted laws criminalizing “hate speech,” with grossly illiberal results. A sample of the Dutch cases shows that the desire to protect minorities is a self-deluding piety in these circumstances. What really lies at the root of these vaguely defined and arbitrarily adjudicated cases is fear of Muslim violence.

One of the earliest such Western cases occurred in the Netherlands in 1992, a few years after Iran’s fatwa against Salman Rushdie triggered murders of “blasphemers” connected with his book The Satanic Verses. A Muslim cabaret artist of Pakistani background, “Zola F,” was found guilty of authoring an unflattering book about Muslim immigration, entitled The Impending Ruin of the Netherlands, Country of Gullible Fools. This created the anomaly of a white court condemning a brown immigrant for “racist hate speech.”

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, an ex-Muslim of African heritage who became a Dutch parliamentarian, was similarly prosecuted. She was charged for criticizing the Islamic teaching on killing homosexuals. Already known for her role in co-directing Submission (the film on abuses against Muslim women that led to the 2004 murder by a Muslim extremist of her co-director, Theo Van Gogh), she announced plans for a sequel on the treatment of homosexuals in Islam. This prompted the Netherlands’ main Muslim lobby to register a complaint that her remarks were “blasphemous and have been received with a great deal of pain by the Muslim community.” In 2005, after two years of legal proceedings for “incitement” to hatred, during which time she received numerous death threats and had to go into hiding, a court finally decided that although she had “sought the borders of the acceptable,” her speech did not warrant prohibition, and she was let off.

Hate-speech arrests occurred in the aftermath of the Van Gogh murder. When an artist in Rotterdam painted a street mural that included the commandment “Thou shalt not kill” next to the date of Van Gogh’s murder, a local mosque leader complained to police that the message was “racist.” The police, on orders of the mayor, sandblasted the mural and arrested a television reporter at the scene and destroyed his film. Another Dutch man hung in his window a poster for a far-right movement that stated, “Stop the tumor that is Islam. Theo has died for us. Who will be next?” After being convicted by two lower courts, he finally prevailed on appeal.

Widespread Muslim violence and protest over the Danish cartoons of Mohammed has put Dutch officials on high alert for provocative caricaturists. In 2008, after an Internet monitoring group reported him to authorities for cartoons deemed insulting to Muslims, the edgy Dutch cartoonist Gregorius Nekschot was arrested. Police seized his computer’s hard drive and cartoon sketches. The cartoons in question opposed Muslim immigration in various tasteless ways. Nekschot remains under suspicion of “insulting people on the basis of their race or belief, and possibly also of inciting hate,” and could face two years in prison or a $25,000 fine if prosecuted. During the course of this case, it was revealed that the Dutch government had established an “Interdepartmental Working Group on Cartoons,” apparently to apprise officials of any drawings that Muslims could find insulting.

The Wilders case is not unique, but it is important. It demonstrates the continued willingness of authorities in Europe’s most liberal countries to regulate the content of speech on Islam in order to placate Muslim blasphemy demands. Few such cases end in conviction, but their chilling effect on free speech within and on Islam continues to widen.

— Nina Shea directs the Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom and co-authored the forthcoming book Silenced (Oxford University Press), on contemporary blasphemy rules.

What Is Hillary’s ‘Appropriate’ Punishment for Adultery?

Via-BIG PEACE

Christine Brim

According to CNN, a 42-year old Iranian mother of two – Sakineh Mohammadie Ashtiani – will be executed by stoning for the alleged crime of adultery in the near future, in a court case upheld by Iran’s Shariah Supreme Court in 2007. Ashtiani speaks Turkish, not Farsi, and therefore her forced confession, given after receiving 99 lashes and later retracted, was based in part on not comprehending the court proceedings.

In his inaugural address Obama promised the world’s tyrants that “we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.” The administration’s hand is still extended; the Iranian fists are still clenched.

In the next few days, those fists will be throwing stones at Ashtiani until she is dead, unless the world intervenes. Amnesty International, among other groups, is strongly protesting the imminent execution. Our current State Department – not so much.

Assistant Secretary of State P.J. Crowley stated Thursday, “We have grave concerns that the punishment does not fit the alleged crime … from the United States’ standpoint, we don’t think putting women to death for adultery is an appropriate punishment.” Crowley called Iran’s judicial system “disproportionate” in its treatment of women.
Apart from this tepid protest of a death by stoning, Crowley’s statement clearly implies that there is an “appropriate” and “proportionate” punishment for women for alleged adultery. The State Department needs to clarify whether this is Crowley’s personal opinion, or the official position of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the Obama administration. This guidance would be especially helpful for women in Shariah-ruled countries, as well as for women in the US and Europe, where honor killings are on the rise (see Phyllis Chesler’s research here and here).

Exactly what punishment for women in cases of alleged adultery does “fit the crime” for this administration?

Is Europe Awakening to Islamist Threat?

Europe may still lean significantly to the left, but a rightward shift fueled by Muslim immigration problems has begun. Just look at the Netherlands.

Via-Pajamas Media

Barry Rubin

The political situation in Europe today is quite different from the stereotype of a continent hostile to the United States (even if Obama is personally popular) and Israel, appeasement-oriented toward Iran and revolutionary Islamism, and eagerly multicultural and politically correct.

True, it is more oriented in that direction than North America, but there is a real struggle afoot.

In many countries — notably the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Germany, and to a slightly lesser extent the United Kingdom and France — the partisan gap between the left and center-right marks a boundary of much greater significance than a decade or two ago. Although each situation is different, the parties of the left tend to be more anti-American and anti-Israel and less alert to the threat of revolutionary Islamism, as well as favor continued large-scale immigration and big-state, big-spending policies.

Take the Netherlands as a case study. After elections last month, the parties of the center-right hold 83 seats, while those of the left have 67. Since there are ten parties in parliament, talks to form a coalition government will last for weeks, especially since the two largest have only twenty percent each. In the elections, only three seats changed hands between blocs.

But the big news was the shift within the center-right — the rise of the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (PVV) led by the controversial Geert Wilders, which almost tripled its presence from 9 to 24 seats. To his enemies, almost no epithet is too extreme to throw at Wilders. The flamboyant Wilders has been outspoken in opposing immigration, especially that of Muslims, making a sharp critique of political Islamism and sometimes Islam itself.

The power of the Dutch state was turned on Wilders, who is currently on trial for making statements which in America would fall well within constitutional protection. State television ran documentaries during the election designed to paint him as a virtual Nazi.

What is Wilders’ program? First, a sharp limitation on asylum seekers admitted into the country, and none from Muslim-majority states. No dual nationality, no new mosques, no separate Islamic schools, no wearing of burqas, and no government subsidies for Islamic media. Mosques where violence is propagated will be closed. Heavy punishment for female circumcision. For their first ten years in Holland, immigrants receive no social benefits or citizenship. At the end of that period, those with no criminal record will receive full citizenship.

The rise in support for Wilders’ party is in large part a response to serious concern over the domestic situation in the country. Aside from the assassination of a filmmaker by a radical Islamist, there has been a steep increase in crime and social welfare spending. Amsterdam, not long ago the most gay-friendly city in the world, is a place where homosexuals might be attacked in the streets by Muslim immigrant youth. A recent television program followed three Jews wearing identifiable garb as they strolled around the city, being harassed and insulted.

Twenty percent of Dutch teachers report that attempts to teach about the Holocaust, in the country of Anne Frank, were rejected or disrupted by immigrant children.

While Muslims still comprise only a bit more than 5 percent of the population, whole areas of Dutch cities have a majority of people who are recent immigrants and whose commitment to assimilation into the country’s continued norms is questionable. For example, it is frequently estimated that up to half the country’s Muslim population is sympathetic to the September 11 attacks.

One of the main arguments against mass immigration is that it is incredibly costly to Dutch taxpayers. It is possible to be suspicious of a report commissioned by Wilders showing that the cost is 7.2 billion euros a year to a country of about 16 million people. But in fact that report was written by the country’s most respected independent think tank, and the estimate is not that much higher than the government’s own estimate of 6 billion a year.

And here’s where it gets interesting. For while the focus was on Wilders’ PVV, the second biggest winner was the mainstream conservative (in European terminology, liberal) Party for Freedom (VVD), which went from 22 to 31 seats. The VVD favors lower taxes, smaller government, AND less government regulation. While Wilders often focuses his criticism on Islam itself, the VVD is quite critical of radical Islamism.

And though the VVD’s positions are less extreme than Wilders’, it also favors serious reductions in immigration, the closing of mosques where radical doctrines are preached, and the denial of social welfare payments for immigrants during their first decade in the country. These two parties received one-third of the vote, and three Christian parties, from whose voters Wilders and the VVD obtained their increased support, have somewhat similar stances.

For instance, here’s what the platform of the Christian Union, the most liberal — in the American sense of that word — of these parties, states:

Every Dutchman has the right to assembly, to religion and to express his opinion. But financial support of Dutch political, cultural, and religious institutes from demonstrably non-free countries (such as Saudi-Arabia and Iran) is not permitted. It’s allowed to protect a free society from the importation of bondage.

It also supports banning the burqa from public buildings, public transport, and schools.

A similar pattern emerges regarding stances toward Israel. Wilders is an outspoken supporter, but the other parties are also sympathetic — though there is an anti-Israel minority in the VVD. The foreign minister, for example, a Christian Democrat, said that Israel was entitled to stop Gaza flotilla ships in international waters, refused to condemn Israel’s actions, and supports tough sanctions on Iran’s nuclear program. While the four non-Wilders center-right parties are more nuanced in their attitude than decades ago, they are certainly not knee-jerk anti-Israel in their positions.

Thus, about 55 percent of Dutch voters backed parties that want a real change in key policies.

Why is nothing dramatic likely to happen? Because 45 percent endorsed parties on the left, and given the Dutch passion for consensus, the existence of so many parties, and the reluctance of the VVD to bring Wilders’ party into government, some kind of broad coalition will likely emerge.

The largest party on the left, Labor — led by former Amsterdam mayor Job Cohen — got less than half of the overall vote. It can be described now as the party of the Dutch status quo — that is, continuation of existing policies. Despite being led by a nominal Jew, it is very critical of Israel and totally uncritical of Hamas. The left favors increases in taxes and government power.

Outsiders would view this situation of deadlock between two sides with such different overall visions of Dutch politics and society as a big problem. In contrast, the Dutch believe they thrive on this kind of paradox, finding some compromise to ease them through. Yet can a major crisis be long avoided given the economic and social issues faced by the Netherlands and so many other European states today?

Thomas, Turkey, and the Liberation of Israel

Via-National Review Online

by Victor Davis Hanson

It is hard to become much more influential than the doyen of the White House press corps, who is given a ceremonial front-rows seat at press briefings and press conferences. So when Helen Thomas suggested that the Israelis should leave their country and “go home” to Poland and Germany, this was not some obscure, eccentric anti-Semite, but a liberal insider who has come to enjoy iconic status and a sense of exemption from criticism.

Note that Ms. Thomas did not call for just a West Bank free of Jews. And she did not just wish for the elimination of the nation of Israel itself. Rather, Thomas envisions the departure of Israelis to the sites of the major death camps seven decades ago where six million Jews were gassed.

Turkey’s role in aiding and abetting the flotilla, and its subsequent anti-Israeli outbursts, were excessive even by the often sick standards of the Middle East — but not exactly new. State-run Turkish television has aired virulent anti-Semitic dramas like the 2006 Valley of the Wolves, in which a Jewish doctor harvests organs from captured Iraqi civilians. Former Turkish prime minister Necmettin Erbakan once claimed that the Jews had instigated World War I in order to create Israel. Israel, Erbakan further asserted, in full-blown Hitlerian prose, was a “disease” and a “bacteria” that needed to be eradicated. The current prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, talks of sending in the Turkish fleet to confront the Israeli blockade, says he is sick of Israeli lies, and warns that his new Turkey is not “a young and rootless nation,” as Israel presumably is (note the code word “rootless”). So speaks our NATO partner and E.U. wannabe. This week, in reaction to criticism from the West, Erdogan labeled such concerns “dirty propaganda” — note well, not just propaganda but a “dirty” sort.

In an odd way, Thomas’s sick suggestions and Turkey’s new Islamist and vehemently anti-Israel foreign policy will have a liberating effect on Israel. After all, if the ceremonial head of the White House press corps wants Israel’s citizens either gone or dead, there is a legitimate suspicion that things are not quite right in the capital of Israel’s staunchest ally. And if the most secular, democratic, and pro-Western Muslim country in the Middle East wishes to pick a fight to prove its Muslim fides, then there is not much hope that Israel is going to win over anyone else in that region.

Anti-Semitism as displayed by both Thomas and Turkey’s leaders is not predicated on criticizing Israel, much less disagreeing with its foreign policy. Instead, it hinges upon focusing singularly on Israeli behavior, and applying a standard to it that is never extended to any other nation.

The left’s strange hostility to Hirsi Ali

Via-Macleans

MARK STEYN: Nicholas Kristof is just the latest great thinker to talk himself into a rosy view of Islam

Despite being a bit of an old showbiz queen, I’m not much for the huggy-kissy photo wall of me sharing a joke with various luvvies. I make an exception on the bureau behind my desk for a shot of yours truly and a beautiful woman, Somali by birth, Dutch by citizenship, at a beachfront bar in Malibu at sunset. I like the picture because, while I look rather bleary with a few too many chins, my companion is bright-eyed with a huge smile on her face and having a grand old time—grand, that is, because of its very normality: a crappy bar, drinks with cocktail umbrellas, a roomful of blithely ignorant California hedonists who’ll all be going back home at the end of the evening to Dancing With the Stars or Conan O’Brien or some other amusement.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali can’t lead that life. She lives under armed guard and was forced to abandon the Netherlands because quite a lot of people want to kill her. And not in the desultory behead-the-enemies-of-Islam you-will-die-infidel pro forma death-threats-R-us way that many of us have perforce gotten used to in recent years: her great friend and professional collaborator was murdered in the streets of Amsterdam by a man who shot him eight times, attempted to decapitate him, and then drove into his chest two knives, pinning to what was left of him a five-page note pledging to do the same to her.


What would you do in those circumstances? Ayaan and I had repaired to that third-rate bar after a day-long conference on Islam, jihad, free speech and whatnot. That’s usually where I run into her, whether in Malibu or at the Carlton Club in London or at a less illustrious venue. Would you be doing that with a price on your head? Or would you duck out of sight, lie low, change your name, move to New Zealand, and hope one day to get your life back? After the threats against the Comedy Central show South Park the other week, Ms. Hirsi Ali turned up on CNN to say that the best defence against Islamic intimidation is for us all to stand together and thereby “share the risk.” But, around the world, every single translator of her books has insisted on total anonymity. When push comes to shove, very few are willing to share the risk. The British historian Andrew Roberts calls her “the bravest woman I know.” I would say she is not only the bravest but also, given her circumstances, the most optimistic. I have an unbounded admiration for her personally, but a not insignificant difference philosophically, of which more momentarily.

Media Leave "South Park" Creators Out to Dry

Via- RCP

By Diana West

Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the creators of "South Park," get it.

They get the free-speech significance of the Danish Muhammad cartoons epitomized by Kurt Westergaard's bomb-head Muhammad.

They even get it across.

"It's so sad, the whole Muhammad, the whole Danish cartoon thing," said Stone, Parker seated beside him during a joint interview with the entertainment Web site Boing Boing.

Don't laugh. Boing Boing here goes where "elite" media fear to tiptoe, let alone tread.

The subject was the 200th episode of "South Park," which, in unusually clean if satirical fashion, focused on Islam's fanatical, and, to Western sensibilities, ridiculous prohibitions on depictions and criticism of Muhammad, who is at one point presented in a bear suit. (Now you can laugh.)

Stone continued: "It's like, if everyone would have just, like, normally they do in the news organizations, just printed the cartoons -"

"Everyone would have rallied together," interjected Parker.

"Now that guy [Westergaard] has to be hiding and all this [bleep] because everyone just kind of left him out to dry. It's a big problem when you have the New York Times and Comedy Central and Viacom basically just [wimping] out on it. It's just sad. I was, like, really sad about the whole thing."

This -- despite the grubby Valspeak-ish patois of the astronomically successful Hollywood postmodern -- is a singularly powerful statement. It is powerful in its sincerity, and it is singular in its, well, singularity.

No other American "name" I can think of, no one tops in pop culture, has spoken out against (or even mentioned) the Islamic threat to Western freedom of expression as exemplified by the Sharia dictates against "Motooning." Certainly no one has produced creative content about it.

Rather, such dictates have been religiously followed -- no pun whatsoever intended -- just as though our society were itself officially Islamic. This makes "South Park's" message the closest thing yet to a mainstream declaration of independence from Sharia. For rejecting both the threat of violence and the emotional blackmail emanating from Islam over critiquing Islam's prophet, the two "South Park" creators deserve a medal.

"They're courageous -- no doubt that they are," said Bill O'Reilly of Fox's "O'Reilly Factor" this week. He was discussing the Islamic death threats against Parker and Stone that, naturally, followed the recent "South Park" Muhammad episode.

The threats came in a jihadist video (caption: "Help Us Remove the Filth") portraying the writer-producers as likely victims of Islamic violence along with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Salman Rushdie, Geert Wilders, Kurt Westergaard and Lars Vilks. A photo of the slain body of filmmaker Theo van Gogh, his head nearly cut off on an Amsterdam, Netherlands, street in 2004 by a jihadist assassin, served as an example.

Rather than praise Parker's and Stone's courage, however, O'Reilly went on to disparage their judgment.

"Was it the smart thing to do in light of the Danish cartoonist and van Gogh?" he asked. "It's harmless to me," he continued about the episode in question. "But if you are a hard-core jihadist, any mention of Muhammad in any kind of way, particularly if you're poking fun at him, is a capital offense."

According to whose law, Bill -- Islam's or ours? Or is our law now Islamic? Those are the question citizens of the Western world need to hear discussed.

But not on "The O'Reilly Factor."

"See, I would have advised them not to do it," O'Reilly continued, "because the risk is higher than the reward."

One reason there is such a high "risk" is because media people such as O'Reilly left Westergaard and now the "South Park" creators, as Parker put it, "out to dry." All media in America should have reproduced Westergaard's cartoon, just as all media in American should now applaud Parker and Stone for their defense of free speech against Sharia.

Surely it is O'Reilly's responsibility as a leading broadcaster to do that small bit to keep the airwaves free.

Alas, this man of the folks doesn't see it that way. "You don't want to give in to the intimidating forces of evil," he said. "But you got to deal with reality. And these people are killers and they will kill you."

In other words, shut up about Muhammad, and everything will be fine -- or at least Islamic.

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