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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Freedom of Expression, Without the Expression

A French imam weighs in, unfortunately.

Via-City

THEODORE DALRYMPLE


There can be moderation even in moderation, and in his interview on September 20 with the French newspaper Le Figaro, the president of the association of imams in France, Hassen Chalghoumi, proved himself moderately moderate. Asked about the recent publication of satirical Mohammed cartoons in the French magazine Charlie Hebdo, he rejected the use of violence and argued that the way to defend the prophet was through “sharing, tolerance, forgiveness, faith and love.” He was also against trying to take the magazine to court, maintaining his support for freedom of expression.

This is all welcome, though I note that he said nothing about rational argument as a way to defend the prophet. And he also, less encouragingly, said this: “The attitude of Charlie Hebdo is irresponsible. For days, we have been doing all we can to appeal for calm, to ease tensions, to condemn violence; and this journal, either unwittingly or through a desire to increase its sales, has revived it [the atmosphere of violence that followed the anti-Islamic film in the U.S.] at the worst moment.”

Here one would have been tempted to ask the imam when the right time would have been for Charlie Hebdo to publish its cartoons, but the interviewer did not. “But let them not deceive themselves,” the imam continued. “It is for them now to accept their part in the material damage that will be caused, and in every building burnt, every person attacked or killed, their responsibility will be involved.” This is surely an odd way of looking at the situation, accepting as it does the logic of the blackmailer or the intimidator: either you do as we say, or we will be violent.