The Rise Of Islamic Correctness

October 18, 2010
Geert Wilders and the Rise of Islamic Correctness
By Andrew G. Bostom

Islamic correctness, which criminalizes any criticism of Islam, is a rising force in the world, and not merely in Muslim-majority countries. Even in traditionally tolerant Holland, a combination of misguided liberal multiculturalism and a fear of violence from immigrants has led to a sometimes farcical prosecution.

This past Friday (10/15/10), Dutch prosecutors asked the presiding judges to acquit Dutch Parliamentarian Geert Wilders on all charges of inciting hate and discrimination arising from his comments on Islam.

Wilders was unsurprisingly "very happy" with the prosecutors' recommendations, adding with his usual plainspoken lucidity, "I do not insult, I do not incite to hatred, I do not discriminate. The only thing I do and will continue to do is to speak the truth."

However, former U.S. federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy underscores an important caveat regarding the presiding judges: they could ignore the recommendations of the Dutch prosecutors and convict Wilders when they deliver their verdict next month. McCarthy reminds us that the Dutch prosecutors never desired to charge Wilders, but they were in effect "overruled" by the Dutch judiciary:

In 2008, the office of the public prosecutor declined to charge him. The lunatic judges are the ones who've been behind this all along, representative as they are of the transnational progressive thinking responsible for having such "crimes" on the books in the first place. In 2009, the Dutch Court of Appeals issued an order essentially overruling the prosecutors and ordering that Wilders be charged.

With refreshing sobriety, Dutch prosecutor Birgit van Roessel argued in her summation that Wilders' statements were made as an integral part of the public debate

... about the immigration and integration of nonwestern foreigners, especially Muslims. Standpoints can vary considerably and emotions can run high, but ... it is a debate that it must be possible to have.

And most importantly, Ms. van Roessel further acknowledged that "[m]any of Wilders' statements seemed to denounce Islam as an ideology or its growing influence in the Netherlands, rather than being intended as an abuse of Muslims as a people or group."

During a March 2009 interview with the Boston Globe's Jeff Jacoby, Wilders had earlier rejected the notion he "hates Muslims" while providing a frank characterization of the totalitarian nature of Islam.

I have nothing against the people. I don't hate Muslims. But Islam is a totalitarian ideology. It rules every aspect of life - economics, family law, whatever. It has religious symbols, it has a God, it has a book - but it's not a religion. It can be compared with totalitarian ideologies like Communism or fascism. There is no country where Islam is dominant where you have a real democracy, a real separation between church and state. Islam is totally contrary to our values.

By making this latter claim, Wilders shattered a corrosive modern taboo, enforced rigidly and without forgiveness by cultural relativist politicians and government bureaucrats, as well as influential "savants" in media, academia, and religion.

But Wilders' assessment not only comports with scholarly observations made (primarily) before the advent of the postmodern Western scourge of cultural relativism, it is supported by contemporary hard polling data from 2006/2007 and their more recent follow-up reported February 25, 2009.

At present, overwhelming Muslim majorities -- i.e., better than two-thirds (see the weighted average calculated here) of a well-conducted survey of the world's most significant and populous Arab and non-Arab Muslim countries -- want these immoderate outcomes: "strict application" of Shari'a, Islamic Law, and a global Caliphate. Specifically, the World Public Opinion.org/ University of Maryland poll (released February 25, 2009) indicated the following about our putative Muslim ally nations of Egypt and Pakistan: 81% of the Muslims of "moderate" Egypt, the largest Arab Muslim nation, desire a "strict" application of Shari'a, Islamic Law; 76% of the Pakistan's Muslims -- one of the most important and sizable non-Arab Muslim populations -- also want this outcome. Furthermore, 70% of Egyptian Muslims and 69% of Pakistani Muslims desire the recreation of a "single Islamic state or Caliphate." Elsewhere, I have detailed the totalitarian impact of these fulfilled Islamic desires based upon their doctrinal and historical application, across space and time.

And these concrete data validate eminent Western scholarly appraisals of Islamic despotism, or in modern parlance, totalitarianism.

Most importantly, our uninformed chattering classes across the political spectrum need to know that their eminence grise on Islamic civilization, Professor Bernard Lewis, and outspoken Dutch Parliamentarian Geert Wilders have a shared understanding of totalitarian Islam. Ironically, Wilders has been demonized -- and is currently being prosecuted -- for expressing views identical to those the Western sage of Islam Lewis put forth in a 1954 essay.

Over a half century later, during his keynote address to the first Conference of the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa in April 2008, Professor Lewis warned of the ominous limits on scholarly analysis of Islam imposed by political correctness and multiculturalism:

The degree of thought control, of limitations on freedom of speech and expression is without parallel in the Western world since the eighteenth century and in some cases longer than that...It seems to me it's a very dangerous situation, because it makes any kind of scholarly discussion of Islam, to say the least, dangerous. Islam and Islamic values now have a level of immunity from comment and criticism in the Western world that Christianity has lost and Judaism has never had.

The politicized prosecution of Geert Wilders for his free-speech criticism of Islam is a case study illustrating Professor Lewis' gravest concerns. Most notably, Professor Lewis in a 1954 essay, "Communism and Islam," expounded upon the quintessence of totalitarian Islam and how it was antithetical in nature to Western democracy while sharing important features of Communist totalitarianism -- in particular, global domination via jihad.

I turn now from the accidental to the essential factors, to those deriving from the very nature of Islamic society, tradition, and thought. The first of these is the authoritarianism, perhaps we may even say the totalitarianism, of the Islamic political tradition... There are no parliaments or representative assemblies of any kind, no councils or communes, no chambers of nobility or estates, no municipalities in the history of Islam; nothing but the sovereign power, to which the subject owed complete and unwavering obedience as a religious duty imposed by the Holy Law...For the last thousand years, the political thinking of Islam has been dominated by such maxims as "tyranny is better than anarchy," and "whose power is established, obedience to him is incumbent."

[Islamic Religious and Communist Party leaders] profess a totalitarian doctrine, with complete and final answers to all questions on heaven and earth...[in]contrast [to]the eternal questioning of Western man. ...[T]he aggressive fanaticism of the believer is the same. The humorist who summed up the Communist creed as "There is no God and Karl Marx is his Prophet'" was laying his finger on a real affinity..[t]he call to a Communist Jihad, a Holy War for the faith-a new faith, but against the self-same Western Christian enemy.

Geert Wilders' keen if blunt conceptions articulate contemporary realities while restating seminal insights on Islam by the universally respected scholar Bernard Lewis, whose written observations from 1954 antedated the present-day morbid affliction of cultural relativism. At present, the tragic rejection of freedom of conscience by mainstream Islamic religious and political institutions representing all Muslim nations, and the global Islamic umma -- a living sine qua non of Islamic totalitarianism -- provide irrefragable confirmation that Wilders' characterization of Islam as a totalitarian ideology is accurate.

Let us hope that the outrageous proceedings against Geert Wilders have pushed the Western freedom-stifling agenda of Islamic correctness too far and that his ultimate acquittal marks the beginning of an unrestrained political debate on the dangers of totalitarian Islam.

Department of Homeland Security Hires Islamist

DHS swears in an Islamist

Elections have consequences

On the weekend before the crucial mid-term elections, we bring you the juxtaposition of two recent events.

First, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano swore in three new members of the Homeland Security Advisory Council—one of whom, Mohamed Elibiary, was a speaker at a 2004 event honoring the Ayatollah Khomeini!

When a Dallas Morning News reporter exposed Elibiary, Elibiary threatened him. Incredibly, Elibiary is someone Napolitano believes should now be on the Homeland Security Advisory Council.

Second, two weeks ago German Chancellor Angela Merkel, in an obvious reference to the tidal wave of Muslim immigrants to Germany, made the stunning statement that multiculturalism in Germany has “totally failed.”

This is emblematic of the broader pushback against the rising threat of radical Islam that is occurring throughout Europe—except, as celebrated author Melanie Phillips points out, in Great Britain (see story below).

Europe is beginning to understand the threat of radical Islam. More and more of the American people are beginning to understand the threat of radical Islam. Unfortunately, it is clear that much of the Obama administration, as illustrated by Napolitano’s latest blunder, does not.

Elections have consequences. Please remember this when you vote.


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http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.7684/pub_detail.asp

October 19, 2010

Britain: Groveling Alone

Melanie Phillips

Angela Merkel has got the point. Multiculturalism has failed, she states flatly, as she surveys western Europe going down under the tide of radical Islam. Rather than liberal society creating the utopia of harmonious cultural pluralism, it is being swallowed whole by the giant predator whose voracious mouth it encourages, in the spirit of tolerance, to open ever wider in the unshakeable belief of western liberals that the jaws about to snap shut around their necks are actually stretched wide in a smile.

All over mainland Europe, a few shoes are belatedly – maybe too late -- starting to drop.

France and Belgium have banned the burqa and other countries are debating doing the same.

Switzerland has banned minarets.

Denmark has imposed ferocious limits on immigration.

In the Netherlands the prosecution in the case against the Dutch politician Geert Wilders for allegedly inciting religious hatred -- through his criticism of Islamic hatred -- has thrown in the towel and asked the judges to acquit him of all charges. See here for an authoritative analysis of the significance of this.

And so what of dear old Blighty, the country which in 1940 stood alone against the threat to democratic life and liberty and the values of western liberalism? Is the shoe of reality starting to drop in the UK too?

A report by Quilliam about City University, central London, states that a hard-line Islamist ideology is being promoted through the leadership of the university’s student Islamic Society, leading to increased religious tensions on campus and to the intimidation and harassment of staff, students and members of minority groups by extremists and increasing the risks of students turning to terrorism.

Ahmadi Muslims in south London have been targeted by Islamists in a hate campaign, and a Muslim woman in Bradford has died after being set on fire (via JihadWatch), underlining the fact that Muslims are themselves front-line victims of Islamic jihadis and sharia law.

And in the Sunday Telegraph, Andrew Gilligan continues to chronicle the remorseless takeover of an entire London borough, Tower Hamlets, by the radicals of the Islamic Forum of Europe using intimidation, infiltration and corruption:

According to one of its own leaflets, the IFE – based at the hardline East London Mosque in Tower Hamlets – wants to change the ‘very infrastructure of society, its institutions, its culture, its political order and its creed … from ignorance to Islam.’ The group is accused by one of the area’s Labour MPs, Jim Fitzpatrick, of infiltrating and ‘corrupting’ his party in a way similar to the Militant Tendency in the 1980s.

The response of other newspapers to what’s going on in Tower Hamlets? As far as I can make out, deafening silence. And what is the response of the rest of the British thinking classes to this and countless other signs of increasing Islamisation and Islamic radicalisation in Britain?

The hitherto resolutely counter-counter-cultural think-tank Civitas, which in the past has produced some outstanding social and cultural analysis, has just published a set of essays on Women, Islam and Western Liberalism in which one author, Alveena Malik, states that the full-face Islamic veil, or niqab, should be regarded

‘...as part of a modern British way of life.’

She continued: ‘The wearing of religious symbols, including the full veil, should be a fundamental human right of an individual in both the public and private sphere. The real test for religious symbols in the public sphere should always be: “Does the wearing of a symbol (such as the kirpan, turban, yarmulke, crucifix and the veil) hinder a citizen’s ability to perform their public civic duties?”’ Britain is in a ‘unique’ position to embrace such a public display of faith because of the role the church plays in the affairs of the state and its ‘multicultural diversity’.

To be fair, the Civitas pamphlet contains other views which profoundly disagree with this. Even so, the idea that advocating as ‘part of the British way of life’ the niqab, which presents such an obvious danger to security as well as intimidating non-radical Muslim women, inciting religious subversion by serving as a symbolic call to arms against western values and destroying the equality inherent in human interaction by virtue of the simple act that we can all see each other’s faces – the idea that this is, as Civitas appears to suggest, a contribution towards liberal diversity, is simply grotesque.

And here’s the thing: the Telegraph also tells us:

Mrs Malik was appointed by last government to a panel of faith advisers for the Department for Communities. She has overseen British Council guidance on ‘intercultural dialogue’.

It looks horribly like, seventy years on, Britain is now once again alone -- this time, though, not standing but grovelling on its knees before those bent upon the extinction of freedom.

Thai Insurgency Takes Toll

Insurgency takes toll on both Buddhists, Muslims
By DENIS D. GRAY – 8 hours ago

KO TO, Thailand (AP) — The young Muslim man says he watched helplessly as soldiers broke his father's bones and punctured his lungs with vicious kicks. After seven hours of relentless torture, the Muslim religious leader died cradled in his lap.

In a nearby village, a 7-year-old Buddhist girl still dials her father's mobile telephone number every evening. Then she readies his bed. But her father is never coming home. He and his brother were riddled with bullets and their bodies set afire as they motorcycled to a computer class.

A vicious Muslim insurgency in Thailand's deep south has spared few. On the roll call of 3,400 dead are monks and teachers, shopkeepers and rubber tappers, officials and innocents from every background.

Islamic radicals are fighting for a separate state in Buddhist-majority Thailand. And a rift is widening between Buddhists and Muslims — communities that had lived harmoniously for generations and now share equally in the suffering.

The separatist movement, which periodically erupts into violence, was born after 1902 when Thailand took over an independent sultanate in a region where some 70 percent of the 1.8 million people adhere to Islam. But past insurgency leaders restricted their attacks to Thai authorities. Violence seldom affected the ordinary people and thus did not embroil them in mutual suspicion and fear.

This changed dramatically in the wake of hardline government policies in the south coupled with the influence of international jihad. In recent years, the insurgency has spread into the fabric of society, creating tensions, suspicions and animosity between Buddhists and Muslims.

___

Perhaps it's the village and their father's role in it which brought on his death, his children say.

Like most communities in the southern, predominantly Muslim provinces, Ko To is deceptively idyllic: wooden houses shaded by lush vegetation, a simple, green-colored mosque, a tea shop for restful chatter, all ringed by the mainstay of the region's economy — rubber plantations.

But the village is within a government-designated "red zone" — an area of high insurgent activity — and subject to martial law. Soldiers patrol through it almost daily, villagers say, entering homes and wary if they find no young men around while often taking those who are for 20-30 days of detention.

Yapa Kaseng was a 57-year-old imam, much loved by some 200 villagers who came to him for religious guidance, his 25-year-old son Anan says.

His home was a center of community life. It may thus have been regarded as a breeding ground for the insurgency by authorities who find it hard to identify the rebels among the apolitical.

It was in this environment — tense and riddled with suspicion — that Anan says soldiers and police grabbed him, his father and several others at ablution before morning prayers. Taken to the Thai Army's 39th Task Force camp in Pattani Province, they were locked inside a truck for two nights before the torture began.

"I could feel the broken pieces of bone when I touched my father's chest. In the end, he could no longer walk so they had to drag him out of the truck by his feet for the final torture session," says Anan, who was detained for another 26 days.

Neither the imam nor his son were charged with any wrongdoing. Last December, eight months after his death, a provincial court ruled that he had been tortured to death by the military. But the court case continues, the soldiers have received no known punishment and Anan says he is still harassed at the omnipresent roadblocks when his name pops up from a computerized "black list" of suspected insurgents and sympathizers.

"The officials don't trust us and we don't trust them. Even if they don't have evidence against us they don't trust us. And this turns young men toward violence," says Anan, who must now work as a low-wage rubber tapper to help his widowed mother, six siblings and others of their close-knit family.

"I am still afraid and feel insecure, thinking that they can come and get me again at any time. Nobody can protect us," he says.

___

The deaths of Arun Sudmat and his brother Hiran, gunned down in March, has left similar scars on their families and the predominantly Buddhist village of Paa See.

"I just couldn't believe or accept what had happened because everyone loved them. They had no enemies. They were friends with the Muslims. "'Why? Why? Why?' I ask myself," says Arun's widow, Neng Kunvarit, tears flowing down her cheeks.

Paa See, a community of some 200 people including Muslims, had not witnessed a violent incident since the insurgency erupted in 2004. It even earned a "Peace Village" award from the government.

A brother of the slain men, Anek, bears no hatred for Muslims, taking a broader view of the conflict: "The government fights the insurgents, politicians fight each other and the villagers suffer."

In the past, he says, Buddhist families would go out in the evenings to visit friends in a neighboring Muslim community, but now both villages shut themselves in at sunset.

"We try to keep the same warm relations with Muslims but it is harder because if a Muslim is seen to be too close to a Buddhist he might be targeted by the insurgents. So they are afraid. This is a sad loss," Anek says, reflecting the fact that 55 percent of those killed have been Muslims.

Arun, a 42-year-old handyman, farmer and school janitor, and 36-year-old Hiran, the deputy village chief, were killed by suspected insurgents on a Saturday morning along a busy street as they headed for class in the provincial capital. Their bodies were stacked one on top of the other, doused with gasoline and torched. The gunmen left behind a note — "Thai officials continue to commit crimes. Malay Muslims are the innocents" — together with, inexplicably and bizarrely, a 20 baht (60 U.S. cents) note.

"They were inseparable from childhood. They died together and we cremated them together," Anek says.

He offers only one possible theory for the killings: The brothers liked to wear black jackets similar to uniforms of Thai Army Rangers. A rumor had spread outside the village that the two had enlisted in the force.

But the family can't quite buy this, unbelieving that such decent people could come to this end. The warmhearted, generous bachelor Hiran daily cared for his mother after her husband abandoned the family. The hardworking, loyal Arun was close to his two sons and especially his little daughter Mai, whom he accompanied each day home from school before going on to other jobs to sustain the poor family.

Mai still refuses to accept the loss. Each evening about 5 p.m., before making his bed, the little girl calls her father's canceled number.

She asks, "Daddy, when are you coming home?"

Glimmers Of Hope In Great Britain

Glimmers of Hope in Great Britain

by David J. Rusin
Fri, 3 Apr 2009 at 12:17 PM
http://www.islamist-watch.org/blog/2009/04/glimmers-of-hope-in-great-britain.html

Because the Islamist project has reached a far more advanced stage in Europe, events there often serve as warnings to America about how not to deal with the challenges that lie ahead. Thus it is quite refreshing to be able to highlight a few positive developments in Britain that the United States should consider emulating.

First, there is growing realization that the UK's old strategy of empowering nonviolent Islamists, assumed to "possess the necessary 'street cred'" to marginalize violent Islamists, has been a disaster. A report by Policy Exchange argues that the government is "underwriting the very Islamist ideology which spawns an illiberal, intolerant, and anti-Western worldview":

"Not only is it failing to achieve its stated objectives; in many places it is actually making the situation worse," they said. "A new generation is being radicalized, sometimes with the very funds that are supposed to be countering radicalization."

[…]

The problem has been caused by the link between violent and nonviolent extremism being "habitually underplayed in official documents produced by central government, local government, and the police."

Second, Britain has launched a new strategy that recognizes the importance of opposing nonviolent Islamism. Among the updated criteria for defining Islamic extremists:

• They advocate a caliphate, a pan-Islamic state encompassing many countries.
  
• They promote Shari'a law.
  
• They believe in jihad, or armed resistance, anywhere in the world.
  

Third, the government has suspended ties with the Muslim Council of Britain — think CAIR with a cockney accent — after one of its senior officials signed a document interpreted as "advocating attacks on the Royal Navy if it tries to stop arms for Hamas being smuggled into Gaza." The government has reinforced the break by pledging to focus its efforts on mosques and smaller groups. Sadiq Khan, the minister for community cohesion, said, "The days of lazy politicians just speaking to one or two powerful community groups or leaders are gone."

America could learn from these changes of direction. While the FBI has cut off CAIR, other Islamist bodies are still welcome in Washington. Moreover, there has been little discernable movement to reach out to smaller organizations representing mainstream Muslims.

Advice for the feds: Contact a few of those Muslims who disowned CAIR publicly this week. They will be some of your best allies in protecting America against the threat of radical Islam, while helping our nation avoid the mistakes that Britain now must correct the hard way.