The gaps between what authorities say they believe about Islamic jihad, and what they believe, what we can say, and what everyone knows, is dangerously wide.
Category Archives: Islam and the West
British Imam denounces political correctness in Islamic sex case
The Imam of an Oxford mosque, Dr. Taj Hargey, had some harsh words to say about members of an Islamic sexual exploitation ring and the culture that refuses to look at it.
But apart from its sheer depravity, what also depresses me about this case is the widespread refusal to face up to its hard realities.
The fact is that the vicious activities of the Oxford ring are bound up with religion and race: religion, because all the perpetrators, though they had different nationalities, were Muslim; and race, because they deliberately targeted vulnerable white girls, whom they appeared to regard as ‘easy meat’, to use one of their revealing, racist phrases.
Indeed, one of the victims who bravely gave evidence in court told a newspaper afterwards that ‘the men exclusively wanted white girls to abuse’.
But as so often in fearful, politically correct modern Britain, there is a craven unwillingness to face up to this reality.
Commentators and poli-ticians tip-toe around it, hiding behind weasel words.
We are told that child sex abuse happens ‘in all communities’, that white men are really far more likely to be abusers, as has been shown by the fall-out from the Jimmy Savile case.
One particularly misguided commentary argued that the predators’ religion was an irrelevance, for what really mattered was that most of them worked in the night-time economy as taxi drivers, just as in the Rochdale child sex scandal many of the abusers worked in kebab houses, so they had far more opportunities to target vulnerable girls.
‘As so often in fearful, politically correct modern Britain, there is a craven unwillingness to face up to the reality that their actions are tied up with religion and race’But all this is deluded nonsense. While it is, of course, true that abuse happens in all communities, no amount of obfuscation can hide the pattern that has been exposed in a series of recent chilling scandals, from Rochdale to Oxford, and Telford to Derby.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2325185/The-Oxford-sex-ring-preachers-teach-young-Muslim-men-white-girls-cheap.html#ixzz2TTE35400 Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook
Islam, Islamist, Jihadist, Jihaddict
Daniel Pipes, for whom I have high respect, tried to distinguish Islam from Islamism, and tried to make the latter into some kind of modern political construct. He then attacked Wafa Sultan and Ayaan Hirsi Ali as “essentialists”, people who held that Islam, not some modern deviation from it, is the probblem. His is a well-argued position. I do not believe it for a moment. He writes:
Islamism accurately indicates an Islamic-flavored version of radical utopianism, an -ism like other -isms, comparable to fascism and communism. Aping those two movements, for example, Islamism relies heavily on conspiracy theories to interpret the world, on the state to advance its ambitions, and on brutal means to attain its goals.
Supported by 10-15 percent of Muslims, Islamism draws on devoted and skilled cadres who have an impact far beyond their limited numbers. It poses the threat to civilized life in Iran, Egypt, and not just on the streets of Boston but also in Western schools, parliaments, and courtrooms.
Our killer question is “How do you propose to defeat Islamism?” Those who make all Islam their enemy not only succumb to a simplistic and essentialist illusion but they lack any mechanism to defeat it. We who focus on Islamism see World War II and the Cold War as models for subduing the third totalitarianism. We understand that radical Islam is the problem and moderate Islam is the solution. We work with anti-Islamist Muslims to vanquish a common scourge. We will triumph over this new variant of barbarism so that a modern form of Islam can emerge.
1. I do not propose to make Islam my enemy; Islam has made me its enemy; I have no choice in my heretical and subordinate status under Mohammed’s religion.
2. While Islamist ideology is attractive to some 10-15% of Muslims, we do not know at any time which 10-15% are atracted to it. A man might go through his jihadist period and renounce it in later age, as he matures. Neither is the distinction denominational. Muslims do not segregate themselves into Islamist mosques and Islamic mosques. Even to say so exposes the fact that the distinction is something adjectival, something we feel the need to make, not something inherent in the religion.
3. I think we gain greater clarity about Islam when we frankly admit its doctrines call for our suppression, enslavement, and eradication. It is like rabies; where we know the population is susceptible but we do not know which of its victims has been bitten. We know for sure that, having joined the Party, so to speak, they are more inclined (statistically) to violent rejection of their non-Muslim surrounding society than others.
4. At a basic level of male behaviour, non-Muslims adolescent and young men go on a tear, wrap a car around a tree, drink themsleves into oblivion, rob a store, do drugs, join ludicrous protest groups, but, on the whole, do not seek to destroy the society around them with explosives and massacres. Muslim males have before them the ready-made excuse and legitimation of jihad.
I do not think there is much difference between me and Daniel Pipes in terms of actual measures we would take to suppress the jihaddicts, oops, jihadists in the world. But, my lingering concern with people such as Pipes is that they would seek to suppress frank discussion of Islam in the name of social peace.
And this is a key point: if Wafa Sultan and Ayaan Hirsi Ali (both, not incidentally, ex-Muslims) are right that there is a “consistency from Muhammad’s life and the contents of the Koran and Hadith to current Muslim practice,” and they most certainly are, as Daniel Pipes apparently acknowledges when he says that “certain continuities do exist, and Islamists definitely follow the Koran and Hadith literally,” then attempts to prescind from Qur’anic literalism in order to reform Islam and create a more peaceful version of the faith will always be challenged by the literalists (who are and have always been the mainstream in Islam) as heretics and apostates.
contemporary witches
I was going over the news today:
Mayhem at Mother’s Day parade in New Orleans
Jason Richwine canned from Heritage Foundation for accurate descriptions of Mexican-American intelligence levels in a PhD thesis of years back
Obama regime considers forbidding Christians to proselytize within US Army, and so forth;
as Western society drops its ideological and religious antibodies, declaring them to be racist, sexist, homophobic etc., and I wonder, what will fill the vacuum? Islam?
Here we are, making our societies deliberately less intelligent, and forbidding discussion of it; making our societies so tolerant we lose any sight of permanent moral realities; absorbing underclass behaviour and saying white people cause it through bad thoughts, rather than black people causing it through total lack of thoughts; dropping standards because they derive from European civilization, or because they are Christian, or because their existence implies that moral standards exist at all, or that they exclude people who would rather be ruthlessly intolerant, exclusivist, and hate-filled from full and equal participation in liberal society’s rich banquet.
Why are we doing this?
More relevant, perhaps, is the approach of the commentariat on those who would draw attention to the permanence and reality of racial, ethnic, religious, sexual, and cultural divisions. The latter are the new witches. They cast spells of racism, sexism and homophobia, and much else besides. They must cause the underperformance or bad behaviour of the groups they describe. Clearly, since all different outcomes are the result, not of any kind of innate or persistence differences among groups, but of social causes, then the people who draw attention to these moral standards, innate or persistent differences, and who refuse to believe in unqualified human equality must be causing the problem. Witches!Burn them!
The modern cultural marxist commentariat is reduced to believing in white witches, rather than change their thinking. Why should they, when the science is settled, there is only one politically correct view of anything, and they control the courts, the universities, and all the pulpits that matter.
An email to York Regional Police chief Eric Jolliffe
This was sent in relation to the threats issued by York regional police to a rabbi threatening bad things if Pamela Geller was allowed to speak at a conference at his synagogue.
Sir, if I understand correctly, your police service forced its chaplain to cancel a completely legal event under threat of dismissal after pressure from one segment of your community. If so, you have made an extremely bad decision. As a police service, you have demonstrated quite effectively just whom you intend to serve and those rights and freedoms you have decided not to protect. In doing so, I believe you have created the conditions for serious problems in the future which your service will have no choice but to confront. But you may find your officers meeting those challenges with much less support than they might otherwise expect. Good luck to them.
Blazing Cat Fur published a letter from the Canadian academic Salim Mansur on this absurd capitulation to Islamic sensitivities.
Marathon bombing and political correctness
It is becoming increasingly clear that the US government was given adequate warning about the Tsarnaev family. The NYT reports the following.
In March 2011, the Russian security service sent a stark warning to the F.B.I., reporting that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was “a follower of radical Islam” who had “changed drastically since 2010” and was preparing to travel to Russia’s turbulent Caucasus to connect with underground militant groups. Six months later, Russia sent the same warning to the C.I.A.,,,The Russian warnings to the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. also raised questions about Mr. Tsarnaev’s mother, Zubeidat, according to two senior American officials.
With ample and clear warning why did the FBI not follow up on this? For that you have to go back to US Attorney General Eric Holder’s testimony before the House Judiciary Committee on May 13,2010 where he refuses to use the term “radical Islam.” The whole youtube video is worth watching to see the tap dance.
This kind of muddled thinking of course percolates down to the rest of the bureaucracy and it is no wonder that FBI training manual in 2011 purged references to the terms “al Qaeda”, “Muslim Brotherhood”, or “jihad.” How can one analyze threats when the corresponding lexicon doesn’t even exist?
Pat Condell on liberals versus progressives
May I be permitted to agree?
Pat Condell, the godless scold, defends the liberal political order against progressives.
Why? Deniers of Jihad cannot explain the world
The obvious inability of apparently rational Americans to conclude that jihad exists, and that some Muslims express themselves through jihad, is a mystery. For some, the link between jihad and the Koran is not conclusive, since, as far as they are concerned, every religion except perhaps Buddhism enjoins its followers to smite the wicked and the unbelievers. So since every religion does this, it is for them impossible to conclude a relationship between Islam, jihad, and terrorist explosions.
Many of these people are in good faith.
They are employing a burden of proof towards the relationship of Islam to jihadist activity that they do not employ in most other circumstances. If they maintained the same burden of proof towards the dangers of crossing a street through heavy fast moving traffic, for example, they would tend to be killed. But when it comes to distributed patterns over time and space, failure to perceive patterns is both easier and serves other, more comforting purposes.
What is the cause of the blockage?
I think that the cause of the blockage for many is that, if they concluded such a relationship existed, namely that as Islam:jihad::Communism: class warfare, they would feel obliged to take much more extreme action than they would like. For many, the existence of such a link would present problems of conscience because they would feel the next step might be the surrender of valuable civil liberties, or worse, mass arrests, deportations, even massacres. So denying the causal link is the basis of continuing to feel comfortable with discomforting facts.
In other words I do not believe that the jihad deniers are unaware of the facts; they resist drawing a picture to themselves of the general relationship among the facts because to do so would force them to conclusions they feel uncomfortable with.
But as the article by Stella Paul in the American Thinker said, we are simultaneously being asked to see something, but denied the legitimacy to say in public what we see, which is jihad.
Marathon bomber Tsarnev, a US citizen, denied Miranda rights
Are we in the fourth term of the Bush Presidency?
Obama administration has decided that Dzokhar Tsarnaev, who became a US citizen in Sept 2012, will be questioned without the benefit of the Miranda warning of his right to remain silent and have a lawyer present based on the “Public Safety” exemption. Anybody remember the “fierce urgency of now” that Obama used to talk about? Anybody remember all the leftist hysteria about Bush dictatorship and shredding of the constitution? All seem such quaint concepts now that a Democrat is in the White House.
This wouldn’t be such an uncomfortable proposition if it wasn’t for the precedence of this administration in killing US citizens abroad, as well as the reluctance to unequivocally state that they will not kill US citizen on US soil. There is a word that describes all this and it is “aristagogue”. It describes those who gain power or prestige by playing upon the vanity, prejudices and insecurities of those who see themselves as our best and brightest, or who wish to be so seen by others.
Template for a terrorist attack
Or, how you can impress your liberal friends by correctly forecasting unfolding events in the next terrorist attack.
Now that people like Gov. Andrew Cuomo, are starting to refer to the random acts of violence as “the new normal“, it is important that we understand how they unfold. We have had enough terrorist attacks in the Western world to model and extrapolate this. Following is the first attempt.
1. Terrorist attack occurs.
2. A leftist politician will attempt to compensate for his limited intelligence by talking about “root cause” of terrorism, e.g. Justin Trudeau – Justin Trudeau and the problem with ‘root causes’
3. A leftist politician will blame the right-wing for the attack, e.g. Barack Obama – Axelrod: Obama Thinks Boston Bombings Could Be Related to ‘Tax Day’, and Chris Matthews - Chris Matthews, Democratic congressman suggest Tax Day tie to Boston attacks
4. A leftist columnist will try to make it a race issue, e.g. Salon.com – Let’s hope the Boston Marathon bomber is a white American, or an example of right-wing hate.
5. Terrorist will most likely turn out to be Muslims.
6. Articles will appear lamenting about the inevitable oncoming brutal backlash against the Muslims although this has never occurred before. BBC - Boston bombings: Muslim Americans await bomber’s ID. As an aside, notice how some of the savvier news organisations, like BBC, thread the needle on the knotty topic of terrorist identification? They don’t want to wait to write about the brutal backlash after the terrorist have been identified in case they get relegated with the slow-moving and slow-thinking print press. They also do not want to jump the gun and identify them as Muslims because that would be, oh gosh, so judgemental, so they write about how the Muslims wait for the identity of the terrorist with trepidation and are “braced for a backlash”.
7. We will be lectured by the politicians who we heard from in #3 above how we should not rush to judgement about “motivations [of]…entire groups of people” even though they were doing precisely that earlier, albeit against their political enemies.
8. The media will print heart-rending tales of how the larger society has mistreated the terrorist and attempt to rationalize, justify and mitigate the responsibility on behalf of the terrorist, e.g. NYT – Far From War-Torn Homeland, Trying To Fit In, and how we should sympathize with them.