The Worldwide Jihad: The Truth About Islamic Terrorism (9 page)

BOOK: The Worldwide Jihad: The Truth About Islamic Terrorism
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Rimsha reportedly has Down syndrome, yet was charged with blasphemy for allegedly burning some pages of the Qur’an among some trash she had collected. Even worse,
a Muslim cleric has now been accused
 of planting the pages of the Qur’an among the remnants of the papers she burned, so as to ensure her conviction. According to Pakistan’s Dawn, a witness “said he tried to stop the cleric from tampering with the evidence, but he insisted it would strengthen the case and lead to eviction of the girl’s family from the locality.”

The case of Rimsha Masih has thus highlighted the irrationality and cruelty of Pakistan’s blasphemy laws, and how they are used against the country’s small Christian minority and other non-Muslims in Pakistan. For years, untold numbers of non-Muslims have been persecuted, harassed, deprived of property, imprisoned, beaten, tortured, and even murdered under their provisions. It is widely documented that Muslims often use them as a tool to settle scores or seize the possessions of non-Muslims with whom they have some dispute. Yet up until the case of Rimsha Masih and a similar case involving another Christian woman, Asia Bibi, last year, the international human rights community has taken little notice.

However, Barack Obama has just dealt a huge setback to any effort to compel Pakistan to drop its blasphemy laws in the interest of human rights, by effectively enforcing Islamic blasphemy laws against American military personnel. For last month,
U.S. military brass announced
 that they were going to punish six American troops who were involved in the notorious burning of Qur’ans in Afghanistan last February.

“The administrative punishments,” according to Reuters, “could include things like reduce rank or forfeiture of pay.” Nonetheless, these “fell short of criminal prosecution, and it was unclear whether they would satisfy Afghan demands for justice.”

Actually, it is not unclear at all: they won’t. Huge numbers of Afghans will not be satisfied with anything less than the deaths of those involved in burning Qur’ans, for death is what Islamic law prescribes for the blasphemer. The troops meant no more malice toward the Qur’an, Islam, or Muslims than did Rimsha Masih, and in fact, only burned the Qur’ans because jihadist prisoners at the Bagram base north of Kabul were using them to pass messages to each other.

But that doesn’t matter to the Afghans who are enraged at the troops for burning the Muslim holy book, and it apparently doesn’t matter to Obama’s politically correct military leaders, either. Burning Qur’ans is not a crime according to American law, but only under Islamic law; thus the “administrative punishments” meted out to American troops for disposing of Qur’ans that had been used by enemies of the United States to plot against American personnel represent the enforcement of Sharia by the U.S. military.

Thus the senators who wrote to Zardari should write to Obama as well, if they want to see an end to the victimization of non-Muslims by Islamic blasphemy laws. For the United States continues to make non-Muslims suffer under unjust charges of blasphemy against this most thin-skinned of religions.

If these American troops do indeed suffer demotion and/or a loss of pay for burning the Qur’an, they can at least take comfort in the fact that as a new Islamic state (one of the largest in the world, as Obama claimed a few years ago), the U.S. is considerably more moderate than Pakistan and Afghanistan as well; in both of those countries, they would have been torn apart by raging mobs long ago, if they hadn’t been already executed legally. In comparison to that, sacrificing a bit of money and honor to the cause of Islam is certainly a small price to pay. Above all, the sanctity of the Qur’an is preserved, and that is apparently all that matters these days.

Russell Brand and the Degeneration of the Public Discourse

President Obama's reelection was the result of forty years of work and more, as the hard Left took control not only of the government, but of the media, the educational system, and the entertainment industry. No one has been willing to admit it, or has much noticed, but we live now in essentially a one-party state, in which the loyal opposition hastens to assure the public that its positions are based on the same core philosophy as that of the majority, but it just has a cleverer or more effective or cheaper way of implementing the majority's will. Those who dare go so far as to question that core philosophy are immediately subjected to opprobrium designed to brand them as Enemies of the People, shunned as quickly and viciously as were the victims of Stalin's show trials.

And so it was that my colleague Pamela Geller appeared recently on Russell Brand's BrandX, in an appearance that clearly Brand, who is apparently a fashionable personality of some note, had designed to use as a teaching moment, so as to warn his dimwitted followers that they must not resist the global jihad and Islamic supremacism, on pain of being read out of polite company and subjected to the ridicule and derision to which he subjected Geller.

To be sure, ridicule is a prescribed Alinskyite tactic for dealing with ideological enemies, but it is more than that as well: it is a confession of intellectual bankruptcy. Brand had Geller on not to discuss issues with her, or to hear her out at all. He would not have a fair and open discussion with her because he could not do so; after all, he is an actor, a professional liar, and she tells the unvarnished and unwelcome truth. But even had he been as informed and committed as anyone on the Left, he could not refute her, since the facts are on her side. So her ideological deviancy, her straying from the straight path, had to be exposed in other ways.

Brand chose to illustrate Geller's heresy by planting a Muslim heckler in the audience with a printed sign reading, "Pamela's Racism KILLS" (what race is jihad terror and Islamic supremacism again)? He lauded the heckler and even brought him up onto the stage, while agitatedly ordering that a microphone be moved away from a woman in the audience who stood up to defend Geller. Then Brand's producer, Charles Davis, published
a piece
that supposedly showed how Geller, when she was allowed to speak on the show at all, had contradicted positions she had taken at her blog, AtlasShrugs.com. Davis could only establish this, of course, by willfully misreading and misrepresenting what Geller actually said, but, as in the old Soviet Union, ideological deviants are not to be accorded any greater courtesy than that in any case.

Geller fought back valiantly, challenging Brand to debate the issues rationally, explaining her positions, and responding to even the most vicious and unfair of Brand's (and the Muslim heckler's) assertions. But one gets no hint of this from the video that aired—virtually everything that she said ended up on the cutting-room floor. If Brand had any integrity (ah, but there I am already setting the bar too high), he would release the full video of the Geller interview. But it is extremely unlikely that he will do that, as it would not serve his ideological purpose.

In this age of Obama, this is what passes for public debate: the politically incorrect one is subjected to scorn and ridicule, is not allowed to respond, and the Leftists who are doing the ridiculing then congratulate themselves on their moral and intellectual superiority. It is not debate, but rather anti-debate, the absence of discussion, the parody of discourse. The point, in fact, is not to refute the assertions and claims of the ideological deviant in question, but merely to signal to the ideologically obedient that this person is to be shunned, is not to be listened to, not to be taken seriously, and above all not to be believed or emulated.

It is the tactic of hyenas, of totalitarians, of the Nazi brownshirts who used to show up at the lectures of dissenting professors, not to argue with them, but only to heckle them, threaten them, and demoralize them, so as to intimidate them into silence. They thought that they represented the future, the dawning of a new age of justice, when ancient wrongs would be righted and ancient evils be put down forever. They thought tomorrow belonged to them. So, certainly, do their ideological heirs today, who are not Pamela Geller and her followers, but Russell Brand and his.

But Russell Brand will find, just as did those brownshirts, that the truth cannot forever be brutalized and ridiculed into silence. It will, one day, rise up, and put them in the place they deserve to be.

Rick Perry’s Jihad Problem

Rick Perry is woefully unfit to be president of the United States, but not because he
couldn't remember
 a key element of his own program during a recent debate, or because he gave a speech while
possibly drunk
. Rick Perry is woefully unfit to be president of the United States because he is a tool of Grover Norquist, the man who may be more responsible than anyone else for enabling
Muslim Brotherhood access
 to the highest levels of power in the U.S.

While it is hard for any Republican candidate to avoid Norquist altogether, so all-pervasive is his influence and power, Norquist is clearly much closer to Perry than to other candidates. Perry and Grover Norquist held a
joint press conference
 in March 2011.
Perry appeared
 at a fundraiser for Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform group. Also, Norquist
actively campaigned
 for Perry back in 2009. Their association is longstanding: Perry was investigated by the Texas Ethics Commission in 2004 for allegations that the governor illegally used campaign money to finance a trip to the Bahamas. The point here is not the allegations, but the fact that
along on the Bahamas trip
 at his own expense was Grover Norquist. Perry and Norquist are clearly not just casual acquaintances.

Which other candidates have fundraised for Norquist? Which have vacationed with him?

Then there is the whole business of the
Perry/Aga Khan curriculum
 on Islam for Texas schools, a complete whitewash of Islam and jihad that was initiated and officially sanctioned by Perry himself. The Perry campaign obviously realized how damaging the curriculum could have been to their man's chances, and so deleted it not only from the web, but also from the Google cache. All the while, Perry's attack dogs on the web energetically spread misinformation and disinformation about the curriculum, while smearing those who called attention to the problems with it.

The Perry love affair was a comedy. Some of the stalwart voices who had initially sounded the alarm about Norquist and his baneful influence within the Republican Party suddenly discovered that hey, an association with Grover really isn't that bad a thing, and everybody does it, so what's the big deal? Others
who profess
 to be anti-sharia decided that Perry's sponsoring a whitewashed Islam curriculum was just fine, since his partner in doing so was the Aga Khan, a "moderate."

The Perry onslaught became particularly virulent when individuals and websites with a reputation for intellectual and journalistic rigor uncritically repeated to large audiences the falsehoods that were being spread about the curriculum. These falsehoods originated with an obscure blogger named David Stein, who
falsely claimed
 that one teacher's lesson plan, completed for an assignment in the teacher training program for the Perry/Aga Khan curriculum, was the official curriculum itself. Since this teacher, Ronald Wiltse, had completed a reasonably good lesson plan, this led many to claim—again, falsely—that there wasn't anything wrong with the curriculum at all.

Yet what was most striking about the rapid spread of these false claims was their origin. David Stein's blog, CounterContempt.com, in June 2011, just before the Perry firestorm, had all of 179 visitors all month. Yet somehow blogs with tens of thousands more visitors daily found Stein's false claims about the curriculum and spread them far and wide in defense of Perry. The Iranian-American writer Amil Imani published a piece, "
Governor Perry's Islam Connection
," which retailed the false information about the Perry/Aga Khan curriculum on Islam for Texas schools that Stein originated. Imani relied for his information on the curriculum on a piece by Alana Goodman at Commentary. Goodman in turn relied on David Stein.

Others relied on Stein as well. Some
conservative bloggers
, including erstwhile friends and allies, responded to Perry's candidacy with cult-like devotion, invoked Stein's false claims, and asked me to delink them and denounced me because I dared question their god.
One anti-jihad writer
 of some reputation for clear thinking about the reality of jihadist teachings and tendencies across the various Islamic sects suddenly discovered, in support of Imani and Stein, an obscure historian from the 1930s whose statements supposedly proved that the misleading and politically correct Perry Islamic curriculum for Texas schools was perfectly fine.

It was remarkable testimony to the power, as well as the anxiety, of the Perry faithful that David Stein's obscure blog, with no readership, no history, and no reputation for credibility, could publish a false claim about the curriculum that so many big blogs would be ready immediately to publicize, while publishing the most outlandish charges against those of us who published the real curriculum.

How the big conservative blogs and even Commentary all found David Stein's tiny blog has never been explained.

Nonetheless, all the Perry camp's chicanery appears to be for naught. Perry will probably never be president, and that's a good thing. If, however, his campaign does revive and he surges again in the polls, I hope that his followers will behave with more integrity. But I won't be holding my breath.

Mona Eltahawy Coulda Been a Contender (Instead of a Bum, Which Is What She Is)

In the classic movie On the Waterfront, the failed boxer Terry Malloy complains in anguish to his brother: “I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am.” Those words apply with particular piquancy to the “journalist” Mona Eltahawy, who goes to court the Thursday after Thanksgiving to defend herself (“proudly”) against a criminal mischief charge stemming from her vandalism of one of our AFDI pro-freedom ad in the New York subways.

BOOK: The Worldwide Jihad: The Truth About Islamic Terrorism
4.76Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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