Thursday, February 09, 2006
Spreading The Virus Of Blind Islamist Rage
What is Taqiyya? It's what idiots fall for on the way to their doom.
Michelle Malkin:
It's worth a reminder that the phenomenon of manufactured hate crimes by Muslims is something we're quite familiar with here in America:
Fake Muslim hate crimes: Where's the apology, CAIR?
Muslim "hate crimes"
The Muslim hate crime that wasn't
More Muslim hate crime myths
Myth of the Muslim hate crime epidemic
The boy who cried "Muslim"
Meanwhile, the Islamist-directed theater continues: "100,000 Muslims to vent anger in London at cartoon protest."
Amir Taheri in The Opinion Journal:
The Muslim Brotherhood's position, put by one of its younger militants, Tariq Ramadan--who is, strangely enough, also an adviser to the British home secretary--can be summed up as follows: It is against Islamic principles to represent by imagery not only Muhammad but all the prophets of Islam; and the Muslim world is not used to laughing at religion. Both claims, however, are false.
There is no Quranic injunction against images, whether of Muhammad or anyone else. When it spread into the Levant, Islam came into contact with a version of Christianity that was militantly iconoclastic. As a result some Muslim theologians, at a time when Islam still had an organic theology, issued "fatwas" against any depiction of the Godhead. That position was further buttressed by the fact that Islam acknowledges the Jewish Ten Commandments--which include a ban on depicting God--as part of its heritage. The issue has never been decided one way or another, and the claim that a ban on images is "an absolute principle of Islam" is purely political. Islam has only one absolute principle: the Oneness of God. Trying to invent other absolutes is, from the point of view of Islamic theology, nothing but sherk, i.e., the bestowal on the Many of the attributes of the One.
MEMRI cites a typical example of the hate-mongering being propagated by the imams:
In a February 3, 2006 Friday sermon, Sheikh Yousef Al-Qaradhawi, who is head of the European Council for Fatwa and Research, president of the International Association of Muslim Scholars (IAMS), and the spiritual guide of many other Islamist organizations across the world (including the Muslim Brotherhood), exhorted worshippers to show rage to the world over the Danish paper Jylland Posten's publication of cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad. The sermon was aired on Qatar TV on February 3, 2006.
Little Green Footballs has the video.
National Review Online:
Creating Outrage
The recent anti-Danish emotional wave coming from the Muslim world, in fact, is far from a spontaneous reaction, but it has been cunningly orchestrated by a knowledgeable insider, a real snake in the grass who has been creeping in Denmark for the last 15 years.
Ahmed Abdel Rahman Abu Laban, a 60-year-old Palestinian imam who has been residing in Copenhagen since 1993, has become over the last few years the face of Islam in Denmark, creating his own persona of a moderate cleric who seeks dialogue but who is victimized by the widespread "racism" of the Danes. Despite his poor command of the Danish language, Abu Laban is a frequent guest on Danish television and in meetings with government officials, where he claims to represent the voice of the local Muslim community. Even though part of the establishment has always looked at him with suspicion (Prime Minister Rasmussen has always refused to meet with him), Danish intelligentsia has made him a celebrity — so much of one that even the Washington Post recently profiled him as "one of Denmark's most prominent imams."
But Abu Laban's real face has now been revealed. In September, the imam immediately condemned Jyllands-Posten's cartoons and led protests at the local level. Danish politicians and media, busy with local elections, ignored him. But Abu Laban is not the kind of person who gives up easily.
Danish Courage
As the riots spread through the Islamic world, the British Foreign Secretary, the U.S. State Department, the United Nations secretary general, various responsible Muslim organizations, many commentators in Europe and the U.S., including some distinguished conservative commentators, are calling for restraint on both sides.
What both sides would those be then? Well, one side has published a handful of cartoons, arguably blasphemous and certainly insulting to the Prophet Mohammed, and the other side has burned embassies, taken hostages, murdered three people suspected of being Christians and/or Danes, shot at Danish soldiers helping children in Iraq, marched through London with banners threatening further bomb attacks on the city, and attacked and beaten people whom they suspected of some vague connection with, well, with Europe or Christianity.
Suppose both sides listen to these calls for restraint. What would happen? I suppose that one side would stop burning embassies and murdering people and the other side would no longer publish cartoons to which the murderers might object. That would mean the murderers had obtained their objective and the Danish newspaper that first published the cartoons had been defeated in its campaign against the unofficial Islamist censorship that in recent years has spread across Europe by murder and intimidation.
Drawing Fire
To try and compare the actions of Jyllands-Posten, as Bill Clinton effectively did, with the race-baiting traditions of Der Sturmer is to reveal an ignorance of history and a disdain for free speech that disgraces the office he once held. Even the most notorious of the cartoons, the one that shows Mohammed with a bomb decorated with Islamic text in his turban, can be seen not as an insult, but as a challenge to Muslims to demonstrate that (as is indeed certainly the case) there is far more to their faith than the atrocities that have recently defaced it. Harsh? Maybe, but it was also in the Western tradition of vigorous, free discussion. And as such it should be defended.
Bombing Of Turkish Riot Police In Istanbul
Crap.
CNN: "The blast took place at an Internet cafe frequented by police officers from the nearby local headquarters of Istanbul's riot police."
Three guesses as to what the local riot police have been doing lately.
Turkish television is showing injured bomb victims arriving at the hospital. Some of 'em are just kids, or early teens. Wire services are reporting four injured.
By the way, today's Turkish Daily News: "Protests spread across Turkey as concerns rise that bigger demonstrations may be in the offing as Friday prayers approach."
UPDATE: SkyTurk just said 14 injured.
The case for cleansing the world of the virulent evil of Islamic fascism grows ever stronger.
