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Julian Glover’s CiF piece, “Don’t turn a failed bomb plot into an al Qaeda victory“, trots out predictable Guardian tropes minimizing the threats faced in the West by Islamic extremism:
The failed bomb plot – in which incendiary devices designed by the top explosives expert working for al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the Yemen-based militant faction, were intended to explode on passenger planes in mid-air – was dismissed by Glover as “a non-exploding printer cartridge packed in a box”.
He then devolves into classic boilerplate moral equivalence by actually suggesting that Western government officials and al Qaeda terrorists may be equally culpable:
“There is another danger we need to be aware of too: the symmetry of self-interest between the would-be bombers and the security services assembled to stop them. Both have a tendency to magnify serious but isolated incidents into one great interconnected global battle.”
Glover then devolves even further into classic Western self-masochism:
“The threat to the west lies in the west and from the west. It comes from cells of bitter and dangerous Islamist expatriates, in Bradford or Detroit, and from a foreign policy that has gone out of its way to allow them to believe quite wrongly that we want to destroy Islam.
The degree to which many in the West simply refuse to take the threats posed by radical Islam – a violent, theocratic, reactionary, misogynistic, racist movement - seriously can’t be overstated. The question asked after 9/11 in the U.S. by many on the far left, “what have we done to make them hate us so much,”continues to be repeated by otherwise smart and sober souls who apparently are unable to wrap their minds around the idea that there is indeed such a thing as good and evil and that, though not every issue in life is black and white, not every political challenge we face is morally gray. The idea that radical Islamist groups will cease in their malicious designs against Jews, America, and the West more broadly, if only we behave better is breathtaking in its naiveté – and reminds me of those, during the Cold War, who suggested that the West and the Soviet Union were both equally to blame for the conflict.
There is a generation of young Europeans and Americans who were raised to believe in immutable Western culpability – a reflexive self-loathing that passes off as “progressive” thought, but really has no resemblance whatsoever to what the word has historically meant. For, progressivism, if it means anything, refers to the belief that Western tolerance should end when faced with threats by those who are intolerant. There is a slippery slope from tolerance to moral relativism, and form moral relativism to outright nihilism. The inability of the Guardian left to morally distinguish between (admittedly imperfect) Western democracies (like UK, the US, and Israel) and undemocratic, illiberal terrorist movements (such as al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, etc.) represents a perversion of the progressive thought they supposedly subscribe to, and a profound threat to the future of freedom around the world.
While it is of course true that war and conflict should be avoided whenever possible, I long for the return of a progressive ideology similar to what existed during WW2 – a movement as passionate about their liberal values as they are about unapologetically asserting that such ideals are indeed worth fighting for.
This was published at The Propagandist by Hadar Sela
Professor Barry Rubin draws our attention to an important shift in the policy of the Muslim Brotherhood: explicit endorsement of the extremist jihadist program of Al Queda and its affiliates.
Unfortunately, as Prof. Rubin points out, they’ve made their intentions known in Arabic. Will the West notice?
“This is one of those obscure Middle East events of the utmost significance that is ignored by the Western mass media, especially because they happen in Arabic, not English; by Western governments, because they don’t fit their policies; and by experts, because they don’t mesh with their preconceptions.”
However, the fact that the Muslim Brotherhood happens to be “the most powerful group, both politically and religiously, in the Muslim communities of Europe and North America” makes it imperative that Western leaders, policy-makers and commentators rid themselves of the current debilitating blind spot which causes them to largely regard events in the Middle East as having no bearing upon their own environment. Generally speaking, much of the West’s media, academia and politicians seem determined to avoid seeing at all costs the connections between the anti-Israel rhetoric on their streets and the creeping influence of the Muslim Brotherhood in their own countries, with all its implications.
For considerable time now, the anti-Israel campaigns in Europe and America have been largely orchestrated by members of the Muslim Brotherhood and its affiliates. Moshe Dann has provided a comprehensive and useful overview of the Muslim Brotherhood and its partner organizations in North America. The situation in Europe is, if anything, even worse.In the UK Hamas activists operate openly and in some cases have achieved a remarkable level of entryism into British institutions.
The Muslim Brotherhood’s foothold in Britain became significant with the arrival there of its official spokesman for Europe, Egyptian-born member Kamal El Helbawy in the mid 1990s. In 1997 Helbawy founded the Muslim Association of Britain (MAB), together with fugitive Hamas commander Mohammed Sawalha, Azam Tammimi (who between 1989 and 1992 worked for the Muslim Brotherhood’s in Jordan) and the son of the head of the Muslim Brotherhood in Iraq, Anas Al Tikriti. Since then, numerous Muslim Brotherhood associated organizations have sprung up in the UK, often connected to at least one of the four above names. They include the Palestinian Return Centre, Interpal, the Institute of Islamic Political Thought, the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and media outlets such as the monthly Hamas magazine ‘Filastin Al Muslima’ and the ‘Palestine Times’.
Also operating in the UK are several organizations set up by the Federation of Islamic Organisations in Europe (FIOE) which is the Muslim Brotherhood umbrella organization in Europe, established in 1989. The Forum of European Muslim Youth and Student Organizations (FEMYSO) for example enjoys links with the European Union, the Council of Europe and the United Nations as well as close links with the Federation of Student Islamic Societies (FOSIS) in British universities.
This was published by Eugene Veklerov in the American Thinker
If you happen to find yourself in Saudi Arabia driving down the highway toward Mecca, you will eventually encounter a big sign advising you that Mecca is for Muslims only. The other road is “obligatory for non Muslims.”
Here is a reality check to keep in mind when someone issues another condemnation of Islamophobia in the Western World. Surely, we have plenty of room for improvement, but we are pikers at the game of religious discrimination.
In many Muslim countries, discrimination against Christians and Jews is not just practiced, it is codified into law. Thus, consider Egypt, which is one of the more secular and moderate countries in the Muslim World with a sizable religious minority of Coptic Christians. Egyptian law stipulates that a “Muslim man may marry a Christian woman but the opposite is forbidden; and if a Muslim woman does marry a Christian man, both the husband and the wife would be considered adulterers“. This quotation is drawn verbatim from a UN document.
It is noteworthy that civil, rather than just religious, laws prevent Christian men from marrying Muslim women. Marrying an Israeli woman is an entirely different matter altogether. “An Egyptian appeals court upheld a ruling that orders the country’s Interior Ministry to strip the citizenship from Egyptians married to Israeli women” (Associated Press report of June, 2010).
While conversion to Islam is encouraged in Muslim countries, conversion from Islam to another religion is a sin. And since the legal systems in many Muslim countries are based on Sharia law, such apostasy is also a crime, and we are not talking about the most fanatical countries like Iran, Saudi Arabia or Sudan. In a widely publicized case, a citizen of now-democratic Afghanistan, Abdul Rahman, was arrested in 2006 for converting to Christianity. He was threatened with execution but eventually he was released from prison under heavy pressure from Western governments.
At CiF Watch, we often contend with the challenge of exposing the profound threats to peace and freedom in the world posed by radical Islam (and exposing the Guardian’s rationalizations for, and apologetics about, this phenomenon) while avoiding narratives suggesting that we know what percentage of the Muslim community worldwide shares such radical views. While there is some empirical data purporting to quantify this percentage, I think its prudent not to assume knowledge pertaining to what’s in the hearts of most Muslims.
However, suggestions that violent religious extremism in the world is spread out equally among the major religious is simply indefensible and easily contradicted by all available evidence.
Naif Al-Mutawa wrote an essay for the Philadelphia Inquirer last year which is typical of such politically correct thinking. The central point, in his essay, “The Many Shapes of Extremism”, was this:
“My intent was to advance the notion that extremism is nothing more than a bunch of neurotransmitters working overtime – or perhaps under time. It is not Islam or Judaism or Hinduism that creates extremism; rather, some people are predisposed to extremism and will pursue it in any faith.”
(Here’s a link to Al-Mutawa’s essay published elsewhere)
Al-Mutawa may be correct to some extent. I’m sure certain individuals are indeed naturally (even, perhaps, biologically) more predisposed to extremism than others, just like some people are more predisposed to abusing drugs or alcohol. But, as with alcohol abuse, we wouldn’t deny an element of choice involved in the behavior would we? Further, if certain cultures have a higher degree of alcoholism than other cultures it would be reasonable to ask why…what are the cultural and ethical norms that may contribute to this disparity. Naif Al-Mutawa refuses to acknowledge or address the fact that (while, again, the overwhelming majority of Muslims are not extremists), violent extremist acts are, when motivated by religion, dramatically more likely to be carried out by Muslims than by non-Muslims (Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, etc.)
The point isn’t to prejudge or, in any way, demonize Muslims. Rather, the point is that, as extremism in our day is to a large degree a radical Islamic phenomena, it is incumbant for the Muslim community to acknowledge this problem, figure out the religious/cultural factors influencing such aberrant behavior, and stop insisting (contrary to all the evidence) that other religions are also plagued with the same degree of extremism. Ultimately, the moderate forces in their community must do ideological battle with the extremists in their midst – to win hearts and minds for a future Islam not compromised such extremism.
A guest post by AKUS
Now that everyone, it seems, with access to a keyboard and blog has had their say – and continues to have their say – about the Koran-burning Pastor I thought I might as well weigh in from the particular perspective of CiF Watch and how the Guardian handled the matter on “Comment is Free”.
Unlike historical cases when religious books were burned with the full support of the government of the time and apparently much of the populace–very often the Torah and Talmud - in the USA self-anointed pastor Terry Jones is opposed by the full weight of opinion of those in government and most citizens. While all agree that he has the protection of the 1st Amendment for freedom of expression and religion, most have also stated that burning a Koran is imprudent and requested that he and others not do so.
In pre-Internet times, Jones would have been found wandering the street next to his church holding up a placard, perhaps equipped with a megaphone, and almost no one would know of his existence. Passers-by would have crossed the road to avoid him, and parents would have told their children it was rude to make fun of the crazy man. It is the Internet and the mainstream media that suddenly catapulted this non-entity into public view.
The Guardian did not hesitate to provide a platform via the Internet to Mya Guarnieri so that she could continue its habit of feeding anti-American hysteria by describing Jones’ views as the start of a nation-wide wave of anti-Muslim hatred. Guarnieri did this in an article with a title that played to two of the Guardian’s favorite tropes, Islamophobia: the new antisemitism, illustrated with a picture of the Ku Klux Klan from 1962. Concluding her article in the usual “rush to judgment” style of CiF columnists Guarnieri wrote:
“Gainesville’s struggle is a mirror for the country. And so are my memories. In the past, there was antisemitism, roiling just below the surface. Now, there is Islamophobia. If Terry Jones burns copies of the Qur’an in Gainesville, he’ll leave a shameful scorch on us all.”
Guarnieri was sharply pulled up by many commenting below the line – even by this Muslim:
Michael Tomasky on American Racism
The Guardian columnist Michael Tomasky doesn’t think too highly of Americans. Let me restate that. He doesn’t think too highly of Republicans, conservatives, Tea Party activists, or opponents of the Mosque at Ground Zero. This last group represents up to 70% of all Americans (and includes a good percentage of Democrats).
As we’ve come to the 9th anniversary of the series of coordinated suicide attacks by al-Qaeda upon the United States on September 11, 2001, such contempt for his fellow Americans strikes me as especially relevant. Allow me to explain.
On “Islamophobia” in America, Tomasky said:
“I did not expect to see this much hatred, this depth of conviction that the president of the United States is an enemy of his own country, this intensity of bigotry directed at American Muslims, this degree of belief in obvious and poisonous lies.”
On the threat by ONE pastor to burn a Koran, Tomasky said:
“I’ll say it again. This stuff is definitely on the rise, and it has to be correlated in some psychic way to the rise of extremism in this country.”
On the stabbing of one Muslim cab driver in NYC, Tomasky said:
“Anyone surprised that a Muslim cab driver was stabbed in New York? If you are surprised, you’ve been sleepwalking the last two weeks….The man, Ahmed Sharif, will survive. But from reports it seems clear that he was stabbed because of his religion.”
Later, Tomasky Updates his original post: “
“[The] initial reporting is that Enright doesn’t fit the profile at all of an angry “Foxer”. He’s a film student who recently went to Afghanistan and who’s been working with a project that supports the building of the Cordoba House.”
Indeed, a law enforcement source told journalist Ben Smith that Enright made “nonsensical statements” to police after his arrest, but that investigators do not see an evident connection to the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque” project.
On opposition, by 9/11 victims’ families, to the Cordoba Mosque at Ground Zero, he said
“Victims are entitled to their irrational hatreds. What they’re not entitled to is for those hatreds to become the basis of policy and to override the principles in the Constitution and the law.”
Yet, he offers no evidence that such incidents are anything but lone acts, nor does he even suggest that there’s data available indicating a rise in (Islamic or any other) extremism. Indeed, Mr. Tomasky’s chimera of an Islamophobic America doesn’t fit the “profile”. According to the most recent (2008) released FBI Hate Crime Statistics Jews are nearly 10 times more likely than Muslims to be victims of Hate Crimes in the U.S.
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Hadar Sela
In praise of Irshad Manji: Courageous Muslim reformer who won’t be published at ‘Comment is Free’
January 24, 2012 in Comments which are off-topic, ad hominem, racist, vulgar or include threats of violence will be deleted | Tags: Comment is Free, Guardian, Irshad Manji, Islam, Karen Armstrong | by Adam Levick | 24 comments
There were two Guardian pieces focusing on Islam which I was tempted to post on today.
The first, “Letters: We need an inquiry into anti-Islam press“, Jan. 24, is a call for a Leveson-style government inquiry into “negative, distorted and even fabricated reports in media coverage of the Muslim community.” Signatories of the letter were accurately characterized by Harry’s Place as “a helpful list of Islamist activists connected to extremist political parties, and those on the far Left (and their hangers-on) who have made common cause.”
The second piece, a CiF commentary by Karen Armstrong titled, “Prejudices about Islam will be shaken by this show“, Jan. 22, cites an exhibition at the British Museum, Hajj: Journey to the Heart of Islam, to argue that a respect for other faiths is central to Muslim tradition. Armstrong conversely berates the West for “succumbing unquestioningly to a medieval [anti-Muslim] prejudice born in a time of extreme Christian belligerence”.
In different ways, both pieces reflect the Guardian’s grand tradition of whitewashing the threats posed by militant Islam and the intolerance towards religious minorities in nations governed by the letter or spirit of Sharia law – and the Western self-flagellation which inhibits honest discussions of Islam’s social and political decline or, per the question Bernard Lewis posed, “What Went Wrong?”.
The question of how best to talk about Islam in the context of our mission (combating antisemitism, and the assault on Israel’s legitimacy, at the Guardian and ‘Comment is Free’) is indeed, at times, vexing. But, the more I read the Guardian the more I’m convinced that the institution’s greatest fault lay not in its unwillingness to critically discuss radical Islam but, rather, in its failure to champion those Muslims who passionately advocate for genuine liberal reform within Islam.
Irshad Manji, the Canadian born Muslim who I had the pleasure of meeting following a speech she gave at the Philadelphia chapter of the American Jewish Committee in 2002, will never be published at ‘Comment is Free’. But, her book, “The trouble with Islam today” (banned across much of the Middle East) is a must-read for those genuinely seeking a future Islam which is moderate, peaceful and tolerant.
Irshad Manji
In “The Trouble with Islam”, Manji addresses:
Manji is a Senior Fellow with the European Foundation for Democracy, and also directs the Moral Courage Project at New York University.
Her latest book, “Allah, Liberty and Love” attempts to explain the following:
In Amsterdam, in 2011, 22 jihadis stormed the launch for ”Allah, Liberty and Love”, ordered her execution and threatened to break her neck.
Those seen in the video are members of “Sharia4Belgium“, an international network with cells in most of the countries Manji visited in 6 months of book tours.
Noted Manji, optimistically, about the incident:
Manji’s bravery is truly inspirational, and stands in stark contrast to our day’s prevailing ethos of denial and appeasement in the face of such profound threats to the liberal values we claim to hold dear.
In praise of Irshad Manji!
(Enjoy the following clips, below, of Manji’s brief introduction to the themes explored in her latest book on Islam. Also, visit her YouTube channel, “Like” her Facebook page, and follow her on Twitter.)
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