Sunday, October 17, 2010
WHO LET THE DOGS OUT?
It's been a week since the Sunday Times ran its profile on me and the attacks from the leftist/Islamic machine have been unremitting. They are rapid not just online, but in print and across the pond. What are they so afraid of? A little truth. Are they so in a hurry to be living under the sharia and I and my colleagues stand in their way?
It gives yo a very good idea how unwilling they are to engage in genuine "dialogue" to explore the most pressing and critical issues of our time. Instead, they destroy the messenger, pervert the message, pat themselves on the back grinning, 'our work is done here.'
You can avoid reality, but you cannot avid the consqueneces of avoiding reality (paraphrasing Rand.)
Daniel Greenfield does a lovely mop up of one such hot mess - jihad Jeff over at The Atlantic. How much longer these clowns can stay in business is anyone's guess.
The Koran Says What Daniel Greenfield (hat tip Jane)
At The Atlantic, J.J. Goldberg produced one of the more misguided addenda to the New York Times' Bash Pamela Geller week, by manufacturing a thin narrative, and then addressing it rather than Geller's actual arguments. And then forwarding it to Gerecht, who isn't familiar with Geller. This practice of creating "strawmen", of arguing against what critics of Islam are supposedly saying, than what they are actually saying, has become a notoriously common tool for the liberal media, which censors even cartoons that don't feature Mohammed, and is certainly eager to censor arguments that do.The attack typically rephrases the arguments in a tone somewhere between mocking and ominous, at once undermining the argument by ridiculing it and associating it with Anti-Semitism, particularly ridiculous as Geller is Jewish, and Islam is undeniably Anti-Semitic.In a recent New York Times interview, the blogger Pamela Geller leveled many serious charges against Islam; she stated that Muslims curse Jews and Christians during their five-times-a-day prayer; that the only good Muslim is a secular Muslim; and most perniciously, she said that the Qur'an has never been properly translated, insinuating that it contains dark secrets about Muslims and their religious responsibilities.There's a huge reach from, "it was never properly translated" to "it contains dark secrets." I feel the Torah has never been properly translated either. That doesn't mean it contains dark secrets. It means it's never been properly translated. I can say the same thing about many novels in languages which don't share much common linguistic ancestry with English.Wafa Sultan, who was raised an Arab Muslim, has said the same thing. As Gerecht himself points out, plenty of Koran translations do show that Islam is hostile to non-Muslims. There are some PC Koran translations, but the most popular ones used by Muslims are non-PC. The diversity of translations used by Muslims shows there isn't necessarily an ideal translation. Because in some cases there isn't even full agreement on what the Koran means. Stating that there should be an ideal translation means that Muslims and non-Muslims who don't know Arabic should know what the Koran says and doesn't say.But J.J. Goldberg makes it his thesis that Geller claimed that the Koran contains "dark secrets." Now I don't claim to read her mind, but this is the quote, Goldberg is working off.Now I also believe that a true translation, an accurate translation of the Koran, is really not available in English, according to many of the Islamic scholars that I've spoken to. That's deeply troubling. And I don't think that many westernized Muslims know when they pray five times a day that they're cursing Christians and Jews five times a day. I don't think they know that.I don't claim to be able to read Geller's mind, but her reference was most likely to, the opening of the Koran, "Show us the straight path, the path of those whom Thou hast favored; not the (path) of those who earn thine anger nor of those who go astray."This is generally thought to mean Jews as being the ones who earned Allah's anger, and Christians being the ones who have gone astray. Robert Spencer has gone into some detail on the subject here. The question here is less about literal translation and more about commonly understood references. Some translations of the Koran do add these words for clarification. Some maintain the original language.But this is less about dark secrets, than it is about clarity. No one needs to argue the meaning of this verse in particular, to show that Islam commands Muslims to conquer and rule over non-Muslims. And Muslims who are familiar with the Koran, learn contextual meanings, rather than just the exact meaning of words. They are taught what the phrase means, rather than just being given a dictionary. This is not unusual with most religious works in most of the major religions. Any Westernized Muslims who do not know that the reference is to Jews and Christians, are either the product of a non-mainstream Islamic education, or no Islamic education whatsoever.While one need not point to this verse to find that the Koran is hostile to Jews and Christians. The centrality of it however is what makes it so vital in Muslim religious life.Gerecht has the unenviable task of making sense of J.J. Goldberg's speculations about what Geller said (rather than Goldberg emailing and asking her) and I have the unenviable task of making sense of that whole mess. A mess that has less to do with the Koran, than it does with silencing straightforward criticism of Islam, to only allow criticism of Islamic extremism.Late in the piece, Gerecht makes the arguable claim that Muslims don't think about Jews and Christians when they pray and don't need to hate Jews and Christians to be Muslims.And about Muslim prayer: I certainly have no perfect way of knowing what Muslims think when they pray, but I really do think they know what they're doing. If westernized Muslims are facing the Almighty, they know what's in their hearts. Devout Muslims need not hate Jews and Christians to worship the Creator.While Jews and Christians are not the focus of Muslim prayers, neither are they absent from them as bad examples, as has already been shown above. This is another strawman that substitutes one argument for another. Islam is based on Allah's rejection of Jews and Christians, and the Koranic claim that Jews and Christians rejected Mohammed. The separate existence of Jews and Christians is in Muslim eyes a testament to their heresy or unbelief. For if they truly believed, they would be Muslims.Can devout Muslims not hate Jews or Christians? Only if we define devout differently than Mohammed, who Gerecht admits hated both.But from a technical standpoint, devout Muslims need not hate Jews and Christians. They're just commanded not to befriend them, and to subjugate and kill them. But if they can do so with no more emotion than machines, perhaps Mohammed would still approve. This is hardly much of a defense though. It is no comfort that your murderers did not hate you personally, but were only acting on orders from their holy book.Reuel Gerecht is correct that Muslims are more than just physical embodiments of the Koran, but nor can you casually talk about Muslims, without acknowledging that they strive to live by the Koran as an ideal. Muslims are human beings who feel the same things we do. But so were the followers of National Socialism or the guards in the watchtowers of Soviet Gulags. There were, for example, Nazis who killed Jews, but also saved some of them. That the same man who oversaw mass murder, might save a child, tells us that people are complex. But it is no denial of what Nazism is, or what Nazis did, or even what this man in particular did.
There js much more. Go (the toons are great too.)
Saturday, October 16, 2010
So this is how it is presented to the people, as a fait accompli. How grotesque.
Last month, "Chancellor Angela Merkel said that Germans have failed to grasp how Muslim immigration has transformed their country and will have to come to terms with more mosques than churches throughout the countryside, according to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung daily."
“Our country is going to carry on changing, and integration is also a task for the society taking up the task of dealing with immigrants,” Ms. Merkel told the daily newspaper. “For years we’ve been deceiving ourselves about this. Mosques, for example, are going to be a more prominent part of our cities than they were before.”
Germany, with a population of 4-5 million Muslims, has been divided in recent weeks by a debate over remarks by the Bundesbank’s Thilo Sarrazin, who argued Turkish and Arab immigrants were failing to integrate and were swamping Germany with a higher birth rate.
The Chancellor’s remarks represent the first official acknowledgement that Germany, like other European countries, is destined to become a stronghold of Islam. She has admitted that the country will soon become a stronghold.
And yet Merkel concedes that German multicultural society has failed. In a speech in Potsdam, she said the so-called "multikulti" concept -- where people would "live side-by-side" happily -- did not work.
"And of course, the approach [to build] a multicultural [society] and to live side-by-side and to enjoy each other... has failed, utterly failed."
It is in the context of these remarks that the brutal reality of what that means becomes painfully clear. German students and teachers are being bullied and beaten by Muslim gangs in Germany. The videos and the reports made by teachers describe a complete breakdown of society (scroll and and watch the deeply disturbing videos below). And yet today it is announced that German universities will train Muslim imams, teachers.
And add this to this potent cocktail -- over at the Weekly Standard:
While German Chancellor Angela Merkel has not mobilized her electoral base around hatred of the U.S.—like her predecessor Gerhard Schröder—she also does not have the required fire in her belly to confront radical Islam. The running list of media reports detailing Germany as a kind of oasis for jihadist activities is the story behind the latest expression of Germany’s dismissal of radical Islamic attacks. Washington Post columnist Jackson Diehl posed this sharp question: “Have Germany's security services learned nothing in the last decade?” He answered his question by saying they had become “dangerously complacent.”
[...]
Hezbollah remains a legal entity in Germany and its 900 members are active in promoting Iran’s revolutionary Islam. If Germany is to be taken seriously on the world stage, it must dissolve Hezbollah’s operation and aggressively shut down mosques that promote revolutionary Islamic terror. In short, the phase of monitoring has to be complemented by cracking the German security whip to stop homegrown radical Islam.
Over at BNI: Muslim Germanophobia
“It is obviously no longer an isolated incident that students and teachers are forced to hear anti-German statements.” It is intolerable that German students and teachers are treated this way in their own country.
Islam in Europe Often they’re ridiculed, often they’re even beaten. In class barely anybody speaks to them, they keep back, rarely voice their opinion – in short, they’re not integrated in school. But these are not Muslim immigrant children in a German school, but German children in a secondary school (5th-9th grades) in Essen where 70% of the children are Muslims.
“They’re not threatened with a knife every day. but the children of Muslim immigrants clearly have their way here,” says the school principal. The female teachers have to deal with students saying “don’t speak to her, she’s just a German slut.”
“When it’s Ramadan, there’s a state of emergency. The last time it went so far, that they spit in our food,” says the home-economics teacher. “People always say that foreigners are discriminated, but here it’s precisely the other way around.” A Lebanese Arabic teacher says that the German way of living is very clearly being rejected by his students, the attitude is almost chic.
The German children respond with aggression or by over-adapting their behavior. In the playground you find them in the corners. Sebastian, an ethnic German 16 year old, feels bullied by the Muslim students, and is often involved in fights. Juli is a friend of the devout Saleh from Palestine. She calls herself a Muslim, which means: no parties, no alcohol, no sex.
The teachers try to respond t the situation with clarity and by upholding German laws and regulations, but also by mother-tongue classes and understanding for the Lebanese.
Islam in Europe Two teachers from a Kreuzberg (Berlin) school recently wrote in the GEW Teachers’ Union paper of the anti-German harassment some German students experience in schools. They wrote that German students are threatened and bullied, and that the non-German students often receive help from relatives or friends in conflicts.
Berlin youth coach Oliver Lück says such incidents happen every day.
• Dennis (14) from Reinickendorf was pushed around and beaten. They (Muslims) could do whatever they wanted with him, and he had to pay protection money to the older foreign students. In the end, he couldn’t take it anymore and thought of suicide. Finally, his parents helped him.
• Lena (15) from Schöneberg – a confident teen, she died her head red and wore black clothes. When she came to the school, she was a foreigner among the other girls, who wore a headscarf. The girls whispered about her, they laughed at her and caller her the ‘fire alarm’. Lena began to smoke, and later started up with alcohol and harder drugs.
• Kevin (16) from Neukölln – There were hardly any Germans in his school. The Arab guys provoked him, first with insults, then tripped him and pushed him. At some point, he fought back, and found himself facing twelve boys, relatives of the attackers, who beat him up. From that point on he started dressing like his tormentors and imitating their language. He wasn’t beaten up anymore, but had to run errands for the others.
• Domitian E. was harassed because I speak German,” says Domitian. ”Altogether we were 29 students in the class, and besides me there was only one other German student,” he says. “The rest were mainly Arabs and Turks.”
From the first few days he was discriminated against, harassed and insulted. They cursed him behind his back since he came from a ‘smart’ school, and that his classmates often accosted him in groups, asking him why he didn’t speak like they did. His classmates spoke “Kanake German” (German with a foreign accent and foreign terms). Domitian says he didn’t want to speak that way. He avoid the other students and tried not to respond to them. Eventually, he avoided school and became increasingly sick.
In today's Human Events, my expose of yet more of the creeping sharia and stealth jihad advancing in the U.S. and Europe:
The latest submission to Islam comes to us from the meat industry in both Europe and the United States. Recently I have been reporting on the little-noted but explosive new revelations that much of the meat in Europe is being processed as halal and sold without the halal label. This is not the exception, but the rule, and the people are being betrayed by their own elected officials. And it's happening here, too.Yes, folks, if you're in Europe, and in many areas in America as well, the meat you are eating is probably halal, unless you're keeping kosher. In a little-known strike against freedom, yet again, we are being forced into consuming meat slaughtered by means of a barbaric, torturous and inhuman method: Islamic slaughter.
Where are the PETA clowns and the ridiculous celebs who pose naked on giant billboards for PETA and "animal rights"? They would rather see people die of cancer or AIDS than see animals used in drug testing, but torturous and painful Islamic slaughter is OK.
Many people have written to me saying that they simply won't eat halal meat, as they object to the methods used to slaughter the animal. And I agree. The Sharia term for halal slaughter is dhakat. Dhakat is to slaughter an animal by cutting the trachea, the esophagus, and the jugular vein, letting the blood drain out while saying "Bismillah allahu akbar"--in the name of Allah the greatest.
Many Christians, Hindus or Sikhs and Jews find it offensive to eat meat slaughtered according to Islamic ritual (although Jews are less likely to be exposed to such meat, because they eat kosher). The issue for many Christians is that in halal slaughter, an imam offers the animal up as a sacrifice to Allah which makes it meat sacrificed to idols.
70% of New Zealand lamb imported into the United Kingdom is halal. It is not labeled as such, so people are eating halal without even knowing it. But people there are fighting back: When halal food was imposed on public schools in the United Kingdom in 2007, parents were in an uproar. And last March, Stop Islamization of Europe (SIOE), the sister organization to my group Stop Islamization of America (SIOA), called for the cessation of mandatory consumption of halal meat on the continent.
As halal slaughter becomes more common in the U.S., the likelihood of non-Muslims who object to halal meat for whatever reason unknowingly buying it also increases....
CAB SWARM: ISLAMIC SUPREMACISM IN NEW YORK CITY, PRAYER IN THE STREETS
Recently New York City Atlas readers have written to complain of a relatively new phenomenon, a cab swarm on Friday afternoons followed by street prayers, etc. I suspect the reason for this is there may be a plan afoot to build a mega mosque in this particular area.
Yes, everyone has religious liberty, but the street praying is territtorial and out of line. How disruptive to this quiet residential area of Manhattan. Mayor Gloomberg is banning smoking from Central Park and other public places but this is OK?
There was no activity at the site of the Ground Zero mega mosque either. They closed surrounding mosques and had worshippers come in from out of the area. Go down to the Ground Zero mosque location on Friday afternoon and check out all the out-of-state plates.
We have seen this activity grow to intolerable proportions in Paris. This reader writes from polite and lovely Riverside Drive and 72nd Street. Here is what Atlas reader Cos wrote:
As recently as one year ago there was typically zero activity at this location on Friday afternoons.
Below are photos (taken today) of what is now the norm. I counted over 250 taxicabs and 30 pedicabs choking the streets around the "Cultural Center". There was not a single squad car, or patrolman on foot, horse or bike anywhere to be seen in the area.Here was the scene.
UPDATE: Reader Davida is spot on:
My husband drives a limo in NYC. If he pulls up to a location to pick up his client and sits there for more than thirty seconds he gets slapped with a $105.00 parking ticket. F**k, I'm gonna tell him to take a prayer rug with him, whip it out, take off his shoes and stick his butt in the air, the he can wait as long as he wants to and no more tickets. Seems as if you are muslim, you can get away with murder. Oh, that's right, they already do.
UPDATE: Special rights for special classes. This is submission to Islamic supremacism.
Jane, in the comment section, reports:
NEW YORK CITY POLICE DEPARTMENT SAYS DIRECTIVE NOT TO TICKET COMES DIRECTLY FROM BLOOMBERG THROUGH CITY COUNCIL
(212) 580-6411 20th precinct to verify
FORT HOOD JIHAD: ARMY OFFICER ORDERED DESTRUCTION OF VIDEO EVIDENCE -- "ALLAHU AKBAR!" -- "ALLAH IS GREATER"
This is treason. An army officer order the destruction of evidence in a jihadist attack on American soldiers? The officer should be on trial for treason. Who is looking out for Americans? We know who is looking out for the jihad in America. All Atlas Fort Hood jihad coverage here.
Fort Hood jihad: Army officer ordered destruction of video evidence Jihadwatch
Can't have a video circulating of a Muslim shouting "Allahu akbar" and murdering people, now, can we? That would be "Islamophobic"!
"Soldier says ordered to delete Fort Hood videos," by Angela K. Brown and Michael Graczyk for Associated Press, October 15 (thanks to Roland):
FORT HOOD, Texas - A soldier who recorded the terror of last year's deadly shooting rampage in Fort Hood using his cell phone was ordered by an officer to delete both videos, a military court heard Friday.Under cross examination, Pfc. Lance Aviles told an Article 32 hearing that his noncommissioned officer ordered him to destroy the two videos on Nov. 5, the same day a gunman unleashed a volley of bullets inside a processing center at the Texas Army post.
The footage could have been used as evidence at the military hearing to decide if Maj. Nidal Hasan should stand trial in the shootings. The 40-year-old American-born Muslim has been charged with 13 counts of premeditated murder and 32 counts of attempted premeditated murder.
Twenty-nine witnesses over three days have appeared either in a courtroom or by video link. Prosecutors have not said whether they'll seek the death penalty if the case goes to trial.
Aviles described how he was waiting for medical tests at the center with his battle buddy, Pfc. Kham Xiong, when he heard someone shout. Then the gunshots began.
He said he saw a tanned, balding man wearing an Army combat uniform and carrying a black pistol.
"I saw smoke coming from the pistol," Aviles told the court.
The pair threw themselves to the floor. Aviles turned to his left to check Xiong and discovered his friend had been shot.
"His head was facing the left and a shard of his skull was sticking up," Aviles said.
Xiong, a 23-year-old father of three from St. Paul, Minn., was among the 13 who died in the attack. Aviles, the 20th person to provide testimony at the hearing, was not hurt.
Addressing the court via video link from Afghanistan, Spc. Megan Martin said she had been waiting to take medical tests when saw a man to her left stand up and shout "Allahu Akbar!" -- "God is great!" in Arabic -- then start firing a weapon...
So crippled has our military (and other branches of government) become by this self-imposed sharia (do not insult Islam), that despite the staggering loss of US soldiers, the chief concern of Army chief Casey in the bloody aftermath of the Fort Hood jihad was that"speculation could potentially heighten backlash against some of our Muslim soldiers and what happened at Fort Hood was a tragedy, but I believe it would be an even greater tragedy if our diversity becomes a casualty here."
That was the concern.
On the day of Major Hasan's mass slaughter of US troops at Fort Hood in the bloodiest act of war on a military base in US history, Major Muslim Hasan distributed Qurans and his card, calling infidels to convert to Islam before his jihad (posted at Atlas November 6, 2009 --Major Hasan's Dawah before Jihad).
Hasan screamed "Allahu Akbar"!!! as he mowed down US soldiers at Fort Hood.
Obama has continued to withhold evidence in the Fort Hood jihadist attack and continues to shield the Muslim terrorist. Senators have been forced to sue the White House for information.ATLAS BROKE THE STORY OF MAJOR HASAN'S BUSINESS CARD "SoA" SOLIDER OF ALLAH here
Below is a partial transcript of Muslim terrorist Major Hasan's fellow psychiatrist’s recollection of a lecture Hasan gave (a “grand round” is the term for it) when he was a medical resident at Walter Reed. “It freaked them out.” Normally, a lecturer focuses on a particular disease or disorder and recent research or treatment options. Instead, Hasan reportedly harangued the doctors and staff about what the Quran taught about non-believers going to hell, being scalded, beheaded, etc. A Muslim psychiatrist in the audience reportedly challenged him about his interpretation of the Quran, but he would not back down (because he was right). Another version of the story I heard quoted a source as saying that several in the audience suggested afterward that Hasan might be a shooter someday.
Here is the direct link to the MP3 file that contains the statement about people wondering if Hasan would "freak out and shoot people someday": This URL still works...at the moment, at least.
Here's Grant's transcription of pieces of the key part that starts a little after three minutes in the audio file:
4:01 - "A couple years ago, two or three years ago, he gave a Grand Rounds presentation"
4:19 - "But instead of giving an academic paper, he gave a lecture on the Quran"
4:29 - "He talked about how if you're a nonbeliever, uh, the Quran says you should have your head cut off, you should have oil poured down your throats, you should be set on fire"
4:58 - "People actually talked in the hallway afterwards about, 'Is he, uh, one of these people who's gonna freak out and shoot people someday?' It was half kidding, but half serious, he said."
Here is the power point presentation Muslim terrorist Hasan gave on grand rounds:
Major Hasan's Power Point Presentation made on Grand Rounds
(The page turns every 12 seconds. Read it all)
ISLAMIC COUP ON LEBANON IMMINENT
The truly and deliberately evil men are a very small minority; it is the appeaser who unleashes them on mankind; it is the appeaser’s intellectual abdication that invites them to take over. When a culture’s dominant trend is geared to irrationality, the thugs win over the appeasers. Ayn Rand
Ahmadinejad did not just go to the Lebanon/Israeli border solely to spew his nazi-like anti-American, antisemtic annihilationist invective. Clearly, there is more to it. Something evil is afoot, and the Arab Press is predicting that something is going to happen.
The free world is without a leader. Obama is silly and dangerous, incapable or unwilling to take a brave, principled stance in defense of freedom and our allies. The forces of evil smell blood, and they are going in for the kill. A world without America's forceful presence is descending into chaos and havoc.
It seems like a lifetime ago (not five short years) when Bush had Syria on the ropes and there were landmark demonstrations for freedom in Lebanon. Then UN Ambassador John Bolton was pressing forward with the UN's investigation of Syria's involvement in the "potential linkages" of the murder of former Lebanese premier Rafiq Hariri and 14 other assassinations of anti-Syrian Lebanese figures. The 14 cases included the murder of anti-Syrian newspaper boss and MP Gibran Tueni last December, which Lebanese lawmakers blamed on Damascus. The removal of Syria's stranglehold on Lebanon led to the Cedar revolution -- Lebanon had a shot at emerging from under the boot of Iranian/Syrian proxy of Hezb'allah's jihad.
Looking back on all those 2005 Atlas posts, they are all infused with the one thing the Obama adminstration is completely devoid of --hope. Oh, the irony.
Kuwaiti Daily Predicts Lebanese Coup on October 16 MEMRI (links, thanks to Armaros)
The Kuwaiti daily Al-Rai predicts, citing Arab diplomatic sources, that on October 16, 2010, following the visit of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Lebanon, Hizbullah and forces affiliated with it will begin implementing their plan to stage a coup in the country.
The daily added that Hizbullah is adamant on changing the makeup of the Lebanese government, regardless of the activity of the Special Tribunal for Lebanon.
Source: Al-Rai (Kuwait), October 9, 2010
Nasrallah Tells Hizbullah Officials 'Good News' Ahead MEMRI
The Al-Akhbar daily, which is close to Hizbullah, reports that in a series of recent meetings with senior Hizbullah officials, Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah updated them regarding plans for dealing with all scenarios, both internal and with regard to the international tribunal for the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq A-Hariri.
Nasrallah promised that the next stage would bring very good news for Hizbullah and its allies.
Source: Al-Akhbar, Lebanon, October 11, 2010
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