POLITICAL HONESTY ABOUT ISLAM.
Putin Denounces Plans for Radical Islamic worldwide Caliphate
Vladimir Putin
declared in Brussels on Monday that radical Islamic groups are planning to
systematically annihilate non-Moslems and to create a worldwide Caliphate.
He added that western civilisation was at risk of being attacked by terrorists,
these attacks being more than sporadic one-off attacks. Rather, they are, in the
opinion of Vladimir Putin a “concerted effort and programme” by an organisation
which has a global structure and which has the intention to commit murderous
atrocities in the name of Islam.
Vladimir Putin also declared that there was a possibility that this organisation
(Al-Qaeda) already has nuclear weapons. He did not hesitate to point out that
the terrorists operating in Chechnya are part of this worldwide league of
extremists and indeed are in constant contact with Osama Bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda.
Western sources repeatedly refer to the Chechens as “separatists” who want to
fight for their independence, whereas the reality is quite different.
The Chechen terrorists are a small part of the 850,000 Chechen population, most
of whom despise the bandits for what they are: common criminals with connections
to international crime, posing in the name of Islam and separatism to gain
sympathy for their cause from the ignorant or from those who periodically like
to attack Russia.
President Putin declared that if the West does not deal effectively with the
Chechen question, acts such as those perpetrated in Moscow and Bali will become
commonplace all over the world.
Fallaci: Warrior in the Cause of Human Freedom
By
Robert Spencer
FrontPageMagazine.com
November 30, 2005
“We are gathered here tonight,” announced David Horowitz, “to honor a warrior in the cause of human freedom.”
Oriana Fallaci, who received the Center for the Study of Popular Culture’s Annie Taylor Award in New York Monday evening, has been a warrior for human freedom ever since she joined the anti-fascist resistance in 1944, at age fourteen. For over six decades, she has fought against those she has labeled “the bastards who decide our lives,” opposing all forms of tyranny and oppression, from Mussolini and Hitler to Osama bin Laden and Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi. She amassed a fearsome reputation as an interviewer, recounting of Ariel Sharon: “‘I know you’ve come to add another scalp to your necklace,’ he murmured almost with sadness when I went to interview him in 1982.” Other scalps on her necklace include that of Henry Kissinger, who termed his interview with Fallaci “the most disastrous conversation I ever had with any member of the press.” While interviewing the Ayatollah Khomeini, Fallaci called him a “tyrant” and tore off the chador she had had to wear in order to be admitted to his presence. According to Daniel Pipes in his introduction of Fallaci Monday night, she is also apparently one of the few who ever made the irascible old man laugh.
Today, at seventy-five years old, Fallaci still stands for freedom. She is suffering from cancer. She stated with her usual directness at the Taylor Awards ceremony: “I shall not last long.” But she has dedicated the four years since 9/11 to trying to awaken her native Italy, Europe and the world to the magnitude global jihad threat, which most analysts continue, whether from willful blindness, ignorance, or a misplaced strategic imperative, to misapprehend. Pipes noted that “she has her differences with the President. When he says that Islam a ‘religion of peace,’ she has said, ‘each time he says it on TV? I’m there alone, and I watch it and say, “Shut up! Shut up, Bush!” But he doesn’t listen to me.’”
And it isn’t, of course, just Bush. Fallaci spoke fervently Monday evening about how Western nations are selling their own homelands and culture to their mortal enemies. “We seem to live in real democracies,” she said, “but we really live in weak democracies ruled by despotism and fear.” Western elites – government and media – are paralyzed by fear, afraid to speak out against the life-destroying aspects of the Sharia law that Islamic jihadists want to impose on the rest of the world. The risk of offending Muslims is, in their calculus, apparently greater than the risk of national or civilizational suicide. Alexis de Tocqueville, according to Fallaci, explained that in dictatorial regimes, despotism strikes the body: the dissenter is tortured into silence. But in democratic regimes that have succumbed to corruption, despotism ignores the body and strikes at the soul. One is not tortured for dissent; instead, one is discredited for it. To affirm the patent fact that Islam is not a religion of peace today renders one “unelectable,” or “bigoted,” or beyond the bounds of what is fit to print. In despotic democratic regimes, Fallaci observed, everything can be spread except truth.
That is indeed the present-day situation. Most of the liberal and conservative mainstream not only will not feature trenchant criticisms like Fallaci’s of the violent and supremacist impulse within Islam; they will not even discuss them. Those who, like Fallaci, speak the truth about the motives and goals of the jihadists are vilified and marginalized, while the purveyors of comforting half-truths, distortions and lies fill the nation’s airwaves and newsprint. Fallaci herself faces the most frivolous of frivolous lawsuits in Italy for defamation of Islam; a Muslim group tried to have banned her searing, passionate response to 9/11, The Rage and the Pride.
Why does all this happen? In her speech Fallaci explained that it was to a great degree because “truth inspires fear.” When one hears the truth, one can only be silent or join the cause. It is a call to a personal revolution, an upheaval, a departure – perhaps forever – from a life of ease and comfort. So most will prefer not to hear the truth -- in no small part because of the difficulty of living up to it. Yet the real heroes, she said, are “those who raise their voices against anathemas and persecution,” while most succumb -- “and with their silence give their approval to the civil death of those who spoke out.”
“This,” Fallaci declared, “is what I have experienced the last four years.” She described how, since 9/11, the whole of Europe has become a “Niagara Falls of McCarthyism” – with the new Grand Inquisitors of the Left persecuting and victimizing all others. “In Europe, we too have our Ward Churchills, our Noam Chomskys, our Michael Moores, our Lewis Farrakhans.” And they are doing immense damage to the unity, will and cultural identity of the people. In Europe as in America, the new thought police ban Christmas observances to avoid offending Muslims; history is rewritten to depict Islam as having built a civilization of peace and mercy (regardless of the preponderance of evidence to the contrary), while Europe’s own Judeo-Christian civilization is regarded as “a spark of a cigarette – gone.” A spent force. In Leftist-controlled municipalities, police stand idly by while Muslim hooligans demonstrate their contempt for European society and culture by urinating upon and otherwise desecrating churches. Fallaci: “This is considered ‘freedom of expression’ – unless the offense is committed against Muslims.”
Meanwhile, the “religion of peace” myth and other falsehoods that interfere with our ability to defend ourselves are propagated aggressively by elected officials, the media, the Hollywood elite, and the justice system. Defenders of freedom are stripped of credibility and denied the means to get their message across. Or if they do get it across, they are not believed. “I really feel as a Cassandra,” said Fallaci, “or as one of the forgotten anti-fascists.” Yet she wears the Left’s attacks with defiant pride. “Since I wrote the trilogy (La Rabbia e l’Orgoglio (The Rage and the Pride), La Forza della Ragione (The Force of Reason), and L’Apocalisse (The Apocalypse), my real medals are the insults I get from the new McCarthyists.”
Fallaci told the audience that she faced three years in prison in Italy if convicted in her trial for hate speech. “But can hate be prosecuted by law? It is a sentiment. It is a natural part of life. Like love, it cannot be proscribed by a legal code. It can be judged, but only on the basis of ethics and morality. If I have the right to love, then I have the right to hate also.”
Hate? “Yes, I do hate the bin Ladens and the Zarqawis. I do hate the bastards who burn churches in Europe. I hate the Chomskys and Moores and Farrakhans who sell us to the enemy. I hate them as I used to hate Mussolini and Hitler. For the cause of freedom, this is my sacrosanct right.”
What’s more, Fallaci pointed out that Europe’s hate speech laws never seem to be used against the “professional haters, who hate me much more than I hate them”: the Muslims who hate as part of their ideology. While Fallaci faces three years in prison in Italy, “any Muslim can unhook a crucifix from a wall in a school or hospital and throw it into the garbage,” with little fear of consequences. Also unprosecuted, she said, were those responsible for a vile little publication entitled Islam Punishes Oriana Fallaci, which urges Muslims to kill her, invoking five Qur’anic passages about “perverse women.” In Italy Fallaci must be guarded around the clock; but no effort has been made to bring those who threatened her to justice.
Yet for all the isolation and the verbal abuse to which her enemies have subjected her, Fallaci remains indomitable – and has found an unlikely ally in Pope Benedict XVI, whom she warmly praised Monday night. Fallaci, who identified herself as an atheist (a “Catholic atheist”), was the first individual granted a private audience with the new Pope. She stated that the Islamic challenge had opened up a void in the West that only spirituality could fill – “unless the Church also misses its appointment with history. But I don’t think it will.”
Despite these warm words for the Pope and the ancient institution he heads, however, Fallaci announced that at the risk of disappointing many of her hearers, “I am not a conservative. I don’t sympathize with the Right more than I do with the Left. I cannot b associated with the Right or with the Left.” Why not? Because, she said, both Right and Left have been guilty of the “abuse of democracy, demagogic egalitarianism, denial of merit, tyranny of the majority, and lack of self-discipline” that are sapping the strength of Europe today. “Europe’s Islamic invasion has been backed by the Left, yes. But it would never have reached the point it has if the Right had not been complicit.”
Another indication of that complicity was, according to Fallaci, the American Right’s support for the entry of Turkey into the European Union – which both Fallaci and her friend in the Vatican oppose. “European citizens do not want Turkey in our home. Condoleeza Rice should stop exercising realpolitik at our expense.” And in America, she asked why the Right was so complacent before Leftist outrages such as the ongoing war against Christmas, the removal of the Ten Commandments monument from the Alabama courthouse, the amending of the noise ordinance to allow for the Muslim call to prayer over loudspeakers (but not church bells) in Hamtramck, Michigan, and others. Why, she asked, was Ward Churchill not fired for calling the 9/11 victims “Little Eichmanns,” while Michael Graham was fired for suggesting that Islam might have something to do with present-day terrorism?
This, Fallaci concluded, is the war we are really fighting. “I do not see Islamic terrorism as the main weapon of the war that the sons of Allah have unleashed upon us. It is the bloodiest, but not the most pernicious or catastrophic aspect of this war.” Far more dangerous to the West in the long run is unrestricted Muslim immigration, which already has brought at least 25 million Muslims to Europe (not counting, Fallaci said, the huge numbers of illegal aliens). That number will double by 2016 and, as Bernard Lewis and others have predicted, almost certainly create a Muslim Europe by 2100.
Yet all this immigration has not been accompanied by integration and assimilation – not because of European racism, but by the Muslims’ own choice. Fallaci noted that many other groups have assimilated into European societies, but Muslims have not. “They don even care to learn our language. They only obey the rules and laws of Sharia.” They do not want to learn European ways; rather, “they want to impose on us their own habits and way of life. They have no intention of integrating with us. On the contrary, they demand that we integrate with them.” Today’s Islamic expansionism, therefore, does not need the armies and fleets with which the Ottoman Empire once terrorized Europe. It only needs the immigrants, whom short-sighted politicians and befuddled multiculturalists continue to welcome. Fallaci said that Europeans – French, Dutch, Germans, English, Italians – are about to reach the status of the Comanches, Cherokees, and Sioux: “We will end up on their reservation.” She noted that some Muslim spokesmen, confident of their imminent supremacy, already refer to non-Muslim Europeans as “indigenous people” or “aboriginals.”
What to do about all this? Establish dialogue with Muslim leaders? Try to strengthen moderate Islam? Fallaci was dismissive of both options. Muslims have no intention of entering into genuine dialogue with non-Muslims, she said, and “I do not believe in moderate Islam. What moderate Islam? Is it enough not to cut heads off? Moderate Islam is another invention of ours.” Adopting Western dress, she said, was easy; adopting Western values was not.
Then Fallaci threw down the gauntlet to the multicultural, politically correct, and fearful. “There is not,” she asserted, “good Islam or bad Islam. There is just Islam. And Islam is the Qur’an. And the Qur’an is the Mein Kampf of this movement. The Qur’an demands the annihilation or subjugation of the other, and wants to substitute totalitarianism for democracy. Read it over, that Mein Kampf. In whatever version, you will find that all the evil that the sons of Allah commit against themselves and against others is in it.” As jarring as such language is to contemporary sensibilities, Fallaci here made a statement of fact that can be verified or disproved. And indeed: Islamic terrorists such as Osama bin Laden, Zarqawi, and others have never hesitated to quote the Qur’an copiously to justify their actions. It remains for those who identify themselves as moderate Muslims to convince violent Muslims that they are misusing the Qur’an – if indeed they are – and should lay down their arms. They have had no notable success in this so far.
Fallaci’s a voice of rare courage. “I am not as young and energetic as you are,” she told the crowd Monday night. “I am hopelessly ill. I shall not last long.” When she is gone, we may hope – for all our sakes – that many others will be ready to step into the breach and speak the truth as she did, whatever the cost, as she did. As Oriana Fallaci so memorably demonstrated in her address on receiving the Annie Taylor Award, nothing less than our civilization itself is at stake.
US evangelical broadcaster Pat Robertson
drew a diatribe Tuesday, March 14, from American Christian and Muslim leaders
for descending in a new rant against Islam.
"At a time when inter-religious tensions around the world are at an all-time
high, Robertson seems determined to throw gasoline on the fire," the BBC News
Online quoted Reverend Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United for
Separation of Church and State, as having said.
Calling the comments "grossly irresponsible," Lynn said it seems as if Robertson
was "wrestling with demons of his own; namely intolerance and bigotry."
"To condemn an entire religion because of the behavior of some is deplorable,"
he said.
On his live television program The 700 Club, Robertson said anew Tuesday that
"Islam is not a religion of peace", and "the goal of Islam, ladies and gentlemen
whether you like it or not, is world domination."
He was responding to a news item about the reaction of Muslims in Europe to the
publishing of cartoons that lampooned Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessings be
upon him).
He said the pictures of violent Muslim demonstrations against the cartoons "just
shows the kind of people we're dealing with. These people are crazed fanatics,
and I want to say it now: I believe it's motivated by demonic power. It is
satanic and it's time we recognize what we're dealing with".
Lynn said it is imperative that Robertson issue an immediate and unequivocal
apology.
"Because millions of viewers have already heard the inflammatory remarks. When
will Robertson ever learn to think before he speaks?"
The offensive cartoons were first published by a Danish newspaper in September
and then reprinted by papers across Europe.
The furor exposed a gulf of misunderstanding between the West, which defended
the publication by citing the right of free speech, and Muslims who saw it a
sort of blasphemy.
"False Message"
Nihad Awad, director of the Washington-based Council on American-Islamic
Relations (CAIR), said US religious and political leaders must condemn
Robertson's remarks in the strongest possible terms.
"The failure by mainstream religious and political leaders to challenge Mr.
Robertson’s Islamophobic remarks will send the false message to Muslims
worldwide that the majority of Americans agree with his hate-filled views," he
said on the rights advocacy group's Web site.
"The constant, and largely unchallenged, drumbeat of anti-Muslim rhetoric is
poisoning the public’s attitude toward ordinary American Muslims."
Two recent polls showed that almost half of Americans have a negative perception
of Islam and that one in four of those surveyed have "extreme" anti-Muslim
views.
The Washington Post’s report on the poll findings quoted experts who say
negative attitudes about Islam are "fueled in part by political statements and
media reports that focus almost solely on the actions of Muslim extremists."
"Islamophobic rhetoric inevitably translates into acts of bias, discrimination
and even violence against Muslims," said Awad.
Robertson has repeatedly defamed Islam and Muslims on his program.
He once called Islam the "religion of the slavers" and said Americans who
reverted to Islam exhibited "insanity."
Robertson had also criticized US President George W. Bush for calling Islam as a
"religion of peace."
During a 2002 appearance on Fox News Channel's "Hannity & Colmes" program,
Robertson smeared both Islam and the Prophet Muhammad.
His repeated ravings are part of a string of anti-Islamic remarks from prominent
US evangelicals, chiefly Jerry Falwell and Franklin Graham.
Washington Post via IslamOnline.net & News Agencies
WASHINGTON, March 15, 2006
Aussie PM defends cleric after Q'uran remarks
May 05 2006
Sydney -
Australian Prime Minister John Howard stepped up to defend the country's
highest-ranking Catholic cleric on Friday after Cardinal George Pell sparked
controversy by saying the Q'uran was rife with "invocations to violence".
Pell, the traditionalist archbishop of Sydney, made the comments about the
Islamic holy book during a speech to a United States audience earlier this year.
The text of the address was posted on the archdiocese's website this week.
Speaking to a group of Catholic business leaders, Pell said an understanding of
Islam was vital for the future of Western democracies.
He said the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States was "a wake-up
call" that prompted him to read the Q'uran.
"I recommend that you too read this sacred text of the Muslims, because the
challenge of Islam will be with us for the remainder of our lives," he said.
"In my own reading of the Q'uran, I began to note down invocations to violence.
There are so many of them, however, that I abandoned this exercise after 50 or
60 or 70 pages," he said.
"Considered strictly on its own terms, Islam is not a tolerant religion and its
capacity for far-reaching renovation is severely limited," he said.
A prominent Muslim spokesperson, Keysar Trad of the Islamic Friendship
Association of Australia, chided Pell for making "ill-informed comments" which
he called a "totally subjective, an off-the-cuff dismissal of the teachings of
one of the world's great religions".
"I think there will be many Catholics out there who'll be cringing when they
hear these comments, and they'll be saying 'what happened to the legacy of Pope
John Paul 2?'," he told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
But Howard defended Pell as someone who "brings a great intellect" to the debate
among religions.
"I'm quite sure he is not trying to be unhelpful," Howard said in a radio
interview when asked about Pell's remarks.
"I know for a fact he's been a strong proponent of good relations between
Christianity and Islam," he said.
Film on radical Islam a wake-up call to the West
By JOHN GLEESON, WINNIPEG SUN
June 1, 2006
Nonie Darwish was wowed by our gorgeous weather but she was less than impressed by one Winnipeg media outlet's shrill, torqued coverage of the documentary film she appears in, Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West.
Aspers sponsor hate film, say critics, roared the headline, despite the fact that only one critic is quoted in the story, an academic.
"This is not a hate film," Darwish told the packed house at Imax Theatre following a Wednesday night screening. "It is against hate, against terrorism."
Darwish went one further and said criticizing the film for not depicting "the other side" is like criticizing an account of Nazi atrocities for "not showing the other side about Hitler."
It was a pretty apt comparison, since the film delves into the extreme cult of death and hatred toward the West that prevails in many parts of the Arab world -- and, in particular, focuses on the state-sponsored brainwashing of Muslim children that is tragically fuelling global terrorism.
Indeed, one of the people interviewed in the film was a former Hitler Youth officer who draws chilling parallels between his own indoctrination and that of school-age children in the Middle East.
Darwish, who now lives in the U.S. but grew up in Egypt and Gaza in the 1950s, recalled having to recite poetry in school pledging jihad against Israel. "We would have tears in our eyes, pledging that we wanted to die," she said.
She was a prime candidate for indoctrination, since her father, a top Egyptian army intelligence officer and founder of the Fedayeen, became the first targeted assassination carried out by the Israeli Defence Forces. It took her many years, she said, to shed her hatred and understand that her father was killed because he ordered the killing of hundreds of Israelis.
Today, Darwish is an outspoken advocate for reconciliation and peace but says westerners are still kidding themselves about the nature and degree of the threat posed by radical Islamic terrorism, which she calls "a declaration of war against Western culture."
"America has to wake up because we are strangling ourselves with political correctness."
As a wake-up call to the West, Obsession sets the record straight on a number of important points that have been glossed over in the name of "not offending" the peaceful but too often silent majority of Muslims.
* Radical Islam is just that, a destructive and hate-filled interpretation of a belief system contained in the Qur'an. It may well be a false interpretation, it may only be shared by a small fraction of the world's 1.2-billion Muslims (though experts in the film estimate that 10% to 15% of Muslims support radical Islam) but to disavow any connection between the two is to deny the primary motivation of the enemy.
* Those who subscribe to the radical Islamic worldview are bent on nothing short of global conversion to Islam by force. "This religion will destroy all other religions by jihad," says a school primer used by Jordanian and Palestinian children.
* The "big sin" committed by westerners is not economic, military or cultural imperialism -- it is the fact that westerners are non-believers (kuffars). As one British-based radical cleric puts it in the film, being a kuffar in a Muslim land means you deserve to be enslaved or killed, "like a cow."
* The saturation o hate propaganda against the West -- the U.S. and Israel, in particular -- is much more pervasive in the Muslim world than most westerners realize.
In reality, says Darwish, despotic regimes use the West as a scapegoat to deflect attention from their own often considerable failures.
Standing before a receptive audience at Imax, she called on Muslims to stand up and speak out against the perversion of their faith by violent fanatics. That, of course, is the true remedy for radical Islamic terrorism.
For the rest of us, let's lose the blinders, shall we?
BROOKSVILLE, Fla., Nov. 2 (UPI) -- A prominent local Republican in Florida said Tuesday he believed Islam was a "hateful, frightening religion."
Tom Hogan, Sr., the recently appointed commissioner of Hernando County, told the St. Petersburg Times Tuesday that he agreed with a letter his wife Mary Ann had written to the paper describing Islam as a "hateful, frightening religion."
"Overall, worldwide, it certainly is," Hogan said. "Don't you read your own paper?
"There's a saying out there, and there's some truth to it, that not all Muslims are terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslims. It's their thing," he told the newspaper.
Mrs. Hogan wrote her letter to the St. Petersburg Times last week in which she criticized county authorities for supporting the celebration of Eid-al-Fitr, the festival that marked the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan on Oct. 23, at a local mosque.
The St. Petersburg Times described Tom and Mary Ann Hogan as being "widely considered the first couple of Hernando County's Republican Party, and both have helped lead the party since the 1960s."
The paper said that local Muslim religious leaders in Hernando County "reacted with shock and dismay" to the Hogans' comments.
"We're deeply concerned about the hateful and racist nature of these comments," Ahmed Bedier, executive director of the Tampa chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, told the newspaper. He said he would urge Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who appointed Hogan to the county commissioner's post less than three months ago, to fire him from it.
But Mary Ann Hogan told the St. Petersburg Times she was standing by her comments. "They can call it whatever they want to," she said. "I'm calling them barbarians. "
Threats on Islam sites could deter terrorists
By The Denver Post
08/03/2007
U.S. Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo., speaks with supporters during a campaign stop at Silver Eagle Harley-Davidson/Buell motorcycle dealership in Waterloo, Iowa, Saturday, May 12, 2007. Tancredo participated in a local annual motorcycle ride of ABATE of Iowa, a statewide motorcycle safety and awareness group. (AP | Scott Mussell, The Waterloo Courier)
Washington - Republican presidential hopeful Tom Tancredo says the best way he can think of to deter a nuclear terrorist attack on the U.S. is to threaten to retaliate by bombing Islamic holy sites.
The Colorado congressman on Tuesday told about 30 people at a town-hall meeting in Osceola, Iowa, that he believes such a terrorist attack could be imminent and that the U.S. needs to hurry up and think of a way to stop it.
"If it is up to me, we are going to explain that an attack on this homeland of that nature would be followed by an attack on the holy sites in Mecca and Medina," Tancredo said at the Family Table restaurant. "Because that's the only thing I can think of that might deter somebody from doing what they otherwise might do."
Mecca and Medina, in Saudi Arabia, are Islam's holiest cities.
A Washington-based Islamic civil rights and advocacy group responded Thursday, calling Tancredo's statement "unworthy of anyone seeking public office in the United States."
"Perhaps it's evidence of a long-shot candidate grasping at straws and trying to create some kind of a controversy that might appeal to a niche audience of anti-Muslim bigots," said Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
This isn't the first time Tancredo has suggested such action.
In 2005, he drew international criticism after he told a radio talk-show host that "you could take out" Islamic holy sites if terrorists ever launched a nuclear attack against the United States.