Latest article: Religious Freedom on the Islamic Temple Mount

Here's my latest article for the Times of Israel, titled: "Religious Freedom on the Islamic Temple Mount". Based on my trip to Israel in July, I explore what it's like for non-Muslims who visit the Temple Mount and ask a number of serious questions about the Islamic faith and it's struggle with religious freedom and moderation. Enjoy. - R.O.

http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/religious-freedom-on-the-islamic-temple-mount/

After Kenya, no more turning the other cheek to those who hate us

Profound, overdue unspoken truths for our post-modern, politically correct naive chattering class. It is time to confront radical Islamism for what it is: a crime against humanity. - R.O.

After Kenya, no more turning the other cheek to those who hate us
The Telegraph - Sept. 23, 2013
By: Allison Pearson

Where is the Muslim condemnation of the Nairobi massacre by maniacs in the name of their religion?

Picture the scene if you can bear to. A bustling shopping precinct where a group of men, women and children are surrounded by armed men. As one of the terrorists moves among them, he demands that the person quailing in front of him names the mother of Jesus or recites the Lord’s Prayer. “Our Father which art in Heaven,” says one woman. She is spared. Her neighbour, a Muslim boy, racks his brain for any line of the Bible, anything he has heard in school or on TV. But it’s too late. The boy is shot through the head; put to death for not being Christian.

Imagine the uproar if that ethnic and religious cleansing had taken place this week. Picture the hollering human-rights activists, the emergency session at the United Nations, the promise of action against the perpetrators who had singled out non-Christians for execution.

Yet this is a hellish mirror image of what took place in the Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi. Islamic fundamentalists murdered scores of innocent shoppers for failing to name the mother of the Prophet Mohammed or recite from the Koran – sufficient proof that they were despised “kafirs” or unbelievers.

Radio presenter Saadia Ahmed said she saw people say something in Arabic “and the gunmen let them go. A colleague of mine said he was Muslim and they let him go as well.” But she added: “I saw a lot of children and elderly people being shot dead. I don’t understand why you would shoot a five-year-old child.”

Roughly the same reason you would stroll down a street in Woolwich and behead a young squaddie wearing a Help for Heroes T-shirt – which is to say, no reason at all, unless blind ideological hatred counts as a reason.

“You’re a very bad man. Let us leave,” four-year-old Elliott Prior shouted at the gunman in Westgate mall who had just shot his mother, Amber, in the leg. The startled jihadist gave Elliott and his six-year-old sister, Amelie, a Mars bar and allowed mother and children to go after urging Amber to convert to Islam. As if.

There is a photograph of Elliott and Amelie standing next to a dead body, still clutching their unopened Mars bar. The children’s eyes are brimming with what they have seen, and can never un-see. Amid the carnage and inhumanity, an off-duty SAS man went back 12 times into the mall and was said to have personally rescued a hundred people. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I shall fear no evil.

We have grown squeamish about using the word evil. We feel it’s a little black and white, a bit too judgmental for modern tastes; but what other description will do for the slaughter of Australian architect Ross Langdon and his partner, Elif Yavuz, a vaccine researcher? The couple was shopping for clothes for their first baby, who was due in a fortnight. The two humanitarians died with their arms around each other and the child they would never meet.

All of this may sound as if it’s taking place at a safe distance. In fact, it’s perilously close and could be coming to a mall near you. There are reports that British-born Somalians were among the gunmen and that Samantha Lewthwaite, aka the White Widow, was leading the attack.

Lewthwaite, who is already wanted for terrorist offences in Kenya, was married to Germaine Lindsay, the July 7 London bomber. She said her husband’s mind had been “poisoned by radicals”. A nervous Britain, bending over backwards to soothe Muslim fears in the wake of the attacks, actually gave Samantha Lewthwaite police protection before she did a runner on a false passport. All the while, it was us who needed protecting from her.

Because the killing of Christians and other “kafirs” took place in a shopping mall and because some of the victims were white, the Nairobi story has dominated the headlines. Another massacre in Pakistan on Sunday barely registered. Some 350 worshippers at All Saints in Peshawar were laying on a free lunch for the needy when two suicide bombers killed 80 people. The attack is part of a savage pattern of assaults on Christians, from Iraq to Egypt.

Why the embarrassed silence when it comes to Islamist persecution of Christians? In Pakistan, a bishop called John Joseph committed suicide in protest at the execution of a Christian man on “blasphemy” charges introduced by fundamentalists. In Germany this week, a Green Party MP of Turkish origin received death threats after urging her Muslim sisters to take off their headscarves and live like Germans.

Here in the UK, we tolerate the increasingly intolerant. It was revealed a few days ago that non-Muslim members of staff at the Al-Madinah School in Derbyshire had to sign contracts agreeing to wear the hijab and make girls sit at the back of the class while boys sat at the front.

Jesus wept. And so should we, quite frankly. Mohammed Shafiq, head of the Muslim Ramadan Foundation, condemned calls to ban the burka, but where is his denunciation of the Nairobi massacre? Where are the voices from Britain’s Somali community condemning the murder of innocents by maniacs acting in the name of their religion?

As a former Sunday schoolteacher, I sort of get the point of turning the other cheek. But, really, enough is enough. Time for a crackdown on fundamentalism in all its poisonous guises. Time to stop appeasing those who hate us and our way of life. Time, in fact, for the clear-eyed moral judgment of a four-year-old child.

“You’re a very bad man,” said Elliott Prior to the jihadist. And he was, and they are.

Time to Define Islamism as a Crime Against Humanity

"Time to Define Islamism as a Crime Against Humanity" - Jerusalem Post
By: Seth J. Frantzman
http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Terra-Incognita-Its-time-to-define-Islamism-as-a-crime-against-humanity-326888

The attacks at Nairobi, Kenya’s Westgate shopping mall follow a familiar pattern to other attacks that occurred in the last few days: in Pakistan, where 81 were killed in the bombing of a church, and in Nigeria where 159 people were slaughtered by Islamists near Maiduguri.

The media and political reactions also follow a neatly crafted script we have all become accustomed to.

First Islamist terrorists attack civilians, attempting to sort out the Muslims from the non-Muslims so as to kill only one group. There are the condemnations of “senseless acts of violence” and appeals for “calm and unity.” Then all is forgotten.Those terrorists captured alive will be put on trial and perhaps executed. And life goes back to normal with the refrain, “terrorism will not prevail.”

The problem is that this script misses a central facet of Islamist terrorism: We must stop treating it as a simple isolated crime; even the word “terrorism” has begun to downplay its actual horror; rather it must be defined as a worldwide crime against humanity.

When the al-Shabaab attack began in Kenya, witnesses related that Muslims were permitted to leave. “They came and said: ‘If you are Muslim, stand up. We’ve come to rescue you,’” Elijah Lamau told the BBC.The Muslims put their hands up and walked past the gunmen. “One man with a Christian first name but a Muslim-sounding surname managed to escape the attackers by putting his thumb over his first name on his ID.

However an Indian man standing next to him who was asked for the name of the Prophet Muhammad’s mother was shot dead when he was unable to answer.”Similarly, in 2004, 17 al-Qaida terrorists attacked the Oasis compound housing oilcompany employees in Khobar, Saudi Arabia.Upon entering the compound, the terrorists waylaid the first Arab looking man they saw and said: “Are you Muslim or Christian? We don’t want to kill Muslims.Show us where the Americans and Westerners live.”

The killers then came upon a US citizen from Iraq named Abu Hashem. He later told reporters that the attackers were polite; “They gave me a lecture on Islam and said they were defending their country and ridding it of infidels.” “Don’t be afraid,” they told him, “we won’t kill Muslims, even if you are an American.”The murderers then proceeded to hunt down non-Muslims from the US, South Africa, Sri Lanka, India, the Philippines, Egypt and Sweden.

After a 24-hour siege, 22 of the residents were murdered and many others wounded. In another instance, on November 27, 2008, in the midst of the Mumbai terror attacks, the perpetrators received a call from their Pakistan-based masters, asking, “How many hostages do you have?” The terrorist responded that they had killed a Belgian hostage but had others.“I hope there is no Muslim among them.”“No, none,” replied the killer.

Later the Pakistani handlers called the terrorists at the Oberoi Trident Hotel and spoke to those located on the 10th floor. The intercepted conversation goes as follows: “Kill all the hostages, except the two Muslims, keep your phone switched on so we can hear the gunfire.”They reply, “We have three foreigners, including women from Singapore and China.”Then the terrorist can be heard telling the hostages to line up, asking the two Muslims to stand to one side. Gunfire reverberates, followed by cheering from the terrorists.

It is interesting how quickly reports of these attacks downplay the guilt of the attackers and filter references to the focus on non-Muslims and the allowing some Muslims to escape the carnage. In November 2009 Fareed Zakaria at CNN did a special on the Mumbai transcripts. Zakaria claims the men were sent from Pakistan with “instructions simply to kill.”

After playing one clip in which any reference to letting Muslims live is absent, he notes that “they were told to go to Mumbai and kill as many people as they could.” Actually they were told to go to Mumbai to kill non-Muslims.

Zakaria emphasizes that the terrorists were poverty-stricken children. “These are peasant boys,” he says. To his credit, he does play a transcript from the terrorist attack at Nariman house, where the Chabad center was targeted. The CNN host mentions the “animus against Jews” but then claims, “in the ’60s and ’70s most Indian Muslims would not even know where Palestine was.” He compares the actions of the terrorists to “brainwashing... it’s sort of the Manchurian Candidate writ large.”

Later in the program the presenter again attempts to emphasize how young the terrorists were “these are peasant boys... these kids seem like teenagers... it [their action] seems almost mercenary.”Note how often Zakaria stresses that these were “boys” – he calls them “boys” twice, “kids” twice and “teenagers” once. The only terrorist captured alive, Ajmal Kasab, was 21 at the time of the attacks.The oldest attacker, Nasir Abu Umar, was 28, while the youngest was 20.

Why the conscious effort to redefine these men as children? Why the conscious decision not to include the part of the transcript including the instructions not to kill Muslims, and to paint the attack as indiscriminate? The real story was that these men set out to kill as many non-Muslims as possible.

The media seeks to hide this facet to foster the narrative of “unity,” yet presenting Muslims and non-Muslims as the victims of terror obscures the genocidal nature of the crime.

When the radical, right wing Golden Dawn party gained popularity last year, the media highlighted the “antiimmigrant violence” it was involved in.There was no downplaying the members as “peasant boys” or obscuring of who the violence was directed at.

These three examples – Mumbai, Khobar and Nairobi – are only the tip of the iceberg. From southern Thailand, to Mindanao in the Philippines, to Syria and beyond, the Islamist or jihadist mentality leads to the mass killing of either non- Muslims, or sometimes to the sectarian slaughter of Muslims, usually Shi’ites.Hundreds of Shi’ites are massacred every year in Pakistan by the Taliban, for instance.

In many cases the terrorists separate Shi’ites from non-Shi’ites, usually identifying them by their first names. For instance, on August 17, 2012, it was reported that “gunmen wearing army uniforms checked the identification cards of the passengers, lined up the Shi’ite passengers on the roadside, tied their hands and then opened fire on them.”

Sound familiar? Many over the years have identified Islamism as “Islamo-fascism” and argued that it champions a form of genocide. But it has not sunk in. We don’t prosecute terrorists as war criminals committing crimes against humanity. Instead, we often obfuscate the nature of terrorist attacks, pretending that terrorists are “misguided youth” who “set out to kill as many as possible.”

The genocidal nature of this type of terror is downplayed. The New York Times described the Nairobi perpetrators as “Shabaab militant attackers.” Really? When they killed 78-year-old Ghanian poet Kofi Awooner and Kenyan radio host Ruhila Adatia-Sood, was that part of a “military” operation? The scenes of piles of dead women sprawled on the floor of the mall; is that “militant?”

In a Times article on the anniversary of the Ku Klux Klan bombing of a church in 1963 the perpetrators are not called “militants.” Yet the objectives and methods of the KKK were no different than the Shabaab or Taliban: the killing of specific groups. No one pretends the KKK “set out to kill indiscriminately.”

The KKK is estimated to have killed 4,743 people between 1882 and 1968. The number of primarily sectariantargeted killings in Iraq in 2012 was 4,574.That’s just Iraq.Adding up the number of victims from attacks patterned along the lines of the one carried out in Kenya, or the ethnic cleansing of non-Muslims in places such as Egypt and Northern Nigeria, would bring the number up to tens of thousands in the past decade – millions in the past century.

This is a “soft” genocide, embodied by the firebombing of a church in Egypt or the shooting of Alawite truck drivers in Syria.It is time to stop hiding what connects Mumbai to Westgate and Khobar. It is a worldwide campaign of ethnic cleansing and murder, and the world community must define this as a crime against humanity and not just as “terrorism."

No Hebrew Please - This is Europe

Disturbing insights about the rise of anti-Semitism across Europe. Must read. - R.O.

No Hebrew Please - This is Europe
By: Bruce Bawer
Jan. 7, 2013 -- FrontPageMag.com

I wrote about it here recently: Israel’s ambassador to Denmark and the head of Copenhagen’s Jewish community have both warned Jews in that city that if they don’t want to be roughed up on the street by anti-Semites, they’d better not wear anything that would identify them as Jews – and, for good measure, they should also lower their voices when speaking Hebrew. The other day, in a supremely depressing article for Israel National News, Giulio Meottiprovided a round-up of similar developments from around Europe.

For instance: a Jewish theological seminary in Potsdam has asked its rabbis not to wear yarmulkes in public. Pupils at a Jewish school in Berlin have been warned to speak German, not Hebrew, on school trips – and to wear baseball caps over their yarmulkes “so you don’t give stupid people something to get annoyed about.” Jews at Rome’s main synagogue now remove their yarmulkes when leaving services; so do Jews in Malmö, Sweden. A Jewish teacher at an adult education center in Kristiansand, Norway, has been told “that wearing the star could be deemed a provocation towards the many Muslim students at the school.” And so on.

The reason for all this cautious behavior, of course, is to avoid the fate of people like the Paris Metro passenger who, Meotti noted, was recently beaten unconscious by a mob who pegged him as Jewish because he was reading a book by Paris’s chief rabbi.

Even Meotti’s laundry list didn’t come close to covering the full range of despicable anti-Semitic outrages, and reactions thereto, that have occurred in Western Europe of late. One example: in early December, it was reported that in the wake of episodes at Edinburgh University in which an Israeli diplomat was “mobbed” and a speech by Israel’s ambassador was “disrupted by chanting students waving Palestinian flags,” many Jewish students, fed up with the “toxic atmosphere” (and, in some cases, scared to publicly identify as Jewish) had left for other colleges – and other countries.

Meotti is among the few journalists who have been sounding the warning for some time about the rise of Jew-hatred in Europe. The last few weeks, however, have seen a flurry of articles on the topic in relatively high-profile places. Can it be that the see-no-evil approach to this international catastrophe is finally giving way under the increasingly heavy weight of reality?

For example, Haaretz, which in late December ran an article entitled “France’s Jews on High Alert,” followed it up on New Year’s Eve with a piece by one Joel Braunold, who – after recalling that as a Jewish kid in London he found Americans’ and Israelis’ comments about anti-Semitism in Europe “hyperbolic,” ignorant, and almost racist – admitted that Europe does indeed have “a serious anti-Semitism problem” now, and that “the number of safe European capital cities has shrunk to a tiny number.” To make matters worse, Europe’s governments “are not taking the issue seriously”: either they dismiss anti-Semitism as a far-right pathology, or they blame it on Israel. This, Braunold says, won’t do:

As Europe’s demography changes, governments have to start systemically educating their citizens that hating Jews is not ok, and that it is unjustifiable. This means going beyond Holocaust education and getting into touchy, hard topics such as Israel and Palestine. If the hate, fear and loathing come from today’s political situation, states have the obligation to make sure their citizens are not being brought up on a diet of racism. That starts with educating each and every child.

Nowhere in Braunold’s piece, incidentally, does he mention Islam or Muslims. There’s nothing unusual about this, of course: this is the New Reticence, to which millions around the world now devoutly subscribe. Yet I would submit that this reticence – this readiness to acknowledge the offense but not name the offenders – is an essential part of the problem that Braunold claims to be determined to help overcome.

Also on New Year’s Eve, the website of Public Radio International ran a pieceheadlined “Anti-Semitism a growing problem in France.” Noting that France has Western Europe’s largest Jewish and its largest Muslim populations, and that the Toulouse school shootings last March were only the most widely reported of “an alarming number of anti-Semitic attacks across France this year,” PRI quoted anti-Semitism expert Sammy Ghozlan as saying that French Jews now “avoid going out late, going to certain neighborhoods, wearing yarmulkes.”

PRI also interviewed a rabbi who travels around France with an imam, meeting young Muslims and trying to talk them out of their Jew-hatred. The rabbi explained that many Muslims justify their prejudice by citing Israel’s purportedly brutal treatment of Palestinians. Curiously – but, alas, not very surprisingly – the rabbi, instead of informing his Muslim interlocutors that they’ve been fed lies about Israel, said that he tells them not to think about Israel, but to focus rather on France. Sigh.

To its credit, PRI didn’t try to hide the fact that the problem at hand is, indeed, anti-Semitic prejudice and violence by Muslims. On the other hand, it did what it could – in familiar mass-media fashion – to spread the guilt around, as it were, making references to intercultural “tensions” and suggesting that the answer lies in “mutual understanding.” Needless to say, anyone who understands Islam understands that those whose mantra is “mutual understanding” just don’t understand at all.

Another article, on December 18, sought to sum up recent developments in Western Europe that have negatively affected people of faith. The authors referred in passing to bans on kosher and halal slaughter and to efforts to outlaw circumcision – matters, in short, of concern to both Jews and Muslims. But anti-Semitic violence? Not a word. Not even the Toulouse massacre rated a mention. On the contrary: the article’s main thrust was that a certain religious group – not Jews – is currently the object of cruel, widespread, and systematic attack:

• “France and Belgium now ban people from publicly wearing full-face veils while Switzerland, the Netherlands, and other European states have debated similar prohibitions. Islamic dress restrictions for teachers exist in some Swiss and German states.”

• “The distinctive dress of conservative Muslims has fueled a fear of ‘the other’ …The increasing restrictions on religious practice and expression in Western Europe both arise from and encourage a climate of intolerance against religious groups, especially those with strong truth claims and vigorous demands on their members. Muslims, in some instances, clearly are being targeted. This increasingly hostile atmosphere in turn triggers private discrimination, and sometimes even violence, against members of these groups.”

The authors’ conclusion: “If the lamp of liberty is to remain lit, Western Europeans must accept that the age of conformity to an official monoculture – secular or religious – is at an end. In the coming year, their countries should embrace their religiously diverse future and accord religious freedom to all.”

Where did this mischievous, duplicitous piece of nonsense appear? In theNational Interest, no less. And who wrote it? Two members of an “independent, bipartisan, federal body” called the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF): Mary Ann Glendon, a Harvard law professor and former American ambassador to the Holy See who was appointed to the commission by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, andAzizah al-Hibri, a lawyer and philosopher who writes about “women’s issues, democracy, and human rights from an Islamic perspective” and who was named to the commission by President Obama.

In other words, the very arm of the federal government that should be joining Meotti and others in raising the alarm about the crisis of Muslim anti-Semitism in Western Europe would seem to be making a very explicit point of pretending that the crisis doesn’t exist at all – and of pretending, moreover, that the perpetrators of faith-based violence are, in fact, its victims. The grim truth about the plight of Jews in Europe, then, is starting to be articulated here and there – but U.S. authorities are doing their best, apparently, to turn that truth on its head.

We Ignore Islamism at Our Own Peril

For any avid foreign affairs reader, the distinction between Islam and Islamism is critical to properly understanding the drama of the Middle East. Moreover a full appreciation of what it is that defines these concepts will facilitate a much broader understanding of the threat facing Western and Arab powers alike. As we watch the violence unfolding in Syria, and the protests rising in Egypt, read the following article and carefully assess the distinction. - R.O.

Headlines to watch:
- Egyptian President's Defiant, Confrontational Speech
- Syria loads chemical weapons into bombs; military awaits Assad's order
- Islamic Fighters in Northern Syria Not United
- Assad faces life or death choice
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Islamology 101: What's the difference between Islam and Islamism?
By: Clifford D. May - Dec. 6, 2012 - National Review Online

White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan

Google “Islamist” and you’ll get more than 24 million hits. Google “jihadist” and you’ll get millions more. Yet I bet the average American could not tell you what it is that Islamists and jihadists believe. And those at the highest levels of the U.S. government refuse to do so.

Why? John Brennan, the top counterterrorism adviser in the White House, argues that it is “counterproductive” to describe America’s “enemy as ‘jihadists’ or ‘Islamists’ because jihad is a holy struggle, a legitimate tenet of Islam, meaning to purify oneself or one’s community, and there is nothing holy or legitimate or Islamic about murdering innocent men, women and children.” To describe terrorists using “religious terms,” he adds, would “play into the false perception” that the “murderers” waging unconventional war against the West are doing so in the name of a “holy cause.”

I get it. I understand why it would be useful to convince as many of the world’s more than a billion Muslims as possible that Americans are only attempting to defend themselves against “violent extremists.” By now, however, it should be obvious that this spin — one can hardly call it analysis — has spun out. The unpleasant fact is that there is an ideology called Islamism and, as Yale professor Charles Hill recently noted, it “has been on the rise for generations.”

So we need to understand it. We need to understand how Islamism has unfolded from Islam, and how it differs from traditional Islam as practiced in places as far-flung and diverse as Kuala Lumpur, Erbil, and Timbuktu. This is what Bassam Tibi attempts in his most recent book, published this year, Islamism and Islam. It has received nowhere near the attention it deserves.

A Koret Foundation Senior Fellow at Stanford University, Tibi describes himself as an “Arab-Muslim pro-democracy theorist and practitioner.” Raised in Damascus, he has “studied Islam and its civilization for four decades, working in the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia, and Africa.” His research has led him to this simple and stark conclusion: “Islamism is a totalitarian ideology.” And just as there cannot be “democratic totalitarianism,” so there cannot be “democratic Islamism.”

Brennan and other American and European officials are wrong, Tibi says, to fear that “fighting Islamism is tantamount to declaring all of Islam a violent enemy.” As for the Obama administration’s insistence that “the enemy is specifically, and only, al-Qaeda,” that, Tibi writes, “is far too reductive.”

Tibi also faults Noah Feldman, the young scholar who advised the Bush administration, and who insisted, despite abundant evidence to the contrary, that sharia, Islamic law, can be viewed as “Islamic constitutionalism.” Feldman failed to grasp the significance of the “Islamist claim to supremacy (siyadat al-Islam),” the conviction that Christians, Jews, Hindus, and Buddhists are inferior and that their inferiority should be reflected under the law and by government institutions.

Tibi makes this important distinction: All jihadists are Islamists, but not all Islamists are jihadists. In other words, not all Islamists are committed to violence, including terrorism, as the preferred means to achieve their goals. He asks: “Can we trust Islamists who forgo violence to participate in good faith within a pluralistic, democratic system?” He answers: “I believe we cannot.”

Chief among Islamist goals, Tibi writes, is al-hall al Islami, “the Islamic solution, a kind of magic answer for all of the problems — global and local, socio-economic or value-related — in the crisis-ridden world of Islam.” Islamists ignore the fact that such governance has been implemented, for example, in Iran for over more than 30 years, in Afghanistan under the Taliban, in Gaza under Hamas, and in Sudan. It has never delivered development, freedom, human rights, or democracy. As for Turkey, Tibi sees it as “not yet an Islamist state” but heading in that direction.

Tibi makes some arguments with which I’d quarrel. For example, he views Saudi religious/political doctrines as a “variety of Salafism (orthodox, traditional Islam) not Islamism.” I would counter that Salafism is a variant of Islamism, albeit one based not on the writings of Hassan al-Banna, who founded the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928, but on nostalgia for the glory days of the seventh century.

Nevertheless, the debate Tibi is attempting to initiate is necessary — and long overdue. During the Cold War there was a field of study known as Sovietology. It was taught in our most elite universities with strong U.S. government support.

Why isn’t Islamology — not Islamic theology, or “Muslim-Christian understanding,” or “Islamic thought” — a discipline today? For one, Tibi observes, because to “protect themselves against criticism, Islamists have invented the formula of ‘Islamophobia’ to defame their critics.” (How did Stalin not come up with Sovietophobia or Russophobia?) And of course if such slander fails to intimidate, there are other ways to shut people up: Tibi has “survived attempts on my life by jihadists.”

A second reason for the absence of Islamology: The U.S. government cannot back the study of an ideology it stubbornly insists does not exist. Finally, those who do fund anything to do with Islam on campus — for example, the Gulf petro-princes who have given tens of millions of dollars to Georgetown and Harvard — have a different agenda, one that does not include free and serious inquiry. We ignore what they are doing — and what Tibi is telling us — at great peril.

— Clifford D. May is president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a policy institute focusing on national security.

The Truth about Militant Islam

This is a must watch video for anyone concerned about the ongoing threat posed by al-Qaeda and militant Islam (skip ahead to about the 8 minute mark below if you want to get to the meat of her arguments).

Lara Logan is the CBS News reporter who was sexually assaulted by an Egyptian mob in Cairo's Tahrir Square a year and a half ago. Last week Logan was the keynote speaker at the annual luncheon of the Chicago Better Government Association last week, and she blasted the Obama administration for lying to the American people about the threat that they face from militant Islam. (Courtesy the Israel Matzav blog.) - R.O.

Eleven years later, “they” still hate us, now more than ever, Logan told the crowd. The Taliban and al-Qaida have not been vanquished, she added. They’re coming back.

“I chose this subject because, one, I can’t stand, that there is a major lie being propagated . . .” Logan declared in her native South African accent.

The lie is that America’s military might has tamed the Taliban.

“There is this narrative coming out of Washington for the last two years,” Logan said. It is driven in part by “Taliban apologists,” who claim “they are just the poor moderate, gentler, kinder Taliban,” she added sarcastically. “It’s such nonsense!”

Logan stepped way out of the “objective,” journalistic role. The audience was riveted as she told of plowing through reams of documents, and interviewing John Allen, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan; Afghan President Hamid Karzai, and a Taliban commander trained by al-Qaida. The Taliban and al-Qaida are teaming up and recruiting new terrorists to do us deadly harm, she reports.

She made a passionate case that our government is downplaying the strength of our enemies in Afghanistan and Pakistan, as a rationale of getting us out of the longest war. We have been lulled into believing that the perils are in the past: “You’re not listening to what the people who are fighting you say about this fight. In your arrogance, you think you write the script.”

Our enemies are writing the story, she suggests, and there’s no happy ending for us.

...Logan even called for retribution for the recent terrorist killings of Christopher Stevens, the U.S. ambassador to Libya, and three other officials. The event is a harbinger of our vulnerability, she said. Logan hopes that America will “exact revenge and let the world know that the United States will not be attacked on its own soil. That its ambassadors will not be murdered, and that the United States will not stand by and do nothing about it.”Unfortunately, I was not able to find video of Logan's talk on line. Two other speeches have been posted, but so far Logan's has not. I guess that President Obama still has friends in Chicago.

http://israelmatzav.blogspot.ca/2012/10/video-cbs-reporter-lara-logan-blasts.html

Westerner's who fuel the Muslim world's grievance culture

As violent protests rage across the Middle East at the "Innocence of Muslims" film, this article challenges Western condemnation of the film and poses one simple truth: "It stands to reason that those who are genuinely enraged by this film have a choice about their behaviour. To suggest otherwise is to paint Muslims as backward people who cannot respond to insults except by the sword or the bomb." So then why does the West continue to bow to medieval extremists bent on igniting violence by condemning the film as much as the protesters? - R.O.   (Update: Another excellent article.)

Westerner's who fuel the Muslim world's grievance culture
Condemning the "grievance" as much as the perpetrator is fast becoming the default response to mass Islamist violence. This must not be allowed to stand.

By: Jeremy Havardi

Rather predictably, The Guardian this week argued that the wave of violence sweeping the Middle East was a spontaneous reaction to the anti Islamic film, "The Innocence of Islam". The film, we were told, set off a "long fuse that led to an explosion of violence that killed the US ambassador to Libya".

The Independent adopted a similar line with its article headlined: "An incendiary film –and the man killed in the crossfire". It added: "The mob enraged by film mocking Prophet Mohamed kills US ambassador in Benghazi rocket attack".

Then on BBC Newsnight on Thursday, ex-Foreign Office mandarin Sir Jeremy Greenstock waded in. The film, he declared, was definitely the "immediate, proximate cause" of the bloodshed.

Nor was this a British reaction alone, for in the US Hilary Clinton made the same causal linkage. The Guardian's Andrew Brown went even further. "The Innocence of Islam" was an "incitement to religious hatred" that deserved to be banned.

Those who blame this murderous mayhem on an obscure film miss the point by the proverbial country mile. The killing of the ambassador appeared to be the result of a carefully planned assassination by jihadist extremists, such as the violent Sunni group, Ansar al Sharia, rather than a mere spontaneous act of anger.

Far from being an expression of Muslim protest in Libya, it was a deranged act of militancy from radicalised Muslims for whom America and all western influences are mortal enemies. The same can be said for much of the violence sweeping every major Arab capital right now. Reducing murderous violence to "protest" risks legitimising behaviour or at least failing to understand its true motivations.

Certainly, one can understand why this amateurish production, a 13 minute clip of which appeared on YouTube, was insulting to Muslims. Its depiction of Muhammad as a pervert and child molester was certainly designed to be intensely provocative. But so are the venomous anti-Semitic and anti-Christian cartoons and images that proliferate in the Middle East. These too cause outrage but we never see mosques or the embassies of Muslim states torched as a result, and rightly so.

It stands to reason that those who are genuinely enraged by this film have a choice about their behaviour. To suggest otherwise is to paint Muslims as backward people who cannot respond to insults except by the sword or the bomb.

It attributes to them a complete inability to defuse their rage by more democratic forms of protest, effectively viewing them as savages from which little better can be expected. Such a view panders to the Islamist grievance culture rather than demanding that Muslims, like everyone else, behave better.

But condemning the "grievance" as much as the perpetrator is fast becoming the default response to mass Islamist violence. In 2002, Muslim mobs went on a murderous rampage in Nigeria, following newspaper comments that Mohammed would have approved the Miss World pageant which was being held in that country. Afterwards, some commentators condemned the organisers of Miss World in more forthright terms than the violent jihadists.

In 2006, there was a prolonged and outrageous display of global violence following the publication of satirical Danish cartoons in Jyllands-Posten. Some of the cartoons depicted the prophet Mohammed in unflattering terms though again, much of the violence was stoked up by local agitators using these cartoons as an excuse.

But as well as condemning sword bearing, embassy burning fanatics, former British Foreign Minister Jack Straw and some of his European counterparts condemned "irresponsible" Danish newspaper editors for publishing the material.

There was another global outpouring of Muslim rage following a speech by the Pope in September 2006 in which he quoted an obscure medieval Emperor, Manuel II. Manuel had condemned Muhammed’s command to "spread by the sword the faith he preached" and the Pope noted, quite correctly, that Islam had a history of using force to spread and defend the faith.

Indeed the instant frenzy of anti-Christian violence was evidence for that very point. Again, many non-Muslims made the mistake of criticising the Pope’s comments, rather than condemning the illegitimate responses of the extremists. Some media outlets gave airtime to the outrageous and incendiary comments of the Islamist Anjem Chaudhry who argued that "capital punishment" would be an appropriate punishment for the Pope.

Lumping offensive remarks or publications with barbaric behaviour excuses the latter while nurturing the extremists’ own victim mentality. But in one sense, this already mirrors the Zeitgeist in liberal Europe. Islamic fanaticism and its terrorist offshoots are seen as the understandable response of a minority aggrieved at "unjust" foreign policy. It is our "provocative" policies in Iraq, Afghanistan or "Palestine" that cause a violent reaction among Muslims.

Hence, it is necessary both to condemn the terrorism and address its "root causes" in foreign policy. As well as being an intellectually false argument, it is morally dubious because it suggests that there is only one inevitable way for enraged Muslims to respond to "our" behaviour. Terrorism remains a choice, and a highly illegitimate one.

Certainly, "The Innocence of Muslims", like the Danish cartoons, is provocative and, for most Muslims, blasphemous. But mob terror and the slaughter of innocents is the preserve of those with an unyielding hatred for western values.

To truly defend those values, our leaders must uphold a system in which we can be offended and, in turn, give offence. The alternative is that we cease to be a magnet for those fleeing from repressive and backward societies.

Jeremy Havardi is a journalist and the author of two books: Falling to Pieces, and The Greatest Briton