HOW MANY LONE WOLVES MAKE A PACK? NIDRA POLLER REPORTS FROM FRANCE
How many lone wolves does it take to make a pack?
Paris December 31, 2009
Nidra Poller
How many lone wolves does it take to make a pack? How many packs make a battalion? How many battalions make a full-fledged enemy in a genuine war?
President Obama copped out on another grave security threat with disingenuous promises and heartfelt finger pointing. Slow on the uptake as usual he finally got around to blaming the CIA—the one G.W. Bush left him– for missing the red flags that should have kept the Jock Bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, from boarding Northwest Airlines flight 253 bound for Detroit—in the minds of unsuspecting passengers—and bound for destruction by the will of Abdulmutallab’s Allah. At first glance Obama’s accusation is plausible. It will reinforce the illusions of softening critics fooled by the Oslo Peace Prize speech and too willing to believe that the American president is finally catching on.
The truth is there are so many red flags it looks like a Revolution Day Parade in the heyday of the Soviet Union. Furthermore, this is the president determined to close Guantanamo and send those “innocent†red- flag-bearers back to their old stomping grounds, beefed up and eager to groom fervent young men like Abdulmutallab for bigger and better exploits. The fact is, the baby-faced Nigerian should be sent to Guantanamo and judged by a military tribunal. And who is talking about red flags? Barack Hussein Obama, whose government is stonewalling a congressional investigation into the Fort Hood massacre.
Come to think of it, if the regime had been forthcoming with information on the Fort Hood martyrdom operation, it might have led to disclosure of the full range of activities of Major Hassan’s mentor, al Awlaki, and his cohorts in Yemen. Some sharp-eyed clerk might have happened upon the plot to send a young Nigerian bearing Christmas gifts from Lagos to Detroit via Amsterdam…in his briefs.
It is easy in retrospect to know that the Jock Bomber shouldn’t have been allowed to board a plane heading for the United States. What about the other 499,999 individuals posted with him on the second string watch list? As these words are written, one of them may be hitching up his trousers and preparing to blow up YOUR airplane. Are they all that different from the latest well-groomed shahid to step up to the check-in counter? How about the Virginia five, recently arrested in Pakistan? Airplanes go flitting from one continent to another and so do young jihadis.
Recognizing one–the Jock Bomber– after the fact is supposed to be proof that the president is getting real about security threats? Recognizing hundreds of thousands waiting in the wings would be called Islamophobic racial profiling and an insult to what Obama calls the “Holy Qur’an.†And we are supposed to poke around in the psyches of these willing serial killers to find out why and where this or that particular individual went wrong? One got it from the mosque, another from the Net, another from an al Qaeda recruiter on campus…
Fulfilling his “we will not torture†vow the president is determined to disrupt, dismantle, and run through the wringer security personnel who dared, in the past, to interrogate enemy combatants. In his zeal to incriminate the G. W. Bush administration, Obama is pushing the 9/11 masterminds in NY’s face and offering them a civilian trial that will downgrade acts of war to misdemeanors. None of the above stopped him from dashing on screen for a flash in the pan appearance in an open collar meant to indicate his sense of urgency. He pouted, passed the buck to agencies that failed to detect this clear-as-a-bell airplane plot, and preened in his heightened self esteem. That’s his idea of getting tough.
I had intended to add, jokingly, that Mr. Obama might want to hand airport security over to Acorn and the SEIU but the Wall Street Journal took the chuckle out of that one. It seems the security breach is going to be exploited as an argument for unionizing TSA employees. That’s a bit greedy isn’t it? They get to monitor full body scanners and want collective bargaining too?
Will President Obama reconsider his promise to close Guantanamo the day after tomorrow? Not on your life! He sticks to his original script: Guantanamo is a recruiting tool for guys like Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. According to The Times of London [Al-Qaeda Groomed Abdulmutallab in London] when Abdulmuttalab was president of the Islamic society at University College London he did invite former Gitmo prisoners to speak, and organized a talk on “Jihad versus Terrorism.†If that’s a red flag raiser, how many Islamic campus leaders right home in the USA deserve one of their own? Problem is, 9/11 happened before Gitmo existed, and Barack Hussein Obama wouldn’t dream of outlawing the Qur’an which is the primary source recruiting tool.
Red flags were ignored, security agencies yawned and dawdled, and the American president won’t put the country on a war footing because it would prove that George W. Bush was right to fight. So it looks like simple citizens have to pick up the slack, put out the fires, save the planes. Can private enterprise help us out here? How about a militarized commercial airline catering to people who know the score? Khaki planes, cabin crew in military fatigues, and all the passengers free to come on board fully armed…except for the lone wolves.
Minarets: the last straw for Eurabians
Nidra Poller
Dateline: Paris
The Swiss referendum on a minaret construction freeze—approved by a hefty 57% of voters—blew the lid off the repressed debate on Islamization. Straw polls up and down Europe outdid the Swiss, yielding stronger anti-minaret majorities, often extended to demands for a moratorium on mosque construction and a ban on niqab. Shameful intolerance or the first stirrings of a long-awaited backlash?
Scolding fingers were shaken in expected and unexpected places. James Morrison rather smugly (“Embassy Row,†Washington Times, December 2) reported: “The leaders of a congressional human rights panel criticized Swiss voters for approving a resolution to ban further construction of mosque minarets and warned that the prohibition violates European religious freedom standards.â€
A chorus of appeals for tolerance arose in France where Chief Rabbi Gilles Bernheim sang in harmony with Mohammed Moussaoui, president of the Muslim umbrella organization, and Interior Minister Brice Hortefeux, whipping boy of diversity advocates.
Rabbi Bernheim opposes any discriminatory measure that deprives one religion of the full range of rights our society grants to other religions. He compares the minaret freeze to a long-ago prohibition against building synagogues taller than churches. And he apprehends the “Islamic violence†that such discriminatory measures might provoke. While exhorting Europeans to change their “opinion of Islam,†Gilles Bernheim admits that no significant improvement will be possible without corresponding efforts in Muslim countries.
Muslim spokesmen and imams present their usual argument that can be summed up as: why ban minarets (niqab, halal swimming pools, Muslim women who refuse to be treated by male doctors…) when there are so few in France? The minaret is not absolutely necessary but a construction freeze would alienate and anger Muslims. Ladi Thami Breze of the UOIF—the French branch of the Muslim Brotherhood and dominant component of the Muslim umbrella organization– sees no harm in erecting minarets to make mosques visible and acceptable as a normal feature of the landscape. And, the apologists unanimously add, there won’t be any muezzin reciting the call to prayer five times a day…
Yet?
The tolerance argument is based on the assumption that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam fit into the immutable category of “religion.†Further, it assumes that all Muslims want to thrust minarets in the face of European citizens, and that all those who voted against minarets are non-Muslim. None of these assumptions withstands logical examination.
Islam, Christianity, and Judaism do not practice “religion†in the same way: the differences are more important than the similarities. The minaret issue was put to a vote in Switzerland precisely because Islam in Europe has been encroaching on the very values of tolerance once revered in European society.
Many European Muslims are refugees from oppressive Muslim nations where there is no freedom of religion, speech, or thought. They are disheartened to see Islamic intimidation now gaining ground in the host countries. It is reasonable to assume that some Muslims voted—in the Swiss referendum and in straw polls all over Europe—for a minaret construction freeze.
Extending limitless tolerance to a religion—Islam—that preaches extreme intolerance is a logical absurdity. Jews in France are harassed, verbally and physically attacked, traumatized, maimed and, in extreme cases, murdered by Muslims inspired by doctrinal Jew-hatred. Increasingly, Jewish parents send their children to private schools because no one can protect them from persecution in the public schools. Muslim women who dress “immodestly†are victims of brutal intolerance. Young French-Muslim women have been stoned, stabbed, or burned alive for refusing submission. Gays are taunted and attacked.
An interesting twist was revealed this fall when a Muslim amateur soccer team from the banlieue refused to play a match with a Gay team from Paris. The coach of the Parisian team is, in fact, a homosexual Muslim who fled the banlieue where he was persecuted for his sexual identity. The banlieue team, threatened with exclusion, relented. And a face-saving apologist—a non-Muslim French woman associated with the team—explained that team members had feared the Gay team might be Islamophobic.
If religious tolerance is an authentic value it cannot be promoted by giving free reign to the construction of minarets, mosques, and Islamic Centers until and unless their spiritual leaders forego certain tenets of a thought system incompatible with the universal values of human rights. Could anything be more clear? Tolerance for one manifestation of one religion– minarets –automatically increases intolerance of all other religions and peoples including citizens of the host country.
Why minarets? Why now? Could it be that minarets are the last straw? Italians have not blocked plans to build a huge mosque that will dwarf St. Peter’s cathedral. The British are stoically accepting a gigantic mosque that will dominate the 2012 Olympics site. In mosques throughout Europe firebrand imams deliver sermons that would make Jeremiah Wright look like a true blue American patriot. And mosque-goers carry out these brutal imprecations on our streets. Only a minority actually seek to destroy the infidels? Of course it’s only a minority. And only a minority of mosques have minarets…so far. And only a minority of devout Muslim women wear niqab…now. It’s not a question of statistics but of a trend that is so obvious you have to be blind to not see it.
Could a Muslim be sincerely surprised by a ban on minarets in Europe when sharia law strictly prohibits the construction of churches or synagogues taller than a mosque and severely limits the rights of Christians to build new churches or even repair dilapidated structures in Muslim lands?
During the 2007 presidential campaign Nicolas Sarkozy made the case for reciprocity. The freedom of Muslims to practice their religion in France would be balanced by freedom for non-Muslims in Islamic nations. Has anything changed? A Christian can’t even bring in his own Bible to read in private in Saudi Arabia, let alone build a church. Slightly less stringent rules and practices prevail throughout the 57 OIC nations but the fact is that Christians are persecuted or chased from most of them (more than 900,000 Jews have already been hounded out of the Muslim world). The once predominant Christian populations of Bethlehem (80%) and Nazareth (60%) have been reduced to persecuted minorities of 20% and 30% respectively.
Sadly, the president’s thoughtful opinion on the current controversy, published in the highbrow leftwing newspaper of reference (December 8, Le Monde), suggests that the model of reciprocity is not coming from the West but from the Muslim world. President Sarkozy cautions Christians, Jews, and Muslims alike to abstain from “ostentation†and avoid “provocation.†They should show gratitude for living in a land of freedom by practicing their religion with “humble discretion.†He assures the faithful that this discretion doesn’t signify watered-down convictions; it is a sign of “fraternal respect for others, with whom one lives, who do not share one’s beliefs.†Inviting French Muslims to keep a low profile, and then throwing Jews and Christians into the mix, the French president defines a reciprocal dhimmitude modeled on time-honored Islamic law and practices, with one significant difference: European Christians would voluntarily forego the dominant position enjoyed by Muslims in the vast territories they occupy.
Tolerance in proudly secular France has been stretched beyond the limits of legality. In the interest of getting Muslims out of the basement prayer rooms that purportedly foster radicalization while at the same time curbing the influence of foreign powers that finance and control French mosques, the separation of church and state has been twiddled to allocate public funding of Islamic schools, libraries or cultural centers that happen to be inextricably joined to mosques. In another attempt to foster “European Islam,†the government has created a sort of theological seminary to train French imams but no one dares to grab the horns of the dilemma: no matter the language or the land, imams are trained in the one and only Islam, which is irreconcilable with Western values.
Beyond tolerance, French opinion-makers love to celebrate the enriching Islamic influence on our society. Muslim holidays are covered with gushing enthusiasm on prime time newscasts. Stylish women in hijab grace the glossy pages of fashion magazines. Sharia compliant finance is unashamedly announced by major banks such as the BNP-Paribas, with nary a word to inform public opinion about the questionable associations of the prescribed experts that oversee compliance. Most of the luxurious grand hotels of Paris are now owned by Muslims. Quranic verses decorate Moorish moldings in the lobby of the George V hotel. “Diversity†is so widespread in schools, streets, shops, and offices that it begins to look like uniformity.
Public reactions to the Swiss minaret freeze reveal the disconnect between the European elites that concocted and sustain the Islamization of Europe and citizens—including Muslims—who endure the hardships it imposes. This has nothing to do with intolerance and may be a sign of desperation. Is the minaret the “petit doigt†[little finger] Europeans are hiding behind?
Descending from the lofty heights of the minaret to the nitty gritty on ground level, what do we discover? Parisian streets closed to traffic for open-air Friday prayers.
[Videos posted on the Riposte Laïque site: ]
Muslims occupy a Parisian street–rue Léon—for prayers (16 October 16, 2009)
Same, rue des Poissonniers
Who needs minarets when you can conquer territory with a simple prayer rug?
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