RUTHFULLY YOURS

Even for someone who has experienced – nay, endured the rigors and brutality of Islamic “culture,” such as Ayaan HIrsi Ali – it may be difficult for that person to condemn the ideology-cum-religion of Islam and disown it as thoroughly and finally as one can Nazism or Communism, regardless of how Islam affected that person’s life, publicly and personally. However, one can “disown” Islam yet some emotional connection to it may linger, like a virus that may lay dormant for decades and then begin to affect one’s thinking and actions.

That state of lingering belief is utterly alien to me; I have been a committed, conscious atheist since my mid-teens. I dismiss all religious systems, dogmas, and tracts. Having been raised in the Catholic religion, I have never been tempted to find a replacement or substitute for it. Paraphrasing the American patriotEthan Allen, reason, then and now, has been to and for me the only “Oracle of Man,” not Christ or Moses, and certainly not Mohammad. Allen’s arguments against superstition are not mine; I rejected God and other ethereal deities, regardless of their names, for two reasons: their metaphysical impossibility, and for moral reasons of rejecting the power and influence of a “higher” authority over my existence and mind.

The lingering need of a person for a “higher” authority will cause him to sooner or later embark on a project of reclamation of, say, Islam, that will be at dramatic odds with a past record and stature as a critic of Islam, failing to realize that to criticize Islam is not enough. It must be repudiated wholesale; as in Nazism and Communism, there are no “redeeming” features in Islam.

I have said it many times before, in past columns over the years; Islam must be refuted and repudiated “root, branch, and twig.” There is no middle, reconciliatory ground to be advanced, argued, and promoted; the whole ideology must be tossed onto an intellectual bonfire with no regrets or personal recriminations or sense of loss. As an active “religion,” it must be reduced to ashes.

It doesn’t matter that, as an ideology, Islam is somewhat schizophrenic, exhibiting on one hand a “nice,” laid-back, wouldn’t-hurt-a-fly persona among the rank-and-file, non-jihadist Muslims, and on the other a mean, vile, vindictive, homicidal, and consistently destructive persona in actions dedicated to conquest and destruction for the sake of destruction among the “fundamentalists.”

Granted, that religion, as a measure of moral guidance, has had a grip on man since the dawn of history, and even before when man first began carving or painting symbols and ideograms on stone tablets or on cave walls. Religion, as author/philosopher Ayn Rand has put it, is a primitive form of philosophy. She wrote that religion demands:

“…blind belief, belief unsupported by, or contrary to, the facts of reality and the conclusions of reason. Faith, as such, is extremely detrimental to human life: it is the negation of reason. But you must remember that religion is an early form of philosophy, that the first attempts to explain the universe, to give a coherent frame of reference to man’s life and a code of moral values, were made by religion, before men graduated or developed enough to have philosophy.

A clinging fealty to or respect for some religious belief, then, in spite of the outrages to which Ayaan Hirsi Ali was subjected by Islam in her life, including a perpetual death fatwa on her, drew her to attempt to salvage Islam in a Hoover Institution paper published in March 2017, “The Challenge of Dawa: Political Islam Ideology and Movement and How to Counter.” It is in three versions: a printable, closely packed version; a longer PDF of it; and a shorter, excerpted version published on March 20th in the Wall Street Journal, “Why Islam Needs a Reformation.” A byline at the end of the Wall Street Journal article reads:

The newest issue of ISIS’ English-language Rumiyah magazine released today encourages old-fashioned theft and looting to help fund the Islamic State, with target suggestions including an armored truck full of cash or an electronics superstore.

The article declares that the wealth of kafir, or disbelievers, is “halal,” so Muslims should “take it” — as long as they remit one-fifth to the caliphate.

The article cites a hadith to show “the clear permissibility of spilling their blood and taking their wealth until they accept Islam… all kuffar who are not under the contract of dhimmah are enemies from whom ghanimah [booty] is taken.”

The writer argues that aside from istijarah, or a safe passage covenant, and the jizyah tax, “the only relationship the Muslim has to the kuffar is that of the sword, i.e. physically waging jihad against them. And any attack on the kuffar, including that which is financial, is jihad. In this regard, any wealth taken from the kuffar through deception or defeat is considered ghanimah.”

“Whether the financial damage is on an individual kafir or the cause of perpetual loss to a business, the Muslim in Dar al-Kufr [land of disbelievers] has the opportunity to follow this blessed sunnah, striking terror by stalking the kuffar and causing them economic harm. There should be no misunderstanding about the excellence of this deed, as taking this wealth is in accordance with the command of Allah.”

Of this stolen wealth, ISIS directs, 20 percent “should be set aside and given to the Khalifah or to an official representative of the Khalifah for those who are able.”

But “whoever kills a kafir – for which he has proof of his killing him” gets to keep all the loot. Or, specifically, “whatever the kafir possesses at the time and place he is killed.”

“This includes his clothing, jewelry, all kinds of weapons, gold, silver, currencies, as well as the vehicle he was using, and so forth,” ISIS adds.

And there’s another loophole: “The one who kills a kafir on a dark street or in an alleyway, while no one else is around, does not need evidence of his kill in order to take the salab [personal belongings].”

Last month, when Marine Le Pen refused to put on a headscarf for a meeting with Lebanon’s “Grand Mufti,” a friend of mine, whom I’ll call Dave, commended her for it on Facebook. Dave, as it happens, is a Manhattan liberal who voted for Hillary Clinton, despises Donald Trump, and thinks Le Pen is a fascist. But he’s also a gay man who’s very clear-eyed about the danger of Islam, especially to gay people, and who is angry at the left, both in the U.S. and Europe, for appeasing the Religion of Peace. And so he gave Le Pen a thumbs-up for her gutsy action.

Since Dave’s own friends list consists almost exclusively of other big-city liberal types, he was immediately savaged for his post on Le Pen. One of them wrote that just because Muslim women decide to cover their hair or body doesn’t mean they’re oppressed, and added that Le Pen, by refusing to wear a headscarf, wasn’t standing up for women but simply “trying to spread hate” towards Islam. Another of Dave’s friends agreed: Le Pen “didn’t behave properly.” So did another: “This woman is not a feminist, she is a fa[s]cist.” Several more comments were along the same lines. Many of Dave’s friends were livid at him for even daring to compliment Le Pen and criticize Islam.

In response to his friends’ complaints, Dave tried to play the gay-rights card, explaining to them that if they accepted the Muslim rule that women need to don a veil to meet a mufti or enter a mosque, they also had to accept the Muslim requirement that gay people – people such as himself – be stoned to death. Plainly, Dave expected that this argument would win the day with his oh-so-liberal, oh-so-gay-friendly friends. But it didn’t. On the contrary, their responses made it clear that they’d fully accepted the current progressive pecking order among officially recognized oppressed groups: gays (especially affluent gay American males such as Dave) are at the bottom of the ladder; Muslims are at the very top. Which means that when gays criticize Islam, a decent progressive is supposed to scream “Islamophobe”; but when Muslims drop gays to their deaths off the roofs of buildings, one is expected to look away and change the topic.

Of course, plenty of gays don’t share Dave’s critical attitude toward Islam. They’ve bought into the idea that they and Muslims are fellow members of the oppression brigade. Either they’re unaware that sharia law prescribes execution for gays and that a large majority of Western Muslims are totally okay with that, or they’ve allowed themselves to be convinced that Muslims today don’t care any more about Islamic law than most Christians or Jews do about Leviticus. Or, even more worrisome, they’ve worked out some Orwellian way of knowing the truth while at the same time not knowing it. So it is that we end up seeing grotesquely absurd pictures of gay people waving banners that decry Islamophobia or that declare gay solidarity with Palestine. CONTINUE AT SITE

It is hard to explain why Bashar Assad used nerve gas — probably Sarin — in the town of Khan Sheikhoun in Syria’s northern Idlib province. On the surface, at least, it would seem to be a totally counterproductive and reckless move likely to anger the Europeans, the Americans, and even his patrons the Russians. Then why would he do it?

It was a surprise, coming as it did immediately after U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley announced that “regime change” in Syria was no longer a priority and the U.S. focus would be on ISIS. This was a major change from the Obama administration and should have reassured Assad that he could hang on as ruler of Syria. But some pundits saw the U.S. policy shift as a perverse incentive for Assad, making it possible for him to believe he could use highly lethal chemical weapons without fear of retaliation. The Sarin would thus be a test of whether the new policy was real. To some degree, the announcement by the British prime minister that the UK had no retaliatory plans despite the attack might seem to be evidence for this argument.

It is a considerable stretch, though, to think Assad would use chemical weapons to test an American policy shift, particularly because this particular shift would have helped Assad and the Alawite minority cut a final deal that preserved their domination. It is doubtful that is the explanation.

The more likely truth is that Assad was deeply afraid that the U.S. policy shift was part of a secret deal with the Russians, one that he had to head off.

In 2014, after the first documented government use of chemicals against the Syrian population, Russia and the United States struck a deal for the removal and liquidation of Assad’s Sarin and other chemical stocks. Part of the importance of the deal lay in the fact that it was negotiated directly between Russia’s foreign minister and America’s secretary of state, making Russia and the United States the high-level guarantors of Assad’s compliance. There was not much compliance, actually — UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon said chemical stocks remained and 5 of 12 chemical plants were still operating months after the disposal was supposed to have occurred. But regardless of what they knew (and regardless of Assad’s use of chlorine gas), the deal was considered a success until Khan Sheikhoun. This first use of Sarin since the agreement poses a direct challenge to both countries, but especially to Russia.

If Facebook insists on the rules of censorship, it should at the very least administer those rules in a fair way. Facebook, however, does not even pretend that it administers its censorship in any way that approximates fairness.

Posts critical of Chancellor Merkel’s migrant policies, for example, can be categorized as “Islamophobia”, and are often found to violate “Community Standards”, while incitement to actual violence and the murder of Jews and Israelis by Palestinian Arabs is generally considered as conforming to Facebook’s “Community Standards”.

Notwithstanding the lawsuits, Facebook’s bias is so strong that it recently restored Palestinian Arab terrorist group Fatah’s Facebook page, which incites hatred and violence against Jews — despite having shut it down only three days earlier. In 2016 alone, this page had a minimum of 130 posts glorifying terror and murder of Jews.

Germany has formally announced its draconian push towards censorship of social media. On March 14, Germany’s Justice Minister Heiko Maas announced the plan to formalize into law the “code of conduct”, which Germany pressed upon Facebook, Twitter and YouTube in late 2015, and which included a pledge to delete “hate speech” from their websites within 24 hours.

“This [draft law] sets out binding standards for the way operators of social networks deal with complaints and obliges them to delete criminal content,” Justice Minister Heiko Maas said in a statement announcing the planned legislation.

“Criminal” content? Statements that are deemed illegal under German law are now being conflated with statements that are merely deemed, subjectively and on the basis of entirely random complaints from social media users — who are free to abuse the code of conduct to their heart’s content — to be “hate speech”. “Hate speech” has included critiques of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s migration policies. To be in disagreement with the government’s policies is now potentially “criminal”. Social media companies, such as Facebook, are supposed to be the German government’s informers and enforcers — qualified by whom and in what way? — working at the speed of light to comply with the 24-hour rule. Rule of law, clearly, as in North Korea, Iran, Russia or any banana-republic, has no place in this system.

What is obvious is that the West concerns itself with its live citizens; we concern ourselves in glorifying our industry of death. No one here really cares about the dead: they quickly become just an excuse for more violence and more terror attacks.

When one looks at Westerners, one can only envy the hyper-morality of their self-criticism. They are forever accusing themselves of moral lapses. Sometimes they seem to have some kind of autoimmune disease whose function is to cleanse their societies.

To us, it looks as if all they really care about are hating Jews and stroking corrupt dictatorships.

Perhaps the time has come to learn from our “enemy” and first take a cold hard look at ourselves.

It is obvious that the West concerns itself with its live citizens; we concern ourselves in glorifying our industry of death.

It seems we regard our dead differently from the way the dead are regarded in the West. Here, no respect is paid to the shaheed [martyr]; he is expendable. He serves only as an excuse to hate, riot and glorify the “resistance” and the “jihad” — terrorist attacks.

Why, during the long years of our conflict in the Middle East, have we Palestinians never interested ourselves in the bodies of Palestinian terrorists killed in terrorist attacks? No one has ever shown the slightest interest in their fate. Arabs and Muslims in the Middle East often point fingers at one another, yet in reality, we respect neither the living nor the dead. No one buries the thousands of bodies of Islamists killing each other. We abandon our brothers to rot in foreign soil. There are untold number of civilians killed in Syria, Iraq and Yemen, their bodies unmourned, eaten by scavengers.

We simply use the bodies of terrorists — to call for more blood and more terrorism against civilians, and to keep the terrorism industry going. No one here really cares about the dead: they quickly become just an excuse for more violence and more terror attacks.

Sometimes it is hard to credit, but there really are good and worthwhile things to be found in the most surprising places — in this instance the journalism of Crikey’s Canberra correspondent, Bernard Keane, who can be very silly indeed. Every now then though, just like the proverbial broken clock, he gets it right and his thoughts on Yusuf Islam, the artist formerly known as Cat Stephens, make that point.

If you don’t have a particular passion for saccharine songs about love and peace and let’s-all-get-along-ism, know that Islam intends to tour Australia in November and it appears that, unlike Ayaan Hirsi-Ali, nobody is threatening to blow him up or stage massive demonstrations outside his concert venues, nor are they harassing the tour promoter’s insurers with dark talk of all the unfortunate things that might happen if Islam is allowed to sing and speak freely. You know the sort of thing: Nice little theatre you’ve got here, pal. Pity if something were to happen to it.

And there is another difference as well. While Hirsi-Ali has never called for anyone to be murdered, Yusuf Islam most definitely and emphatically has, as per this video clip. Keane writes:

Yusuf Islam joined in the Iranian-initiated demand that Rushdie be killed for his book, The Satanic Verses. According to Yusuf Islam in 1989, Salman Rushdie should have been murdered for his book.

“He must be killed. The Koran makes it clear — if someone defames the prophet, then he must die,” Islam said in February that year.

Keane adds that the singer favoured death by burning — something it will be good to remember the next time Peace Train comes on the radio.

Islam has never dis-avowed his homicidal sentiments, as far as an extensive Google search can establish, yet he is allowed to enter the country without official obstacle or intimidation of his hosts and promoters. Rushdie, meanwhile, has spent more than a quarter century shadowed by bodyguards and living every waking moment with the thought that the next might be his last.

One reason no one is protesting Yusuf’s tour may well be that, unlike the snarling Left and its Islamist allies, those of more conservative mien are too busy attending to work, family and paying taxes to look up contact information for Immigration Peter Dutton, a former policeman who some think might make a decent PM one day. This might be his chance to prove it by following the precedent set in 1975 by Clyde Cameron, who banned Alice Cooper from entering the country. Ah, innocent days!