http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3353/peace-process-west-bank Abbas’s media, spokesmen and mosque imams have radicalized Palestinians to the point where many of them are no longer prepared to hear about peace. The conflict in the Middle East is not over a settlement or a checkpoint. Rather this is a conflict over the very existence of Israel. The day the video was […]
http://www.andrewbostom.org/blog/2012/09/19/charlie-hebdo-and-sharia-versus-freedom-of-speech/
Charlie Hebdo and Sharia Versus Freedom of Speech
My forthcoming book Sharia Versus Freedom [1], elaborates in great detail the grave threat, Sharia, Islam’s totalitarian “universal law” poses to our bedrock Western liberties—especially freedom of conscience and speech.
Charlie Hebdo, the satirical French tabloid, has just published [2] (9/19/12) a new series of cartoons lampooning Islam’s prophet Muhammad.
According to one of contemporary Islamdom’s most popular and respected clerics, Yusuf al-Qaradawi—who will no doubt raise vociferous objections to the publication of these caricatures, and perhaps even issue a fatwa calling for the “punishment” (i.e., death, imprisonment, etc.) of the cartoonist—Muhammad remains the “Jihad Model [3]” for all Muslims justifying the creed’s mission for violent subjugation of the “infidel” and sanctioning murderous “martyrdom operations,” in modern parlance homicide bombings, to achieve that end.
As Qaradawi himself, legions of other mainstream Muslim legists, including the mainstream Assembly of Muslim Jurists of America, and the laws of many Islamic nations affirm, Charlie Hebdo’s publication of such “blasphemous images” is a criminal act punishable [1], at minimum by fine and imprisonment, or even death—all in accord with Islam’s freedom of speech abrogating “Holy Law,” the totalitarian Sharia [1].
Professor Carl Brockelmann (1868–1956), the renowned scholar of Semitic languages, and arguably the foremost Orientalist of his generation, made these candid observations [1] about the sharia’s injunctions pertaining to penal law, in 1939—Islamic law being “valid” eternally, and all too widely applied in Brockelmann’s era, till now.
Blasphemy with respect to God [Allah], the Prophet, and his predecessors is punished by death, as is defection from Islam, if the culprit persists in his disbelief.
Almost three-quarters of a century later, Rising Restrictions on Religion, a report by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion and Public Life issued August 9, 2011, examined [1] the issue of “defamation” of religion, tracking countries where various penalties are enforced for apostasy, blasphemy, or criticism of religions. “While such laws are sometimes promoted as a way to protect religion, in practice they often serve to punish religious minorities whose beliefs are deemed unorthodox or heretical,” the report noted. The Pew report, consistent with Brockelmann’s assessment from 1939, found that application of the sharia at present resulted in a disproportionate number of Muslim countries, twenty-one—Afghanistan, Algeria, Bahrain, Brunei, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Maldives, Morocco, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Tajikistan, Turkey, Western Sahara, and Yemen—registering the highest (i.e., worst) persecution scores on their scale. Furthermore, the Pew investigators observed [1],
Eight-in-ten countries in the Middle East–North Africa region have laws against blasphemy, apostasy or defamation of religion, the highest share of any region. These penalties are enforced in 60% of the countries in the region.
http://ideas.time.com/2012/09/19/why-im-a-one-issue-voter/
EITHER THE MAN IS A TOTAL FOOL OR ANOTHER FOOL SABOTAGED HIM AND WROTE THIS DRIVEL ON HIS STATIONARY…..SHAME ON HIM….HE SHOULD ISSUE AN APOLOGY…INSTEAD HE IS PREENING AND PROUD OF THIS FOUL LINKING OF THE HOLOCAUST AND HIROSHIMA….RSK
“There are two words that symbolize the terror of the twentieth century: Auschwitz and Hiroshima. An Iranian bomb threatens to combine them both. It portends the destruction of an entire nation and an entire people in a moment. However hard it may be to imagine such wholesale slaughter, if history has taught us nothing else, it has taught that today’s delusions of madmen can become tomorrow’s reality.”
I have never voted in a Presidential election on one issue alone, but I will this year.
We all know there are crucial economic and social issues. If you are out of a job, what could be more pressing? There are foreign policy challenges with Russia, China, North Korea and the Middle East. I do not mean to minimize the urgency of these issues. But this year, for me, they must all take a back seat.
Although I recently delivered the benediction at the Democratic National Convention, I considered the act religious, not political — a blessing, not an endorsement. My decision this year will be simple: I will vote for whichever candidate seems likelier to stop Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.
There are two words that symbolize the terror of the twentieth century: Auschwitz and Hiroshima. An Iranian bomb threatens to combine them both. It portends the destruction of an entire nation and an entire people in a moment. However hard it may be to imagine such wholesale slaughter, if history has taught us nothing else, it has taught that today’s delusions of madmen can become tomorrow’s reality.
The problem is not one person. True, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad describes Israel as an “insult to humanity” and “a cancerous tumor,” and calls for its “disappearance.” But it is equally true that in May, the chief of staff of the Iranian armed forces, Major-General Seyed Hassan Firouzabadi, said: “The Iranian nation is standing for its cause [and] that is the full annihilation of Israel.” And in June, Iranian Vice-President Mohammad Reza Rahimi told a United Nations-sponsored anti-drug conference that the Jews were responsible for the spread of illegal drugs around the world, that the Zionists control the international drug trade, and that they had ordered doctors to kill black babies.
Experts from Israel’s former Mossad Chief Meir Dagan and others point to a genuine concern that Iran would bomb Israel. So those like The New York Times‘ Bill Keller who declare that Iran would not use the bomb are foisting their own humanitarian criteria on people who do not share them. The reasoning seems to be: “Since for me it is unthinkable, it must be impossible.” But we have learned to our cost in the twentieth century, when it comes to atrocity, the unthinkable is indeed possible. “Containing” a nuclear Iran is the opposite of real politik; it is fantasy politik.
http://pjmedia.com/blog/the-fantasy-of-the-fragile-muslim/ Immediately following the initial Islamist violence in Egypt and Libya, which has now spread throughout the Islamic world, the White House and Hillary Clinton’s State Department blamed a barely seen video that mocked the Prophet Mohammad. While a mainly compliant media reinforced this notion, some criticism has hit the public square. In response, the […]
4 Injured as Explosion Hits Kosher Supermarket in France A kosher supermarket in a French suburb was attacked with at least one explosive device on Wednesday, as two suspects dressed in black targeted shoppers inside the market, reportedly injuring 4 people. According to reports from the French news agency Sipa, the two suspects placed a […]
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/09/18/the_seven_deadly_sins_of_john_brennan?page=full WHAT OBAMA’S HIGH PRIEST OF TARGETED KILLINGS DOESN’T WANT YOU TO KNOW Last week, I introduced readers to John Brennan, the U.S. president’s closest advisor for intelligence and counterterrorism issues. Although Americans know little about Brennan, he plays an essential role in shaping and implementing the expansive, unprecedented targeted killing of suspected terrorists and […]
http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=2568 On Sept. 28, 2000, Israeli opposition leader Ariel Sharon visited the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Because of the political controversy over the holy site, Sharon’s ascent to the holy site had to be coordinated in advance. And so it was. Then Public Security Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami gave the green light to Sharon, after receiving […]
http://shmuelkatz.com/wordpress/?p=936 “There is always an easy solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong.” This quip by American journalist H.L. Mencken contains a profound truth, particularly where the Arab-Israeli conflict is concerned. There has been no end to plans to ‘solve the problem’. Many never get off the ground. Those that do — […]
http://pjmedia.com/andrewmccarthy/2012/09/19/the-palestinians-do-not-want-peace/ Besides the illusion of “Islamic democracy,” another telltale symptom of Spring Fever (the title and subject of my new book) is the fantasy that Palestinians want peace — which is to say, peaceful coexistence with their Israeli neighbors. Thus the shrieking over Mitt Romney’s matter-of-fact observation of the matter of fact that the Palestinians […]
http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/
“Above all else, it is important to make clear to our own people and to theirs, that we have borders and nations for a reason. That if foreign nations and peoples would like to use force to tell us what movies we can make, then we will use force to tell them what protests they can have, and that in a contest of force, we will win.
It is time for a new way, a way in which Muslims will no longer have to learn about America and Americans will no longer have to learn about Islam, where we will give up on winning each other’s hearts and minds, and stick to watching each other’s property lines. That is the argument that needs to be advanced in the face of Obama’s catastrophic Arab Spring failures and the alternative to it is four more years of terror and appeasement.”
While Maureen Dowd warns that the neo-conservatives are coming back, an event surely worse than the siege of American embassies and the murder of American ambassadors, she can rest her head easy on that account. The neo-conservatives died in the siege of Benghazi, much like Mubarak they are still around, but completely irrelevant in the way that most ideas are once they lose their meaning.
Dowd would know better than to celebrate the death of neo-conservativism, if she understood what that really meant, beyond the shadowy menace that her dinner party guests tell her about before the main course is served.
In the Middle East, neo-conservatives offered a middle ground between appeasement and belligerence that blended Cold War politics and Third World democracy outreach. The ideas that made so much sense when former liberals were confronting the nightmarish repressive powers of the Soviet Union met their end in the Middle East for reasons that neither they nor their ideological enemies can explain.
