This is a long post, but please take the time to read it, as it contains several different points of common interest.
The Islamic world continues to threaten violence against anyone who challenges any aspect of their faith system. Free speech in Islamic controlled countries is practically nonexistent, while the media in European countries, with large Islamic populations, pull articles critical of Islam and apologize for any supposed slights against Islam.
Islamic Terrorist reside, alive and well, in all these places, as they continue on a course, proven effective by the appeasers, of threatening, violence and death to all who oppose them.
Three European newspapers banned for “offending Islam”
Reporters Without Borders today condemned the Egyptian government’s decision yesterday to ban the sale of three recent issues of European newspapers containing articles which it considered “offensive to Islam.”
“Some people may indeed have felt offended by these articles but censorship is never an acceptable response,” the press freedom organisation said. “It is up to readers to form their own opinions and to have a debate about them, if they want. But it is not the job of the authorities to decide which information may or may not be made available to the public.”
Information minister Anas Al-Fekki issued a decree banning the sale of the 19 September issue of the French daily Le Figaro, the 16 September issue of the German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and the latest issue of the London-based Guardian Weekly.
Le Figaro’s 19 September issue had already been banned in Tunisia on the same grounds. It contained an op-ed piece by philosopher Robert Redeker headlined: “What must the free world do in the face of Islamist intimidation?”
The ban on the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung was prompted by an article in its cultural supplement on Islam and the recent controversy about Pope Benedict’s comments.
Teacher in hiding after attacking Islam
A French philosophy teacher has gone into hiding under police protection after receiving death threats for an article he wrote attacking Islam and the Prophet Mohammed.
The teacher, Robert Redeker, was writing in response to the angry reactions around the Islamic world to a lecture by Pope Benedict XVI two weeks ago, in which he drew a link between Islam and violence.
His article, describing the Koran as “a book of incredible violence”, sparked death threats against Mr Redeker, and fuelled fears of rising tensions between supporters of free speech in secular western societies and their resident Muslim populations.
These concerns led to the removal of a controversial Mozart opera from the programme of Berlin’s Deutsche Opera this week because of fears the show, adapted to include a scene showing the Prophet Mohammed’s severed head on stage, would be targeted by Islamic extremists.
Dominique de Villepin, France’s prime minister, asked about the death threats against Mr Redeker on French radio, said: “It’s unacceptable and shows that we are living in a dangerous world, too often intolerant, and the extent we must be vigilant to have total respect of others in our society.”
Le Figaro on Friday published a front page editorial declaring: “We condemn as resolutely as possible the serious attack on the freedom of thought and the freedom of speech that this affair has provoked.”
Mr Redeker’s article, entitled “Faced with Islamic intimidation, what should the free world do?” was published in Le Figaro on September 19. In it, he attacked the Prophet Mohammed, saying: “Pitiless war leader, pillager, butcher of Jews and polygamous, this is how Mohammed is revealed by the Koran.” Tunisia and Egypt banned the issue containing the article.
Mr Redeker, who has not returned to his class in Saint-Orens-de-Gameville, a village near Toulouse in south-west France, since his article was published, claims to have received letters saying an order to kill him had been signed and his would-be assassins knew his address.
The philosophy teacher, who has earned a reputation for his outspoken anti-Islam views, complained he had become “homeless in the French republic, while all I did was exercise my constitutional right to freely express my opinion on a religion.”
However, he received only partial support from his boss, Gilles de Robien, education minister, who declared his “solidarity” with Mr Redeker, but argued that “a public employee should be prudent and moderate in all circumstances.”
Dailil Boubakeur, the moderate head of the French Muslim Council, condemned the death threats. “They are not Muslims threatening him, they are extremists, radicals. We leave them to take responsiblity for their threats, they do not represent us,” he said.
But one of Mr Boubakeur’s advisors told the Financial Times that Mr Redeker had a reputation for being “ideologically committed” to the theory of a clash of civilisations between Islam and the west.
As French state schools are part of the domain of the secular state, they are meant to be free of all religious influence. This concept led to France’s controversial ban on students wearing visible religious symbols, including the hijab, or Islamic headscarf.
Here is the English translation of Robert Redeker’s article:
What should the free world do while facing Islamist intimidation?
The reactions caused by Benedict XVI’s analysis of Islam and violence highlight the underhanded maneuver carried out by Islam to stifle what the West values more than anything, and which does not exist in any Moslem country: freedom of thought and expression.
Islam tries to impose its rules on Europe : opening of public swimming pools at certain hours reserved exclusively for women, ban on caricaturing this religion, demands for special diets for Muslim children in school cafeterias, struggle to impose the veil at school, accusations of Islamophobia against free spirits.
How can one explain the ban on the wearing thongs on Paris-Beaches* this summer? The reasoning put forth was bizarre: women wering thongs would risk “disturbing the peace”. Did this mean that bands of frustrated youths would become violent while being offended by displays of beauty? Or were the authorities scared of Islamist demonstrations by virtue squads near Paris-Beaches?
However, the authorization of the veil on the street is more disturbing to public peace than wearing a thong, because it invites complaints against the upholding the oppression of women .This ban represents an Islamization of sensibilities in France, a more or less conscious submission to the diktats of Islam. At the very least it is the result of the insidious Muslim pressure on the minds: even those who protested the introduction of a “Jean Paul II Square” in Paris would not be opposed to the construction of mosques. Islam is trying to force Europe to yield to its vision of humanity.
As in the past with Communism, the West finds itself under ideological watch. Islam presents itself, like defunct Communism, as an alternative to the Western world. In the way of Communism before it, Islam, to conquer spirits, plays on a sensitive string. It prides itself on a legitimacy which troubles Western conscience, which is attentive to others: it claims to be the voice of the oppressed of the planet. Yesterday, the voice of the poor supposedly came from Moscow, today it originates in Mecca! Again, today, western intellectuals incarnate the eye of the Koran, as they have incarnated the eye of Moscow. They now excommunicate people because of Islamophobia, as they did before because of anti-communism.
This opening to others, specific to the West, is a secularization of Christianity that can be summarized thus:the other person must come before myself. The Westerner, heir to Christianity, is the that exposes his soul bare. He runs the risk of being seen as weak. With the same ardor as Communism, Islam treats generosity, broadmindedness, tolerance, gentleness, freedom of women and of manners, democratic values, as marks of decadence. They are weaknesses that it seeks to exploit, by means of useful idiots, self-rigtheous consciences drowning in nice feelings, in order to impose the Koranic order on the Western world itself.
The Koran is a book of unparalleled violence. Maxime Rodinson states, in Encyclopedia Universalis, some truths that in France are as significant as they are taboo. On one hand: “Mohammed revealed in Medina unsuspected qualities as political leader and military chief (…) He resorted to private war, by then a prevalent custom in Arabia (….) Mohammed soon sent small groups of partisans to attack the Meccan caravans, thus punishing his unbelieving compatriots and simultaneously acquiring the booty of a wealthy man.”
There is more: “Mohammed profited from this success by eradicating the Jewish tribe which resided in Medina, the Quarayza, whom he accused of suspect behaviour.” And: “After the death of Khadija, he married a widow, a good housewife, called Sawda, and in addition to the little Aisha, barely ten years old. His erotic predilections, held in check for a long time, led him to ten simultaneous marriages .”
A merciless war chief, plunderer, slaughterer of Jews and a polygamist, such is the man revealed through the Koran.
Of , the Catholic church is not above reproach. Its history is strewn with dark pages, for which it has officially repentaed. The Inquisition, the hounding of witches, the execution of the philosophers Giordano Bruno and Vanini, those wrong-thinking Epicureans, in the 18th century the execution of the knight of La Barre for impiety, do not plead in the church’s favor. But what differentiates Christianity from Islam is obvious: it is always possible to go back to true evangelical values, the peaceful character of Jesus as opposed to the deviations of the Church.
None of the faults of the Church have their roots in the Gospel. Jesus is non-violent. Going back to Jesus is akin to forswear the excesses of the Church. Going back to Mahomet, to the conbtrary, reinforces hate and violence. Jesus is a master of love, Mahomet is a master of hatred.
The stoning of Satan, each year in Mecca, is not only an obsolete superstition. It not only sets the stage for a hysterical crowd flirting with barbarity. Its importis anthropological. Here is a rite, which each Muslim is invited to submit to, that emphasizes violence as a sacred duty in the very heart of the believer.
This stoning, accompanied each year by the acciedental trampling to death of some of the believers, sometimes up to several hundreds, is a rite that feeds archaic violence.
Instead of getting rid of this archaic violence, and thus imitating Judaism and Christianity (Judaism starts when it abandons human sacrifice, and enters civilization; Christianity transforms sacrifice through the Eucharist), Islam builds a nest for this violence, where it will incubate. Whereas Judaism and Christianity are religions whose rites spurn violence, by delegitimizing it, Islam is a religion that exalts violence and hatred in its everyday rites and sacred book.
Hatred and violence dwell in the book with which every Muslim is brought up, the Koran. As in the Cold War, where violence and intimidation were the methods used by an ideology hell bent on hegemony, so today Islam tries to put its leaden mantel all over the world. Benedict XVI’s cruel experience is testimony to this. Nowadays, the West has to be called the “free world” in comparison to the Muslim world; likewise, the enemies of the “free world”, the zealous bureaucrats of the Koran’s vision, swarm in the very center of the frre World.
Link to Le Figaro.
Teacher who attacked Islam: ‘alone and abandoned’
Robert Redeker, 52, is receiving round-the-clock police protection and changing addresses every two days, after publishing an article describing the Koran as a “book of extraordinary violence” and Islam as “a religion which … exalts violence and hate”.
He told i-TV television he had received several e-mail threats targeting himself and his wife and three children, and that his photograph and address were available on several Islamist Internet sites.
“There is a very clear map of how to get to my home, with the words: ‘This pig must have his head cut off’,” he said.
Read the rest of the article.
Hat Tip: Michelle Malkin.
And I say to the Islamic Terrorist:
“Lan astaslem!!!”
“I will not submit!!!”
