"If only more people could follow his example, instead of taking the path of appeasement in the name of cultural sensitivity, the long years of murder and mayhem wrought by the Islamists on the West might come to an end." — Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Unherd, August 7, 2022.
[A] terrible and different reality: the fatwa is gaining ground...
Islamic extremists in 2012 published a terrifying "most wanted list", like those of the FBI. Title: "Yes we can. A bullet a day keeps the infidel away.... " What happened to the faces and names on that list? They have been killed, left the public arena to protect themselves, or died under police protection.
We do not even know they exist: our fearful conformist press never tells their amazing stories. They live among us, in Paris, London, Oslo, Copenhagen, Berlin, Amsterdam and all the other European capitals. They live according to a strict security protocol: they have to tell the police in advance what they will do during the day, who they will see and where they will go and, if any place is not considered safe, these victims are forced to change plans.
"Anyone who criticizes Islamism must expect to be violently attacked in this country and without anyone being offended." — Jan Aleksander Karon, journalist, Tichys Einblick, August 20, 2022.
"Give us his head," Islamists shouted outside a British school in Batley. They wanted to murder a teacher whose name we do not even know and who was forced to leave the school after heavy death threats. What was he guilty of? Having shown in class some of the Mohammed cartoons during a lesson on freedom of expression.
All decent people should stand with Salman Rushdie and against his persecutors. Is it now a little bit clearer that radical Islam is today one of the biggest threats to Western culture and that we are not winning, but instead becoming like turkeys celebrating Thanksgiving?
-https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18815/free-speech-rushdie-fatwa
"Salman
Rushdie is a
champion of free speech, bravely standing up for Western ideals when so many
shy away from the fight. If only more people could follow his example, instead
of taking the path of appeasement in the name of cultural sensitivity, the long
years of murder and mayhem wrought by the Islamists on the West might come to
an end." — Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Boualem Sansal writing for L'Express last week:
"[T]o
speak only of France, the police will soon no longer be enough, it will be
necessary to recruit battalions or form a new body of bodyguards, who know
Islam and can recognize under which dress it is presented."
French journalist Zineb El Rhazoui has more bodyguards than many Macron ministers. "Zineb El Rhazoui must be killed to avenge the Prophet," reads a fatwa.
The new address of the Charlie Hebdo newspaper offices is secret and it has six armored doors and a safe room that the journalists can enter in case of attack. The entire editorial office of Charlie Hebdo is now protected by 85 police officers. Former Charlie Hebdo director Philippe Val lives in a house with bulletproof windows, police officers and an armored safe room where there is a special telephone line to call for help. Each Charlie Hebdo employee is always accompanied by a car with two policemen. If the need arises, another police motorcycle or armored car should arrive.
Mina Ahadi, who founded the Council of Former Muslims in Germany, does not move without an escort, and like the novelist Fatma Bläser, who was the victim of a forced marriage, is protected by the police.
Turkish-born lawyer Syran Ates, in Berlin, is protected by six police officers. "She receives three thousand threats," her lawyer said.
When Can Dündar, the bravest Turkish journalist, who as the director of the newspaper Cumhuriyet expressed solidarity with Charlie Hebdo, left Turkey for Germany, he would never have imagined that he would need the police protection. The biggest difference is that in Turkey, policemen searched his house looking for items to compromise him, while in Berlin they are guarding his home.
"Critics of Islam must fear for their lives: death threats and attacks," notes the German website Tichys Einblick.
"Anyone
who criticizes Islamism must expect to be violently attacked in this country
and without anyone being offended," said journalist Jan Aleksander Karon.
"In Germany it is increasingly dangerous to criticize Islam".
"We have lived with the fear of a terrorist attack for nine years, and yes, that is the explanation why we do not reprint the cartoons, whether it be our own or Charlie Hebdo's. We are also aware that we therefore bow to violence and intimidation."
Also under
protection is the French-Algerian journalist Mohammed
Sifaoui. His
photograph and name are published on jihadist websites next to the word
"apostate". Many people under protection are women, such as Marika Bret, a Charlie Hebdo employee
who was "exfiltrated" from home, and the French television presenter
originally from Turkey, Claire Koc. Or the journalist Ophélie
Meunier, the
reporter from Zone Interdite who reported on the Islamization of Roubaix in
prime time with the French politician Amine Elbahi, of the Républicains Party, who
received threats of beheading.
"Give us his head," Islamists shouted outside a British school in Batley. They wanted to murder a teacher whose name we do not even know and who was forced to leave the school after heavy death threats. What was he guilty of? Having shown in class some of the Muhammad cartoons during a lesson on freedom of expression. He now lives in a safe house with his wife and children, out of fear of being killed. The threat is deemed so serious that not even the family's relatives know where they live. "The windows of the house where the teacher lived for more than eight years are covered with white sheets".
Khomeini’s fatwa didn’t just mark Rushdie for assassination, but included the publishers of the novel and bookstores selling it: all “are condemned to death. I call on all valiant Muslims wherever they may be in the world to kill them without delay, so that no one will dare insult the sacred beliefs of Muslims henceforth. And whoever is killed in this cause will be a martyr.”
Iran’s
current leader, Ali Khamenei, in 2017 confirmed the fatwa: “The decree is as
Imam Khomeini issued.”
In 2015, when PEN gave an award to French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo––twelve of whose staff had been murdered by two jihadist terrorists over cartoons deemed offensive to Islam–– 200 authors protested the award, accusing PEN of “valorizing selectively offensive material: material that intensifies the anti-Islamic, anti-Maghreb, anti-Arab sentiments already prevalent in the Western world.”
This
cowardly cant was called out by Rushdie: “This issue has nothing to do with
an oppressed and disadvantaged minority. It has everything to do with the
battle against fanatical Islam, which is highly organized, well funded, and
which seeks to terrify us all, Muslims as well as non-Muslims, into a cowed
silence.”
But such
cringing apologetics for Khomeini also appeared in 1989. Esteemed British
historian Hugh Trevor-Roper declared that he “would not shed a tear if some British
Muslims, deploring Mr. Rushdie’s manners, were to waylay him in a dark street
and seek to improve them.” A UCLA professor said
Khomeini was “completely within his rights” to condemn Rushdie to death. After
riots in Pakistan, the U.S. embassy assured
Muslims that “the U.S. in no way supports or associates itself with any
activity that is [in] any sense offensive or insulting to Islam”––which
was a de facto sacrifice of the right to free speech.
Indeed,
such fear historically has been a tactic of jihad, in order “to strike
terror into the enemies of Allah,” as the Koran puts it (8.60). The fatwa
condemning Rushdie, and the subsequent violence and appeasement, created what Daniel
Pipes has called the “Rushdie rules”: anything perceived as an insult to
Islam would be met with riots, violence, murder and, in the case of women,
rape. And it has worked for decades, with Western politicians, academics,
media, and popular culture self-censoring to avoid such blowback, all the while
they camouflage their cowardice as “tolerance” and “respect for diversity.”
As Hilaire
Belloc pointed out in 1938, Westerners “have forgotten all about Islam.
They have never come in contact with it. They take for granted that it is
decaying, and that, anyway, it is just a foreign religion which will not
concern them. It is, as a fact, the most formidable and persistent enemy which
our civilization has had, and may at any moment become as large a menace in the
future as it has been in the past.”
Moreover,
in contrast to a secularizing West, “In Islam there has been no dissolution
of ancestral doctrine—or, at any rate, nothing corresponding to the universal
break-up of religion in Europe. The whole spiritual strength of Islam is still
present in the masses of Syria and Anatolia, of the East Asian mountains, of
Arabia, Egypt and North Africa. The final fruit of this tenacity, the second
period of Islamic power, may be delayed —but I doubt whether it can be
permanently postponed.”
When Belloc wrote those words, the Muslim Brotherhood, arguably the last century’s most significant promoter of restoring Islam’s global dominance, had been in existence for 10 years. Its founder Hassan al Banna, and chief publicist, Sayyid Qutb––“al Qaeda’s intellectual godfather,” as the Hudson Institute’s Lee Smith described him––had explicitly defined Islam’s global renewal in terms of violent jihad.
According
to al Banna, for example, “It is the nature of Islam to
dominate not to be dominated, to impose its power to the entire planet.” His
colleague Qutb made it clear that force would be necessary to achieve Islam’s
restoration: “Those [Western infidels] who have usurped
the power of Allah on earth and made His worshippers their slaves will not be
dispossessed by words alone.”
The next
major offensive in this battle came with the 1978-79 Islamic Revolution in Iran.
Its architect was the Ayatollah Khomeini, a revered Shiite cleric. In
1941 he had defined the divine obligation of Muslims to expand Islam by force: “Those who study jihad will understand
why Islam wants to conquer the whole world,” for those conquered and converted
“will be marked for everlasting salvation.”
After he
came to power in 1979, Khomeini explicitly named
violent jihad as the instrument of that transformation: “Islam is a religion of
blood for the infidel but a religion of guidance for the other people,” i.e.
Muslims. The purpose of the Iranian Revolution, then, was not “to lower the
price of melons,” as Khomeini sneered at Western materialism. It was to wage jihad
in order to restore Islam’s lost global dominance.
Therefore, “We shall export our revolution to the whole world. Until the
cry ‘There is no God but Allah’ resounds over the whole world, there will be
jihad.”
For over 40
years Iran has fulfilled Khomeini’s pledge, its proxies like Hezbollah
inflicting terrorist violence on the enemies of Islam such as Salman Rushdie,
just the most famous of Iran’s many victims. The citizens and armed force of
America have been prominent casualties of Iran’s proxies, especially the 1983
murder of 243 military personnel in Beirut, a heinous attack that went
unanswered by the Reagan administration.
Khomeini
and the Iranian religious revolution were also potent influences on Osama bin
Laden and al Qaeda.
During the Nineties, al Qaeda carried out several attacks on U.S. soldiers and
diplomats, none of which provoked serious retaliation from the Clinton
administration. These terrorist acts culminated in the gruesome carnage
of 9/11 that killed nearly 3000 Americans. Like the previous decade of
attacks, 9/11 was another, more spectacular escalation in the war to fulfill
the goal bin Laden set out at al Qaeda’s birth: “To lift the word of Allah to
make His religion victorious.”
… the Bush
administration adopted a “nothing to do with Islam” stance, and
transformed the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq into nation-building projects and
democracy promotion, the mistaken lesson derived from the West’s victory in the
Cold War. Few considered that those Western ideals would not attract many of
the adherents of a militant faith that created one of history’s biggest
empires, and that for a thousand years dominated Europe and the Mediterranean.
More dangerous was Bush’s naïve outreach to the Muslim world that distorted Islamic doctrine in order to appease the global umma of believers. In his address to the nation nine days after 9/11, Bush claimed that the al Qaeda terrorists “practice a fringe form of Islamic extremism that has been rejected by Muslim scholars and the vast majority of Muslim clerics,” and said of Islam in general, “Its teachings are good and peaceful, and those who commit evil in the name of Allah blaspheme the name of Allah.”
… the Koran and Mohammed: “I was ordered to fight people until they confess that there is no God but Allah and until they pray and pay alms” ––that is, convert to Islam, or if they are “people of the book,” Christians and Jews, pay the jizya tax to their Muslim overlords (Koran 9.22).
The
jihadists have told us over and over what their motives are, and how they are
grounded in the Koran, the life and sayings of Mohammed, and in centuries of
esteemed exegetes like the 14th century philosophers Ibn Khaldun and
Ibn Taymiyyah, both of whom are not “fringe” authorities for modern Muslims.
Yet the
Biden administration and the Europeans are still making concessions and
promising to pay what amounts to jizya to the mullahs of Iran––according
to Israel, a fiscal infusion worth $200 million a day––so that they rejoin the feckless
nuclear deal, even though they are already on the brink of possessing nuclear
weapons.
That’s not
all. The Nuance Party wants Swedish school children to be taught about
their country’s history of “Afrophobia and Islamophobia” (sound familiar?) and
about Sweden's - yes, Sweden’s - role in the transatlantic slave trade.
In a mind-boggling reversal of reality, the party’s website tells us that “Sweden's
Muslims experience both physical and verbal personal attacks of a racist nature
on a daily basis. Damage and vandalism of property are just a few examples of
this horrific phenomenon.”
The site
also explains that Nuance “is a pro-Palestinian party” that seeks the
dissolution of Israel, wants Sweden to sanction Israel as often as possible at
the UN and in Brussels, and “does not recognize Jerusalem as the capital of
Israel.” And then there’s this: “The Nuance Party does not take a stand for the
Palestinian political government. The Nuance Party takes a stand for the
Palestinian people.” In other words: we won’t criticize Hamas.
All in all,
it’s “a clear Islamist agenda,” wrote Helena Edlund in Document - and
therefore, in a country where at least 8% of the people are Muslims,
most of them concentrated in enclaves, is electoral gold for the Nuance Party,
whose leaders expect to win at least a few seats in the Riksdag (the national
parliament) and to get voted on to city councils as representatives of some of
the many neighborhoods where up to 90% of voters are “foreign-born” (or
are the children of two “foreign-born” parents).
The Social Democratic Party - whose leaders, living in the safest places in the country, have managed for decades not to get alarmed at all by the terrifying consequences of Islamization for more and more of their country’s people - is sure as hell alarmed now, because its years of catering to Muslims (and being rewarded in turn by their support at the polls) may now be at an end. “The Social Democrats have taken our votes for granted,” party secretary Rami Hussein said recently. “I would like to see other parties take our issues seriously, but they don't. That's why we have to get involved.” Translation: Muslims in Sweden have gotten everything they’re going to get out of the Social Democrats. Their numbers are now big enough to enable them to win power through their own Islamist-oriented party, and thereby take the process of stealth jihad to a new level. (This has already happened, by the way, in the Netherlands, where the Denk Party - denk is Dutch for “think” and Turkish for “equal” - has three seats in the Tweede Kamer, a.k.a. House of Representatives.)
Amusingly,
the political, media, and academic elites that used to have nothing but pretty
things to say about Islam have now changed their tune. Big time. “They claim
not to be a Muslim party, but it is Muslims they are mainly trying to mobilize
- above all Sunni Muslims,” Jonas Esaisson, a political scientist at
Gothenburg University, told NRK. Tomas Morgan Johansson, Sweden’s Minister
of Justice, warned that the Nuance Party will intensify division in Swedish
society ...
Dagens Nyheter, has reported that one out of seven of the Nuance Party’s candidates have been convicted of serious crimes, including assault. But so what? Among Muslim voters in Sweden, being arrested for transgressing secular law - the infidels’ law! - is probably a plus. The bottom line is that what we’re seeing here is the beginning of the inevitable next step in the modern history of a Western Europe whose political leaders have ignored - and even abetted - their countries’ gradual Islamization. In time, the Muslim parties in the Netherlands and Sweden will be joined by new Muslim parties in other Western European countries. As the Muslim population grows, those parties will gain strength. And over time, almost imperceptibly, power will change hands, and in Sweden, for example, a constitutional monarchy will turn into an “Islamic republic.” Don’t listen to me - take it from Basem Mahmoud, a Malmö imam who preached in February that “Sweden is ours. It's ours, whether they like it or not. In ten to fifteen years, it will be ours.”
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/08/salman-rushdie-and-wests-jihad-denial-bruce-thornton/
Rushdie sa:
"I profoundly regret the distress that publication
has occasioned to sincere followers of Islam," he said in one
statement, asking his publisher to hold back release of the paperback edition
of the book. As a matter of self-preservation, his position was understandable.
And, still,
it was all to no avail. Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa
against Rushdie, contending that even if the author
"became the most pious man of all time" it was the duty of every
Muslim to "employ everything he has got" to murder the writer.
The point
of the fatwa was not only to punish Rushdie for blasphemy but to intimidate
others from daring to engage. It worked. As I note in detail in my recent book,
Europe -- and to a lesser extent, the United States -- began to self-censor any
topic that might offend Islamic theocrats. No one should be guaranteed a job or
a book, of course, but folding to illiberal pressure only incentivizes more
threats and violence, as we saw with Charlie Hebdo and the numerous other
attacks that followed. More recently, the left has simply begun smearing anyone
who noted the illiberalism of political Islam as an Islamophobe. As author Kenan
Malik noted, the legacy of the Rushdie fatwa was that Western Europe had
"internalized" censorship. "Rushdie's critics lost the battle --
The Satanic Verses continues to be published," he wrote. "But
they won the war. The argument at the heart of the anti-Rushdie case -- that it
is morally unacceptable to cause offense to other cultures -- is now widely accepted." Rushdie has rightly called this
capitulation "censorship by fear."
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