Radical Islam’s War on Free Speech

Can’t We Talk About This? from “Can’t We Talk?” Homepage on Vimeo.

We have to note that in the majority, Muslims in the U.S. are pretty moderate, reasonable, and even patriotic. According to the Pew Center:

These are tense times for American Muslims. Majorities say that their religious group faces a lot of discrimination in the United States, that the media is unfair to Muslims and that other Americans do not view Islam as part of mainstream U.S. society. Nearly one-in-five (19%) say they have been called offensive names in the last year, and 6% say they have been physically threatened or attacked.

Yet for most American Muslims, these problems only partially define their personal experiences in the U.S. Four-in-five say they are satisfied with the way things are going in their lives, and 84% categorize Americans in general as “friendly” (55%) or “neutral” (30%) toward U.S. Muslims. About nine-in-ten (92%) say they are proud to be American.

These findings come from Pew Research Center’s new survey of 1,001 U.S. Muslim adults, conducted Jan. 23 to May 2, 2017. The poll follows earlier Pew Research Center surveys of American Muslims in 2007 and 2011.

But Islam is less benign in Europe, with a political culture inferior to that of the U.S. There, “blood and soil” nationalism (you can’t be a real German or Frenchman unless your ancestors have lived there for centuries) is mixed with political correctness (Muslims have to be pandered to as a “marginalized group”).

And there, as here, a radical minority of politically active Muslims are actively trying to suppress free speech. And doing so with the aid of politically correct secular leftists.

Islam: Europe vs. America

From Jeff Jacoby in the Boston Globe:

LONG BEFORE TUESDAY’S terror attacks in Brussels, it was clear that Belgium had become a breeding ground for Islamist extremists. Hundreds of Belgian Muslims — as many as 500, according to one estimate — have gone to Syria and Iraq to fight for ISIS, making Belgium by far Europe’s leading supplier of foreign jihadists. Last November’s horrific slaughter in Paris was masterminded by a Belgian radical, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, and at least four of the men who carried out those attacks were from the Brussels district of Molenbeek. One of them was Salah Abdeslam, who was captured in Molenbeek, after an intense manhunt, on March 19.

For Islamist imams and terrorist ringleaders, such neighborhoods — heavily Muslim, densely populated, with high unemployment and crime rates — have proved fertile territory for recruiting violent jihadists. “There is almost always a link with Molenbeek. That’s a gigantic problem, of course,” Belgium’s prime minister said after the Paris atrocities.

But it’s only recently that the country’s security officials began confronting that “gigantic problem” with an appropriate sense of urgency. The New York Times reported last fall that weeks before the Paris attacks, Molenbeek’s mayor, Françoise Schepmans, was given a list of more than 80 Islamist terror suspects living in her district. She took no action and was unapologetic even after three of the men on the list took part in the Paris massacre.

“What was I supposed to do about them?” Schepmans told the Times. “It is not my job to track possible terrorists.”

That jaw-dropping complacency helps explain how an ISIS fifth column has been able to operate with such brazenness in Western Europe. But incompetent policing doesn’t explain why Muslims living in neighborhoods like Molenbeek, or in the banlieues outside Paris that have experienced violent riots, should be susceptible to Islamist radicalization in the first place.

Muslim communities are not inherently predisposed to violence. The presence of a sizable Muslim population in a non-Muslim-majority country does not inevitably presage jihadist bloodshed or demands for the imposition of sharia. It is true that some 650,000 Muslims live in Belgium, but five times as many — 3.3 million — live in the United States. Why hasn’t America become a hotbed of Islamic extremism? Why aren’t American Muslims by the thousands flocking to fight for ISIS, Al Qaeda, and other terrorist organizations? Why, despite the efforts of Islamist pressure groups such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations — a Muslim supremacist operation that masquerades as an advocate for civil rights — are most American Muslims intent on adopting America’s customs and way of life?

The United States has been far more successful at assimilating and integrating Muslim immigrants into American society and culture than has Western Europe. There are no Muslim ghettoes here like those in Molenbeek or the Paris suburbs, where authorities turn a blind eye to antisocial behavior and aggressive incitement by radicals preaching jihad. Of course there have been some heinous exceptions, such as the Tsarnaev brothers, the Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hassan, or the killers in San Bernardino. And mosques in American cities have often been built with funding from Saudi Arabia, which promotes a harsh and puritanical version of Islam.

Nevertheless, at the grass-roots level, Muslims in the United States, like other cultural and religious minorities, have had no problem acclimating to mainstream norms. In a detailed 2011 survey, the Pew Research Center found that Muslim Americans are “highly assimilated into American society and . . . largely content with their lives.” More than 80 percent of US Muslims expressed satisfaction with life in America, and 63 percent said they felt no conflict “between being a devout Muslim and living in a modern society.” The rates at which they participate in various everyday American activities — from following local sports teams to watching entertainment TV — are similar to those of the American public generally. Half of all Muslim immigrants display the US flag at home, in the office, or on their car.

Given America’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the bloody battles with Islamic regimes and insurgents, and the threat to homeland security from “lone wolf” terror attacks, it might seem surprising that Muslims in Detroit or Brooklyn aren’t at least as alienated as those in Molenbeek. But they aren’t. For despite the rise of identity politics and the balkanizing pressures of multicultural correctness, America’s melting pot still works. Generations of Muslim immigrants have come to America to escape repression, poverty, or war in their homelands. The life they have made for themselves here has been freer, safer, more prosperous, and more embracing than the existence they left behind. There are tensions, but not enough to keep most Muslims from fitting themselves comfortably into the American mosaic.

At a time when populist demagogues are doing so much damage to our social fabric, it is well to remember why Molenbeek is a European phenomenon, and not an American one. At the core of the American experience is a conviction that immigrants who come to America can and should become Americans. Patriotic assimilation turns profoundly dissimilar foreigners into proud and happy Americans. “Muslims in the United States,” Pew found, “reject extremism by much larger margins than most Muslim publics” around the world.

Americanization — E Pluribus Unum — is not only a key ingredient in the American Dream. It also keeps us safe.

Bottom line: American culture, with its emphasis on individualism and personal freedom, is more benign than the culture of Europe.

But America has its enclaves of cultural pathology: colleges and universities. Under the tutelage of leftist faculty and campus bureaucrats, Muslim and Arab students are encouraged to nurse a sense of grievance, and especially to hate the state of Israel. Thus we have things like “Israeli Apartheid Week” week at Marquette.

In this, as in other things, academia is an island a cultural pathology in a generally benign national culture.

Decadent European Elites Hate Israel (And So Do American Academics)

From Jewish News Online:

What we have today is a moral, intellectual siege of Israel, by the academic and media elites of Europe’s chattering-class citadels. They’ve turned Israel into Global Enemy No1, the source of all the world’s sorrow, a nation to be railed against more than any other on Earth.

My dictionary says a siege is the “surrounding of a place” with the intent of making its inhabitants surrender. Could there be a better description of European progressives’ myopic singling out of Israel for invective, and their shunning of its wares, books and even people via the BDS movement? People in Israel feel this moral siege, this intellectual blockade, very strongly.

Some Israelis I spoke to seemed more upset about the turn against Israel in Europe than they were about the more immediate threat posed Islamists in the Middle East. It wasn’t hard to work out why. As one said, “We considered Europe a friend”: “We thought Europe and Israel had a lot in common, being Western and democratic.”

This cuts to the heart of the Euro-elites’ paranoia about Israel, their turn against it: it is really European values, the ideals of modernity and democracy, they’ve given up on. The thing that riles them most about Israel is that it reminds them of what they used to be like, of the values they once espoused, before they lost the moral plot and sank into the cesspit of relativism and post-Enlightenment self-loathing.

Plucky, keen to protect its sovereignty, considering itself an outpost of liberalism… Israel is a painful reminder to today’s morally anchorless European thinkers and agitators of what their nations once were.They hate Israel because they hate themselves.

Israel has become the whipping boy of guilt-ridden Western liberals who’ve given up on the very idea of the West.

Of course, the same critique applies to leftist elites in the U.S., who are reflexively anti-Israel. Academics (especially in the humanities and social sciences) are the most typical examples of this sort of decadence. As reported by Frontpage:

Seeming to give proof to Orwell’s observation that some ideas are so stupid they could only have been thought of by intellectuals, yet another academic association—this time the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA)—has followed the lead of the American Studies Association, the American Anthropological Association, the Asian Studies Association, and several others by ignobly voting to approve another academic boycott of Israel.

With the characteristic pseudo-intellectual babble that currently dilutes the scholarly relevance of the social sciences and humanities, the NWSA’s recommendation to approve a boycott announced that, “As feminist scholars, activists, teachers, and public intellectuals we recognize the interconnectedness of systemic forms of oppression,” that “interconnectedness,” no doubt, justifying the singling out of Israeli academics for their particularly odious role in the oppression of women in the Middle East. “In the spirit of this intersectional perspective,” these moral termagants continued, “we cannot overlook the injustice and violence, including sexual and gender-based violence, perpetrated against Palestinians and other Arabs in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, within Israel and in the Golan Heights, as well as the colonial displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians during the 1948 Nakba.”

As Orwell made clear, corrupt language indicates corrupt thinking, and we have it in spades here.

And the fact that feminists think this way is particularly bizarre.

Perhaps it has escaped the notice of the NWSA experts on gender and sexuality issues that if one wanted to punish any Middle Eastern country for its subjugation and abuse of women, Israel would probably not be the first nation to come under reasonable or justifiable scrutiny for a group dedicated “to principles of human rights, justice and freedom for all, including academic freedom.” Totalitarian and despotic regimes throughout the region have created an oppressive group of social pathologies that negatively affect women, including genital mutilation, stoning of adulteresses, “honor” killings by fathers and brothers who have been shamed, cultures of gender apartheid in which women are seen as property with no emotional or physical autonomy, ubiquitous sexual assault, and a general subjugation of women, complete with regulations governing behavior, movement, speech, and even requirements that women be covered by burqa or hijab.

This is just more evidence, if any is needed, that feminism isn’t about women. It’s about left-wing politics and a set of cultural biases typical among leftists.

And among advanced industrial nations, American is the most like Israel. Which is why the leftists elites don’t like America either. And why ordinary Americans (especially Republicans) like Israel.

Self-Criticism in the Muslim World

An organization called MEMRI (Middle Eastern Media Research Institute) records and translates TV broadcasts in the Middle East. Their specialty has been chilling videos of fanatical Muslims (and even Muslim children) discussing the need to kill Jews.

However, that’s not the whole story. In some parts of the region self-criticism of Islam is seen on TV, and real intellectual debate happens. Here are a few examples.



OK, this one is an entertainer, so one might be inclined to claim this is a lot like (say) Kim Kardashian offering a critique of U.S. society. But (1) people like this may have more effect on the culture than intellectuals, and (2) her observations are sensible.

Terrorism: Being Honest About the Enemy

From liberal New York Times columnist (not a Fox News pundit) Thomas Friedman, thoughts on the inability of the Obama White House to honestly discuss the nature of the terrorist threat.

I’ve never been a fan of global conferences to solve problems, but when I read that the Obama administration is organizing a Summit on Countering Violent Extremism for Feb. 18, in response to the Paris killings, I had a visceral reaction: Is there a box on my tax returns that I can check so my tax dollars won’t go to pay for this?

When you don’t call things by their real name, you always get in trouble. And this administration, so fearful of being accused of Islamophobia, is refusing to make any link to radical Islam from the recent explosions of violence against civilians (most of them Muslims) by Boko Haram in Nigeria, by the Taliban in Pakistan, by Al Qaeda in Paris and by jihadists in Yemen and Iraq. We’ve entered the theater of the absurd.

Last week the conservative columnist Rich Lowry wrote an essay in Politico Magazine that contained quotes from White House spokesman Josh Earnest that I could not believe. I was sure they were made up. But I checked the transcript: 100 percent correct. I can’t say it better than Lowry did:

“The administration has lapsed into unselfconscious ridiculousness. Asked why the administration won’t say [after the Paris attacks] we are at war with radical Islam, Earnest on Tuesday explained the administration’s first concern ‘is accuracy. We want to describe exactly what happened. These are individuals who carried out an act of terrorism, and they later tried to justify that act of terrorism by invoking the religion of Islam and their own deviant view of it.’

This makes it sound as if the Charlie Hebdo terrorists set out to commit a random act of violent extremism and only subsequently, when they realized that they needed some justification, did they reach for Islam.

The day before, Earnest had conceded that there are lists of recent ‘examples of individuals who have cited Islam as they’ve carried out acts of violence.’ Cited Islam? According to the Earnest theory ... purposeless violent extremists rummage through the scriptures of great faiths, looking for some verses to cite to support their mayhem and often happen to settle on the holy texts of Islam.”

President Obama knows better. I am all for restraint on the issue, and would never hold every Muslim accountable for the acts of a few. But it is not good for us or the Muslim world to pretend that this spreading jihadist violence isn’t coming out of their faith community. It is coming mostly, but not exclusively, from angry young men and preachers on the fringe of the Sunni Arab and Pakistani communities in the Middle East and Europe.

Friedman then goes on to make an important distinction among Muslim communities.

Something else is also at work, and it needs to be discussed. It is the struggle within Arab and Pakistani Sunni Islam over whether and how to embrace modernity, pluralism and women’s rights. That struggle drives, and is driven by, the dysfunctionality of so many Arab states and Pakistan. It has left these societies with too many young men who have never held a job or a girl’s hand, who then seek to overcome their humiliation at being left behind, and to find identity, by “purifying” their worlds of other Muslims who are not sufficiently pious and of Westerners whom they perceive to be putting Muslims down. But you don’t see this in the two giant Muslim communities in Indonesia or India.

Friedman, in other words, is not keen to blame all of Islam for terrorism, but neither is he unwilling to honestly voice the problem.

That Video That’s Getting People Killed in the Middle East

We aren’t absolutely sure what video violent Islamist types have been protesting, but a good guess is that it’s this one, scenes from which have been posted on Buzzfeed.

So this is an insult to The Prophet?

More like an insult to the audience. And taking it at all seriously is an insult to The Prophet.

As Bizzfeed notes:

The anti-Muslim “movie” that served as the spark or pretext for a wave of violent unrest in Egypt and Libya may not be a movie at all.

As the video above — cut from the YouTube video tied to a global controversy — shows, nearly all of the names in the movie’s “trailer” are overdubbed. The video is a compilation of the most clumsily overdubbed moments from what is in reality an incoherent, haphazardly-edited set of scenes. Among the overdubbed words is “Mohammed,” suggesting that the footage was taken from a film about something else entirely. The footage also suggests multiple video sources — there are obvious and jarring discrepancies among actors and locations.

However, CNN has reported that the cast and crew disavowed the movie, and the overdubbing could also have been to conceal the content from the cast itself. Gawker interviewed a woman who played a part in the movie, who said that she had had no idea what it was about when she was hired.

As The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg reported today, the supposed filmmaker, “Sam Bacile,” appears not to be a real person — or at least not the director of the movie. A consultant to the movie, Steve Klein, told Goldberg that he didn’t know Bacile’s real name and that he wasn’t Israeli as reported.

The person using Bacile’s name told the Associated Press and the Wall Street Journal that the film had been made using $5 million from those donors, as well as a sizable crew of 45 people behind the camera and nearly 60 actors. The film’s low production values make those numbers risible. Five million dollars is more than the budget of some reputable independent films, and could certainly buy a better production than what went into the Mohammad film.

The film ranks with the infamous “Plan 9 from Outer Space” as a movie that’s actually fun to watch.

You won’t be laughing with it. You’ll be laughing at it.

Anti-Gay? It’s Fine Coming From Pet Democratic Groups

From Mark Steyn, writing about the intolerance of the left in the face of comments from Chick-fil-A president Dan Cathy opposing gay marriage.

Meanwhile, fellow [Boston] mayor Tom Menino announced that Chick-fil-A would not be opening in his burg anytime soon. “If they need licenses in the city, it will be very difficult,” said His Honor. If you’ve just wandered in in the middle of the column, this guy Menino isn’t the mayor of Soviet Novosibirsk or Kampong Cham under the Khmer Rouge, but of Boston, Massachusetts. Nevertheless, he shares the commissars’ view that in order to operate even a modest and politically inconsequential business it is necessary to demonstrate that one is in full ideological compliance with party orthodoxy. “There is no place for discrimination on Boston’s Freedom Trail,” Mayor Menino thundered in his letter to Mr. Cathy, “and no place for your company alongside it.” No, sir. On Boston’s Freedom Trail, you’re free to march in ideological lockstep with the city authorities — or else. Hard as it is to believe, there was a time when Massachusetts was a beacon of liberty: the shot heard round the world, and all that. Now it fires Bureau of Compliance permit-rejection letters round the world.

Mayor Menino subsequently backed down and claimed the severed rooster’s head left in Mr. Cathy’s bed was all just a misunderstanding. Yet, when it comes to fighting homophobia on Boston’s Freedom Trail, His Honor is highly selective. As the Boston Herald’s Michael Graham pointed out, Menino is happy to hand out municipal licenses to groups whose most prominent figures call for gays to be put to death. The mayor couldn’t have been more accommodating (including giving them $1.8 million of municipal land) of the new mosque of the Islamic Society of Boston, whose IRS returns listed as one of their seven trustees Yusuf al-Qaradawi. Like President Obama, Imam Qaradawi’s position on gays is in a state of “evolution”: He can’t decide whether to burn them or toss ’em off a cliff. “Some say we should throw them from a high place,” he told Al Jazeera. “Some say we should burn them, and so on. There is disagreement. . . . The important thing is to treat this act as a crime.” Unlike the deplorable Mr. Cathy, Imam Qaradawi is admirably open-minded: There are so many ways to kill homosexuals, why restrict yourself to just one? In Mayor Menino’s Boston, if you take the same view of marriage as President Obama did from 2009 to 2012, he’ll run your homophobic ass out of town. But, if you want to toss those godless sodomites off the John Hancock Tower, he’ll officiate at your ribbon-cutting ceremony.

As is often the case, liberals are entirely knee-jerk when one politically correct group (say, gays) is in opposition to a politically incorrect group (say, Christians).

But pit one politically correct group against another, and they become very inconsistent.

Islamists Attack Mosque in Timbuktu

The name of the place is a metaphor for the very far extent of the earth, but something happening there is a very literal example of the evil of radical Islam. From the Guardian:

Five times a day for more than 15 years, Aphadi Wangara has led prayers at Sidi Yahya mosque in Timbuktu, one of three in the ancient Malian desert town. But the day after hardline Islamists attacked and damaged the 15th-century mosque, the softly spoken imam had no consoling words to offer.

“I prefer to keep my silence. What is in my heart cannot be said,” said Wangara, who is in his late 60s.

Barely 24 hours earlier, a group of Islamist militants had appeared outside the clay-coated mosque, armed with pickaxes and shouting “Allahu Akbar”. They broke down the entrance and destroyed a door locals believed had to stay shut until the end of the world. The militants, who belong to the al-Qaida-linked Ansar Dine, had already defaced mausoleums and tombs of local Sufi saints, prompting Unesco to declare Timbuktu an endangered world heritage site.

“There is a door that absolutely cannot be opened at the entrance of the [Sidi Yahya] mosque,” said Haidrata, a resident who gave only his first name. “We believe it is a profanity to open this door; it can only be opened on the day the world will end. The militants broke it down. They were shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’. When I asked them why, they said [it was] because they were being accused of destroying endangered monuments when they hadn’t done so – they wanted to show what they were really capable of.”

Ansar Dine and the Tuareg separatist MNLA movement say the local monuments and distinctive sun-baked mosques renowned for palm trees protruding from earthen walls, sprinkled throughout Mali, are idolatrous and contrary to their strict interpretation of Islam. Sanda Banama, an Ansar Dine spokesman, said the monuments were “un-Islamic”.

“In Islam, there are strict laws about the way and size in which tombs are built,” Banama said.

Ansar Dine, who have seized the northern two-thirds of Mali after a coup toppled the southern Bamako-based government, continue to control Timbuktu, residents said. “People are still leaving their houses to go to the market but they are scared,” said Fatima Sow, who fled to Bamako on Sunday as pickup trucks with Ansar Dine militants prowled the city. “A while back the militants whipped a couple who they said were fornicating before marriage.”

Almost 1,000 kilometres south in Bamako, a transitional government struggling to exert control over the vast territory amid violent demonstrations and counter-coup attempts has appeared powerless to stop the attacks. But the assault on the Sidi Yahya mosque has prodded festering anger among ordinary Malians.

“Everybody is absolutely frustrated; everybody is angry. Many of those people will be willing to take to the streets and push the government into doing something,” said Tiégoum Maiga, who is organising a march through the capital on Wednesday. “The government says it can’t do anything but people in Timbuktu are using sticks and stones to defend themselves.”

Cheick Oumar Cisse, a former culture minister and one of Mali’s most famous film-makers, said: “It’s good that these things are being labelled crimes but it is not even the worst thing these terrorists have done. In January they attacked and disembowelled 100 Malian soldiers and the international community said nothing.

“The more people denounce them, the more they will defy the international community to prove they are masters in their own territory. We hope the destruction will stop here, but these are people who are completely mad and incapable of being reasoned with.”

Ecowas, the economic community of west African states, is considering presenting a military plan to the UN security council as militant Islamists, already thriving on a “kidnap economy” operating out of the country’s northern desert, have flourished. Protests have also simmered for weeks as the key northern garrison towns of Timbuktu, Gao and Kidal have fallen to Ansar Dine and other Islamist groups. In Gao a municipal councillor was killed last week by the group, residents said.

Officials said squabbles between the various groups also made dialogue difficult. “Basically, they all want power but are not agreed on how to go about it. That means new factions are emerging every day,” a Malian presidential aide said.

Thousands of Malians have flocked to neighbouring Mauritania, Niger and Burkina Faso, triggering a potential refugee crisis along its fragile borders. “There is absolutely no order in the north of Mali. Anywhere there is no authority and considering how vast the territory is, it’s very worrying for Mauritania, it’s worrying for the entire region,” a Mauritanian presidential official told the Guardian.

Shouting Down a Speaker: Left Wing Fascism at the University of New Mexico

You can read an account of the event here.

The interesting thing here is that audience members, clearly sympathetic to the speaker, rushed the demonstrators and forced them out of the hall. Were they justified in doing that?

In this instance, yes.

Either you have the rule of law, or you have the state of nature. Had cops been present to quell the disruption and arrest the disruptors, then audience members would have been obligated to stand by and let the cops do their job. But no cops (apparently) were present.

In a state of nature, people have a right to use force if necessary to protect their rights. It is important that they not use more force than necessary, and in this case all that happened was that the disruptors were pushed or shoved out of the room, and there was a minor scrap over the page of slogans one demonstrator held.

Universities ought to maintain the rule of law. But often they do not, especially when the lawless are on the political left. That’s why we would like to see more cases where the audience uses the force necessary to eject people who have assaulted free speech.

Liberals, Conservatives and Those Airport Screenings

Drudge has been after this for months, and now not only cable news but the mainstream media have noticed the very intrusive searches that the Transportation Security Agency has been doing at airports.

But what about liberal and conservative reactions?

Conservatives have been up in arms, while the reaction of liberals has been much more muted, if not downright supportive.

Here’s the irony: liberals were apoplectic about security measures early in the Bush Administration. The Patriot Act, warrant-less wiretapping of foreign phone numbers associated with terrorism, searches of computers of suspected terrorists — all these were condemned as invasions of privacy.

And of course conservatives supported Bush.

So what is going on here? Is it as simple as whether the president is a Republican or a Democrat? That’s part of it.

But the key factor is that conservatives are protective of ordinary, law-abiding U.S. citizens. And liberals are protective of politically correct victim groups.

On 9/11, Muslims ceased to be evil fundamentalist oppressors of women, and became victims of American imperialism.

So we get 75 year-old grandmothers sexually molested in airports.

Muslim Awareness Week at Marquette

It’s coming up. The poster for the event is here.

We have criticized various Muslim and Arab (not quite the same) events in the past, when they featured a virulent anti-Israel bias, or featured hard leftist anti-American speakers.

At one point, it became so bad that the local Jewish community and Jewish faculty complained to Marquette, and urged that the university try for more balance. (Since these events are virtually always cosponsored and financially supported by Marquette, it’s not any sort of violation of academic freedom to urge that Marquette as an institution take a more balanced approach.)

But this event seems rather moderate and constructive. Most Americans understand little about Islam, and “coming to understand” doesn’t mean one has to adopt an anti-Israel and anti-American viewpoint.

Stunning Intolerance: Quebec Wants To Ban Muslim Head Covering for Women

Google Blocking Recommendations For “Islam Is”

From an atheist website:

Why is Google Blocking “Islam Is” Search Recommendations?

Notice when you start typing in the Google search field that it shows recommendations below the field? The recommendations are based on popular searches and a rather nifty algorithm that tries to determine what it is you are searching for.

But Google is intentionally blocking these recommendations for “Islam is…”

Try it for yourself. First, establish exactly what Google should be doing.

In the search field type “Christianity is” and you will see recommendations of “bullsh*t, not a religion, a lie, false, a cult, wrong, fake, dying, Jewish, and not a religion t-shirt.”

In the search field type “Hinduism is” and you will see recommendations of “monotheistic, false, polytheistic, the majority religion of, the oldest religion, not a religion, fake, most commonly found, characterized by, and wrong.”

In the search field type “Buddhism is” and you will see recommendations of “not a religion, wrong, not what you think, bullsh*t, polytheistic, a religion, false, based on what concepts, the best religion, and atheism.”

In the search field type “Judaism is” and you will see recommendations of “false, not a race, not a religion, a race, a religion of the book, not Jewish, a gutter religion, monotheistic, a cult, and a religion.”

Try typing “Atheism is” and you will see recommendations of “a religion, dead, not a religion, wrong, the new fundamentalism, growing, a non-prophet organization, so senseless, illogical, a religion supreme court.” Clearly they are not holding back on the Atheists.

Now, let’s try Islam. Type in “Islam is” and you will see. . .

Absolutely nothing. That’s correct. Google makes no recommendations based on searches of “Islam Is.”

Why is Google blocking search recommendations for “Islam is?”

So why is Google blocking the search recommendations? Are they afraid of offending Muslims who will likely retaliate against Google? Or is it as one person suggested on Facebook, an attempt by Google to simply ignore Islam?

There is an image of the results described in the blog entry here.

We just tried the search for “Islam is,” and sure enough, no recommendations are shown.

Google won its top position among search engines fair and square, but monopolies, especially information monopolies, are a dangerous thing.

[Update]

Our query to Google about this produced the following response from Nate Tyler, one of their PR people:

Thanks so much for the inquiry. This is an issue we take very seriously and, like you, when we saw the reports this week we looked into the issue and discovered that it is indeed a bug and we’re working to fix it as quickly as we can.

Hope this helps.

Israel & the Palestinians: The Chimera of a “Two State Solution”

Virtually everybody claims to want a “two state solution” in the Middle East -- the State of Israel living alongside an independent Palestinian State.

This sounds reasonable. It sounds sensible. Indeed, it would be both things. Except for one thing. According to Jeff Jacoby:

It isn’t going to happen.

International consensus or no, the two-state solution is a chimera. Peace will not be achieved by granting sovereignty to the Palestinians, because Palestinian sovereignty has never been the Arabs’ goal. Time and time again, a two-state solution has been proposed. Time and time again, the Arabs have turned it down.

In 1936, when Palestine was still under British rule, a royal commission headed by Lord Peel was sent to investigate the steadily worsening Arab violence. After a detailed inquiry, the Peel Commission concluded that “an irrepressible conflict has arisen between two national communities within the narrow bounds of one small country.” It recommended a two-state solution -- a partition of the land into separate Arab and Jewish states. “Partition offers a chance of ultimate peace,” the commission reported. “No other plan does.”

The Peel Commission’s proposed two-state solution (1937). The Arabs said no.But the Arab leaders, more intent on preventing Jewish sovereignty in Palestine than in achieving a state for themselves, rejected the Peel plan out of hand. The foremost Palestinian leader, Haj Amin al-Husseini, actively supported the Nazi regime in Germany. In return, Husseini wrote in his memoirs, Hitler promised him “a free hand to eradicate every last Jew from Palestine and the Arab world.”

In 1947, the Palestinians were again presented with a two-state proposal. Again they spurned it. Like the Peel Commission, the United Nations concluded that only a division of the land into adjacent states, one Arab and one Jewish, could put an end to the conflict. On Nov. 29, 1947, the UN General Assembly debated -- and by a vote of 33-13 adopted -- Resolution 181, partitioning Palestine on the basis of population. Had the Arabs accepted the UN decision, the Palestinian state that “the whole world wants” would today be 61 years old. Instead, the Arab League vowed to block Jewish sovereignty by waging “a war of extermination and a momentous massacre.”

Over and over this pattern has been repeated. Following its stunning victory in the 1967 Six Day War, Israel offered to exchange the land it had won for permanent peace with its neighbors. From their summit in Khartoum came the Arabs’ notorious response: “No peace with Israel, no negotiations with Israel, no recognition of Israel.”

At Camp David in 2000, Ehud Barak offered the Palestinians virtually everything they claimed to be seeking -- a sovereign state with its capital in East Jerusalem, 97 percent of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, tens of billions of dollars in “compensation” for the plight of Palestinian refugees. Yasser Arafat refused the offer, and launched the bloodiest wave of terrorism in Israel’s history.

To this day, the charters of Hamas and Fatah, the two main Palestinian factions, call for Israel’s liquidation. “The whole world” may want peace and a Palestinian state, but the Palestinians want something very different. Until that changes, there is no two-state solution.

Using the United Nations to Censor Speech

From Maclean’s:

A coalition of Islamic states is using the United Nations to enact international “anti-defamation” rules

Pakistan and the other nations that have banded together in the Organization of the Islamic Conference have been leading a remarkably successful campaign through the United Nations to enshrine in international law prohibitions against “defamation of religions,” particularly Islam. Their aim is to empower governments around the world to punish anyone who commits the “heinous act” of defaming Islam. Critics say it is an attempt to globalize laws against blasphemy that exist in some Muslim countries — and that the movement has already succeeded in suppressing open discussion in international forums of issues such as female genital mutilation, honour killings and gay rights.

It might seem that the right to defame a religion is not one that’s important to a civilized society, so who not prohibit defamation?

The trend has rights advocates worried for numerous reasons, beginning with the language used. If the notion of “defaming” a religion sounds a little unfamiliar, that’s because it is a major departure from the traditional understanding of what defamation means. Defamation laws traditionally protect individual people from being materially harmed by the dissemination of falsehoods. But “defamation of religions” is not about protecting individual believers from damage to their reputations caused by false statements — but rather about protecting a religion, or some interpretation of it, or the feelings of the followers. While a traditional defence in a defamation lawsuit is that the accused was merely telling the truth, religions by definition present competing claims on the truth, and one person’s religious truth is easily another’s apostasy. “Truth” is no defence in such cases. The subjective perception of insult is what matters, and what puts the whole approach on a collision course with the human rights regime — especially in countries with an official state religion.

In a written brief [it was noted] that the resolutions seek to mimic the kinds of anti-blasphemy laws that exist in countries such as Pakistan. The UN resolutions “operate as international anti-blasphemy laws and provide international cover for domestic anti-blasphemy laws, which in practice empower ruling majorities against weak minorities and dissenters,” her brief states. Pakistan’s penal code includes a section that states that defiling Islam or its prophets is deserving of the death penalty; that defiling, damaging or desecrating the Quran will be punished with life imprisonment; and insulting another’s religious feelings can be punished with 10 years in prison. A 2006 report from the U.S. State Department on international religious freedom stated that such anti-blasphemy laws “are often used to intimidate reform-minded Muslims, sectarian opponents, and religious minorities, or to settle personal scores.” According to Amnesty International, Younis Masih, a Christian, was sentenced to death in 2007 for allegedly making derogatory remarks about the Prophet Muhammad. In Egypt, a professor at Cairo University was declared an “apostate” in 1995 for teaching his students to read parts of the Quran metaphorically, and was ordered to divorce his Muslim wife.

The fact that the resolutions keep passing, and that UN officials now monitor countries’ compliance, could help the concept of “defamation of religions” become an international legal norm, said Livingstone, noting that when the International Court of Justice at The Hague decides what rises to the level of an “international customary law,” it looks not to unanimity among countries but to “general adherence.” “That’s why these UN resolutions are so troubling,” she said. “They’ve been passed for 10 years.”

We don’t like such laws in any way way whatsoever, but we particularly don’t like the fact that such notions as “defaming a religion” will never be enforced in an even-handed way.

We can’t imagine anti-Christian bigots like Richard Dawkins or Christian-hating comics like Bill Maher ever being prosecuted. In reality, it’s only politically correct victim groups that get any protection.

There would be one huge irony if a prohibition against “defaming” Islam became law: the gay lobby, which itself often has the right to shut up speech hostile to homosexual acts, would find attacks on how Islam views homosexuality to be verboten.

A gay/Islamic war over “hate speech” would be an hilarious spectacle, but we would prefer simple free speech.

David Horowitz to Speak at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

From a press release from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Conservative Union:

David Horowitz will speak in the UWM Union’s Wisconsin Room on April 30th at 7:30p.m.

The talk will be on Islamo-Facism.

Horowitz is a high controversial speaker, since he says things that are considered “offensive” (supposedly) to Muslim students. In reality, he talks rather bluntly about the threat of the radical wing of Islam. Just as black race hustlers don’t like the reality of race and crime talked about, a lot of Muslim activists don’t like the unsavory nature of some Islamic movements talked about.

Given the reign of political correctness on college campuses, it’s the grievance mongers who are catered to by the campus bureaucrats. Sensible Muslims (like sensible blacks) get pretty much ignored.

The UWM Conservative Union has an honorable record of bringing controversial speakers to that campus. As the press release points out:

David’s speech will be the conclusion of a series of speeches held at UWM this year by the Conservative Union, which has included conservative author-scholars Walid Shoebat, Peter Schweizer, Dinesh D’Souza, and Bay Buchanan.

In the case of Shoebat, a Muslim student group tried to get the talk cancelled, and the UWM administration appeared to be trying to impede the whole thing by imposing a punitive charge for security.

But the bureaucrats there caved, and Shoebat spoke.

We frankly wonder why we don’t get more speakers this controversial at Marquette.

Shoebat Speech: Victory for Free Expression

It seems so common that politically incorrect views are shut up on college campuses these days that it’s news when somebody is allowed to speak.

But it happened last night at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Walid Shoebat had his say before an overflow audience of 750 at the UWM Union.

The whole thing was in question for a while. When the Conservative Union at UWM first proposed bringing in Shoebat, the UWM administration, by its body language, didn’t seem too happy about the prospect, and threw up some procedural roadblocks.

Under pressure, especially from conservative talk radio, the UWM administration began to see things differently, and approved the speech, but with a draconian $1,700 addition charge for security added to the regular room fee.

Eventually, that charge was dropped.

Muslim students tried to get the speech cancelled, and failed.

Shoebat a Hero?

Our elation over the victory for free speech doesn’t require us to like Shoebat. It happens we do like Shoebat, but that’s irrelevant.

The majority of the crowd, heavily laced with Jews and listeners of conservative talk radio received him very favorably.

Some of our students who attended thought him excessively harsh, however. One just told us that Shoebat reminded him of Hitler.

That is the point of free speech. You get to listen. You get to make up your mind.

Muslim Response

A large number of Muslim students were present, and they asked hostile questions of Shoebat. Fair enough.

There was some inappropriate heckling at times, some very uncivil questions, and even one threat of violence -- which was not to be taken seriously.

But Shoebat got to speak his peace.

Likewise, a small group of calling themselves “Jews Against Islamophobia” protested. They were cordoned off in the hall outside the event, but in plain sight (and indeed, within a yard or two) of the crowd as it filed past slowly.

And Muslim students organized their own counter-forum to rebut Shoebat’s assertions.

How Did the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Look?

It appeared that UWM had to be intimidated by a huge burst of publicity, mostly coming from Milwaukee talk radio, to do the right thing.

But a lot of university bureaucrats, when faced with an issue like this, simply hunker down and insist on shutting up speech that might cause controversy. This has chronically been the case at Marquette. So if we have only faint praise for UWM, that’s more than we have for a lot of institutions.

When the night arrived, UWM handled things with a high level of professionalism. Security was good, and dissenters had their right to speak too.

Precedent

Issues like this create precedents. Each and ever case of censorship on a college campus reinforces the idea that any speaker that some aggrieved group dislikes can and should be banned.

But each time censorship fails, the norm of academic freedom is reinforced. In the future, UWM bureaucrats will know that it’s safer, simpler and much better public relations just to let the controversial speaker talk.

We wonder when Marquette will get this message.

Women’s Studies Departments and Women Under Islam

From Frontpage Magazine:

Despite their vigilance in behalf of women’s rights in America and other Western nations, Women’s Studies Departments across the nation have been strangely passive in the face of the barbaric treatment of women in Islamic regimes. Numerous hours are spent in the classroom, dissecting the reasons for the ‘wage gap’ in America, violence against women and the ‘privileges’ accorded Caucasian males. But courses on the plight of women in Islamic regimes are strangely absent. Where there are a few courses that touch on Islamic women in Women’s Studies programs, the focus is often cultural and literary, while the abuses go unmentioned.

This failure to confront the abuse of women who live in Islamic countries stands in stark contrast to the mission statements of many Women’s Studies departments, which describe their focus as the inequality that women suffer in patriarchal societies. Thus the official mission statement of the Penn State Women’s Studies Department declares that “As a field of study, Women’s Studies analyzes the unequal distribution of power and resources by gender.” Why then does the Penn State department not offer a course analyzing the extreme inequalities that characterize the status of women in the Islamic world?

The article goes on to analyze the course offerings in Women’s Studies at eight universities. It concludes:

It is stunning that among the Women’s Studies departments of these eight prominent universities which openly declare that their missions are to analyze “unequal distribution of power and resources by gender” and to envision “a world free from sexism” there is only a single course on Women and Islam which speaks to these issues.

We ran this by a source who is well-informed on women’s studies in academia, and got this response.

The article is essentially accurate but also fails to understand the nature of women’s studies. It has always been biased toward the humanities (English, history, and philosophy). The social sciences are suspect due to our method (objective not intersubjective, to name one distinction). Thus, it is no surprise that “women in Islamic studies” is mostly literary/social history. Further, US women’s studies are often criticized as being ethnocentric. An occasional academic position in women’s studies will call for “Third World Women” expertise but this merely spotlights the “otherness” of non-Western women. One exception to this is that the texts for the intro to women’s studies course are always written by social scientists (in political science, sociology, psychology) and several new texts on my shelf are international/comparative in focus and the US is just one case.

So, post a rant against women’s studies as not toeing the Bush line against “rape rooms” and his mission of saving Afghani women. However, women’s studies would be the same, 9/11 or not. It is consistent. On the other hand, the women’s movement in the US is very engaged with Islamic women, to the extent that a raging critique of the feminist movement is on-going in women’s studies journals (the charge is that Ellie Smeal and her Feminist Majority Foundation’s project has orientalized Islamic women by focusing on the veil/burqa without understanding the non-oppressive cultural meaning).

Nothing about this response makes us think better of Women’s Studies departments. But we are inclined to agree that the Frontpage article is really a bit of a cheap shot.

Islamic Discussion Board

We get, via e-mail, a fair amount of material about how Islam is an evil and oppressive religion.

And doubtless, some places in the hands of some people it is.

Of course, on a university campus, Muslim students get treated by campus bureaucrats as a politically correct victim group. Indeed, they with some frequency get their sensibilities protected by campus censorship.

But the reality for most Muslims is a bit different. We just got, via e-mail, an announcement of a new operation called Guided Message Board. The subhead reads “Share & Discuss Islamic news, thoughts & ideas.”

We suggest checking the “Public Message Board,” where one can find messages with the heading Help Prevent Child Labor in Egypt, Gelatin from non halaal animals and Quran Word for Word for Mobiles.

Then check out the Islamic Discussion and the thread New Reverts/Converts.

There is nothing here very exciting. It’s actually pretty banal.

And that’s the point.

The people on the board are neither agents of Osama, nor are the victims of Western Capitalist imperialism.

If you have any Muslim friends, you know this already. But maybe you don’t.

Note, the board is brand new, and has few messages. Will it take off? Who knows, but it bears watching.

The Future of Europe -- And the U.S.?

In the new issue of The American Conservative (which is not on the web yet) an essay from Swarthmore political scientist James Kurth. His forecast for Europe is not optimistic. Via Beliefnet and Dad29:

Current social attitudes and demographic trends in the West suggest that there will be a continuation of low reproduction rates among Western peoples and therefore a severe decline in their populations. Conversely, there will be a continuation of high immigration of non-Western peoples into the Western nations and of higher reproduction rates among the non-Western communities in the West than among the Western people themselves. This will have major consequences not only for the military strategies of the Western nations but for their national security -- and even identity.

The most dramatic consequences are likely to occur in Europe, where most of the non-Western populations will be Muslim. These communities already perform functions essential to the economic system, and within the next decade, they are poised to become an important part of the political system. Many European countries will become two nations, and Europe as a whole will become two civilizations. The first will be a Western civilization or, more accurately, given Europeans’ rejection of many Western traditions, a post-Western civilization comprised of people of European descent. It will be secular, even pagan, rich, old, and feeble. The second will be the non-Western civilization, descended from non-European peoples. It will be religious, even Islamic, poor, young, and vigorous. ...The two civilizations will regard each other with mutual contempt. In the new civilization, there will be a growing rage, and in the old civilization, there will be a growing fear. These will be the perfect conditions for endemic Islamic terrorism, urban riots, and mob violence: an Islamist insurgency within Europe itself.

For the nations of the West, which have arrived at this historically unprecedented state, a viable strategy for the nation is no longer possible because they are no longer really nations at all.

Two pessimistic? Maybe.

Applicable to the U.S.? Not in the short run. In the long run, a real danger.

But the U.S. is still a Christian nation, notwithstanding the hostility toward Christianity of certain elites. And the massive immigration of people not acculturated to American norms is from Hispanic Christians, not Muslims.

An irony of all this is that the safety of secular people in the U.S. (and this includes not only atheists and agnostics but the nominally religious) lies in the fact that this is a Christian nation.

Christians will protect, both by being willing to fight and willing to procreate, the moderate Constitutional regime that secures the liberty of all.

Which is why the secular hostility to Christians, as well as the tendency of secular people to romanticize Muslims as victims of Western imperialism, is so short-sighted.