September 6, 2010 Afghans wave banners saying “Quran is our law, Islam is our religion” during a demonstration against the U.S. in Kabul. Hundreds railed against the U.S. and called for President Barack Obama’s death at the rally denouncing an American church’s plans to burn the Islamic holy book on Sept. 11.
Musadeq Sadeq-AP

As I’m sure everyone is made aware of already, General Petraeus has publicly spoken out against the wisdom (or lack thereof) of the planned burning of Korans on September 11th:

“It could endanger troops and it could endanger the overall effort,” Gen. Petraeus said in an interview. “It is precisely the kind of action the Taliban uses and could cause significant problems. Not just here, but everywhere in the world we are engaged with the Islamic community.”

Hundreds of Afghans attended a demonstration in Kabul on Monday to protest the plans of Florida pastor Terry Jones, who has said he will burn copies of Islam’s holy book to mark the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Afghan protesters chanted “death to America,” and speakers called on the U.S. to withdraw its troops. Some protesters threw rocks at a passing military convoy.

Military officials fear the protests will likely spread to other Afghan cities, especially if the event is broadcast or ends up on Internet video.

Gen. Caldwell said many Afghans do not understand either the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment or the fact that President Barack Obama can’t simply issue a decree to stop Mr. Jones from his demonstration. Military officials said they were not trying to deny Mr. Jones his right to free speech, but feared he was not thinking about the consequences of his actions.

“There is no question about First Amendment rights; that is not the issue,” Gen. Caldwell said. “The question is: What is the implication over here? It is going to jeopardize the men and women serving in Afghanistan.”

As opponents of the “Ground Zero Mosque” like to say, “This isn’t about what’s legal. We know it’s legal. This is about what’s right.”

What good will be accomplished by the burning of the Koran? In its original Arabic, it is regarded with deep reverence by those who practice the faith seriously (both by jihadis and by peaceful Muslims), as the very Word of God. By trying to hurt “radicals” who else are they hurting in the process? Of course, Terry Jones, who authored a book titled “Islam is of The Devil,” is one of those who regards Islam itself as the enemy. This plays right into the hands of bin Laden and Zawahiri who desperately want the entire Muslim world to buy into their propaganda that the West, and the U.S. in particular, are persecuting Muslims and are at war with their faith. Truth is not on their side…unless al Qaeda has willing dupes like Terry Jones pawning for them.

There is no question that a good percentage of the Islamic world has a tolerance and anger management problem:

Allegations of mishandling the Quran have interrupted Afghan security training at least twice this year, Gen. Caldwell said.

In one instance, a Quran fell to the ground when an American officer opened a locker during an inspection of Afghan trainees’ barracks. The rumor quickly spread that the officer had thrown it to the ground, angering the trainees at the camp. “He quickly apologized, but rumors took off like wildfire,” Gen. Caldwell said. “It was so hard to get the misperception turned around we stopped all training for the rest of the day.”

Reports about the Quran have set off violent protests before. A report in Newsweek, later retracted, that a U.S. interrogator at the Guantanamo Bay prison had flushed a Quran down a toilet set off riots in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

And certainly there is a fair amount of double standard at work, where artists, comedians, writers, and anti-Christian bigots feel free to insult and defile Christianity while Islam appears to be “off limits”. At least not without “Islamic rage boy” terrorizing the offenders with fatwas and rioting.

There is no fear of Christian militant Crusadists walking up to Andres Serrano and stabbing him to death over Piss Christ.

However, a few points:

1) We are not in the middle of a war with Christian religious radical extremist militants where winning hearts and minds of the Christian majority is a major part of waging a global counterinsurgency effort.

2) Just because one can ridicule Christians and Jews and get away with it does not make it right to do so. One should, in general, be respectful of others. Be the example. The line of reasoning that argues “We’ll let a mosque be built here as soon as they allow churches and synagogues to be built at Mecca and Medina” are just juvenile and self-serving tit for tats. Why would we choose to be “more like them”? So arguing that we should burn Korans because others are able to desecrate things held sacred by Jews and Christians and get away with it is just a weak, childish, vindictive, gratuitous form of being what you profess to hate. Who are we really hurting here?

We shouldn’t have to tip-toe on eggshells around a particular religion and give special preferential treatment to it, not extended to the other faiths. However, the reality also remains that one of the three major faiths does have an anger management problem amongst a sizable minority of its practitioners and we are in the middle of a war. A war that requires the winning of hearts and minds and the marginalization of the more radical elements of Islam from the more moderate elements of Islam.

We have Muslim allies in our war. They and our enemy share the same Holy Book. But their reading of it differs. How does burning their Holy Book hurt our enemy and not our allies?

Interestingly enough, one of my friends who is French Muslim-American, posted a CNN video interview of Terry Jones a couple of weeks ago on her FB wall. Every single one of her Muslim friends merely laughed or was dismissive, expressing a “turn the other cheek” sentiment in their comments. No stereotypical Islamic rage here. One might call their reaction a very typical “Christian” response. They’d probably disagree and say they are being “Islamic” in their tolerance (Believe it or not, cynicism and derision aside, Sumbul Ali-Karamali talks about tolerance in Islam in her book, “The Muslim Next Door”).

I do not believe that desecration of the Koran hurts bin Laden and Zawahiri in the slightest. I do believe that they welcome- they beg for “International Burn a Koran Day” to occur….because it plays right into their propaganda playbook.

Just because we can…..should we?

A handwritten Koran is displayed during an exhibition in Malacca, Malaysia January 12, 2008. You Witness News/Aizuddin Saad

Donald Bly:

Wordsmith… if you are so certain that these Muslim loons are so benign… then you shouldn’t have any problem posting a cartoon of Mohammed to the site. They would never never issue a fatwah calling for your death for exercising your right to free speech.

Since my scanner’s out of commission, I had to resort to an online drawer (seriously, I’m a much better artist than this!)

Now go ahead and broadcast this to every jihad and Islamic forum on the ‘net.

So what was your point anyway, Bly?

Eric Holder is unable to identify Radical Islam as a cause of terrorism. Holder looks like nothing as much as an incompetent chiropractor as he ties himself in knots in avoiding the painfully obvious. As Andy McCarthy points out, Holder has no trouble calling us a “nation of cowards” or calling out Bush administration officials as “war criminals” yet cannot admit what a sensible person knows. At first glance this seems odd. Then upon reflection it makes sense, because philosophically, radical Islamists are the same as Democrats.

Radical Islam and Demcrats have a dislike of free speech. That is, they dislike free speech for anyone other than themselves. One one hand Islamic radicals call for the end of Israel, but threaten with death those who would dare cast an insult at Islam. And it need not be an insult- Theo Van Gogh was murdered for his work showing how Islam abuses women. Some even feel free to say that Jews are pigs and apes. The lives of cartoonists are threatened when they dare include Mohammed in a satire. They are attacked when invited to give a lecture. Their homes are burned. Comedy Central caved to terrorism and censored a South Park episode. Then, after cowing to Islamic pressure to not even show Mohammed in a cartoon, Comedy Central is planning a cartoon featuring Jesus Christ as a “fish out of water.” To be critical of Islam can mean one lives forever under the threat of death.

Democrats behave in a very similar manner. They reserve unlimited free speech for themselves even to the extent of insult but would severely restrict the same rights for others. When Bush was President it was fashionable for dissent to be patriotic. Nancy Pelosi said that she was a fan of disruptors. Hillary Clinton said “I’m sick and tired of people who say that if you debate and disagree with this administration, somehow you’re not patriotic. We need to stand up and say we’re Americans, and we have the right to debate and disagree with any administration.” Unfortunately, that means Americans are only entitled to disagree with Republicans. Disagreeing with Democrats brings an entirely different kind of reaction. Nancy Pelosi said that enforcing immigration laws was “un-American.” Blanche Lincoln said that protesting health care was also “un-American.” Pelosi went so far as to compare Tea Party protesters to Nazis.

Democrats and left wingers sound an awful lot like Radical Islamists. And the comparisons don’t stop there. They don’t stop with words either.

Ann Coulter was invited to give a lecture at the University of Ottawa but it was shut down when violence ensued. Coulter was assaulted at the University of Arizona when a pie was thrown at her while she was on stage. Karl Rove is accosted at book signings and has been pelted with eggs. RNC buses have had bags of concrete dropped upon them. The point man in inciting the violence is one Barack Hussein Obama. He has exhorted followers to “get in their face. “He has said that “if they bring a knife to a fight, you bring a gun.” An Obama aide said to “punch back twice as hard.”

A SWAT team was called out in Quincy, Illinois to protect Obama from a particularly dangerous group of hardened criminals.

Intimidation. Violence. Assault. It is the stuff of Islamic radicals. It is also the stuff of Democrats. No wonder Holder can’t bring himself to say it. He’d be pointing a finger right at himself.

And his boss.

What happens when you appease those who use violence to silence those they don’t agree with? You allow them to shape the debate. You allow them to win and you silence freedom of speech:

By constantly buckling in to the slightest Muslim displeasure — whether by altering films, removing museum art, or canceling book launches — the West has perpetuated a vicious cycle wherein Muslim sensitivities are ever heightened and outraged at the slightest slight, and Western freedoms of expression are correspondingly diminished and trampled upon. What’s worse, such self-imposed censorship falls right into the hands of homegrown Islamists actively working to subvert Western civilization from within.

Yesterday Lars Vilks, the man who drew Muhammed as a dog and has been receiving death threats ever since, was giving a speech at a University in Sweden and was promptly attacked by fanatical Islamic idiots:

Lars Vilks, the Swedish cartoonist who drew Mohammed as a dog, was recently told that a scheduled lecture on free speech, to be held at Jönköping Högskolan, would be canceled due to “security concerns.” This, of course, is a common evasion, intended to protect the brittle sensibilities of Muslim students while supposedly standing four square behind the right of free speech.

Alas, the administrators in Jönköping had a point. During a lecture in Uppsala today Vilks was attacked by a pack of feral fundamentalists, one of whom managed to headbutt the artist and break his glasses. Police intervened and waged a short battle with the religious nutters who can be heard in the video below, captured by the newspaper UNT, shouting Allahu Akbar!

Well, the violence has worked once again:

Officials said they would “not likely” invite Vilks again because of the incident. In some quarters, the university’s reponse is adding to concerns that violence and threats from some members of the Muslim community are effectively muzzling free speech.

It wasn’t too long ago that Comedy Central buckled under to the threats and now this….when will the western world learn?

I won’t buckle under, that’s for sure.

Baltimore Sun:

It’s not even that the terrorists have won, it’s that wannabe terrorists have won.

A group called Revolution Muslim, which by most accounts seems less a terrorist cell than, metaphorically speaking, a couple of guys living in their parents’ basements, managed to scare Comedy Central this week into censoring South Park for mocking their religion, or rather, the ban in some quarters of depictions of the prophet Muhammed.

The Anti-Defamation League, which has tracked the New York-based Revolution Muslim, says the group has no more than about a dozen members, is known mainly for spouting anti-Semitism, handing out pamphlets on the sidewalks of New York and picketing mosques that it thinks aren’t radical enough. The founders are converts to Islam, including one who previously was Jewish and associated with a group called, no joke, Jews for Allah.

I missed both episodes, but caught the Jawa Report on the first part that was aired, which saw South Park celebrate its 200th episode. In it, they resuscitated some of the best of what they had done previously, including the depiction of Mohammed before the outrage over the Danish cartoons.

The episode, so far as I can tell from clips that now have been cut and redacted more than your basic National Security Agency document, was making a point about the depiction taboo by putting Muhammed inside a bear mascot suit to protect him from being depicted.

As it turned out, it wasn’t even Muhammed underneath the suit, but Revolution Muslim nonetheless was outraged and warned that South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone would “wind up like Theo Van Gogh,” the Dutch filmmaker murdered in 2004 by an Islamic radical over a movie that accused the religion of condoning violence against women.

Comedy Central responded to the website warning by bleeping out even the word “Muhammed” in the following episode and — off-the-charts irony alert! — the entire speech that one character makes about fear and intolerance.

So to recap: A cartoon was censored not for depicting Muhammed but merely talking about depicting Muhammed and then even that talk was censored. This has to go down as one of the strangest freedom-of-speech cases ever — when Kyle is silenced, we all are silenced.

But such is the state of the world today that, a) some of the sharpest political commentary comes from Comedy Central courtesy of Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert and, yes, South Park, and b) now even Comedy Central has wimped out.

And to a fringe group that a Muslim advocacy organization, Council on American-Islamic Relations, quickly denounced as extremist and lacking in any credibility. Would that other mainstream groups similarly speak out against the fringers in their own midsts when they threaten violence.

The Jawa Report had a great analysis of the first part when the controversy began brewing as an Islamist nutjob named Zach posted a death threat via Twitter:

All the more ironic given that this was a response to the latest episode of South Park in which Mohammad is portrayed as having a super power which celebrities want.

What is Muhammad’s super power? No one can criticize him.

Something celebrities would die — or kill — for.

But they weren’t making fun of Muhammad. They were making fun of Muslims like Zach who are the only group of religious zealots who threaten violence every time they are offended.

Which makes this whole thing perfectly ironic.

And it’s not just Zach, but his buddies on the forums and over at Facebook who are pissed off at South Park for once again pointing out that they are a bunch of thin-skinned dirtbags.

Rusty’s updated the post with more threats by Islamist buddies of Zach (separate from Revolution Muslim). Also, another follow up post.

Here are Matt and Trey discussing the episode before it aired:

All this makes me want to see the missed episodes baaaaaaaaadly.

And (hat tip to Steve Schippert) May 20th is “Everybody draw Mohammed Day”:

After Comedy Central cut a portion of a South Park episode following a death threat from a radical Muslim group, Seattle cartoonist Molly Norris wanted to counter the fear. She has declared May 20th “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day.”

Norris told KIRO Radio’s Dave Ross that cartoonists are meant to challenge the lines of political correctness. “That’s a cartoonist’s job, to be non-PC.”

You can find more on all of this by going to the Revolution Muslim website, including links to other news articles. (They seem to have a backup blogspot.com, too). I’m sure they’ll be thrilled to note FA linking to them and respecting their point of view.

Remember: May 20th. You don’t have to be a professional artist to draw Mohammed, so maybe readers would care to submit their cartoon depictions?

For me, this isn’t about disrespecting the faith of 1.5 billion. It’s about not having my freedom suppressed and my actions dictated by intolerant, thin-skinned lunatics.

Comedy Central definitely didn’t censor the South Park episode out of deference and respect for Islam. They did it out of fear and intimidation. They caved to terror-threats…made not by rioting mobs but by a handful of wannabe wahabbi nutjobs.

UPDATE*

Here’s the Super Best Friends ep with commentary where Mohammed makes his physical appearance (without fanfare death threats, pre-Danish cartoons):

You can watch the 200th episode below:

It seems, though, that when an American military officer who is a practicing Muslim allegedly shoots forty of his fellow soldiers who are about to deploy to the two wars the United States is currently fighting in Muslim countries, some broader meaning might, over time, be discerned, especially if the officer did, in fact, yell “Allahu Akbar” while murdering his fellow soldiers, as some soldiers say he did. This is the second time this year American soldiers on American soil have been gunned down by a Muslim who was reportedly unhappy with America’s wars in the Middle East (the first took place in Arkansas, to modest levels of notice). And, of course, this would not be the first instance of an American Muslim soldier killing fellow soldiers over his disagreements with American foreign policy; in 2003, Army Sgt. Hasan Akbar killed two officers and wounded fourteen others when he rolled a grenade into a tent in a homicidal protest against American policy.

Here’s a simple test: If Nidal Malik Hasan had been a devout Christian with pronounced anti-abortion views, and had he attacked, say, a Planned Parenthood office, would his religion have been considered relevant as we tried to understand the motivation and meaning of the attack? Of course. Elite opinion makers do not, as a rule, try to protect Christians and Christian belief from investigation and criticism. Quite the opposite. It would be useful to apply the same standards of inquiry and criticism to all religions.

QUESTION: Why isn’t the same standard of inquiry and criticism given to Christians and Muslims?

Carlos Bledsoe/Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad/Abdulhakim Bledsoe/Human Pondscum gave an interview to the Associated Press, reported yesterday, in which he justifies the killing of Private William Andrew Long as not murder, “because U.S. military action in the Middle East made the killing justified.”:

“I do feel I’m not guilty,” Abdulhakim Muhammad told The Associated Press in a collect call from the Pulaski County jail. “I don’t think it was murder, because murder is when a person kills another person without justified reason.”

~~~

Muhammad told the AP he admitted to his actions to police and said he was retaliating against the U.S. military.

“Yes, I did tell the police upon my arrest that this was an act of retaliation, and not a reaction on the soldiers personally,” Muhammad said. He called it “a act, for the sake of God, for the sake of Allah, the Lord of all the world, and also a retaliation on U.S. military.”

In the interview, Muhammad also disputed his lawyer’s claim that he had been “radicalized” in a Yemeni prison and said fellow prisoners that some call terrorists were actually “very good Muslim brothers.”

He also said he didn’t specifically plan the shootings that morning.

“It’s been on my mind for awhile. It wasn’t nothing planned really. It was just the heat of the moment, you know,” said Muhammad, who was arrested on a highway shortly after the attack.

~~~

Muhammad, 23, said he wanted revenge for claims that American military personnel had desecrated copies of the Quran and killed or raped Muslims. “For this reason, no Muslim, male or female, sane or insane, little, big, small, old can accept or tolerate,” he said.

He said the U.S. military would never treat Christians and their Scriptures in the same manner.

No! Certainly not! The U.S. military would never seize and destroy Bibles!

“U.S. soldiers are killing innocent Muslim men and women. We believe that we have to strike back. We believe in eye for an eye. We don’t believe in turning the other cheek,” he said.

Asked whether he considered the shootings at the recruiting center an act of war, Muhammad said “I didn’t know the soldiers personally, but yes, it was an attack of retaliation. And I feel that other attacks, not by me or people I know, but definitely Muslims in this country and others elsewhere, are going to attack for doing those things they did,” especially desecrating the Quran.

Muhammad isn’t the brightest crayon in the box, is he? But then, what crayon in the jihad movement coloring book is?

But he’s got a point.

Here are photos to support Muhammad’s assertions, showing proof positive that “U.S. soldiers are killing innocent Muslim men and women.”:

Michael Totten:

The Iraqis of Anbar Province turned against Al Qaeda and sided with the Americans in large part because Al Qaeda proved to be far more vicious than advertised. But it’s also because sustained contact with the American military – even in an explosively violent combat zone –convinced these Iraqis that Americans are very different people from what they had been led to believe. They finally figured out that the Americans truly want to help and are not there to oppress them or steal from them. And the Americans slowly learned how Iraqi culture works and how to blend in rather than barge in.

“We hand out care packages from the U.S. to Iraqis now that the area has been cleared of terrorists,” one Marine told me. “When we tell them that some of these packages aren’t from the military or the government, that they were donated by average American citizens in places like Kansas, people choke up and sometimes even cry. They just can’t comprehend it. It is so different from the lies they were told about us and how we’re supposed to be evil.”

OMG! Check out the U.S. soldier shooting Iraqi police graduates….with a *gasp* camera:

Michael Yon:

I took that photo on May 2nd of 2005 up in Mosul. A suicide car bomber had lined up to do an attack on some of our soldiers, and they were in Stryker fighting vehicles. And Farah, and about twenty other kids, had run out to…when they would hear the Strykers, they would run out and waive, and the soldiers throw them candy and that sort of thing. And Farah’s mother later said that she ran out barefooted, you know, to waive and get candy or whatever, the suicide car bomber, who could have waited two or three blocks to attack our guys, or at least do it away from the kids, just ran right, drove right through the kids and exploded, detonated right there, killed one boy outright, burned him up. And then, you know, Farah…a woman, I don’t know if it was her mother, but a woman ran out with Farah, and came to the first American soldier she could fine. Walt Gaya, this is a pattern I’ve seen over and over, when Iraqis get hurt, they immediately go to American soldiers. And Walt was pushing out to a sniper position, but…and that’s really where he needed to go. But when he saw Farah injured, he grabbed her and took her back to the medics. The medics started working on her, and then Mark Bieger, he’s the major who’s in the photo that’s on the cover of the book, he picked up Farah, wrapped her in that blanket, and started to rush off to the hospital, grabbed up a few of the family members, and rushed to the hospital with Farah. But she, unfortunately, Farah died, so that’s how that photo was taken.

Here are stories of al Qaeda in Mesopotamia- Bledsoe’s fellow ideologues in the “jihad” movement- building mosques, hospitals, schools, infrastructure, protecting innocent Iraqis, and handing out candies, school supplies and soccer balls to Iraqi kids:

Link:

An Iraqi officer near Sinjar told me that recently a group of perhaps twenty “jihadists,” many of them foreign, descended on a Nineveh village. The Iraqi officer said the terrorists killed some adults and two babies. One baby they murdered was 15 days old.

Michael Yon:

I still find people in America, Nepal, Thailand, UAE and other countries who believe al Qaeda propaganda that they attack us because we support Israel or occupy Muslim holy land. This would not explain the decapitated Iraqi children I photographed when locals told me al Qaeda did it. This would not explain the Iraqi children al Qaeda has blown up, or the Afghans and Pakistanis killed by al Qaeda, or the Africans who are murdered by the same cult of serial killers. Did those decapitated children in the Iraqi village even know where America or Israel are? What about the Shia mosques they destroyed in Iraq? Were they occupying Saudi Arabia or supporting Israel?

A bleeding ground for takfiri terrorists:

Killers of children:

At first, he said, they would only target Shia, but over time the new al Qaeda directed attacks against Sunni, and then anyone who thought differently. The official reported that on a couple of occasions in Baqubah, al Qaeda invited to lunch families they wanted to convert to their way of thinking. In each instance, the family had a boy, he said, who was about 11 years old. As LT David Wallach interpreted the man’s words, I saw Wallach go blank and silent. He stopped interpreting for a moment. I asked Wallach, “What did he say?” Wallach said that at these luncheons, the families were sat down to eat. And then their boy was brought in with his mouth stuffed. The boy had been baked. Al Qaeda served the boy to his family.

Iraqis love their children.

Over here, the fact of al Qaeda murdering children is just that: it’s a fact. How they chose to commit the murders is a variable that changes from incident to incident. I’ve written often about how Iraqis, as a rule, love and greatly value their children . This makes the children especially vulnerable as targets for terrorists. That is a brutal fact.Al Qaeda drinks and uses drugs here. This is not propaganda. This is not even news, it’s a fact that I wrote about back in 2005.

Yes, it’s the American military strapping bombs to Iraqi women and children the disabled, and sending them off to blow up more innocent Muslims:

Baghdad, 1 Oct. (AKI) – Al-Qaeda has over the past two years used 24 children to carry out suicide bombings in Iraq, the director of military operations for the Interior Ministry, Abdelaziz Mohammed Jasim, told pan-Arab daily al-Sharq al-Awsat.

“Of the 24 children, five had a mental disability. From analysing the others’ remains, we established that they were homeless,” said Jasim.

American soldiers stationed in Iraq have reported that the insurgency has armed children as young as 11 to fight against them.

Al-Qaeda is targeting orphans, street children and mentally disabled children as suicide bomber recruits as well as women, according to the Iraqi Interior Ministry.

There have been at least 16 suicide attacks carried out by women in recent months in the volatile Al-Qaeda stronghold of Diyala province, north of the Iraqi capital, Baghdad.

Iraqi children (photo) in general make up 20 percent of the civilian victims of bomb attacks in the country.

How many Muslims has the global “jihad” movement killed?

Carlos Bledsoe/Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad/Abdulhakim Bledsoe/Human Pondscum is perfectly justified in a “nothing personal against Pvt. Long” murder because he believes the Quran has been desecrated by the American military and that U.S. soldiers are murdering innocent Muslims.

Previous FA posts:
June 3: Obama Silent On Killing Of Army Solder By Terrorist But Shocked Over Tiller Murder

June 3: Pvt. Long’s assassin roamed free because of “insufficient evidence” for wiretaps/investigation

June 2: Murdering US soldiers on the streets – the drawbacks of using law enforcement as terrorist policy

THE LIE

At his meeting with bipartisan leaders of Congress, Obama said he would make his stimulus proposal available on the Internet, with a Google-like search function to show each proposed project or program, by congressional district, according to three people who attended.

THE REALITY

In a press conference Thursday, the House Republican leadership spoke candidly about being kept out of the House-Senate conference on the Obama-Pelosi-Reid so-called “economic stimulus” bill. They confirmed they had not yet seen the text of the bill as of 4 p.m.

Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) said he was unsure how many Democrats would vote with Republicans again on this bill but that he thought Republicans “may get a few” Democrats to side with them. The fact that the Demos have now broken their promise to have the public able to see the bill for 48 hours may drive more Dems into the Republican camp.

“[I] don’t know, ‘cause they haven’t seen the bill either,” Boehner said. “The American people have a right to know what’s in this bill,” Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind) told HUMAN EVENTS after the press conference. “Every member of Congress — Republicans and Democrats — voted to post this bill on the internet for 48 hours, 48 hours ago. We’ll see if the Democrats keep their word.”

For some completely unknown reason (I just can’t possibly imagine) MSNBC has not followed up on its own article by asking Democrats what happened to the 48hr online review?

So, who DOES know what’s in the bill that Congress is going to approve? Congress doesn’t. Lobbyists do

Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri? The salafi fundamentalists? Sufi Islam? Farrakhan and The Nation of Islam? Baha’ism? Sunni or Shi’a? The Ayatollahs who wish to bring about the end time and reign in the 2nd coming of the 12th Imam? Modern “reformers” like Sayyid Qutb and Mohammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, the inspiration for al Qaeda and modern Islamic fundamentalism? What gives them the religious authority to define a religion that does not have priests? Is CAIR really the voice of “moderates”? Is Islam inflexible and incapable of embracing modernity and a divorce from the violence and hatred of political Islam and 7th, 12th century backwardness? Or, can it be reformed by those devout Muslims like Dr. Zuhdi Jasser?

Z, a friend of mine, had an opportunity to listen to Dr. Jasser speak; and I think came away from the talk, a better person for it, and a better advocate for fighting the war against Islamic terror and Islamism, without lashing out at at the hundreds of millions of Muslims who practice the faith, in peace.

I know this doesn’t sit well with many right-wingers. Good. Sometimes, we need the stupid smacked out of us. We’ve become so educated on the dangers of the Islamist threat by immersing ourselves in Robert Spencerian research and anti-Jihad books, blog any and every news story on honor killings and Islamic cultural encroachments upon our western society, that we find validation in our dim view of Islam as a whole.

I’m not saying there aren’t real dangers and a real threat from wahhabism and Islamist fundamentalism. But I am saying that some of us are becoming religious bigots, where our prejudice and hatred are based upon self-indoctrination of anti-Islam literature. Our views against Islam are shaped not by a lack of education, but by an overabundance and an overbalance of education, tilted in one direction. We are all-too willing to believe the worst about Islam, and zero-in only on repeating the negative stories. Positive stories about Muslims get ignored or dismissed as the exception; we seize upon the negative news, then cry out “where are the moderate voices?” We don’t see them, because we’re too busy looking for the worst.

We are under threat of becoming the stereotype that multicultural liberals wish to see us as: intolerant, warmongering, religious and ethnic bigots.

I have an anti-Islam troll living under the bridge of my blog; anytime I come out with a post that doesn’t condemn the entire religion, he will crawl out of his hole to tell me how I am a dhimmi and defender of evil. Bigots like him are part of the problem and have their heads up their asses every bit as much as they rightfully accuse some of us as having our heads in the sand.

bin Laden and Zawahiri tried to convince the Muslim world that the West are at war with Islam. They have failed. That is, unless they’ve simultaneously convinced the West that Islam is at war with them.

Dr. Jasser represents the kind of modernity and reformation that Islam needs to undergo if it is to survive peacefully alongside the other great world religions in the 21st century. We should not fall into the trap of becoming what we hate.

Here’s an excerpt from Islam vs. Islamists (apparently uploaded by Tarek Fatah):

Another clip:

This is the PBS episode from their program series that they had initially pulled, apparently influenced by the likes of CAIR, who they deem to be the “true” “moderates”, because they are bearded. I got to see a free screening of this documentary in June of 2007 and highly recommend it to everyone. It is the irony of ironies that the multiculturalist liberals at PBS would suppress Islam vs. Islamists, when the four voices of those in the program are the very “moderates” people need to hear from.

When we lament, “where are the moderate voices in Islam?”, “Why aren’t they speaking out and denouncing Islamic terror?”…..well, you can thank, in part, PBS.

Ok, readers: Let me have both barrels in the face, and tell me why I’m wrong.

Muslims attend Eid-al-Fitr prayers on a street in Mumbai, India. Muslims across the world are celebrating Eid al-Fitr, the festival marking the end of the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan.Punit Paranjpe, Reuters

Most people assume that bigotry and prejudice are born of ignorance. Of a lack of education. This is true. But I think it is also based upon an overabundance of “slanted” knowledge.

Like many FA readers, after 9/11, I steeped myself in literature of the Robert Spencer-variety, warning me of the dangers of (radical/political ) Islam. Anyone who wanted to define Islam as “a religion of peace” was ridiculed as being asleep and ignorant; of having drunk the political correctness kool-aid and multiculturalist nonsense. And they were right.

But now, I think we have become so “educated” on Islam, that as mostly outsiders looking in, we have only educated ourselves to the opposite extreme, in our views. And that is just as damaging to fighting and winning the war against Islamic terror as it is to deny that we are engaged in a real war with a radical movement. Yes, radical. Not normative, but extremist, radicalism.

I know allies of mine on the right insist that radical Islam is the norm; that there is no such thing as a “moderate” Muslim, unless he be an apostate to the religion of Islam. And they will point me to all the passages from the Hadith and Koran that I’m already familiar with, and tell Muslims that they know Islam better than the Muslims themselves know Islam. Great.

A devout Muslim tells you he is peaceful, and you tell him, “No you’re not; and if you are, you don’t know Islam. You’re not a real Muslim, because I read Robert Spencer’s books and know better than you do about your own faith; you don’t get to define it, who practice it; I get to define it for you, who studies a slant side of it.” Merely reading anti-Islamic books and taking the Koranic word literally, isn’t necessarily education. It’s an important part of our education; but when you are only immersed in a one-sided viewpoint with an agenda, then that becomes propaganda. Propaganda from the right, countering propaganda from the left. Somewhere amidst all of that, lies the reality.

Michelle Malkin is a high-profile blogger of great influence, with many “fans” on the right side of the blogosphere.

Amy Proctor’s reaction to one of Malkin’s latest entries, is shared by myself as well. By way of Bottomline Upfront:

Michelle Malkin’s appalling new series on her blog, Stuff Muslims Don’t Like: A new feature, is inflammatory, insulting and ignorant. My husband is a MSG in the Army and a Religious Leader Engagement subject matter expert in the war on terror, particularly relating to Iraq, and he is equally appalled. She justifies her series by comparing it to a blog called Stuff White People Like:

“Of course, Stuff Muslims Don’t Like doesn’t purport to characterize the entire Muslim population anymore than Stuff White People Like purports to characterize the entire population of white people. It’s a look at predictable predilictions, proclivities, and trends.”

Sure it doesn’t, Michelle. She makes no distinction between an entire population and whoever her swipes are intended for. Her flawed analogy doesn’t consider that Islam is a religion, not a race.

A sign of a mature, 21st century-evolved religion, is one that is thick-skinned enough to endure irreverent humor and insults without flying off the handle. So someone like Bill Maher enjoys the freedom to slander the Pope and insult a great religion and we have the freedom to criticize him for it. Bill Maher isn’t courageous, since he knows Catholic Crusadists aren’t going to come after him and take his life; all he can whine about in terms of persecution and freedom of speech, is if his HBO show has the plug pulled because we exercised our freedom of speech in expressing our indignation and dissatisfaction. Real courage is standing up to the Islamic crazies. It’s when Iraqis like,

Abu Ali said that on 1 April 2007, he and his people attacked al Qaeda in Buhriz for their crimes against Islam. He also said something that many Muslims have said to me: al Qaeda are not Muslims. (Both Sunni and Shia have said nearly the exact same words, at times on video.)

Abu Ali said that “al Qaeda is an abomination of Islam: cutting off heads, stealing people’s money, kidnapping . . . every type of torture they have done.”

Muslims like him, who oppose the hirabahists, should be embraced as the true adherence to Islam. The majority of Muslims who are not plotting to subjugated the entire world under Islamic fundamentalism should be allowed to define who and what they are; not the armchair Spencerian Islamic scholars and not the Zawahiris and Qutbists.

You say you want to win the War on Terror? Win in Iraq? How does that instill confidence in Abu Ali that he chose not only the winning side by allying with the U.S., but also that he chose the right side, when we lash out as his religion, as a whole, rather than surgically zero in on the Wahhabists, Salafi fundamentalists, and Qutbist ideologists who are waging war on everyone, including on Muslims?

Amy Proctor writes further,

It goes on with comments of blathering ignorance of proportions that make me shudder. Do Malkin readers hold those views toward this man and his son? Or these Muslim women who are laying down their lives for their country? How about this man? Or these blind children and their amazing teacher? They’re Muslim, too. How about this Muslim who teaches children that the United States is their friend? Or this man and his son? Or these Muslims who reached out to the Vatican in a gesture of unity and peace? How about this Iraqi volunteer who saved U.S. troops and civilians by throwing himself on a suicide bomber? Funny, because I thought she and her readers typically praise these Muslims

Muslims have been losing their lives, fighting against al-Qaeda and other Islamic terror networks. American Muslims such as Dr. Zuhdi Jasser (if CAIR is the Jesse Jackson Rainbow/PUSH Coalition of the Muslim community, Jasser is like the Michael Steele of American Muslims) acknowledges that his faith needs reformation and modernization; telling devout Muslims like him that Islam cannot be reformed, or it’s no longer Islam, is like telling all the branches of Christianity that continue to spring up that they are not true Christianity, because they don’t practice the faith as it was practiced two thousand years ago (or is it 6,000?).

No, I’m not drawing a moral equivalence between Christianity and Islam. I’m neither a Biblical nor Koranic scholar, and am not talking about theological tenets. I realize that at their core, they have fundamental differences. Christianity has evolved. I find that a portion of the Muslim world is still rooted in 12th and 7th century cultural-thinking and beliefs.

Michael Totten points to a part of the Islamic world that has embraced modernity…and they aren’t even in the United States:

I’m writing this from the capital of Kosovo, the least “scary” Muslim country on Earth. I’ve grown accustomed to moderate Muslims after living in and traveling to places like Beirut and Istanbul, but Kosovo is surprising even to me. Islam in this country is so thoroughly liberal (“moderate” doesn’t quite cover it) that, if it weren’t for the mosques, there would be no visible evidence that Kosovo is a Muslim country at all. I’ve been in Prishtina, the capital, for four days, and I can count the number of women I’ve seen wearing a hijab on one hand. Aside from the conservative dating culture, women here are as liberated as Christian women in the rest of the Balkan region.

A large number of Kosovo’s Muslims are Sufis—the most peaceful and the least fundamentalist of all the world’s Muslims. Sufis can be found in many parts of the Islamic world, but here in Kosovo they proudly proclaim that they are the most “progressive” of all.

Soft-imperial Wahhabis are trying to export their brand of Islam from the deserts of Saudi Arabia to this fertile green land. They have their work cut out for them with this crowd. Bosnia notoriously welcomed thousands of Salafist mujahideen fighters from the Arab world during Yugoslavia’s violent demise. But the Kosovo Liberation Army brusquely told them to stay the hell out of their country—even while they faced an ethnic cleansing campaign directed from Belgrade.

Amy Proctor:

Malkin and her commenters ought to be ashamed of themselves. They say they support the war efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq but systematically insult the allies GEN Petraeus and our troops are making on the ground in the combat zone. Their words are as poisonous as any Democrat’s who continue to call Iraqis too lazy to fight for their own country. While politicians like Ron Paul or Dennis Kucinich argue that a U.S. presence in the Middle East in and of itself has provoked Muslim nations to take aim at U.S. interests around the globe, it is sentiments like Michelle Malkin’s that make it more difficult for Muslims to want U.S. soldiers on their soil. If these people are the friends of the troops, who needs enemies?

Some previous posts:
One Muslim’s Jihad, is Another Muslim’s Hirabah
LA Screening of Islam vs. Islamists
Counter-Propaganda
Dhimmi Я NOT Us
Understanding Counter-Insurgency
Islam for Dhimmis