Pamela Geller in her own words

Sometimes you don't need a shorter, folks.

"The Obama legacy will not only be the degenerate spending which led to the economic downfall of this country, but he will also go down in history as the first anti-freedom leader whose foreign policy led to a universal caliphate across the world."

It's not just a phobia. It's a complex of fixed, false beliefs that cannot be exorcised or even called into question by facts or reasoned argument. It's a delusion.

The Hatemobile

From Loonwatch:

Courage

Most Norwegian kids have never lived in a war zone, and so have never been stalked through the woods by a ruthless killer, intent on their extermination.

The immigration and diversity that Anders Breivik and his ilk hate so much helped to save Norwegian lives.

From the Moscow Times:

Chechen War Prepared Teens for Norway Terror

16 August 2011

By Nikolaus von Twickel

Two Chechen teenagers who survived last month's massacre on Norway's Utoya Island said they pelted right-wing extremist Anders Breivik with stones and saved lives.

Movsar Dzhamayev, 17, and Rustam Daudov, 16, told the Norwegian Dagbladet daily that they were reminded of the war in their native Chechnya after seeing Breivik killing three people in front of their eyes on July 22.

"I have seen people being shot before in my country when I was small and had flashbacks," Dzhamayev said in the interview published late last week.

But after speaking to his father by cell phone, he pulled himself together. "My dad said, 'Attack the perpetrator and do it properly,'" he said.

With a third unidentified friend, the teens armed themselves with stones and returned to the scene only to witness Breivik killing another young camper on the island outside Oslo.

"We stood three meters from him and wanted to beat him, but then he shot one of our friends in the head. So we just threw the stones and ran for our lives," Daudov said.

While he was unsure whether he hit Breivik, Dzhamyev said he was certain he had.

"First he howled and then turned to me and shouted, "[expletive] [racial slur]," he said.

The teens said they decided that it was too difficult to stop the gunman and better to save lives. They discovered a cave-like opening in a rock where they managed to hide 23 children from Breivik, who ended up killing 69 people at the camp and eight more people in a bombing in central Oslo.

Dzhamayev, who kept guard outside, also dragged three youngsters from the lake who were close to drowning.

The two Chechens, who both live in Norway, said they first met each other at the summer camp and immediately became close friends.

Norway has a sizable population of Chechens, most of whom came as refugees from the wars that have ravaged the North Caucasus republic over the past 15 years.

Dzhamayev and Daudov are not the only Chechens reported to have survived the camp. A third, Anzor Dzhukayev, 17, was briefly arrested after the massacre on suspicion that he was an accomplice, Norwegian media reported last week.

A police spokesman said he was suspected of throwing away his gun and blending in because he showed no emotions, the Verdens Gang newspaper reported Friday.

Dzhukayev, who was released the following day, explained his coolness with his childhood experiences. "When I was little, I lived in a house full of bodies. I remember seeing dogs eating them," he was quoted in media reports as saying.

A website I wish I had made. . .

. . . and, in fact, did.

A couple of years ago, when I had a lot of time on my hands, and the quantity of subject material was more manageable, I created a blog called The Mozlems Are Coming! I had intended to devote it to ridiculing the xenophobic conspiracy theory, forwarded by Spencer, Geller, Wilders and co., that there is a vast and ancient Muslim plot to conquer and subjugate non-Muslims everywhere.

I'm only slightly kidding.

Then, a combination of being busy, being lazy, the mushrooming of the Fear-O-Sphere genre, and the limited hit-count of this blog itself led me to put the project on hold indefinitely. It's something I regret. Since then, what used to go on in the darker corners of the internet has gradually moved into the mainstream, from the anti-Mosque protests in New York to the appearance of the many books penned by anti-Muslim wingnuts in hands of strangers I see on busses and trains. Before he spectacularly and gruesomely disproved every argument ever made about Scandinavians and racial profiling, Anders Breivik added his own 1500-page magnum opus to this growing body of hate literature.

For Spencer, Geller, et al to claim they weren't responsible is a bit like saying that Wagner wasn't responsible anti-Semitic violence. It's true, but he did inspire some people who were.

It is, therefore, regrettable that there aren't more people engaged in countering this burgeoning industry, whose intellectual products have already made a bloody imprint upon the world. Fortunately, a few brilliant people have stepped into the gap:


The site provides profiles regular updates on all the activities going in the Fear-O-Sphere, well-informed refutations of its (ahem) "scholarly" works, and unlike most political blogs (including and especially the anti-Islam ones), some healthy debate and disagreement in the comments, with regular contributions from a haters themselves.

I highly recommed the exposé on "Muslim Reformer" Wafa Sultan, one of the leaders of the cottage industry of Islam-Experts-With-Funny-Sounding-Names that professional hatemongers have come to rely upon.

None other than anti-Islam kingpin Robert Spencer himself has taken to flailing wildly at Loonwatch, calling it an "Islamic hate site." No comment from me is needed.

In summary: TheProudIslamist <3 Loonwatch.

Who else argues like this?

Perusing the Fearosphere so you don't have to! That's right, it's another edition of our ongoing series "Teh Mozlems are Coming!"

Today's entry comes from the "Center for the Study of Political Islam" an institution (to use the term loosely) that has been polluting the internet over the last 4 years with it's self-published erudition - available to you in print form starting at $8.95 per book, plus taxes and shipping!

In a seminal high-school english assignment, entitled "Statistical Islam", the good folks over at the CSPI (yes, they get an acronym!) demonstrate how thoroughly they have mastered Islam.

"The Koran, in turn, points directly to Mohammed. It says 91 times that Mohammed is the perfect Muslim. He is the divine human prototype, the only pattern acceptable to Allah. The actions and words of Mohammed are so important that they have a special name—Sunna. We find the Sunna in two texts. The Sira is the biography of Mohammed and the Hadith is the collection of hadiths (small stories, traditions) about Mohammed.

"Islam is based on Koran and Sunna. Since the Sunna is found in the Sira and the Hadith, this means that three books contain all the doctrine of Islam—the Trilogy. If it is in the Trilogy (Koran, Sira, Hadith), then it is Islam. If something is not in the Trilogy, then it is not Islam. All of the Islamic doctrine is found in the Trilogy. Now, we have the complete information with no missing pieces."

There is a proverb that goes "Associate yourself with seekers of truth, but stay away from those who have found it." Amongst Muslims, there are a host of groups and individuals who use a chauvinistic sort of reasoning to claim that they have cornered the market on spiritual truth. And yet the traditional Muslim schools of thought are filled with hundreds of volumes of exegesis of the Qur'an, of the Hadith, and of the work of previous scholars. The so called "Trilogy" (which, aside from the Qur'an, is comprised of dozens of books of varying authenticity) may be a solid data-set, but its interpretation is obviously more complex.

With the assistance of a handy graph, the sages at the CSPI go on to argue:

. . . If Mohammed had continued with preaching religion we can extrapolate that there would have only been 265 Muslims when he died, instead of the 100,000 that resulted from his politics and jihad. This gives us an estimate of 265 conversions due to religion and 99,735 conversions to due the political jihad process. We can calculate the relative contributions of religion and politics in growth. Islam’s success was 0.3% religion and 99.7% politics 7 at the time of Mohammed’s death, 632 AD. . . . The statistical conclusion: Islam is primarily a political ideology.

The obvious conclusion that the authors are trying to lead us to (unsurprisingly, they made up their minds before they started this little study) is that Islam is not like Christianity or Judaism or Hinduism, or any other religion, but more like Communism or Nazism - a material ideology rather than a faith tradition.

This is, of course, because the authors never considered (or at least, never wrote an essay on) what would have happened if, for instance, the Jews of the Torah hadn't been instructed to drive out the inhabitants of the land of Canaan following their Exodus from Egypt. The authors never take notice of how Hinduism privileged the invading Aryans over the native (and vanquished) Dravidian peoples by giving domination of the priestly Brahmin caste almost exclusively to Aryans.

I don't think I really need to explain how the spread of Christianity was, ahem, "accelerated" through politics and warfare.

A religious practice that exerts no influence and has no political consequences is not likely to spread. While a few highly intellectual people might find satisfaction in a private spiritualism, the majority of people look to religion not only to answer their philosophical questions about the universe, but also provide them with guidance in how to order their relationships with other people. All of the major religions encourage a communal practice, around which a community can be built that strives toward a common set of virtues. That necessitates politics.

Of course, if your goal is to convince people that Islam is more like Communism than Christianity, then pointing out the political success of other major religions doesn't help.

What does help, however, is to claim that Muslims have more in common with Nazis than they do with Neopagans:

The Trilogy of Medina is even more negative about the Jews than Hitler’s Mein Kampf. What marks the biggest difference between Mein Kampf and the Trilogy is that Hitler did not write first section in Mein Kampf detailing how much he admired the Jews. There is a contradiction about how the Koran treats Jews in Mecca and how they are treated in Medina. Due to dualistic reasoning, both attitudes about the Jews are true, at the same time.

So now we have the Qur'an being portrayed as worse than Mein Kampf. Now, I've never read Mein Kampf. For all I know, it's mostly about how much Hitler hates Austrian prison food. The comparison, however, is useful for the conclusion that our self-styled "Islamic Scholars" are driving us towards, because Mein Kampf is nonetheless associated in the popular consciousness with the attempted extermination of the Jews.

The alternative hypothesis is, again, not considered: that the positive references to Jews are general, dealing with the religion as a whole and its great prophets, while the negative references relate to specific circumstances, like being surprised from the rear by a Jewish tribe in Medina, even as you were trying to defend yourselves from an external attack by the Meccans.

This reasoning is not unique to critics of Islam, but also to its self-declared stalwarts. Much of the anti-Jewish sentiment that has spread through Muslim communities (particularly after 1948, but also before) is based upon a similarly decontextualized reading of the Qur'an. Ironically, the strongest allies that the anti-Islam movement has are some of the most ostentatiously religious elements within the Muslim ummah.

Both groups claim to have an indisputable hold on what Islam is, and both groups employ a simplistic reading of primary sources in order to justify their views. "This is Islam," each says "and anything else is something you made up." They are fond of quoting one another, each to inspire fear of the other in their audience. Ironically, the protagonists act to strengthen their opponents.

It's almost as if they want a conflict.

Spot the darkies

From this weekend's anti-mosque protest in New York.

There are, by my count, at least two clearly non-white people in the photo, one in the foreground and one in the background, and at least 2 people of ambiguous ethnicity.

I'll acknowledge that the anti-Islam movement is an open tent. It's just that only white people seem real anxious to go in.

The trouble with George Galloway. . .

. . . is that he sometimes reveals that he operates under a misconception that is, unfortunately, common amongst people at his end of the political spectrum, and that is also, unfortunately, something that the wingnuts and bedwetters are not entirely incorrect about. Specifically, he believes that people of all faiths, on average, take their scriptures equally seriously. The result is this somewhat embarrassing exchange between Galloway and this British documentary film-maker. I'm posting it here because I have, in the past, posted clips of Galloway laying waste to opponents on a variety of issues related to Muslims and Anglo-American involvement in Muslim countries.



The discussion, which begins with a civil tone, ends with Galloway assuming the tone of an interrogator, while simultaneously himself refusing to give any response to what was a completely fair question repeated ad nauseum by the guest.

Much has been made of Galloway's other public gaffes, but for me these have only called into question his judgement, and not his character or the soundness of his positions. This exchange, however, does create doubt about the latter.

While the Old Testament does contain far more violence than the Qur'an, for one reason or another, the overwhelming majority of British Jews or Christians don't take it all that seriously. That's not to say that they don't have any faith at all, but it does say that they have developed a variety of rationales (some less convincing than others) to effectively ignore most of it.

Amongst Muslims, particularly within the reactionary neo-Salafi school promulgated by the ibn Saud, not only the Qur'an, but Prophetic narrations from canonical secondary sources are taken, in a decontextualized form, as literal instructions that are binding upon Muslims for all eternity without qualification.

This does not validate the anti-Islam thesis that Muslims are all therefore suspects in a vast conspiracy to crush Western Civilization, but it does mean that one would indeed have a harder time finding a British church in which people were prescribing the death penalty for apostasy, than a mosque in which the same was being said. Without a knowledge of the Muslim community from the inside, that fact provokes either blind denial from those sympathetic to the Muslim community, or blind hate from those with xenophobic or imperialistic tendencies.

Ultimately, though, what infuriates me about the school of Islam promulgated by the ibn Saud is not that it creates a distraction from the genuine material grievances that create anti-Western sentiment in the Muslim world.

As for Galloway, he lost his seat in the British election. I have a feeling though, that this isn't the last we shall hear of him.

Shorter Swiss Referendum Analysis

Referendum: "MUSLIMS = BAD"

Be frightened children! Their architecture is out to get us!

The Truth About Rifqa Bary

In August, I wrote here about a troubling case involving 17-year-old Rifqa Bary, an Ohio girl from a Sri Lankan Muslim family who converted to Christianity and fled to Florida, claiming refuge with a Christian pastor against what she claimed was her impending "honour killing."

As I said then, though the truth was far from clear, all of the luminaries of anti-Islam - Robert Spencer, Pamela Gellar, Frank Gaffney, Wafa Sultan, and the like - were flogging the story hard, claiming that Rifqa was in danger, and that her fanatical father was after his daughter's blood, inspired by Islam.

Outside the courthouse

Since then, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) was asked by the state's governor to investigate the girl's claims against her parents in Ohio.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joF3cCB_n_4
(embed disabled)

A little excerpt from the FDLE's investigation summary:

. . .

Ms. Bary discussed her upbringing and stated that she had been a cheerleader at New Albany High School. When asked if her father approved of her cheerleading she stated that her father had no real idea what the concept or activities involved in cheerleading were, and allowed it. She stated that she always wore sweatpants or other coverings to hide the short skirt of the cheerleading outfit from him. She stated her father had never been to an event in which she performed as a cheerleader. Furthermore, she stated the family had no photos of her cheering or team photos as would appear in a yearbook.

On August 27, 2009, Mr. Bary stated to FDLE that he knew about his daughter’s cheerleading activities. He said that she had asked her mother for permission to cheer and was denied. Ms. Bary then asked Mr. Bary for his approval and he subsequently allowed her participation.. Mr. Bary stated that he drove her to cheerleading practice occasionally during the week He said he had never seen her perform due to his work commitments.

On August 27, 2009, Rilvan Bary told FDLE that his parents seemed to be supportive of his sister’s cheerleading activities.

When FDLE and other investigators visited the Bary household on August 27, 2009, several photos of Ms. Bary dressed in her cheerleading uniform were prominently displayed in the family living room.

. . .

FDLE’s investigation has not developed any information which supports an allegation of criminal activity in the state of Florida. Furthermore, our investigation has provided no clear evidence of criminal activity in other states which may be supportive of the above allegations. FDLE is prepared to assist the state of Ohio or any other entity in furtherance of investigative matters which may pertain to their areas of jurisdiction.

In other words, the cops in Florida saw no evidence that Miss Bary had never been the victim of a threat or criminal act by her family.

This, of course, puts the Anti-Islam brigades in a tough position - either they got all hot and bothered over a truckload of teenage acting-out, or the FDLE is willfully blind to the "jihadist agenda" as it pertains to Rifqa Bary. Guess which one they picked?

Kyle over at RightWingWatch puts it beautifully:

So, in short: the FDLE report concluded that Bary was in no danger and that pretty much everything her right-wing supporters had been claiming was false, which, according to those right-wing supporters, only proves that the FDLE and others are engaged in a conspiracy to kill Bary and "replace our Constitution and the liberties it enshrines with the brutal and repressive program known as Shariah."

---------------------

If this were just another story of paranoid delusions and wingnut tomfoolery, I would be happy to leave the story there, and walk away gloating over another embarrassment for the anti-Islam brigades.

This, however, is a story about a real girl and a real family. As I wrote in my first piece on this, half of me wanted Rifqa's claims to be true, because if they were, then she had a good reason to tear her family apart, because her father would have been, as she claimed, a monster.

It is impossible to say for certain whether he was a model father, but we do know for certain now that there are an awful lot of things that Miss Bary both embellished and lied about in order to make her story more dramatic. That by itself is a terrible thing, because it means that she has torn her family apart for the sake of people who are interested primarily in using her to grind an axe against the Muslims of the world. In so doing, she has shamed and dishonoured her parents.

It is not the Christian thing to do.

May she and her family find a way to reconcile. Ameen.

The "Ultra-Secretive" Muslim Brotherhood

Since I enjoy subjecting myself to large doses of online wingnuttery, I was reading an article in Human Events, the self-proclaimed "Headquarters of the Conservative Underground." In the the minds of its publishers, conservatism in the United States has been somehow driven "underground."

According to the headline by Rowan Scarborough, the "FBI Partners With Jihad Groups!" Oh noes! Which Jihad groups?

A former agent told HUMAN EVENTS the bureau is dealing with the groups that maintain an under-the-radar alliance with the Muslim Brotherhood. The ultra-secretive Muslim Brotherhood, with chapters worldwide, is the glue for a network of Islamic groups.

"ultra-secretive", eh? Wow. That's between mega-secretive and terra-secretive, right? I wonder if it's possible to find traces of this shadowy organization on Ye Olde Internets.


Conveniently, they are at http://www.ikhwanweb.org . Of course, one can't expect to find any meaningful information on the Brotherhood's site. You're probably never going to find the celebrated manifesto, for instance, where members of the Brotherhood propose a "kind of grand jihad in America." It's probably all just propaganda, codewords, and side-of-nose-tapping to signal execution of plans made three years earlier in a musty room with a single swinging lightbulb somewhere near a railway track.

Let's try searching the site for the terms "grand jihad," :

Reporting The Muslim Brotherhood

In a federal courtroom in Dallas last October, the leadership of the now-defunct Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, once the nation’s largest Muslim charity, stood accused of using the charity as a Hamas fundraising front. It was the federal government’s most important terrorism fundraising case to date.

By Rod Dreher

What follows is a damning exposé of the Brotherhood's alleged role in fomenting radical interpretations of Islam in the United States, along with the same quotation from the manifesto produced above.

So not only is the Muslim Brotherhood no more "ultra-secretive" than, say, any major political party anywhere (and it is Egypt's largest opposition party, despite being banned by Mubarak's repressive regime), it also publishes withering criticism of itself on its own website. Either the Ikhwan (Arabic for brotherhood) are true believers in open debate and ideological forthrightness, or they are very careless about what they post on their website.

So why the hyperbole in the Human Events article? Simple: to make people scared. As one lone commenter added after the article:

The hypocrisy festering below the surface of this, and most articles I read on this website, astounds me. Who armed the jihad groups in the first place in the 1980s? And have you seen the photos from that same decade, of U.S. politicians shaking hands and smiling and being buddy-buddy with Saddam and other dictators (ahem, Rumsfeld, Bush I, etc.)

I'm a scientist. As such, I understand that the search for truth (if it can be found) fundamentally depends on identifying my own assumptions and biases. This website and almost everything in it fails to meet this most basic principle. You play on emotions and fear and this is irresponsible journalism at best, and anti-american and anti-humanity at worst.

- Casey, Clemson

At which point, the anti-intellectualism of the "Conservative Underground" necessitated a pile-on.

Rifqa Bary

The troubling case of Rifqa Bary.



I don't know if Rifqa's father actually threatened to kill her, or if she really has been brainwashed by Pastor Lorenz to lie against her family. Neither would surprise me. There exists no shortage of bigoted Muslim fathers or creepy wingnut Christan pastors in the world to make either story implausible. For all we know, both narratives may carry some element of truth.

Some parts of her story make sense, and some do not - the argument, for instance, that Islam mandates the death penalty for those who forsake it, is based on a particular reading of hadith (collections of narrations from the Prophet Muhammad's life), and not upon the Qur'an, the fundamental document of Islam. It is clearly a line she has been fed. Sri Lanka has a 7.6% Muslim population with the rest being Buddhists (the majority), Christians, and Hindus; hardly the environment for Muslims to be setting up insane asylums for the religiously wayward. "Honour killings" are called that because they are committed to preserve family honour, not because the murderer feels somehow honoured to have been involved - and they are a mostly South Asian phenomenon, and not restricted to Muslims.

The anti-Islam brigades are meanwhile exploiting the story to the hilt to demonstrate that misogyny and religious intolerance on the part of some Muslims is attributable to Islam itself.

Half of me does not want Rifqa Bary's story to be true, but the fact that it is so plausible is itself troubling. If this is a conceivable thing for a Muslim father anywhere to do - be it in Pakistan, Iraq, or in Canada - then the Ummah has failed; we are not the enlightened nation that we make ourselves out to be.

The other half of me wants it to be true - because if Rifqa Bary has fled her home, taken refuge with a Christian Pastor, and levelled these kinds of allegations against her own family, then I sincerely hope she has done it for good reasons. If she hasn't, then how can her family ever recover?

For now, though, the wise will wait for the truth to come out, because eventually it always does.

JihadWatch Tolerance Epic Fail!

The professional fearmongers over at Robert Spencer's "JihadWatch" recently posted this article from the distressingly confused Anti-Defamation League (ADL), complaining that the WhyIslam? website linked to other websites that "feature extreme anti-Semitic and anti-Israel invective."

While two of the examples cited at least complain of what could legitimately be called anti-Semitic, or at least Anti-Jewish sentiments, this one was interesting:

"- IslamOnline, a Web-based publication connected to Sheik Yusuf Qaradawi, a radical Muslim brotherhood ideologue based in Qatar. The publication promotes anti-Israel terrorist groups, has referred to Zionism as a "cancer," and has repeatedly claimed that the close ties between the U.S. and Israel demonstrate their mutual desire to oppress Muslims. In January 2008, IslamOnline published a poem in its Arts and Culture section that gave graphic instructions on how to behead someone."

Thanks for giving us the whole story, guys. It's also nice to see the ADL reiterating its position that Zionism = Judaism.

Now, let's see what we can find on the front page, sans disclaimer, of the lovely JihadWatch website - leave alone the site's own numerous calls to end Muslim immigration to Western countries.

• One doesn't have to scroll far down to find "Bare Naked Islam," a site hosting stories like "Islam's rules for having SEX WITH ANIMALS" and a banner slogan at the head of the site stating "It isn't Islamophobia when they really are trying to kill you!" along with such gems as
  

Arab presence in the land called Israel was VIRTUALLY NON-EXISTENT until the late 19th-early 2oth Centuries when the Zionists took over.

Only the mentally unstable deny the existence of Palestinians, while posting in turquoise.

• If that doesn't do it for you, how about the infamous "Religion of Peace" website! The content speaks for itself, as does the fact that it was one of the earliest links added to the JihadWatch sidebar. My personal favourite gem from this one: "Muslim immigration into the UK has left a trail of rape victims, but as long as the political elite place a higher value on multiculturalism, Britain's women will just have to keep taking one for the team!

• Or how about the "Stop the Islamisation of Europe" site. The graphics accompanying its campaign to end Mosque construction speak for themselves.

  

• Then there's this lovely gem from the "What should a free man do?" blog: More mayhem in Europe. More blatant, in-your-face disobedience here. More recruitment into state-side versions of these once sand-bound savage tribes.

• Or how about this lovely passage from yet another "essay" by European "essayist" Fjordman, whom Spencer has gone to lengths to defend:

"Muhammed was a brilliant intuitive lea der/general, and he and his companions devised a near perfect closed system of war aginst the rest of humanity. Only by showing that Allah is not infallible can we be victorious in keeping our freedom, our life, our liberty and pursuit of our happiness. Muslims are extremely childish in their view of themselves and the world - they are superstitious and thus afraid of dogs, of the Koran getting dirty etc. T hey continually tell us the truth about their paranoia, and their intentions. Therefore, one of the best tactics for us to take in the War on Terror is to mock them and exploit their childishness, so that they will expose themselves to everyone."

You don't need, however, to go hunting (or actually, randomly clicking) on links from the Jihadwatch sidebar to find the fearmongers. The site itself is dedicated to the purpose, as are all of Spencer and co.'s hate-filled screeds about Islam and Muslims.

Did the editors of the WhyIslam site display some bad judgment on their Resources page? Perhaps, but for JihadWatch to complain . . .

Call it what it is

The above poster is a cartoon. Whether or not a small boy holding a teddy bear, casting a shadow forming the word "Gaza" was ever fired upon by an Israeli helicopter is irrelevant.

The poster makes no claims about Jews, or even about Israelis. It presents the conflict, however, as the David-and-Goliath struggle that it is, where a high-tech, multi-billion dollar army of occupation, motivated by a religious-nationalist ideology, seeks to crush the life of the native population.

When two Canadian universities banned the above poster from appearing on their billboards, the argument of one of them was:

"A poster from the campus group Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights has recently come to the attention of the Communications Office. All posters approved by the Communications Office must promote a campus culture where all members of the community can play a part in a declaration of human rights recognizing the inherent dignity and equal rights of all students. Consequently, we will not place this particular poster on our campus billboards."

In other words, because the poster was going to upset Zionists, it couldn't be displayed.

When the Muhammad cartoons were published in Canada, every wingnut came out of the woodwork to defend Ezra Levant. Despite my distaste for the man, I was with them, and not only because fining the man only increased his fame. When Geert Wilders produced his film "Fitna," I yawned, and wondered what the fuss was about. He has since become a hero amongst the usual anti-Islam types who style themselves "defenders of free speech."

Will they stand up for the artist in this case?

Don't hold your breath.

Shorter Diana West

Article: Win the "Trust" of People Who Hate Us? What?

Obama is devoting more troops to fighting the non-rational Afghan savages, when he oughtta be stopping the Moslems from coming over here.

Rational.

Shorter Robert Spencer

Article: Obama Takes the Appeasement Path

Obama's relentless fraternizing with the enemy has only emboldened them. Consider these innocuous quotes from Iranian sources.

I don't trust Obama, but some people are just too crazy for words to describe.

Shorter Robert Spencer

Another one for the Paranoid Delusions file.

Article: A change of tactics: opting for the stealth jihad

During my latest speech exposing the vast plot to impose a Muslim theocracy over America, agents of jihad did not boorishly disrupt the event, proving just how devious they have become.

Shorter Robert Sibley

Article: Recalling another 9/11 Attack

George Bush's glorious "Coalition of the Willing" in Iraq is just like the European army that triumphed over the Ottoman hordes at Vienna in 1683, which is really the main reason why Muslims are angry at the West today.

Tariq Ramadan flattens Philippe de Villiers

Here's an entertaining exchange between Muslim academic Tariq Ramadan and conservative French politician Philippe de Villiers, on the French current events show Ripostes.



de Villiers believes that France's Muslim minority represents a threat to the Republic, and does not consider them to be truly "French." He goes from condescending and disingenuous to desperate and scatterbrained, ending the debate by grasping at ad hominem attacks against Ramadan.

De Villiers' arguments are prototypical of the "The Mozlems are Coming!" hysteria that seems to have gripped the much of the internet and the Western world, relying on isolated anecdotes, confusing Islam with the behaviour of certain Muslims, and holding them to a moral standard which he refuses to apply to anyone else - himself included.

It's in French, so if you don't understand the language, you should learn.

Shorter Daniel Pipes

Article:
The West's Islamist Infiltrators

Over the past 6 years, several Muslims have been accused of supporting terrorists, or fired from jobs in the US where they might have posed a threat, which just proves the need for us to be suspicious of every Muslim.

(What is a shorter?)