Posts Tagged ‘Islam’
Thursday, November 4th, 2010
Just because the U.S. has an election doesn’t mean Islamic fundamentalists rest. So here’s a roundup of Islamic- and Jihad-related news from around the world.
Tags:Bill Mahar, CAIR, Democrats, Elections, Iran, Islam, Islamist, Jihad, Keith Ellison, MEMRI, Michael Totten, Oklahoma, Saudi Arabia, This Week in Jihad
Posted in Democrats, Elections, Jihad | 1 Comment »
Saturday, October 23rd, 2010
Thanks to an Instalanch (with assists from Ace of Spades and Moe Lane, among others), my piece on Elizabeth Moon and WisCon has proven extraordinarily popular, so I’ve been spending a fair amount of attention on that. (And numerous liberal science fiction professionals have been writing in to thank me for it, as the shrill, exclusionary rhetoric and tactics of the FailFandom crowd have alienated vast swathes of the field.) But that’s not the only news from the World of Jihad this week, so here’s a roundup of a few other notable developments:
- The convert-to-Jihadism that threatened the lives of South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone over the Mohammed episodes is going to prison:
A 20-year old guy named Zachary Adam Chesser pled guilty on Wednesday to three federal charges: communicating threats against South Park’s writers, soliciting violent jihadists to desensitize law enforcement, and attempting to provide material support to Al-Shabaab, an organization designated by the US as a terrorist group….He faces a maximum penalty of 30 years in prison when sentenced on February 25, 2011. He was born Jewish, and converted in his teens to an extremist strain of Islam, adopting the name Abu Talhah al-Amrikee….Chesser admitted that he promoted online what he called “Open Source Jihad,” where he would direct jihadists through his online forums to information on the Internet that they could use to elude capture and death while maintaining relevance and striking capability.
- London borough turning into an Islamic republic (the Telegraph‘s phrasing, not mine). Lutfur Rahman, the newly-elected Mayor of Tower Hamlets, has “close links [with] a Muslim supremacist body, the Islamic Forum of Europe (IFE) – which believes, in its own words, in transforming the ‘very infrastructure of society, its institutions, its culture, its political order and its creed… from ignorance to Islam.’”
- Speaking of UK jihadists, Pregnant Asiyah Khan of Bradford, who burned to death, may have been the victim of an honor killing.
- Benjamin Kerstein points out the obvious: the Middle East Peace Process is a joke.
- If you’re wondering what “Islamic moderates” look like, take a look at this essay by Mohamed El-Moctar El-Shinqiti, which, in diagnosing the cure for Arab decline, calls for a guarantee of the rights of non-Muslims, but rejects a wholly secular state saying that “non-Muslim minorities and non-practicing Muslims need to accept the fact that Islamic law is too rich and too important to be discarded.” Mr. El-Shinqiti’s vision of a rule based on moderate Islamism would be a distinct improvement in countries like Iran and Saudi Arabia, but a vast step backwards in any Western society based on individual rights.
(Hat tips: Instapundit, JihadWatch, Michael Totten, MEMRI.)
Tags:Abu Talhah al-Amrikee, Asiyah Khan, Benjamin Kerstein, Elizabeth Moon, honor killing, Islam, Islamic Forum of Europe, Islamist, Jihad, Lutfur Rahman, Matt Stone, Open Source Jihad, Radical Islam, South Park, Trey Parker, Zachary Adam Chesser
Posted in Foreign Policy, Jihad | No Comments »
Thursday, October 21st, 2010
The Wiscon convention committee (concom) has caved in to extremist demands and canceled Elizabeth Moon’s Guest of Honor invitation.
Why?
She dared to voice politically incorrect thoughts about Islam. Naturally the very small but quite vocal FailFandom contingent dedicated to the far-left agenda of political correctness and identity politics demanded her head. Sadly, the cowards running WisCon decided to offer it up to appease the PC Police.
So America’s main feminist science fiction dis-invited a Guest of Honor they had already extended an invitation to (which you just don’t do) for the crime of speaking out against radical Islam, the greatest threat to woman’s freedom in the 21st century. And Elizabeth Moon isn’t Mark Steyn or Ann Coulter; my impression from talking to her is that she’s probably best described as a moderate Democrat. And I suspect anyone from outside the suffocating confines of FailFandom are likely to find very little in her original essay to justify this self-indulgent orgy of wailing and rending of garments the FailFandom brigade greeted it with.
Bad move, WisCon. And it’s one you will regret.
Hat tip: Patrice Sarath.
Edited to Add: Welcome Instapundit readers! I hope some of the other topics here on BattleSwarm will interest you as well. I do want to note that this is my political blog, and I cover non-political science fiction (and other) topics over on Futuramen.
Also, I have some signed Elizabeth Moon book for sale over here as well.
Tags:Elizabeth Moon, feminism, Islam, Jihad, Political Correctness, science fiction, WisCon
Posted in Democrats, Jihad | 45 Comments »
Saturday, September 18th, 2010
Molly Norris, the cartoonist who created Everybody Draw Mohammed Day as a joke, has now gone into hiding because American-born, Yemen-based imam Anwar al-Awlaki has put a fatwa on her head. As the WSJ asks: Where’s Obama standing up for her First Amendment rights?
In other news, award-winning science fiction writer Elizabeth Moon has enraged some of the usual suspects (including one deploying the classic “but-but-but Pope Alexander II” fallacy) by pointing out that modern Islam has some problems as part of a larger essay on citizenship, with which there is much to agree. (I do take exception to her passing comments about “Libertarians, survivalists, Tea-Partyers” being people whose “whose goals benefit only their own group;” as smaller government and lower budget deficits are indeed goals that would benefit United States citizens as a whole. And survivalists need only bring up Katrina, Ike, etc., to point out that people with sources of functional food, communication, transportation, etc., in an emergency greatly benefit the community as a whole as well.) I thought about posting this on my non-political blog, where I cover a lot of science fiction topics, but thought it fit in better over here.
As long as we’re on the topic of The Religion of Peace™, there are ten time as many antisemitic hate crimes in the U.S. as anti-Islamic hate crimes. (Figures are from 2008, the most recent for which the FBI has released figures.) As for Europe, some may find it appalling that every single “assault rape” committed in Oslo, Norway between 2007-2009, “the offender was a non-Western immigrant.”
At some point in the future, I hope to touch on the topic of why Islamists have become the most sacred group in the American Far-Left Pantheon of Victimization (perhaps one could ask Lynne F. Stewart, assuming you could contact her during visiting hours while serving her 10-year sentence for aiding and abetting terrorists), but this post is already long enough as is…
(BTW, I have some of Elizabeth’s books for sale over on at Lame Excuse Books for those of you who read science fiction.)
Tags:Draw Mohammed Day, Elizabeth Moon, Islam, Islamist, Jihad, Lynne Stewart, Molly Norris, rape
Posted in Jihad, Media Watch | 8 Comments »
Wednesday, August 4th, 2010
So I saw the link for this Michael Totten interview on Instapundit, and the name Benjamin Kerstein rang a bell. He was the one that penned this excellent essay on Zionism as a refutation of liberalism, which I cited in some of my Helen Thomas coverage.
This interview talks about, among other things, the “reality bubble” English speakers in Tel Aviv walk around, the Arab-Israeli conflict, options for dealing with Iran, and more. It’s quite fascinating. Read the whole thing, and remember than Totten depends on reader tips for his funding.
Tags:Benjamin Kerstein, Islam, Israel, Jihad, Michael Totten, Zionism
Posted in Foreign Policy, Jihad | No Comments »
Wednesday, May 19th, 2010
While looking around for comments on Everybody Draw Mohammed Day, I came across this post by one Kamran Haider. It offers quite a different Islamic take on the cartoon controversy than you usually read:
Every now and then someone throws a lit matchstick to the curtain covering our weaknesses and we start dancing around the fire to amuse the whole world….now when someone draws cartoons of the prophet, their idea is not to spread paganism but it is either to express resentment or plain hatred or apparently for the sake of free speech. Our way of reacting to this is normally, rioting, knocking down our own property and killing innocents.
Instead, I want to pose, some different questions to the muslim community. Lets just go back in history and ask ourselves, how did the prophet himself react when people in his time used all means to offend him (facebook didn’t exist back then but if you study history you will find out they used everything that they had at their expense)? What did he do when people threw garbage at him?
If the prophet was alive today and an old lady had thrown garbage at him, what would her fate be at the hands of angry mobs of ‘devout muslims’. Most probably they would storm her house and tear her into pieces. Wait a minute though…would the prophet let them do this? Since he chose to take care of her when she got sick instead of ‘getting offended’ then I am pretty sure he wouldn’t suggest rioting, burning down their own property in anger, killing innocents and mounting an irrational response.
I don’t agree with everything in the essay, but it’s certainly worth reading.
Tags:Draw Mohammed Day, Islam, Jihad
Posted in Jihad, Media Watch | No Comments »
Friday, May 14th, 2010
David Pryce-Jones
The Closed Circle: An Interpretation of the Arabs
Harper & Row, 1989.
I had heard this was one of the best overviews of Arab culture, and I’ve been reading it off and on between other things. It’s enlightening and depressing. Pryce-Jones asserts that all Arab nations are mired in a power-challenging/money-favoring culture based largely on a shame-honor response. By his account (and he calls on an extensive array of sources to back up his arguments), Arab (and, to a lesser extent, Turkish, Berber and Persian) cultures have always been ruled by strong men succeeding in establishing themselves by force and ruling through violence and money-favoring to eliminate or control possible rivals. The powerful rule (not only for themselves, but for their clan and allied clans) and the weak obey. It reminds me of that line from Black Hawk Down: “In Somalia, killing is negotiation.” In his view, Islamofascism, socialism, communism, Baathism, Pan-Arabism and modernization have all had whatever ideas they originally espoused suborned to become just another avenue for power-challengers to intrigue against the current power-holder, and likewise an excuse for the power-holder to ruthlessly suppress and eliminate possible rivals. He says that all outsiders (Western as well was Soviet) have misread the intentions of various power-holders by taking them at their word rather than viewing their statements as mere excuses or pretexts for their actions, to be discarded as easily as an old shirt should the situation call for it. He also says that mercy, human rights, democracy, etc., are all viewed as signs of decadent weakness by those within power-challenging cultures. In some ways, his is a very compelling argument; in others, it’s such a totalizing worldview that just about any action can be explained in power-challenging terms, and a system that explains everything explains nothing. Still, it’s a fascinating book (including very interesting chapters on how Nazi propaganda took root in the middle east, and the Arab-Israeli conflicts), and an important part of the puzzle as to why the Middle East seems to remain stubbornly immune to “rational” solutions.
Tags:Arab, book review, David Pryce-Jones, Islam, Jihad
Posted in Foreign Policy, Jihad | 1 Comment »
Sunday, April 25th, 2010
Here’s an event I can get behind: Everybody Draw Mohammed Day on May 20.
If you’re not up on Comedy Central’s cowardly censorship of the latest South Park episode, this Mark Steyn piece will get you up to speed, as well as being full of the usual Mark Steyn goodness.
Just in case you haven’t seen it, here’s Jon Stewart on The Daily Show on the controversy:
And, of course, this is obligatory:
Updated: The blackboard quote for tonight’s episode of The Simpsons was “South Park: We’d be standing beside you if we weren’t so scared.”
Tags:Draw Mohammed Day, Islam, Jihad, Mark Steyn, Mohammed, South Park, The Simpsons
Posted in Jihad | 4 Comments »
Thursday, November 12th, 2009
Stratfor suggests that Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan may have been heeding a call to jihad by Nasir al-Wahayshi, leader of al Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula. (They also note how difficult it is for the FBI to investigate individuals such as Hasan.) Since mine is a relatively young blog, some readers may be unfamiliar with the tenants of Wahhabism, and the Saudi role in spreading its radical ideology. For more background on that, you might want to read Stephen Schwartz’s The Two Faces of Islam. And don’t forget the Saudi role in bankrolling CAIR, the primary Islamist apologist front group in the US.
Bottom line: The Saudis are still not our friends.
Tags:CAIR, Ft. Hood, Islam, Islamist, Jihad, Nidal Hasan, Wahhabism
Posted in Foreign Policy, Jihad, Texas | No Comments »
Thursday, November 5th, 2009
No one should make light of the horrible tragedy at Ft. Hood today. However, it’s very discouraging to read how the MSM refuses to cover the story’s stubborn, politically incorrect facts:
In this CNN report, there’s still no mention of the fact the shooter is a Muslim some ten hours after the shooting, and eight after Major Malik Nadal Hasan’s identity was first reported. (Of course, CNN has a history of refusing to report “inconvenient” facts.)
Likewise, the LA Times refuses to cover those same details.
Here’s the rub: This is a huge national story with tons of coverage…and it’s obvious that the MSM is lying to us by omission. The chances are extremely strong that they’re lying to us just as much in thousands of stories every year that garner less attention. And they wonder why their circulations/ratings are in freefall and no one trusts them anymore…
Patterico has more on the subject.
(Hat tip: Instapundit)
Tags:Ft. Hood, Islam, Jihad, MSM, Nidal Hasan, shooting
Posted in Guns, Media Watch | No Comments »
