SAS flight passengers might soon only have a menu made entirely from Halal food to choose from on all flights in the near future.
Gate Gourmet, the food unit of Gategroup which supplies food for the pan-Scandinavian airline, told the Financial Times they have plans to switch all production to halal methods of food preparation.
Halal foods include certain meats, but no pork, and the animal is slaughtered in a specific method.
Guy Dubois, the CEO of Swiss-based Gategroup, told the newspaper that it is considering the move to save costs, as all of the production is streamlined, and the menu is agreeable to all passengers.
Fouad Ajami, a Shiite Muslim and a professor at Johns Hopkins, in the Wall Street Journal, quotes a survey by Elaph, the London Arabic electronic daily news publication, which found that 58% of respondents to its poll opposed the construction of the Ground Zero Mosque and cites a better Islamic precedent.
There is a great Arab and Islamic tale. It happened in the early years of Islam, but it speaks to this controversy. It took place in A.D. 638, the time of Islam’s triumphs.
The second successor to the Prophet, the Caliph Omar—to orthodox Muslims the most revered of the four Guided Caliphs for the great conquests that took place during his reign—had come to Jerusalem to accept the city’s surrender. Patriarch Sophronius, the city’s chief magistrate, is by his side for the ceremony of surrender. Prayer time comes for Omar while the patriarch is showing him the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
The conqueror asks where he could spread out his prayer rug. Sophronius tells him that he could stay where he was. Omar refuses, because his followers, he said, might then claim for Islam the holy shrine of the Christians. Omar stepped outside for his prayer.
We don’t always assert all the “rights” that we can get away with. The faith is honored when the faith bends to necessity and discretion.
Mark Steyn rants over the elite’s response to Koran-burning-that-never-took-place as well as to the plight of the latest victim of cartoon jihad, Molly Norris.
He didn’t burn any buildings or women and children. He didn’t even burn a book. He hadn’t actually laid a finger on a Koran, and yet the mere suggestion that he might do so prompted the President of the United States to denounce him, and the Secretary of State, and the commander of US forces in Afghanistan, various G7 leaders, and golly, even Angelina Jolie. President Obama has never said a word about honor killings of Muslim women. Secretary Clinton has never said a word about female genital mutilation. General Petraeus has never said a word about the rampant buggery of pre-pubescent boys by Pushtun men in Kandahar. But let an obscure man in Florida so much as raise the possibility that he might disrespect a book – an inanimate object – and the most powerful figures in the western world feel they have to weigh in.
Aside from all that, this obscure church’s website has been shut down, its insurance policy has been canceled, its mortgage has been called in by its bankers. Why? As Diana West wrote, why was it necessary or even seemly to make this pastor a non-person? Another one of Obama’s famous “teaching moments”? In this case teaching us that Islamic law now applies to all? Only a couple of weeks ago, the President, at his most condescendingly ineffectual, presumed to lecture his moronic subjects about the First Amendment rights of Imam Rauf. Where’s the condescending lecture on Pastor Jones’ First Amendment rights?
When someone destroys a bible, US government officials don’t line up to attack him. President Obama bowed lower than a fawning maitre d’ before the King of Saudi Arabia, a man whose regime destroys bibles as a matter of state policy, and a man whose depraved religious police forces schoolgirls fleeing from a burning building back into the flames to die because they’d committed the sin of trying to escape without wearing their head scarves. If you show a representation of Mohammed, European commissioners and foreign ministers line up to denounce you. If you show a representation of Jesus Christ immersed in your own urine, you get a government grant for producing a widely admired work of art. Likewise, if you write a play about Jesus having gay sex with Judas Iscariot.
So just to clarify the ground rules, if you insult Christ, the media report the issue as freedom of expression: A healthy society has to have bold, brave, transgressive artists willing to question and challenge our assumptions, etc. But, if it’s Mohammed, the issue is no longer freedom of expression but the need for “respect” and “sensitivity” toward Islam, and all those bold brave transgressive artists don’t have a thing to say about it. ...
It is a basic rule of life that if you reward bad behavior, you get more of it. Every time Muslims either commit violence or threatens it, we reward them by capitulating. Indeed, President Obama, Justice Breyer, General Petraeus, and all the rest are now telling Islam, you don’t have to kill anyone, you don’t even have to threaten to kill anyone. We’ll be your enforcers. We’ll demand that the most footling and insignificant of our own citizens submit to the universal jurisdiction of Islam. So Obama and Breyer are now the “good cop” to the crazies’ “bad cop”. Ooh, no, you can’t say anything about Islam, because my friend here gets a little excitable, and you really don’t want to get him worked up. The same people who tell us “Islam is a religion of peace” then turn around and tell us you have to be quiet, you have to shut up because otherwise these guys will go bananas and kill a bunch of people. ...
Look at how liberal progressives protect their own. Do you remember a lady called Molly Norris? She’s the dopey Seattle cartoonist who cooked up “Everybody Draws Mohammed” Day, and then, when she realized what she’d stumbled into, tried to back out of it. I regard Miss Norris as (to rewrite Stalin) a useless idiot, and she wrote to Mark’s Mailbox to object. I stand by what I wrote then, especially the bit about her crappy peace-sign T-shirt. Now The Seattle Weekly informs us:
You may have noticed that Molly Norris’ comic is not in the paper this week. That’s because there is no more Molly.
On the advice of the FBI, she’s been forced to go into hiding. If you want to measure the decline in western civilization’s sense of self-preservation, go back to Valentine’s Day 1989, get out the Fleet Street reports on the Salman Rushdie fatwa, and read the outrage of his fellow London literati at what was being done to one of the mainstays of the Hampstead dinner-party circuit. Then compare it with the feeble passivity of Molly Norris’ own colleagues at an American cartoonist being forced to abandon her life: “There is no more Molly”? That’s all the gutless pussies of The Seattle Weekly can say? As James Taranto notes in The Wall Street Journal, even much sought-after Ramadan-banquet constitutional scholar Barack Obama is remarkably silent:
Now Molly Norris, an American citizen, is forced into hiding because she exercised her right to free speech. Will President Obama say a word on her behalf? Does he believe in the First Amendment for anyone other than Muslims?
Jonah Goldberg examines the liberal notion that you are to blame for people’s deaths if you do something Muslims do not like, like burn a Koran or draw a cartoon image of Mohammed, and Muslims riot and kill someone or get killed.
When Pope Benedict delivered his Regensburg address in 2006, he suggested that Islam had a link to violence. In response, many Muslims rioted. It’d be funny if it weren’t so sad.
When Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer was asked in an interview about Koran-burning, he brought up former Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’ famous comment that the First Amendment “doesn’t mean you can shout ‘fire’ in a crowded theater . . . Why? Because people will be trampled to death. And what is the crowded theater today? What is the being trampled to death?”
There are a number of grave problems with the crowded-theater cliche. First, you can—even must—yell “fire” in a crowded theater: It just has to be the truth.
But more to the point, fires are not human beings. Fire has no choice but to burn because that is what fire does. Humans have choices. Yet in this formulation (from which Breyer has somewhat retreated), Muslims are akin to soulless, unthinking flames. Taken seriously, this comparison suggests rational people have every reason to fear Muslims in much the same way they fear fire.
There are complex issues here. But the simple truth is the Islamist extremists who behead and riot do have a choice. They want to murder. What they want is an excuse, and they’ll find one no matter what.
The Center for Security Policy on Wednesday released its Team B competitive analysis the Islamic Sharia ideology and its adherents which “challenges the assumptions underpinning the official line in the conflict with today’s totalitarian threat, which is currently euphemistically described as ‘violent extremism,’ and the policies of co-existence, accommodation and submission that are rooted in those assumptions” and makes a number of recommendations.
U.S. policy-makers, financiers, businessmen, judges, journalists, community leaders and the public at large must be equipped with an accurate understanding of the nature of shariah and the necessity of keeping America shariah-free. At a minimum, this will entail resisting – rather than acquiescing to – the concerted efforts now being made to allow that alien legal code to become established in this country as an alternate, parallel system to the Constitution and the laws enacted pursuant to it. Arguably, this is already in effect for those who have taken an oath to “support and defend” the Constitution, because the requirement is subsumed in that oath.
U.S. government agencies and organizations should cease their outreach to Muslim communities through Muslim Brotherhood fronts whose mission is to destroy our country from within, as such practices are both reckless and counterproductive. Indeed, these activities serve to legitimate, protect and expand the influence of our enemies. They conduce to no successful legal outcome that cannot be better advanced via aggressive prosecution of terrorists, terrorfunders and other lawbreakers. It also discourages patriotic Muslims from providing actual assistance to the U.S. government lest they be marked for ostracism or worse by the Brothers and other shariah-adherent members of their communities.
In keeping with Article VI of the Constitution, extend bans currently in effect that bar members of hate groups such as the Ku Klux Klan from holding positions of trust in federal, state, or local governments or the armed forces of the United States to those who espouse or support shariah. Instead, every effort should be made to identify and empower Muslims who are willing publicly to denounce shariah.
Practices that promote shariah – notably, shariah-compliant finance and the establishment or promotion in public spaces or with public funds of facilities and activities that give preferential treatment to shariah’s adherents – are incompatible with the Constitution and the freedoms it enshrines and must be proscribed.
Sedition is prohibited by law in the United States. To the extent that imams and mosques are being used to advocate shariah in America, they are promoting seditious activity and should be warned that they will be subject to investigation and prosecution.
Textbooks used in both secular educational systems and Islamic schools must not promote shariah, its tenets, or the notion that America must submit to its dictates. Schools that promote anti-constitutional teaching should be denied taxpayer funding and lose charitable tax status.
Compounds and communities that seek to segregate themselves on the basis of shariah law, apply it alongside or in lieu of the law of the land or otherwise establish themselves as “no-go” zones for law enforcement and other authorities must be thwarted in such efforts. In this connection, assertion of claims to territory around mosques should be proscribed.
Immigration of those who adhere to shariah must be precluded, as was previously done with adherents to the seditious ideology of communism.
Norris’s comment struck a chord with bloggers and was widely reported, but all the attention she attracted made the cartoonist uneasy. Only a few days later, April 26, Norris was backing off and trying to distance herself from the whole affair.
Crawfishing, of course, did her no good at all, and in June,
Anwar al-Awlaki, our own home-grown jihadi cleric, now broadcasting agitprop and threats on the Internet out of Yemen, placed Molly Norris on a hit list including 8 others guilty of blasphemous caricatures of the prophet as a “prime target” whose “proper abode is hellfire.”
Now Seattle Weekly reports that Norris has gone into hiding.
[Molly Norris], on the insistence of top security specialists at the FBI,.. is, as they put it, “going ghost”: moving, changing her name, and essentially wiping away her identity. She will no longer be publishing cartoons in our paper or in City Arts magazine, where she has been a regular contributor. She is, in effect, being put into a witness-protection program—except, as she notes, without the government picking up the tab. It’s all because of the appalling fatwa issued against her this summer, following her infamous “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day” cartoon.
Personally, I think she should just move to red state America where everybody has guns.
“Qur’an… an accursed book… So long as there is this book there will be no peace in the world.”
—William Gladstone (1809-1898) British Prime Minister
“Ever since the religion of Islam appeared in the world, the espousers of it…have been as wolves and tigers to all other nations, rending and tearing all that fell into their merciless paws, and grinding them with their iron teeth; that numberless cities are raised from the foundation, and only their name remaining; that many countries, which were once as the garden of God, are now a desolate wilderness; and that so many once numerous and powerful nations are vanished from the earth! Such was, and is at this day, the rage, the fury, the revenge, of these destroyers of human kind.”
—John Wesley (1703-1791) Methodist leader
“Adopting from the new Revelation of Jesus, the faith and hope of immortal life, and of future retribution, he [Mohammed] humbled it to the dust by adapting all the rewards and sanctions of his religion to the gratification of the sexual passion. He poisoned the sources of human felicity at the fountain, by degrading the condition of the female sex, and the allowance of polygamy; and he declared undistinguishing and exterminating war, as a part of his religion, against all the rest of mankind. THE ESSENCE OF HIS DOCTRINE WAS VIOLENCE AND LUST. TO EXALT THE BRUTAL OVER THE SPIRITUAL PART OF HUMAN NATURE. Between these two religions, thus contrasted in their characters, a war of twelve hundred years has already raged. The war is yet flagrant … While the merciless and dissolute dogmas of the false prophet shall furnish motives to human action, there can never be peace upon earth, and good will towards men.” [The words in caps are as originally printed].
[On the Koran:] The precept of the koran is, perpetual war against all who deny, that Mahomet is the prophet of God. The vanquished may purchase their lives, by the payment of tribute; the victorious may be appeased by a false and delusive promise of peace; and the faithful follower of the prophet, may submit to the imperious necessities of defeat: but the command to propagate the Moslem creed by the sword is always obligatory, when it can be made effective. The commands of the prophet may be performed alike, by fraud, or by force.
— John Quincy Adams (1767-1848) Sixth President of the United States
“[Islam] is essentially an obstructive, intolerant system… It has consecrated despotism; it has consecrated polygamy; it has consecrated slavery. It has declared war against every other creed; it has claimed to be at least dominant in every land… When it ceases to have an enemy to contend against, it sinks into sluggish stupidity and into a barbarism far viler… It must have an enemy; if cut off…from conflict with the infidel, it finds its substitute in sectarian hatred of brother Moslems…”
—Edward Augustus Freeman (1823-1892) British historian
“Christianity was saved in Europe solely because the peoples of Europe fought. If the peoples of Europe in the seventh and eighth centuries, and on up to, and including, the seventeenth century, had not possessed a military equality with, and gradually a growing superiority over, the Mohammedans who invaded Europe, Europe would at this moment be Mohammedan and the Christian religion would be exterminated.
Wherever the Mohammedans have had complete sway, wherever the Christians have been unable to resist them by the sword, Christianity has ultimately disappeared. From the hammer of Charles Martel to the sword of Sobieski, Christianity owed its safety in Europe to the fact that it was able to show that it could, and would, fight as well as the Mohammedan aggressor.”
The civilization of Europe, America, and Australia, exists today at all, only because of the victories of civilized man over the enemies of civilization—because of victories through the centuries from Charles Martel, in the eighth century, and those of John Sobieski, in the seventeenth century. …There are such “social values” today in Europe, America and Australia only because during those thousand years, the Christians of Europe possessed the warlike power to do what the Christians of Asia and Africa had failed to do—that is, to beat back the Moslem invader.”
—Teddy Roosevelt (1858 – 1919) Twenty-sixth President of the United States
“Will not perhaps the temporal power of Islam return and with it the menace of an armed Mohammedan world, which will shake off the domination of Europeans — still nominally Christian — and reappear as the prime enemy of our civilization? The future always comes as a surprise, but political wisdom consists in attempting at least some partial judgment of what that surprise may be. And for my part I cannot but believe that a main unexpected thing of the future is the return of Islam.”
—Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953) Author/Historian
“How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia [rabies] in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. …The fact that in Mohammedan law [sharia] every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property, either as a child, a wife, or a concubine, must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men. Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities—but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world.”
—Winston Churchill (1874-1965) British Prime Minister
——————————————————————-
Muslim voices:
“Islam makes it incumbent on all adult males, provided they are not disabled and incapacitated, to prepare themselves for the conquest of [other] countries so that the writ of Islam is obeyed in every country in the world. But those who study Islamic Holy War will understand why Islam wants to conquer the whole world…. Those who know nothing of Islam pretend that Islam counsels against war. Those [who say this] are witless. Islam says, kill all the unbelievers just as they would kill you all! …Whatever good there is, exists thanks to the sword, and in the shadow of the sword! People cannot be made obedient, except with the sword! The sword is the key to Paradise, which can be opened only for Holy Warriors! …Does all that mean that Islam is a religion that prevents men from waging war? I spit upon those foolish souls who make such a claim.”
—Ayatollah Khomeini (1902-1989) Iran’s Supreme Leader from 1979 to 1989—the highest ranking political and religious authority of the nation.
“Arise. O sons of Arabia, fight for your sacred rights. Kill the Jews wherever you find them. Their spilled blood pleases Allah, our history, and religion.”
—From a radio broadcast by Amin el-husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. After instigating a pro-nazi putsch in Baghdad in 1941, he left for Germany, where he spent the remainder of WWII broadcasting propaganda to the Middle East.
“We should fully understand our religion. Fighting is a part of our religion and our Sharia [Islamic legal code]. Those who love God and his Prophet and this religion cannot deny that. Whoever denies even a minor tenet of our religion commits the gravest sin in Islam.”
—Osama bin Laden
“Islam isn’t in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant. The Qu’ran should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on earth.”
—Omar Ahmed CAIR (Council for American Islamic Relations) Founding Chairman
‘He’s going to burn a Koran? Quick, let’s go join a terrorist organization that mass-murders people.’
According to Obama, Jones’s “stunt” (a fair description) is already “a recruitment bonanza for al-Qaeda.” That’s absurd. No sensible person joins a terrorist organization dedicated to mass murder simply because somebody torches a Koran.
If the president, who is principally responsible for American national security, actually believes what he says, what is his excuse for not confronting Islamist regimes? These are not Looney Tunes pastors with followings smaller than the First Lady’s traveling caravan; they are governments that confiscate and destroy Bibles, crucifixes, Stars of David, and other articles of profound religious substance and symbolism to non-Muslims. That goes on, systematically, every single day — although still not as often as you’d imagine, because Islamic societies are so innately intolerant that there aren’t a lot of non-Muslim religious items to be found in, say, Saudi Arabia.
Jones is going to burn a Koran; sharia calls for killing human beings who renounce Islam. Does the president have an explanation for why Christians and Jews are not forming terror cells with the bonanza of recruits that must come forward on a daily basis given the “stunts” that, in Saudi Arabia, are known as law enforcement? ...
I wish Americans would trip over themselves with a fraction of the zeal on display here to condemn the torching of the American flag — a symbol of freedom and sacrifice. But that’s beside the point. Burning a book sacred to Muslims is a stupid, provocative thing to do. Yet it is conscious avoidance — okay, willful blindness — to claim that Jones is causing the threat to our troops, in addition to the threat of other attacks and riots by Muslims (of the sort we’ve seen with the Danish cartoons, the false claims of Koran-flushing at Gitmo, the school teacher who named a teddy bear Mohammed, etc.).
Those are all pretexts. The cause is Islamist ideology, which is dehumanizing of non-Muslims (or, in the case of the Ahmadi, even of Muslims who reject parts of mainstream Islamic doctrine). It is the ideology that puts the world’s Muslims on a hair trigger. ...
Wouldn’t it be nice if, while they publicly chide an American citizen for striking the match, our public officials took the occasion to chide the ideology that turns cultures into dynamite?
—————————————————-
Michelle Malkin observes that it isn’t easy to avoid offending a religion with the kind of anger management problem Islam has.
Shhhhhhh, we’re told. Don’t protest the Ground Zero mosque. Don’t burn a Koran. It’ll imperil the troops. It’ll inflame tensions. The “Muslim world” will “explode” if it does not get its way, warns sharia-peddling imam Feisal Abdul Rauf. Pardon my national security-threatening impudence, but when is the “Muslim world” not ready to “explode”?
At the risk of provoking the ever-volatile Religion of Perpetual Outrage, let us count the little-noticed and forgotten ways.
Just a few months ago in Kashmir, faithful Muslims rioted over what they thought was a mosque depicted on underwear sold by street vendors. ...
(numerous examples)
The eternal flame of Muslim outrage was lit a long, long time ago.
Alphonse de Neuville, Count Roland Behaving Insensitively at Roncesvalles, 1894
Or guart chascuns que granz colps,
Que malvaise cançun de nus chantet ne seit!
Paien unt tort e chrestiens unt dreit.
Now must we each lay on most hardily,
So songs of shame shall ne’er be sung of us.
Pagans are wrong and Christians are right.
Chanson de Roland, 1013-1015
————————————————————— Sarah Palin says that burning a copy of the Koran on the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks is “insensitive and an unnecessary provocation” and reminds us of the Golden Rule.
I don’t think Golden Rule applies to foreign enemies in time of war, and I’d say that Sarah Palin is clearly getting too close to Washington and sounds more and more like a conventional politician.
The FBI is warning that a backlash and retaliation is likely.
Pastor Jones may be a crank, and burning the Koran is neither genteel nor the most attractive choice of gestures, but here we are.
We are in a situation in which the obscure minister of an insignificant local congregation proposes an action insulting to Islam, and consequently find ourselves threatened and warned of bloodshed and massive violence if we don’t stop him.
Meanwhile, the leadership class of the country is responding by urging him to cease and desist, openly acknowledging fear of Islamic violence. Mere squeamishness and discomfort with being placed in the position of defending a gesture which is just not nice is additionally at work in rendering the American leadership class hors de combat.
Most of the same people ran, rather than walked, to defend Imam Abdul Rauf’s project constructing and Islamic Cultural Center, originally named for one of Islam’s most prized European conquests, within the zone of impact of the 9/11 attacks.
Personally, I’m completely fed up with the intelligentsia’s culture of utilitarian calculation and its cowardly inclination to shrink from direct opposition and open conflict with a hostile and insolent alien superstition. At this point, Pastor Jones burning that Koran is just like knocking off the chip that the town bully has placed on his shoulder.
Knock it off and then clean his clock for him, or prepare to bow and scrape and cringe in perpetuity is the real choice. We already have the New York Times, the Boston Globe, and Yale University Press practicing self censorship in response to Saracen sensibilities with respect to the Danish cartoons featuring Mohammed. We have Harvard University introducing sexual segregation in its gymnasium to accommodate Islam.
Where does accommodating and appeasing of Islam stop? With dhimmitude (subjection of non-Muslims to Islam) and with payment of the Jizyah, the Islamic tax on non-Muslims.
[T]he Jizyah shall be taken from them with belittlement and humiliation. The dhimmi shall come in person, walking not riding. When he pays, he shall stand, while the tax collector sits. The collector shall seize him by the scruff of the neck, shake him, and say “Pay the Jizyah!” and when he pays it he shall be slapped on the nape of the neck.
Andrew McCarthy expresses the view, which I share, that the American people have gotten tired of hearing about how much deference we need to pay to the sensibilities of Muslims.
A tectonic shift is in motion: How fitting that its focal point is Ground Zero, the inevitable fault line between Islam and the West.
Only the blink of an eye ago, uttering the unpleasant truth that in terms of doctrine there is no such thing as “moderate Islam” resulted in one’s banishment from what our opinion elites like to call the “mainstream,” by which they mean the narrow-minded, viciously defended circle of their own pieties and fictions. You could say it, but your skin had better have an extra coat or two of thick: You were in for a fusillade of rage, the likes of which our candor-phobic elites would never dream of unleashing at our Islamist enemies — no matter how clearly those enemies announced their intention to destroy us.
The fusillade still comes, but now its blows only glance. The elites and their mainstream have been exposed as frauds: Being on the wrong side of enough 70-30 issues will do that to you.
In the wake of the battle over a mosque at Ground Zero, a move by the Hartford City Council is sure to have its critics.
The Council announced Tuesday that it has invited local imams to perform Islamic invocations at the beginning of the Council meetings in September.
An e-mail from the Common Council called it “an act of solidarity with our Muslim brothers and sisters.”
The email even referenced the ongoing issue in New York. “One of the goals of the Council is to give a voice to the many diverse peoples of the City, which is especially important given the recent anti-Islam events throughout the country.”
One wonders when the city fathers of Hartford, Connecticut last felt any inclination to express their solidarity with Americans serving in combat in the Middle East, or even with non-haute bourgeois Americans residing outside coastal cities and suburbs.
Their touching concern for supposititious “Muslim brothers and sisters” (How does the Philippine Insurrection song go? “He may be the brother of Big Bill Taft, but he ain’t no brother of mine.”) has nothing to do with anything real. There is no fraternal (or sororal) connection between the greasy pols of Hartford and Imam Abdul Rauf in Manhattan or to some imaginary peaceful body of tolerant Muslims friendly and well-disposed toward non-believers in Hartford at all. The real relationship is between democrat party politicos and the form of ethical narcissism which expresses itself in gestures of political correctness.
Members of the community of fashion love to strike poses of moral superiority, and no experiences of that kind are quite so gratifying as those which simultaneously embrace the exotic other and at the same time elevate one above the unworthiness of one’s own defective culture, civilization, and fellow citizens.
General Petraeus, CNN reports, is warning that some Bible-thumping Florida church’s intention to burn the Koran next Saturday might endanger US troops.
The U.S. commander in Afghanistan on Monday criticized a Florida church’s plan to burn copies of the Quran on September 11, warning the demonstration “could cause significant problems” for American troops overseas.
“It could endanger troops and it could endanger the overall effort in Afghanistan,” Gen. David Petraeus said in a statement issued Monday.
The Dove World Outreach Center in Gainesville, Florida, plans to mark the anniversary of al Qaeda’s September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington by burning copies of the Muslim holy book. The church insists the event is “neither an act of love nor of hate,” but a warning against what it calls the threats posed by Islam.
The event has drawn criticism from Muslims in the United States and overseas, with thousands of Indonesians gathering outside the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta, Indonesia, on Sunday to protest the planned Quran burning.
“The burning is not only an insult to the holy Quran, but an insult to Islam and Muslims around the world,” said Muhammad Ismail, a spokesman for the hard-line Indonesian Muslim group Hizb ut-Tahrir.
With about 120,000 U.S. and NATO-led troops still battling al Qaeda and its allies in the Islamic fundamentalist Taliban movement, Petraeus warned that burning Qurans “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.”
Can one begin to imagine General McArthur warning Americans against burning the Rising Sun flag during WWII, or General Patton advising a news organization that a symbolic burning of Mein Kampf might inflame Waffen SS units?
If you’re scared of the camel-fornicating sons of the Prophet, you shouldn’t be in the US military in time of war.
Frankly, I think instead of these endless exercises in cultural sensitivity and attempts to placate the religious bigotry of the Saracens, we ought to issue US troops bathroom tissue imprinted with the Koran and burn the Koran daily as part of routine latrine maintenance.
We’re at war with militant Islam. Islamic intolerance and insolent demands for deference to their superstition are the hallmarks of the ideology which produced the September 11th attacks on the United States. The Koran and the Prophet Mohammed are Islamicist symbols in very much the same way the meatball flag, the swastika, and pictures of Adolph Hitler were intrinsic to the ideology of our enemies in WWII.
Trying to fight a war, while supporting your enemies’ proposal to build a combined recruiting center and victory monument in the vicinity of their surprise attack, and while insisting on reverential treatment of their symbols, is nothing short of ridiculous.
All this shows that liberalism is so thoroughly decadent, so utterly bound up in namby pamby inhibitions against conflict and animosity, that liberals are basically incapable of making war. The liberal consciousness requires military action inevitably to be accompanied by simultaneous appeasement, and prohibits a genuine commitment to defeating the enemy out of self-defeating fears of antagonizing anyone. All liberal wars are Korea and Vietnam. They all have to end either in concession and withdrawal or in stalemate. For liberals, appeasement is always a substitute for victory.
I didn’t originally think much of that silly Florida church’s Koran-burning demonstration, but I’ve changed my mind. I plan to look for my own copy and take it out and light it up on Saturday, too, just to affirm a general policy of Americans declining to placate hirsute barbarians afflicted with superstitious extremism. If that makes the Taliban angry, that is just too bad.
Mosques in Italy will not receive a share of income tax revenue the Italian government allocates to religious faiths each year. Hindu and Buddhist temples, Greek Orthodox churches and Jehovah’s Witnesses will be eligible for the funds, according to a bill approved by the Italian cabinet in May and still must be approved by parliament.
Until now, the government had earmarked 8 percent of income tax revenue for Italy’s established churches. The great majority of these funds go to the Catholic Church, although if they wish, individual tax payers may elect to give the money to charities and cultural projects instead.
The head of COREIS, one of Italy’s largest Muslim groups, Yahya Pallavicini, said he was bitter that Islam had been denied the revenue from Italian income tax.
“Work should be begun on legally recognising those moderate Muslims who have for years shown themselves to be reliable interlocutors who are free of and fundamentalist ideology,” he said.
Islam is not an established religion in Italy and there is only one official mosque in the country, Rome’s Grand Mosque (photo). Politicians from the ruling coalition cite radical imams, polygamy and failure to uphold women’s rights by Muslims immigrants as obstacles to recognising Islam as an official religion in Italy.
Obviously, we are not Italy, and the US framers ruled out any federally established churches in 1787, but the Italian government’s decision is interesting because it demonstrates that some countries within Christendom do recognize that the differences between the culture of Islam and our own are gravely important and Islamic intransigence and pretensions to supremacy inevitably lead to conflict.
Islam is not just another, alternative mode of religious expression like Zen Buddhism or the Jehovah’s Witnesses, or the Church of Latter Day Saints. Muslims cannot be assumed to be willing to attend their own services, raise their children in their faith, hold the occasional fund-raising bazaar or annual parade and be content.
Muslims typically attempt to prevent, even to punish, criticism or mockery of Islam. Muslims refuse to recognize the equality of other religious faiths or of unfaith. Muslims commonly decline to assimilate. And Muslims reject fundamentally the principle of separation of church and state.
As long as Islam aspires to replace our culture and politics with its own; as long as Islam refuses to criticize itself, reform, or accommodate itself to modern pluralist societies; as long as Islam is both a religion and a political adversary of the West; Islam is not entitled to claim the immunities and privileges associated with being just another religion.
