Sir Charles Napier

Even liberal Time Magazine sounds indignant:

When a Christian believer in a nation wholly dependent on U.S. support faces trial and possibly execution simply for embracing the same faith as the President of the United States, you’d think that country would be read the riot act. Instead, Washington’s response to the trial in Afghanistan of Abdul Rahman has been rather muted. Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Nicholas Burns has emphasized the U.S. commitment to freedom of worship, and urged the Afghan authorities to follow what he said was their own constitution’s commitment to the same principle. But, he added, the U.S. was not going to pressure the Afghan authorities on the matter. “This is a case that is not under the competence of the United States,” he said. “It is under the competence of the Afghan authorities. We hope that the Afghan constitution is going to be upheld, and in our view, if it is upheld, he will be found to be innocent.”

Mr. Bush said he was “deeply troubled.”

I’m troubled when I hear — deeply troubled when I hear that a person who has converted away from Islam may be held to account. That’s not the universal application of the values that I talked about.

So much for that Woodrow Wilson democracy stuff. If the primitive ragheads we liberated want to relapse into medieval barbarism, we need to revise our theories of political development.

Maybe the heathen Afghans, like the once primitive and blue-painted inhabitants of the British Isles, require a few centuries of closer intercourse with civilization under adult supervision, before they are, in fact, ready to assume their rightful place in the community of nations as a self-governing, independent, and democratic state. Democracy, pace Woodrow Wilson, contemporary expectations, and George W. Bush, is a system characteristic of intellectually advanced and comparatively enlightened states. Give some primitive savage the vote, and what he wants to vote for is liable to be precisely the kind of thing that ought to be illegal in the first place.

The United States ought to contact the government of Afghanistan, and quote what Sir Charles Napier, British commander-in-chief in India, told the Hindus regarding the practice of suttee (the burning of widows on their husband’s funeral pyres).

You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours.

Daily Illini student Editor-in-Chief Acton Gorton was fired yesterday by the Illini Media Company board of directors, after “a thorough review, a report by a student task force of senior members of the staff, and a hearing” found that Gorton violated Daily Illini policies about “thoughtful discussion of and preparation for the publication of inflammatory material.” Gorton published the Danish Jyllands-Posten cartoons on February 9th.

The board, made up of University of Illinois students and faculty, voted unanimously to fire Gorton. Opinions Editor Chuck Prochaska, who was also suspended on February 14th, was reinstated, but decline to return to the paper.

Earlier posting.

It’s not going to be necessary for the sons of the Prophet to attack Evansville. The local authorities have already accepted their status as dhimmis (subjugated members of an inferior culture and faith) and are prepared to enforce Sharia (Islamic law) voluntarily.

————————

Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds.

David Warren contemplates the underlying assumptions behind George W. Bush’s Wilsonian crusade to establish democracy in the Midde East, and confronts the unthinkable prospect that they could be mistaken.

The Americans went into Afghanistan and Iraq with my blessings, as my reader may recall…

.. In (the) view — which I hold to be Mr Bush’s — we are dealing with what amounts to a planetary civil war, between those who accept the state-system descended from the Treaty of Westphalia (1648), and an emergent Islamist ideology that certainly does not. To Mr Bush’s mind, only legitimately-elected governments, presiding over properly-administered secular bureaucracies, can be trusted to deal locally with the kind of mischief an Osama bin Laden can perform, with his hands on contemporary weapons of mass destruction.

But Mr Bush was staking his bet on the assumption that the Islamists were not speaking for Islam; that the world’s Muslims long for modernity; that they are themselves repelled by the violence of the terrorists; that, most significantly, Islam is in its nature a religion that can be “internalized”, like the world’s other great religions, and that the traditional Islamic aspiration to conjoin worldly political with otherworldly spiritual authority had somehow gone away. It didn’t help that Mr Bush took for his advisers on the nature of Islam, the paid operatives of Washington’s Council on American-Islamic Relations, the happyface pseudo-scholar Karen Armstrong, or the profoundly learned but terminally vain Bernard Lewis. Each, in a different way, assured him that Islam and modernity were potentially compatible.

The question, “But what if they are not?” was never seriously raised, because it could not be raised behind the mud curtain of political correctness that has descended over the Western academy and intelligentsia. The idea that others see the world in a way that is not only incompatible with, but utterly opposed to, the way we see it, is the thorn ever-present in the rose bushes of multiculturalism. “Ideas have consequences”, and the idea that Islam imagines itself in a fundamental, physical conflict with everything outside of itself, is an idea with which people in the contemporary West are morally and intellectually incapable of coming to terms. Hence our continuing surprise at everything from bar-bombings in Bali, to riots in France, to the Danish cartoon apoplexy.

My own views on the issue have been aloof. More precisely, they have been infected with cowardice. I am so “post-modern” myself that I, too, find it almost impossible to think through the corollaries from our world’s hardest fact. And that fact is: the post-Christian West is out of its depth with Islam.

“We Refuse to Renounce our Critical Intelligence”

After having overcome fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism, the world now faces a new totalitarian global threat: Islamism. We, writers, journalists, intellectuals, call for resistance to religious totalitarianism and for the promotion of freedom, equal opportunity and secular values for all. The recent events, which occurred after the publication of drawings of Muhammed in European newspapers, have revealed the necessity of the struggle for these universal values. This struggle will not be won by arms, but in the ideological field. It is not a clash of civilisations nor an antagonism of West and East that we are witnessing, but a global struggle that confronts democrats and theocrats. Like all totalitarianisms, Islamism is nurtured by fears and frustrations. The hate preachers bet on these feelings in order to form battalions destined to impose a liberticidal and unegalitarian world. But we clearly and firmly state: nothing, not even despair, justifies the choice of obscurantism, totalitarianism and hatred. Islamism is a reactionary ideology which kills equality, freedom and secularism wherever it is present. Its success can only lead to a world of domination: man’s domination of woman, the Islamists’ domination of all the others. To counter this, we must assure universal rights to oppressed or discriminated people. We reject cultural relativism, which consists in accepting that men and women of Muslim culture should be deprived of the right to equality, freedom and secular values in the name of respect for cultures and traditions. We refuse to renounce our critical intelligence out of fear of being accused of “Islamophobia”, an unfortunate concept which confuses criticism of Islam as a religion with stigmatisation of its believers. We plead for the universality of freedom of expression, so that a critical intellect may be exercised on all continents, against all abuses and all dogmas. We appeal to democrats and free spirits of all countries that our century should be one of Enlightenment, not of obscurantism.

12 signatures

Ayaan Hirsi Ali РChahla Chafiq РCaroline Fourest РBernard-Henri L̩vy РIrshad Manji РMehdi Mozaffari РMaryam Namazie РTaslima Nasreen -Salman Rushdie РAntoine Sfeir РPhilippe Val РIbn Warraq

The 12 signatories (from left to right): Ayaan Hirsi
Ali РChala Chafiq РCaroline Fourest- Bernard-Henri L̩vy
– Irshad Manji – Mehdi Mozaffari – Maryam Namazie –
Taslima Nazreen – Salman Rushdie – Antoine Sfeir –
Philippe Val – Ibn Warraq

——————————–

Published in Jyllands-Posten, reported by Politically Incorrect. Hat tip to Michelle Malkin.

Described as circulating on the Internet by Le Devoir, a French Québécoise paper.

“A believer wounded by the unbelievers. An unbeliever wounded by the believers.”

It’s by Delize, and probably appeared in Le Monde or France Soir. The same Delize did the earlier “Relax, Mohammed” cartoon in France Soir.

————————

Hat tip to Matthias Storme.

The Telegraph reports:

Iran’s hardline spiritual leaders have issued an unprecedented new fatwa, or holy order, sanctioning the use of atomic weapons against its enemies.

In yet another sign of Teheran’s stiffening resolve on the nuclear issue, influential Muslim clerics have for the first time questioned the theocracy’s traditional stance that Sharia law forbade the use of nuclear weapons.

One senior mullah has now said it is “only natural” to have nuclear bombs as a “countermeasure” against other nuclear powers, thought to be a reference to America and Israel.

The pronouncement is particularly worrying because it has come from Mohsen Gharavian, a disciple of the ultra-conservative Ayatollah Mohammad Taghi Mesbah-Yazdi, who is widely regarded as the cleric closest to Iran’s new president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Nicknamed “Professor Crocodile” because of his harsh conservatism, Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi’s group opposes virtually any kind of rapprochement with the West and is believed to have influenced President Ahmadinejad’s refusal to negotiate over Iran’s nuclear programme.

The comments, which are the first public statement by the Yazdi clerical cabal on the nuclear issue, will be seen as an attempt by the country’s religious hardliners to begin preparing a theological justification for the ownership – and if necessary the use – of atomic bombs…

(A) bus strike, which has led to the jailing of more than 1,000 drivers, was originally sparked by an industrial dispute over unpaid wages benefits. But the robustness of the state response has indicated the nervousness of the Ahmadinejad regime over any internal dissent.

Reports from Iran say that Massoud Osanlou, the leader of the bus drivers’ union, was arrested at his home by members of the Basij, the pro-regime militia, and had part of his tongue cut out as a warning to be quiet.

If Teddy Roosevelt was in the White House, he’d quote that fatwa after he used precisely those nonconventional weapons to eliminate the Iranian nuclear weapons development program.

Christopher Hitchens demands (in a must-read editorial) that we stand up for Denmark.

The incredible thing about the ongoing Kristallnacht against Denmark (and in some places, against the embassies and citizens of any Scandinavian or even European Union nation) is that it has resulted in, not opprobrium for the religion that perpetrates and excuses it, but increased respectability! A small democratic country with an open society, a system of confessional pluralism, and a free press has been subjected to a fantastic, incredible, organized campaign of lies and hatred and violence, extending to one of the gravest imaginable breaches of international law and civility: the violation of diplomatic immunity. And nobody in authority can be found to state the obvious and the necessary—that we stand with the Danes against this defamation and blackmail and sabotage. Instead, all compassion and concern is apparently to be expended upon those who lit the powder trail, and who yell and scream for joy as the embassies of democracies are put to the torch in the capital cities of miserable, fly-blown dictatorships. Let’s be sure we haven’t hurt the vandals’ feelings.

Max Boot concludes that it’s not just opportunistic leaders fanning the flames of Islamic hatred over the Danish cartoons:

Why are so many Muslims so enraged by a handful of cartoons published in an obscure Danish newspaper?

It’s not enough to point out how the governments of Egypt, Syria and Iran are stoking the protests in a cynical ploy to deflect Western pressure for democratic reform and to curry favor with Islamic radicals. Their strategy wouldn’t be so successful if it didn’t resonate with deeply ingrained attitudes among the Muslim multitudes.

I got an earful of those views last week in Kuala Lumpur while attending a conference sponsored by New York University and the Malaysian Institute of Diplomacy and Foreign Relations. The ostensible subject was: “Who Speaks for Islam? Who Speaks for the West?”

We never did answer those questions, but the infidel attendees did get a redhot blast of indignation from the Muslim participants, who hailed not only from East Asia but also from Europe, North America, Africa, the Middle East and South Asia.

Even though all of the Muslim delegates were intellectuals, activists, politicians and other movers and shakers, they resonated with the rage of the dispossessed. With considerable justification, they fulminated against the backwardness of the Islamic world compared to the West. With considerably less justification, they blamed their frustrations on the West.

If only I had a ringgit [the basic unit of money in Malaysia] for every time some delegate complained that the plight of the Palestinians showed the world’s anti-Muslim bias. One attendee even had the gall to claim that Israel is allowed to violate U.N. resolutions while no Muslim state has that luxury—at the very moment Iran is thumbing its nose at the United Nations!

This was coupled with ritualistic denunciations of other anti-Muslim offenses—from the real (Russian repression in Chechnya) to the farcical (a Pakistani academic blamed the CIA for creating Islamic fundamentalism in his country).

Naturally the United States got scant credit (except from one Bosnian) for repeatedly waging war to free Muslims from oppression. Instead of being thanked for saving Muslims from genocide in places like Kosovo, the United States was denounced for committing genocide against them.

Other complaints abounded—the global financial system is biased against Muslim countries like Indonesia (which was hurt by the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis); the propagation of knowledge is dominated by American universities like Harvard and Yale; the U.N. Security Council has no permanent Islamic member ; and on and on.

Of course, blaming the United States for the world’s ills is not an exclusively Islamic phenomenon, as one non-Muslim attendee from Austria proved by complaining that Hollywood had destroyed the European film industry.

But such whininess is particularly pronounced among the large number of Muslims who have never come to grips with the subservient position they have occupied in world affairs since Napoleon’s 1798 invasion of Egypt.

In recent years, some Muslims, notably the authors of the 2002 U.N. Arab Human Development Report, have been acknowledging internal problems—a lack of freedom, honest government, gender equality, scientific research and education—that have turned their societies into global also-rans.

But in Kuala Lumpur there wasn’t much introspection in evidence. Most attendees—and I suspect their views are broadly representative of the Muslim world as a whole—preferred to rant against supposed Western oppression.

The cartoon brouhaha not only confirms this victimization legend, it assuages the shame many Muslims feel over the atrocities committed in their name by Osama bin Laden & Co. To hear many Muslim attendees talk, you would think there is no difference between a cartoonist who injured no one physically and terrorists who kill thousands of innocent people.

The trope of the conference seemed to be: “We have our extremists. . . and you have yours.” Former Iranian President Mohammad Khatami took this argument to its logical conclusion by equating American neoconservatives with al-Qaida. As if Paul Wolfowitz were plotting to crash hijacked aircraft into Tehran office buildings.

The most depressing aspect of the whole cartoon affair is not the intolerance for press freedom exhibited throughout Muslim lands. It is the willingness of so many Muslims to scapegoat the West for their own failures.

Muslim nations will never make any progress unless they stop focusing on the offenses, real or imagined, visited upon them by the outside world and start looking within for what ails them.

The Guardian reports that Peshawar Imam Mohammed Yousaf Qureshi announced a bounty of $25,000 and a car from the Mohabat Khan mosque for the death of an unspecified Danish cartoonist. The holy man (who probably can’t read and write) evidently did not understand that the cartoons were produced by twelve different cartoonists.

Qureshi said the mosque and his religious school would give $25,000 and a car, while a local jewelers’ association would give another $1 million. No representative of the association was available to confirm it had made the offer.

“This is a unanimous decision by all imams (prayer leaders) of Islam that whoever insults the prophet deserves to be killed and whoever will take this insulting man to his end, will get this prize,” Qureshi said.

Denmark, the European, Union and the United States ought to respond decisively to this sort of thing.

What Europe and/or the United States (in the probable absence of European capability) ought to do in response to the sort of thing is what a 19th century British government would have done in response to insolent primitives stirring up native hostility. We should send troops into Peshawar to level the mosque offering this blood money, apprehend and hang Qureshi (with a pigskin rope), pillage and sack the Peshawar jewelers district, and then compel the government of Pakistan to pay for the costs of the expedition.

Bernama (the Malaysian National News Agency) reports:

Muslims Advised Not To Celebrate Valentine’s Day

KUALA TERENGGANU, Feb 13 (Bernama) — Muslims in the country, especially lovers, have been advised not to celebrate Valentine’s Day tomorrow.

State Islam Hadhari Development Committee Deputy Chairman, Muhammad Ramli Nuh said celebrating the Day could be regarded as recognising the enemies of Islam because Valentine or Valentinus took part in planning and attacking Cordoba, once a well-known centre of Islam in Spain, causing its downfall.

He was speaking to reporters after opening the seminar on Understanding of Tasawwuf Nusantara at Universiti Darul Iman, Malaysia, here, today.

Muhammad Ramli said although not many couples celebrate Valentine’s Day in the state, the state government wished to remind that the celebration should not be held including in hotels.

He reminded hotel managements to be sensitive to the religious beliefs of the people.

Muhammad Ramli is ill informed.

February 14th, prior to 1969, was the feast day of two, or possibly three, saints and martyrs named Valentine, all reputedly of the Third Century. The first Valentine, legend holds, was a physician and priest in Rome, arrested for giving aid to martyrs in prison, who while there converted his jailer by restoring sight to the jailer’s daughter. He was executed by being beaten with clubs, and afterwards beheaded, February 14, 270. He is traditionally the patron of affianced couples, bee keepers, lovers, travellers, young people, and greeting card manufacturers, and his special assistance may be sought in conection with epilepsy, fainting, and plague.

A second St. Valentine, reportedly bishop of Interamna (modern Terni) was also allegedly martyred under Claudius II, and also allegedly buried along the Flaminian Way. A third St. Valentine is said to have also been martyred in Roman times, along with companions, in Africa.  Because of a lack of historical evidence, the Roman Catholic Church dropped the February 14th feast of St. Valentine from its calendar in 1969.

Hat tip to Stop the ACLU.

Christopher Hitchens responds to those, like US State Department spokesman Sean McCormack, who find satires of Islam “unacceptable:”

I, too, have strong convictions and beliefs and value the Enlightenment above any priesthood or any sacred fetish-object. It is revolting to me to breathe the same air as wafts from the exhalations of the madrasahs, or the reeking fumes of the suicide-murderers, or the sermons of Billy Graham and Joseph Ratzinger. But these same principles of mine also prevent me from wreaking random violence on the nearest church, or kidnapping a Muslim at random and holding him hostage, or violating diplomatic immunity by attacking the embassy or the envoys of even the most despotic Islamic state, or making a moronic spectacle of myself threatening blood and fire to faraway individuals who may have hurt my feelings. The babyish rumor-fueled tantrums that erupt all the time, especially in the Islamic world, show yet again that faith belongs to the spoiled and selfish childhood of our species.

Big Pharoah had a revelation of some new commandments for Muslims, including the all-important number 7:

7.Thou shall NOT riot over cartoons published 4 months ago. Try to riot over cartoons published 2 months ago. At least it might make more sense that way.

———————————

Hat tip to FrancoAlemán via Glenn Reynolds.

———————————

The same FrancoAlemán posts pictures of the blasphemous image of Jesus holding a Phoenix missile. An “artist” named Oscar Seco is insulting the Christian religion at an art fair being held outside Madrid. Quick! start the rioting, and boycott Spain.