Monday, September 24, 2012

Gatestone Update :: Daniel Greenfield: Why Do They Hate Us?, and more



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Why Do They Hate Us?

by Daniel Greenfield
September 24, 2012 at 5:00 am
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Conflicts begin with the hope of political, territorial and economic gains. Muslims are encouraged by their leaders to hate us for the same reason that Nazi leaders encouraged Germans to hate the Jews whose wealth and property they had their eyes on. The appeaser consensus obstinately refuses to understand that Muslim violence is not blowback in response to our foreign policy, but an aggressive action intended to extend Muslim power and influence in a vacuum that we have left open for them.
Like gawky teenagers, Americans are far too obsessed with what people thousands of miles away think of them. The first reaction of the ordinary man in the street on December 7, 1941, was not to wonder why the Japanese hated him. It was not even his tenth reaction because at that point he was much too busy hating the Japanese to care why they hated him.
That attitude might not be pretty, but it was a practical response to the exigencies of wartime, and that war, like most wars, was not fueled by emotion, but by territorial aggression. FDR was unconcerned with Japanese emotions, let alone their hearts, minds and livers; because he knew that the conflict did not come down to emotions but to a power struggle between a Japanese empire in the Pacific and the only Western country with a view of the Pacific capable of standing up to the land of the rising sun.
The study of Muslim rage, its wellsprings and tides, is as worthless as the study of Japanese rage in the dying days of the 1930s. Despite the showy displays of violence in the last week by inflamed Chinese mobs attacking Japanese properties and Muslim mobs attacking American properties, the conflicts do not revolve around the axis of emotion, but of power and territory.
The issue, whether it is in the South China Sea or the world, is still that old Lebensraum [space to live]. Hatred is a useful emotion for those-who-want-to-expand-their-territory to feel for the people-whose-territory-they-want-to-expand-into. That is something that every conqueror from Genghis Khan to Adolf Hitler knew and intimately understood. If you are going to fight a people, then you might as well hate them too.
The moderns assume that war comes from hate, rather than hate coming from war. They study the rhetoric that our enemies use as pretexts for their acts of war, and lecture us on why Bin Laden was so angry at the United States of Infidels and how a badly dubbed movie led to a "spontaneous" wave of violence on the anniversary of Bin Laden's original attacks.
A short study of war however is enough to teach us that pretexts of the emotional, rather than the territorial kind, do not matter. Hitler's pretexts for war were all manufactured, one after another, to the shame of politicians in London and Paris who took his imaginary grievances seriously.
It did not seem to enter the gentlemanly mind of a Chamberlain that Hitler's issues with his neighbors arose only because he wanted to conquer them. It has similarly not entered the minds of our modern Chamberlains that Muslims are encouraged by their leaders to hate us, for the same reason that Nazi leaders encouraged Germans to hate the Jews whose wealth and property they had their eyes on.
The appeaser consensus obstinately refuses to understand that Muslim violence is not blowback or the uncontrollable reflex of a knee being jerked in response to our foreign policy. It is not a reaction that can be soothed by applying aloe and appeasement, but an aggressive action intended to expand their power and influence. That refusal to see Muslims as actors rather than reactors is rooted in a colonialist view of Third World peoples as the balls in our pinball foreign policy machine, rather than civilizations looking to step into a power vacuum that we have left open for them.
There was nothing spontaneous about this latest wave of violent attacks targeting American interests. It was a coordinated effort across multiple countries with the practical purpose of taking over properties in the Muslim world legally considered American territory, lowering the American flag and replacing it with the black flag of the Jihad and the Caliphate.
The Mohammed video, like Israel, serves as a convenient Grand Unification Theory of Islamic outrage, but the attacks were no more emotional than any other invasion and their meaning can be gleaned from their timing and their tactics, rather than the press releases. The attacks would have gone forward regardless of whether a Coptic filmmaker had dubbed in some lines about Mohammed, because their purpose was to use September 11 to demonstrate Jihadist staying power after the death of Bin Laden and to begin the Jihadist transition from terrorist groups to guerrilla armies.
Muslims do hate us, but the reasons why they hate us, rooted in xenophobic scripture and tribal cruelty, are not why we are at war. Conflicts do not begin out of hate alone, or France and England would still be at each other's throats; they begin with the hope of political, territorial and economic gains. Islam is more than a theology; it is the manifest destiny of over a thousand years of raiders, looters and slave merchants.
If Muslims only hated us, then we could live with that. But like Japan on December 1941, they do not just hate us in the abstract fashion that countries and peoples hate one another. We are not just hated. We are in their way.
Related Topics:  Daniel Greenfield

How Much For A Piece Of The First Amendment?

by Karen Lugo
September 24, 2012 at 4:00 am
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American freedoms must not be extorted away by the tantrums of raging mobs. "Caving in to bullies only accelerates the rate and scale of their ambitions." — Eugene Volokh, UCLA School of Law
The United States faces mounting pressure from the 57-member Organization of Islamic Cooperation to comply with demands for "legislation against incitement to religious hatred, violence, discrimination on the basis of religion, in particular for Muslims."
The response to both marauding rioters and fatwa-driven heads of Islamic states must be a confident and unequivocal defense of First Amendment guarantees as enshrined in the Bill of Rights and confirmed by America's highest Court.
Just a year and a half ago the Supreme Court considered whether there should be a special free speech "funeral exception" to protect military families from demonstrators shouting epithets such as, "Thank God for dead soldiers" as these families bury their fallen daughters and sons. The near-unanimous ruling affirmed the full spectrum of public debate, including speech as "distasteful" as the Phelps cult's hateful jeers. This decision, denying the Snyder family compensation for emotional pain, was a bitter pill for many to swallow, but the Court properly refused to react to pain "by punishing the speaker."
The current talk of caving in to murderous Islamists and censoring the latest speaker, or filmmaker, is in direct violation of the same First Amendment free speech protections that applied to the funeral demonstrators. If it is safe to presume that military families who are confronted with vile demonstrators will not react violently, why the desperation to placate the offended party when thuggery is part of the equation?
Some commentators rationalize that Islamists, according to arbitrary blasphemy protestations, can be expected to "act out." They therefore claim that the Brandenburg rule, as it excludes expressions "likely to incite or produce imminent lawless action" from the zone of protected speech, should apply to speakers who offend Muslims. This generalized approach, however, ignores the instruction provided by the Supreme Court in Brandenburg when it clarified the standard as akin to "preparing a group for violent action and steeling it to such action." The Court was careful not to convey a vague and easily manipulated "likely to incite" standard.
Also lost in this desperate attempt to tamp down the tantrums is the absurd premise that legal culpability for a bad act can be shifted to a third party. For example, if the threatened riots had resulted from Seattle cartoonist Molly Norris's suggestion about an "everybody draw Mohammed day," she would have been in the impossible position of defending against the legally contorted charge that she may or may not reasonably have known that she was saying something sufficiently offensive to incite mob mania. The potential for upping-the-ante if feigned offenses can be leveraged into crimes would only be limited by Islamist inventiveness.
Unseemly haste to placate the violent mobs on their terms reveals just how desperate leaders are to put off a reckoning until another day. What we forestall along with the inevitable confrontation, nevertheless, is the audacity that accrues to the thugs as American pundits and politicians focus on censoring the filmmaker.
One of the hard lessons from the pre-school sandbox is that bullies thrive on weakness. Yet Obama hopes to escape this truth as his administration desperately pressures Youtube to ban the video, and spends $70,000 of taxpayers' money to run public service disclaimers in Urdu. Youtube has responded that the clip is not in violation of community terms of use -- although Youtube did comply with censorship requests from Libya and Egypt. Pakistanis reacted to the Obama administration's public relations entreaties with a national day of rampage, killing at least twenty.
In Great Britain a debate over historian Tom Holland's documentary Islam: The Untold Story scheduled for two days after the Cairo and Benghazi attacks was canceled. France recognized Charlie Hebdo's right to publish risqué cartoons of Mohammed but did shut down twenty embassies in Muslim countries for fear of riots.
As constitutional law professor and blogger Eugene Volokh writes, caving in to bullies only accelerates the rate and scale of their ambitions. After performing a straightforward cause-and-effect analysis, Volokh concluded that it would "actually be safer — not just better for First Amendment principles, but actually safer for Americans — to hold the line now, and make clear that American speech is protected."
Even if accelerated tantrums and murder are the initial response, civilized society would be better off hanging tough. The future of American rule of law depends on facing down these particular bullies at this time. Otherwise, Prof. Volokh's trifecta will prevail: "kill Americans, visibly force America to change its ways, and on top of that suppress the blasphemy or other behavior that you dislike, win win win." The key to implementing this trifecta is the visible component of the formula. If America sacrifices prestige and moral authority on the world stage to buy temporary relief, Western states know exactly how to score the transaction: civilization loses, barbarians win.
Military families, Christians, Jews, tea party activists, and various other groups must suffer insult with a stiff upper lip so that discourse can run the full range of parody and ridicule. The kind of free, unfettered, and robust speech that sustains a free and independent people entails give and take all the way around, and the worthwhile benefit is a full vetting of ideas and policies.
Patrick Henry did not say, "Give me liberty, or . . , ahh . . , uhm . . , I will apologize for even asking." Our examples, our founding leaders, spoke in clear and certain terms.
Daniel Webster surveyed America's founding era in 1826 and exhorted subsequent generations to cherish the "newly awakened and unconquerable spirit of free inquiry and diffusion of knowledge such as has been before altogether unknown and unheard of." He warned that if "these great interests fail, we fail with them."
No matter how objectionable or socially repugnant is the material in controversy, American freedoms must not extorted away by the tantrums of raging mobs. Our destiny must remain subject to American sovereign will and be determined by time-tested deliberative processes.
Karen Lugo is Co-Director, Claremont Institute Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence.
Related Topics:  Karen Lugo

Extremists Establish Foothold in the Balkans

by Irfan Al-Alawi
September 24, 2012 at 3:00 am
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A moderate interpretation of Islam and a respect for people who believe in other religions – for which Kosovo Muslims are known – may have persuaded agitators that Kosovo was in need of an "Islamic revival" of the kind Wahhabis, Deobandis and other extremists apparently deem necessary for the global Muslim community. The "Rahma (Mercy)" charity, operating out of Bolton and Leicester in the UK, and following the radical Deobandi sect that inspired the Taliban, wires funds there.
Peace TV, an enterprise directed from India, Saudi Arabia, and Dubai by a fu­­ndamentalist Islamist preacher, Zakir Naik, has established a 12-hour daily program in Kosovo, a country 90% Muslim.
The entry into Kosovo of Naik's Peace TV, broadcasting each day in Albanian from 9:30 a.m. to 10 p.m., appears to be an element in a novel campaign by South Asian Islamists to establish a foothold among Europe's indigenous Balkan Muslims. Peace TV's message is hard-line Wahhabism, which insults, in aggressive terms, spiritual Sufis, Shia Muslims, non-fundamentalist Sunnis, Jews, Christians, and Hindus, among others. Radical Islamist interlopers and their financiers, mainly from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, have also been relocating to Macedonia, Bosnia-Hercegovina, Montenegro, and Serbia.
Peace TV is coordinated in Kosovo by a local "Center for Islamic Studies," which appears to exist only online and via television – and, in addition to Naik's propaganda, offers academic studies and fatwas [religious opinions]. The "Center" also does not identify its officials or financing – except for its link to Naik.
The channel, via satellite, broadcasts mostly in English and Urdu, to audiences in South Asia and South Asian Muslim immigrant communities elsewhere, and into Kosovo since 2009.
Naik, a physician with no Islamic religious training, has praised terrorism – including that of the late Osama Bin Laden; both he and his efforts have been condemned by Indian Muslim authorities. He was banned from entry into Britain in 2010, after which his multiple-entry visa to Canada was cancelled.
Peace TV now includes interviews in the Albanian language with Kosovo Muslim figures under the influence of Wahhabism. Previously, Peace TV featured lectures by Sabri Bajgora, named "chief imam" of the Balkan republic by Naim Ternava, Kosovo's Wahhabi supreme Islamic cleric since 2003.
Bajgora has been the focus of several controversial incidents in the Kosovo Islamic community. In 2011, for example, Ternava, Bajgora and two other Muslim functionaries were denounced by seven highly-qualified and notably-moderate professors who had been dismissed without cause from Kosovo's Faculty of Islamic Studies.
The expelled scholars pointed out that Ternava, Bajgora, and their group lack advanced credentials in religious instruction.
In March 2012, Bajgora also made news after removing a moderate cleric, imam Musli Verbani, from a mosque in the northern Kosovo town of Kacanik. The expelled imam was supported by some 1,800 local Muslims in Kacanik, who demonstrated for his reinstatement.
In July 2011, along with Peace TV, the "Center" produced videos supporting the proposed erection of a Wahhabi "mega-mosque" in Prishtina, the Kosovo capital.
Muslim extremists assembled in Prishtina – which has 22 mosques at present, some distinguished by their beautiful decorations – to demand a "big mosque" as a counterpart to a Roman Catholic cathedral currently under construction in the center of the city, and dedicated to Mother Teresa – an Albanian who was born in neighbouring Macedonia.
Catholics, about 10% of the populace of two million, are the second largest religious community in Kosovo, which is constitutionally defined as a secular state; and Catholics, although a minority, are prominent in Kosovo culture and politics.
The campaign for a "mega-mosque" was viewed by many Albanian Muslims as an extremist provocation. Observers of the demonstrations for a new and large structure reported that many participants were Albanians from Macedonia, where the official Islamic Community is under fundamentalist control.
"Rahma (Mercy)" is a charity operated out of Bolton and Leicester in the UK and following the radical Deobandi sect of Islam, which inspired the Taliban. The charity has also supported a radical preacher, Kastriot Duka, alias Xhemajl Duka – who, before he was expelled from Kosovo to his birthplace, Albania, in 2010, established a mosque and a program for orphans in the Kosovo village of Marina, near the city of Skenderaj.
Traditional Muslims in the Skenderaj vicinity obtained 6,000 signatures for a petition demanding closure of Duka's compound, in which, they complained, young girls were forced to wear Wahhabi-style face veils and full-body covering.
In August, however, Artan Haraqija and Visar Duriqi of the Kosovo Center for Investigative Reporting revealed that since his expulsion, Duka has repeatedly reentered Kosovo and visited his mosque and orphanage, while money from "Rahma (Mercy)" in Britain is sent there through bank wire or by courier.
"Rahma (Mercy)," created in 1999, had the alleged purpose of assisting Kosovo war refugees. Peace TV and "Rahma (Mercy)" apparently chose to target Kosovo as a poor country ravaged by war a decade ago and in need of substantial aid.
The moderate interpretation of Islam and the respect for people who believe in other religions – for which Kosovo Muslims are known -- may also have persuaded the South Asian agitators that Kosovo was in need of an "Islamic revival" of the kind Wahhabis, Deobandis, and other extremists apparently deem necessary for the moral and spiritual health of the global Islamic community. Kosovo, for instance, is the only continental European region, outside the small part of Turkey bordering on Bulgaria and Greece, in which Sufi spirituality is a major element in Islamic culture. As many as 40% of Muslims in western Kosovo are Sufis, with Sufi meeting houses and mosques open in every place.
For Zakir Naik and the luminaries of Peace TV, as well as the Deobandis of "Rahma (Mercy),'" the prominence of Sufism in Kosovo may be another incentive to "cleanse" local Muslims of their alleged "deviations."
Kosovo Albanians are devoted to their own Muslim legacy and can become combative when faced with ideological aggression from abroad. In addition to Arabs, Iranian agents and Turkish fundamentalists have also attempted visible inroads in the Kosovo Muslim community. The possibility of fundamentalist subversion of Kosovo Muslims merits close scrutiny, and committed assistance to moderate believers.
Related Topics:  Irfan Al-Alawi

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