The Only Sane Response

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The Only Sane Response Posted: 10 Jan 2015 02:18 AM PST H/T to ACT! for Canada. "These guys are dead," says Mark Steyn, "because back in 2005, these Danish cartoons were published in an obscure Jutland newspaper, and a bunch of fanatics went bananas and started killing people over them. So a couple of publications on the planet, including mine in Canada, and Charlie Hebdo in Paris, published these cartoons...Le Monde didn't, and the Times of London didn't, and the New York Times didn't, and nobody else did. And as a result, these fellows in Charlie Hebdo became the focus of murderous rage. If we'd all just published them on the front page and said 'If you want to kill us, you go to hell, you can't just kill a couple of obscure Danes, you're going to have to kill us all,' we wouldn't have this problem. But because nobody did that, these Parisian guys are dead. They're dead. And I've been on enough, I've been enough events in Europe with less famous cartoonists than these who live under death threats, live under armed guard, have had their family restaurant firebombed — it's happened to a Norwegian comedian I know — have come home and found their home burned, as a Swedish artist I know happened to. And all these people doing the phony hashtag solidarity, screw your phony hashtag solidarity. Let's have some real solidarity — or if not, at least have the good taste to stay the hell out of it.” He's absolutely right. The only sane response to this kind of attack is for every publication to publish the cartoons. "To honor those who've died for Free Speech," says Bosch Fawstin, "I don't raise my pen up in the air, I put it to paper and draw Mohammad." Mohammad

Is Jihad Really An "Inner Struggle?" Posted: 09 Jan 2015 02:50 PM PST Dr. Tina Magaard — a Sorbonne-trained linguist specializing in textual anal­ysis — published detailed research findings in 2005 (summarized in 2007) com­paring the foundational texts of ten major religions. Magaard con­cluded from her hard data-driven analyses: The texts in Islam distinguish themselves from the texts of other religions by encouraging violence and aggression against people with other religious beliefs to a larger degree. There are also straightforward calls for terror. This has long been a taboo in the research into Islam, but it is a fact that we need to deal with. Magaard added some detail: There are 36 references in the Koran to expressions derived from the root qa-ta-la, which indicates fighting, killing or being killed. The expressions derived from the root ja-ha-da, which the word jihad stems from, are more ambiguous since they mean “to struggle” or “to make an effort” rather than killing. Yet almost all of the references derived from this root are found in stories that leave no room for doubt regarding the violent nature of this struggle. Only a single ja-ha-da reference (29:6) explicitly presents the struggle as an inner, spiritual phenomenon, not as an outwardly (usually military) phenomenon. But this sole reference does not carry much weight against the more than 50 references to actual armed struggle in the Koran, and even more in the Hadith. - Excerpted from an article by Andrew Bostom. Read the whole article here.