The Bigotry of Our Time

by Douglas Murray • June 16, 2015 at 5:00 am

These people, step by step, want to make every expression of Israeli and Jewish cultural life subject to their idea of how a nation under constant threat of terrorist bombardment should behave.
They denounce Israel as a militaristic society and then attempt to outlaw every non-militaristic cultural and artistic expression from that society.

Director Ken Loach (left) is the most prominent signatory of a letter to the UK's Guardian newspaper, calling for a boycott of the London Israeli Film and Television Festival. Actress Miriam Margolyes (right), another signatory, is best known for signing anti-Israel joint letters "as a Jew."

The letters page of The Guardian in the UK is regularly filled with letters, jointly signed by "correct-thinking" people who hope that in so doing, they will give themselves both a little puff of publicity and simultaneously signal their loyalty to all modern virtues. The pecking order can be rough. Ordinarily the paper selects the headline names to put under the letter and then adds "and 57 others" or some such. So if you're the Guardian's idea of a household name, your name will get in print. But if you are one of the space-filler "C-list" celebrities, people will have to guess whether you are among the "others."

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The Most Inexcusable Crime in the Muslim World

by Uzay Bulut • June 16, 2015 at 4:00 am

Even visionary calls for Islamic reform by Egypt's President, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, were not publicly welcomed by a single Western leader.
An ideology that encourages its adherents to engage in deadly rioting, burn down embassies, and kill people over cartoons, but that shows no great signs of sorrow as little girls are sold and raped, most likely does not have much to contribute to advancing civilization.
An ideology that treats women as property, that murders or imprisons intellectuals and that sentences a blogger to 1000 lashes and ten years in jail -- if he survives -- has no right to blame troubles on the West or anyone else.
This view has nothing to do with the West or any kind of Western intervention.

Soheil Arabi (right) was last year sentenced to death by an Iranian court for "insulting the prophet of Islam" in Facebook postings.

Violence and intolerance envelop the Muslim world. People who commit barbaric acts -- slaughtering Christians, Jews, Muslims and Hindus, almost anyone -- say they are merely upholding Islamic sharia law against "blasphemy," apostasy and "unbelievers." These Islamic extremists daily take those laws in their own hands, murdering anyone who wants to think freely or differently. Every day, arrests, trials, floggings, torture and the murder of journalists, poets, students and human rights activists are a routine practice.

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