Open Season on the Jews of France
Yet another French Jew is murdered in an anti-Semitic hate crime.
In what has become a disturbing, and all too familiar occurrence in France, another elderly French Jew has been murdered in an unprovoked attack motivated by antisemitism. On May 21, an 89-year-old Lyon resident named René Hadjaj was defenestrated from the 17th floor of the apartment complex where he resided. The perpetrator has been identified as a 51-year-old male of Algerian origin named Rachid Kheniche. Hadjaj was said to have been wearing a kippah at the time of the assault.
French police were quick to dismiss the attack as a dispute between neighbors unrelated to antisemitism. However, watchdog groups quickly alerted French law enforcement authorities to Kheniche’s social media postings where he engaged in antisemitic rants. After viewing the postings, the French prosecutor’s office requested that judges presiding over the case include an antisemitic motive charge as an aggravating circumstance in killing of Hadjaj.
Hadjaj’s murder is eerily similar to the horrific April 2017 murder of Sarah Halimi, a 65-year-old French-Jewish retired doctor, who was severely beaten and thrown from her apartment to her death. In that case, the killer was a 27-year-old drug dealer and user named Kobili Traore. Halimi, who lived in the same apartment complex as Traore had previously expressed fear of her future killer after enduring his repeated antisemitic threats. During his assault against Halimi, Traore yelled Allahu-Akbar (God is Great) a common Islamist refrain. After killing her, Traore reportedly said that he had just killed The Shaytan, an Islamic reference to Satan.
Concerned neighbors who heard the commotion in Halimi’s apartment and her cries for help called the police, whose response could be classified as comical if it wasn’t so sad. They initially arrived at the wrong address. When they finally reached the correct address, they waited for a SWAT team rather than entering immediately. A quick police response would have likely thwarted the attack and saved Halimi’s life.
But worse was yet to come. As in the case with Hadjaj, law enforcement authorities were quick to dismiss the antisemitic motive for the attack. After a public outcry, they changed their tune and added the charge of antisemitism as an aggravating factor. After a long and protracted legal proceedings, involving psychiatric reports and appeals, the French court ruled that Traore’s murder of Halimi was the result of a drug-induced psychosis and that therefore, he was not criminally responsible for her murder.
The logic of the French court that exonerated Traore is beyond comprehension. It essentially allows a murderer to escape the consequences of his own purposeful, deleterious and irresponsible actions. The manner in which France’s judiciary dealt with Halimi’s killer will remain an indelible stain on France’s judicial system and testament to its disregard for the rule of law and basic societal norms.
The Hadjaj and Halimi cases are not isolated incidents. In 2018, an 85-year-old Holocaust survivor named Mireille Knoll was stabbed 11 times by an assailant, who like Traore, yelled Allahu Akbar while stabbing her. In that case, two petty criminals broke into her Paris home believing that because she was Jewish, she was in possession of “hidden treasures.” The stabber was sentenced to life in prison but is eligible for parole in 22 years. His accomplice was acquitted of murder but convicted of theft with antisemitic motives and received 15 years.
France’s 500,000 strong Jewish population is under siege. Jews across the country are subject to daily harassment and assault, principally at the hands of France’s Muslims who far outnumber the Jewish population by a factor of about 10 to 1.
Three months prior to Hadjaj’s murder, a young French Jew named Jérémie Cohen was the victim of a gang assault. He was observant and wearing a kippah and this was sufficient to trigger the mob to attack him. In a desperate bid to escape his attackers, he ran into a busy thoroughfare and was fatally struck by a passing vehicle. Predictably, French police were quick to dismiss the incident as a simple traffic accident. It was only after Cohen’s family presented authorities with CCTV footage did the Justice Ministry agree to reopen the investigation.
It is open season on the Jews of France. Antisemitism represents a constant and prevalent menace and French authorities are doing little, if anything to combat it. It often spikes during times of Mideast tension, but irrational Jew-hate does not need an excuse to rear its ugly head.
Many of those who carry out these attacks are well known to authorities either due to their association with petty crime or radical Islam. Often, it’s both. The criminals merge the tools of their crime trade with radical Islam, making for a violent combination.
The plight of the Jews of France makes for yet another compelling argument for the existence of a strong Israel. Whenever Jews are in the minority, they become the target of violence, and this is particularly true when religious fervor and jealousy are added to the mix. In the meantime, the Jewish flight from France continues apace with most heading for – you guessed it – Israel.
The French Imam Who Quoted the Quran
You'll never believe what happened next.
Tue May 24, 2022
What on earth were French officials thinking? Or have we gone way beyond the point where “officials” and “thinking” can be used in the same sentence? The French news site Fdesouche reported Tuesday that Ahamada Mmadi, an imam from Comoros, has been deported from France. In parting from the land of crepes and Suzettes, Mmadi struck a defiant note: “I have nothing to regret and nothing to apologize for as long as I have spoken the word of Allah. If I repent, I am no longer a Muslim.” Fair enough, Mmadi, but France’s action in deporting this Muslim cleric is curious in the extreme. According to the Islamic news site 5 Pillars UK, Mmadi and his family were “deported from France after he recited a verse from the Quran and quoted a Hadith which encouraged women to be chaste, stay at home and obey their husbands.” He was accused of making “comments incompatible with the principles and laws of the Republic.”
So Mmadi’s statement that he had “spoken the word of Allah” was actually referring to why he was deported. But if he was really deported for quoting the Qur’an and Hadith, what do French authorities think the other imams in the country are teaching?
Mmadi added: “I don’t have to apologise for the moment I spoke the word of Allah. … Our sisters live a nightmarish life … and we call it a land of freedom.” Mmadi was claiming that women in France live a “nightmarish life” because they aren’t subject to the restrictions on women’s freedom that Islamic law entails. The good imam was apparently criticizing the status of women in France, as compared to the status of women in states that enforce Islamic law (Sharia), during a sermon at the Saint-Chamond mosque in the Loire department. During that sermon, he quoted a passage from the Qur’an that French authorities thought was unacceptably misogynistic.
According to 5 Pillars UK, Mmadi quoted this passage from the Qur’an: “And stay in your houses. Do not display yourselves with the display of the time of ignorance. Be regular in prayer, and give alms, and obey Allah and his messenger.” (Qur’an 33:33)
If French officials were looking for misogyny and inequality, the Qur’an has much more disturbing passages than that. It even calls for the beating of women that Muslim men even suspect might be contemplating getting out of line: “Men are in charge of women, because Allah has made the one superior to the other, and because they spend of their property. So good women are obedient, guarding in secret what Allah has guarded. As for those from whom you fear disobedience, give them a warning and banish them to separate beds, and beat them.” (Qur’an 4:34)
It doesn’t seem, however, as if Mmadi even quoted that verse; the other one, calling for women to cover themselves and stay at home, was bad enough in itself for French authorities. To be sure, according to 5 Pillars UK, however, Mmadi did go a bit farther: “He also told worshippers at the mosque about an authentic Hadith in which Abu Huraira (ra) reported: ‘The Messenger of Allah, peace and blessings be upon him, said: ‘If a woman prays her five prayers, fasts her month of Ramadan, guards her chastity, and obeys her husband, she will enter Paradise from any gate she wishes.’” This was the basis upon which “French authorities in the Loire region deemed his sermon, which was made at Eid prayers last year, ‘discriminatory.’”
Mmadi pointed out quite correctly: “These are not my words, they are the words of the Prophet and of God. All I did was repeat what was in the holy books.” Indeed. And so it is extraordinary that French authorities deported him for this. There are hundreds, maybe even thousands, of other imams in France. Do French authorities think that they don’t read the same Qur’an that contains the passage Mmadi quoted? Do French authorities assume that all other imams in France reject the Qur’an’s exhortations to violence, misogyny, and hatred for unbelievers? Do they not realize that other Muslims besides Mmadi read and believe in the Qur’an as well?
If French authorities, as well as authorities all over the West, including the U.S., think that imams such as Ahamada Mmadi are “extremists,” they’re in for a rude awakening. They continue to insist that they want to create a new Islam with French characteristics, an Islam that will be compatible with French secularism. Yet the Qur’an also has Allah telling the believers: “This day I have perfected your religion for you and completed my favor to you, and have chosen Islam as the religion for you.” (5:3) If Islam is perfect as it is, any change will only make it worse, not better. That’s why innovation (bid’a) is a serious sin in Islam. Do French officials honestly think they will be able to create a new, Westernized Islam, shorn of its features that are offensive to contemporary Western sensibilities? If so, they really are in for a rude awakening.
Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He is author of 23 books including many bestsellers, such as The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades), The Truth About Muhammad and The History of Jihad. His latest book is The Critical Qur’an. Follow him on Twitter here. Like him on Facebook here.
Macron Denies ‘Great Replacement’ But Admits Migrant Integration Failures
124
LUDOVIC MARIN/AFP via Getty Images
17 Dec 202182
3:08
French President Emmanuel Macron has denied the existence of the “Great Replacement” and claimed France is a country of immigrants, but has admitted migrant integration failures in recent decades.
The French president said he did not believe in the Great Replacement, a theory coined by writer Renaud Camus to describe the ongoing rapid demographic shifts taking place in Europe and elsewhere as elites in business and politics view human beings as interchangeable, replaceable things. The theory has become a major talking point in France in recent weeks.
“When we talk about these phenomena, it is better to first look at the figures,” President Macron told broadcaster Tf1 this week and added: “Since the end of the 19th century, we have been a nation of immigration, with part of that immigration having been integrated through work.”
“It has helped the growth of our country, to move forward. When I hear the nonsense of saying zero immigration… There has never been zero immigration, that is not true. […] I don’t believe in the Great Replacement. It’s not here,” the French president added.
Macron’s remarks were largely directed at opposition presidential candidate and conservative pundit and writer Eric Zemmour who has referenced the Great Replacement many times in the past and has called for a zero immigration policy as part of his presidential platform.
“Zero immigration will become a clear objective of our policy,” Zemmour said at his first campaign rally earlier this month in the Paris suburb of Villepinte.
President Macron did admit in his remarks, however, that migrant integration efforts in France have seen troubles in recent years, saying: “What is true is that in recent decades, we have not integrated well.”
“Our economy was not strong enough, we did not adapt our efforts to integrate, and we had a policy that consisted of building neighbourhoods where we put all the difficulties in the same place. We segregated our country. It was three mistakes, and we are in the process of gradually correcting them,” Macron said.
The French president has previously railed against so-called parallel societies in France, particularly Islamic parallel societies, and has vowed to tackle issues of separatism following the murder of teacher Samuel Paty last year.
The death of Paty, who was beheaded by a Chechen refugee Islamist radical, sparked the Macron government to vow to crack down on radical Islam in France as well as to promise to confront political Islam.
President Macron also admitted that immigration into France has increased in recent years, but blamed the phenomenon on “political crises” and people trafficking networks, saying: “The answer is not to say that there will be a Great Replacement.”
Despite the French leader’s denial of the Great Replacement, the theory has caught the attention of many in France and a recent poll released in November claimed that as much as half of the French public believes in the theory.
Follow Chris Tomlinson on Twitter at @TomlinsonCJ or email at ctomlinson(at)breitbart.com
Video: Biden Begs Taliban for Mercy
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/08/video-biden-begs-taliban-mercy-frontpagemagcom/
When leftists learn how bribing Jihadists doesn’t work.
Mon Aug 16, 2021
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This new Glazov Gang episode features Anni Cyrus, an artist, the producer of The Glazov Gang, the founder of Live Up To Freedom and National Director of American Truth Project.
[Learn more about how Anni has joined Mike Lindell in his fight for freedom and also about her new Etsy Channel.]
Anni discusses Biden Begs Taliban for Mercy, analyzing When leftists learn how bribing Jihadists doesn’t work. She credits her video to Daniel Greenfield's Frontpage article: Biden Sends 3,000 Troops, Offers Taliban Bribes, As Afghanistan Disaster Looms.
Don't miss it!
And make sure to watch Anni discuss The Solution to Stop Islam, where she unveils a powerful and humanistic plan.
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Illegal Alien Refugee Met With the Pope, Burned a Cathedral, Killed a Priest
Europeans and Americans are paying the price for Pope Francis’ support for illegal migration.
Fri Aug 13, 2021
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
Pope Francis concluded the Extraordinary Jubilee of Mercy by inviting thousands of homeless from across Europe to Rome. Many of those homeless were foreign migrants. Among them was Emmanuel Abayisenga, a Rwandan migrant, the son of a man tried for genocide, who had been in France since 2012, and finally got his chance to briefly meet with the Pope.
While reporters brandished telephoto lenses and stood on chairs to capture the moment, Pope Francis clasped Abayisenga's arms. The Rwandan, toting a Nike backpack and headphones, appears, as local French clergy would later insist, to be, "fully integrated" into Europe.
He was also the model of the "socially deprived" people whom Pope Francis was looking for.
The Pope had urged convents and monasteries to open their doors to migrants and refugees.
“May every parish, every religious community, every monastery, every sanctuary of Europe, take in one family,” he insisted. Europeans should welcome migrants and Christians should not fear the “differences” of Muslims. He boasted that, “There are two parishes in the Vatican, and every parishioner has welcomed a Syrian family.”
“Those arriving in Europe now are fleeing from war or famine. And we are in some ways responsible, because we strip their lands for profit,” Pope Francis scolded Europeans.
While Pope Francis’ pro-migrant policies have been disastrous in America with illegal aliens spreading the coronavirus across the country, French Catholic institutions have been among the hardest hit by the Pope’s policy of sheltering illegal migrants like Emmanuel Abayisenga.
Last year the Nantes Cathedral, whose cornerstone had been laid in 1434, began to burn. The Grand Organ, over 400 years old, was destroyed along with historic stained glass windows.
Abayisenga had started two fires near the Grand Organ and a third near an electric panel.
The year after meeting with Pope Francis, Abayisenga began volunteering at the Nantes Cathedral. Like many other migrants, his asylum requests had been repeatedly turned down, but the Rwandan migrant continued to stay in the country with the support of the clergy.
“He was even the most protected man in Nantes at the ecclesial level: the parish, the Franciscans, the Secours Catholique supported him. Even the former bishop of the diocese, Jean-Paul James, tried to plead his case with the prefect," a local churchgoer related.
But before the fire, Abayisenga had sent a threatening email complaining that church officials hadn’t done enough for his asylum petitions to allow him to stay in France and suggesting that the cathedral was possessed by a devil that needed to be driven out. Despite that he was allowed to retain his position as a warden, tasked with locking up and unlocking the cathedral.
After the fire, it didn’t take long to figure out who had done it, for the authorities to set him loose, and for the same system harboring illegal refugees to welcome him back again despite what he had done.
Abayisenga’s lawyer claimed that he “bitterly regretted” setting the fires.
“The citizens of Nantes are still angry with him, but for the most part it is empathy that dominates now,” a Cathedral official explained.
Even though Abayisenga had already been ordered to leave France four times because his asylum requests had been repeatedly denied, he was allowed to stay while awaiting trial.
After spending a month at a mental hospital, the cathedral arsonist was released and placed in an abbey under the supervision of Fr. Olivier Maire of the Montfort Missionaries. The Rwandan spent a few months there before Fr. Maire called the police because he had tried to leave.
A few more months went by and then Abayisenga murdered Fr. Maire. The illegal migrant then turned himself in for this latest horrifying crime against those who had kindly sheltered him.
Reports say that the Rwandan illegal alien refugee beat the 60-year-old priest to death.
Abayisenga is back in a psychiatric hospital and French authorities are claiming that nothing could have been done differently despite the four deportation orders for the illegal refugee.
"I regret the unnecessary controversies," Gerald Darmanin, the country's Minister of the Interior, snippily said at a press conference. As if there were no reason for people to wonder how an illegal migrant could have remained in France for nearly a decade, despite four deportation orders, and one of the most infamous arsons in a generation, before he murdered a priest.
But there is plenty of blame to go around.
For once the killer isn’t an Islamic terrorist, but the same broken system welcomed him, harbored him, failed to enforce the law, and gave him every possible opportunity to do harm.
Even after the Nantes Cathedral arson, pro-refugee organizations regaled the media with stories about his difficult childhood growing up during the Rwandan genocide (in which his father appears to have been a perpetrator). Yet despite all that, Abayisenga was apparently able to get a college degree and a good job before deciding to head over to France.
French authorities dismissed his claims to being a refugee, but they also failed to remove him.
And the clergy who sheltered him may have had the noblest motives, but failed to exercise even the most basic common sense no matter how obvious the threat that the migrant represented.
There is a good reason why countries have borders and laws. Abayisenga is a reminder of that.
Mercy and kindness are lovely qualities, but any individual, community, country, and culture must, at the barest minimum, see to its own survival, or its compassion is a suicide pact.
Pope Francis has argued that migrant rights should be prioritized over national security. He has sneered at President Trump and border security in the United States, declaring that, “builders of walls, be they made of razor wire or bricks, will end up becoming prisoners of the walls they build.” But the alternative to living securely within your walls is that your cathedrals will be burned and your priests murdered by the migrants you allowed inside your open borders.
Europeans and Americans are paying the price for Pope Francis’ support for illegal migration.
Too many people of all religions, Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish, have become prisoners of an unbalanced rhetoric of compassion that prioritizes grandiose shows of virtue signaling over the difficult human balance between protecting ourselves and helping others. In the face of such demands, we must remember that we cannot save the world if we cannot even save ourselves.
The story of the Nantes Cathedral, of Fr. Maire, and of Abayisenga is a reminder that the price of giving endlessly to enemies, exploiters, or even the unbalanced may be a butcher’s bill.
And that is a price that no country, no culture, and no civilization can endlessly afford to pay
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Now Even Science Demonstrates Islamic Aggression
Recent DNA findings concerning Turks.
Fri Aug 13, 2021
Raymond Ibrahim is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
Along with Islamic doctrine and history, one can now add science to the list of things that demonstrate Islamic aggression.
Ancestry.com, a company that operates a network of genealogical and historical records, and provides DNA ancestry kits, recently asserted what history already knows: most of the denizens of Turkey are not Turks but rather the descendants of Christian peoples, mostly Greeks, who lived in Anatolia well over a millennium before the Turks invaded, but converted, due to Islam’s three choices (conversion, jizya/submission, or death).
As might be expected, many Turks, who tend to be zealous over their heritage, are outraged at finding that their ancestors were not conquering Turks but conquered infidels. This finding also underscores a vicious cycle I’ve discussed before: most of those Muslims who today persecute the indigenous Christians in their midst—and Turks rank among them—are themselves the descendants of Christians who converted to Islam to cease their own persecution.
One wonders how long before DNA studies reveal another, even more unflattering fact: the bloodline of conquering Muslims—Turks chief among them—is further adulterated with the blood of European concubines, sex-slaves, many millions of which were imported over the centuries by Turks, Tatars, Barbary corsairs, and various other Muslim peoples. The historical record is clear on this.
As one example, in 1438, Bartolomeo de Giano, an Italian Franciscan, witnessed the Turks’ slave raids throughout the Balkans. From Hungary, 300,000 were enslaved and “carried off in just a few days,” he wrote; from Serbia and Transylvania 100,000 were “led away in iron fetters tied to the backs of horses. . . . [and] women and children were herded by dogs without any mercy or piety. If one of them slowed down, unable to walk further because of thirst or pain, O Good Jesus! she immediately ended her life there in torment, cut in half.”
As one historian observes, “The massive enslavement of slavic populations during this period gave rise, in fact, to our word ‘slave’: in Bartolomeo’s time, to be a slave was to be a Slav.”
Similarly, the Greek historian, Doukas (1400-1462), writes the following about the palace of Ottoman sultan Bayezid:
[T]here one could find carefully selected boys and girls, with beautiful faces, sweet young boys and girls who shone more brightly than the sun. To what nations did they belong? They were Byzantines [Greeks], Serbs, Wallachians, Albanians, Hungarians, Saxons, Bulgarians, and Latins…. He himself [Sultan Bayezid] unceasingly gave himself over to pleasure, to the point of exhaustion, by indulging in debauchery with these boys and girls.
Nor, as some of these passages suggest, were European slaves used only for pleasure; Muslims regularly procreated with them as well. Even that one Turk most celebrated by Erdogan’s Turkey—Bayezid’s great-grandson, Muhammad II, the conqueror of Constantinople—was born of a Christian slave mother. This did not change the fact that he became an avowed enemy of Christendom—the “forerunner of antichrist” as he was described.
Moreover, as Darío Fernández-Morera, author of The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise, explains:
Such was the impact of Christian slaves on Islamic lands, that many of the Umayyad rulers of Islamic Spain, as the sons of sexual slaves, were blue-eyed and blond or red-haired; and the founder of the “Arabic” Nasrid dynasty of Granada was called al-Hamar, “the Red One,” because of his reddish hair and beard. … Arabist Celia del Moral observes that in Umayyad al-Andalus the most coveted and therefore expensive sexual slaves were blond and red-haired females from the Northern Christian regions.
In fact, according to the calculations of Spanish Arabist Julian Ribera, due to the constant sexual intercourse with European slave women, the genetic Arab component of each generation of Umayyad rulers was reduced by half, so that the last Umayyad, Hisham II (976-1013), was approximately only 0.09 percent Arab.
Nor was this phenomenon limited to Muslim elites—caliphs, sultans, emirs, and the like—because they could afford “well-staffed” harems. Naturally, it is they whose doings are recorded, because it is they—the rulers, not the lay Muslim—that chroniclers recorded. Even so, history makes clear that European sex-slaves were, depending on time and place, abundantly available to the average Muslim.
Thus we learn that the slave markets of Adrianople (Edirne), formerly the Ottoman capital, were so inundated with European flesh that children sold for pennies, “a very beautiful slave woman was exchanged for a pair of boots, and four Serbian slaves were traded for a horse.”
Similarly, considering that sixteenth century “Algiers teemed with Christian captives, and it became a common saying that a Christian slave was scarce a fair barter for an onion,” little wonder by the late eighteenth century, European observers noted how “the inhabitants of Algiers have a rather white complexion.”
Will Ancestry.com or similar organizations ever demonstrate this other unflattering fact concerning Muslim bloodlines through DNA? Unlikely.
Quoted material in the above article was excerpted from and is documented in the author’s book, Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West.
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When it comes to the Taliban, Nancy Pelosi is delusional
Showing a bizarre disassociation from facts, senility, or a feminist obsession that overrides all other things, Nancy Pelosi issued an utterly ludicrous statement on Afghanistan. Its entire focus is on women and girls. There’s no mention of the thousands or tens of thousands of men who have been and will be slaughtered in cold blood. There’s also no recognition that the Taliban is a medieval Islamic sect that believes women and girls (including little girls) belong in the home cooking for and satisfying the sexual needs of their Taliban husbands – and that’s it.
I’m printing the pertinent language from Pelosi’s statement, along with my comments.
The President is to be commended for the clarity of purpose of his statement on Afghanistan and the actions he has taken.
Pelosi is referring to a White House statement on Saturday when Kabul’s fall was imminent but before it actually happened. He stated that 5,000 troops will return to Afghanistan to get Americans and favored Afghans out of the country. Since then, the U.S. Embassy has fallen and it’s placed a notice on its website stating:
The security situation in Kabul is changing quickly including at the airport. There are reports of the airport taking fire; therefore we are instructing U.S. citizens to shelter in place.
Also, if Americans want to leave, they will face the ultimate bureaucratic insult to people looking at the possibility that they will be captured or killed by medieval Islamists: They must fill out an online form. Without it, tough luck!
U.S. citizens wanting assistance in departing the country should register for any option that might be identified to return to the United States, and must complete this Repatriation Assistance Request for each traveler in their group. Spouses and minor children of U.S. citizens in Afghanistan who are awaiting immigrant visas should also complete this form if they wish to depart. Please do so as soon as possible. You must complete this form even if you’ve previously submitted your information to the U.S. Embassy in Kabul. Do not call the U.S. Embassy in Kabul for details or updates about the flight. This form is the only way to communicate interest in flight options.
I’m sure that people sheltering in place from gunfire (with the Taliban using weapons America abandoned) are perfectly situated to go online and fill out those all-important forms.
Pelosi, though, has different priorities:
The Taliban must know that the world is watching its actions. We are deeply concerned about reports regarding the Taliban’s brutal treatment of all Afghans, especially women and girls. The U.S., the international community and the Afghan government must do everything we can to protect women and girls from inhumane treatment by the Taliban.
Once again, we’re seeing the administration’s bizarre belief that the Taliban care about the world’s opinion. Democrats care deeply, so much so that they govern to please “the world” before they govern to benefit Americans. The Taliban answer only to Allah, and they do so via the words of a fanatic warlord turned prophet. Those guides tell them that women exist solely to satisfy men’s lust.
Any political settlement that the Afghans pursue to avert bloodshed must include having women at the table. The fate of women and girls in Afghanistan is critical to the future of Afghanistan. As we strive to assist women, we must recognize that their voices are important, and all must listen to them for solutions, respectful of their culture. There is bipartisan support to assist the women and girls of Afghanistan. One of the successes of U.S.- NATO cooperation in Afghanistan was the progress made by women and girls. We must all continue to work together to ensure that is not eroded.
The Taliban don’t need a “political settlement.” They’ve won the war. As for bloodshed, they’re all in. As women and little girls are turned into sex slaves, I’m sure they’ll appreciate that Pelosi wants the Taliban to “listen to them for solutions,” all while the West is “respectful of their culture.” Defying all facts and logic, Pelosi has this delusional belief that there is some sort of gentlemanly agreement to be had with the Taliban, by which they swear to abandon the Koran’s mandates about women.
Our political leaders are clowns. They’re not even fun or funny clowns. They’re nightmare clowns from a horror movie. But this is no movie and real people will die and suffer in Afghanistan. And with radical Islam again on the move (and very successfully so), I worry that lots of us are going to die soon. I think it’s time to reinstate full security at iconic American locations that make ripe targets for terrorists.
Image: Nancy Pelosi (edited). YouTube screen grab.
Reflections on Kurt Westergaard and Sharia Speech Suppression
The power of a cartoonist's pencil.
Fri Aug 13, 2021
Among 12 caricatures of Islam’s prophet Muhammad published by the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten on September 30, 2005, “it was Westergaard’s image that would change my life,” the paper’s cultural editor Flemming Rose wrote. As he detailed in his 2014 book, The Tyranny of Silence: How One Cartoon Ignited a Global Debate on the Future of Free Speech, Kurt Westergaard, who died July 14, ignited a firestorm over the right to criticize Islam.
“I am not by nature a provocative person,” Rose related, despite a “global view of me as a dangerous and irresponsible troublemaker” for his role in unleashing what became known as the Cartoon Crisis. He had solicited cartoons of Muhammad in order to examine self-censorship and intimidation after Rose became aware of the difficulties confronting a Danish author who struggled to find illustrators willing to depict Muhammad in a children’s book. Almost immediately after publication, the Cartoon Crisis “spiraled into a violent international uproar, as Muslims around the world erupted in protest. Danish embassies were attacked, and more than 200 deaths were attributed to the protests.”
Muslim anger fixated on Westergaard’s drawing of Muhammad with a bomb in his turban, something that for him began innocently enough. As Rose recalled, this “drawing was done on September 21, 2005, the same day that [Westergaard] and other members of the Danish cartoonists’ society received my letter inviting them to depict Muhammad.” Westergaard remembered:
The idea came to me immediately. The bomb is an age-old symbol of terrorism, and I thought if I use the Arabic inscription from the Islamic creed I’d be able to make the point clear that Islam is the terrorists’ spiritual ammunition….It took maybe an hour, all told. It was just another day at the office, really.
No stranger to controversy over his political cartoons, Westergaard merely felt that “I did a job. I’m entitled to my opinion, and what I expressed in the drawing is true.” Rose noted that Westergaard had been an equal opportunity offender of others, including Christians and the Jewish state of Israel. A previous Westergaard cartoon had “showed the Star of David with a bomb attached to it—reminiscent now of his depiction of Muhammad in 2005,” Rose noted.
Maria Gomez agreed with Westergaard that the “drawing expressed how I felt inside my heart. It represented a piece of reality.” This Spanish woman lost her husband in the March 11, 2004, bombing of Madrid commuter trains by an Al-Qaeda cell. She later appeared at the 2007 trial of the bombers wearing a T-shirt with Westergaard’s Muhammad caricature, only to be told by the trial judge that her shirt was prejudicial to the trial proceedings.
“After the attack, Maria developed a deeper interest in Islam,” Rose unsurprisingly observed. “When she was a child, her grandfather had been concerned about immigration into Spain from North Africa and the Middle East, and he had often told her about Spain’s long history with Islam.” This historic subjugation only made Gomez identify more with Westergaard’s drawing.
Analyzing this identification, Rose observed that the “glorification of Muhammad among Muslims may be perceived as offensive to those whose kin have been killed in Muhammad’s name.” For Gomez, a “group of Muslims had murdered her husband and destroyed her life.” “Should it not be considered a mark of civilization that in the face of barbaric violence, we respond only with a cartoonist’s pencil and a T-stint?” Rose contrasted.
Not all Muslims agreed, and Rose, Westergaard, and the Jyllands-Posten received numerous threats after 2005. From 2007 on, Westergaard lived under police protection, which saved his life on New Year’s Day 2010. A Somali man linked to al-Shabab terrorists broke into Westergaard’s home while he was there with his five-year-old granddaughter and almost stabbed him to death before he was able to flee to a previously installed safe room and call the police.
These threats took numerous tolls on Westergaard’s liberty. For example, he resigned his Jyllands-Posten freelance position in summer 2010 in order to spare his colleagues concerns for their safety, and the “attack so alarmed Westergaard’s hairdresser that she refused to cut his hair,” Rose noted. Yet Westergaard remained resolute, stating, “I’m an atheist, and I can only say that the reactions to my drawing have made me stronger in my faith.”
As Rose extensively documents, many other creative individuals have drawn a hypocritical line at offending Muslims, even though otherwise the “breaking of taboos is considered to be progressive.” “Examples of self-censorship, intimidation, and pressure exerted by governments and interest groups on free speech were legion, both before and after we published the cartoons,” he noted. The late American writer and free speech advocate Nat Hentoff described in the book’s forward a “growing amount of self-censorship among individuals and societies confronted by highly-combative cultures that allow no criticism of their sacred beliefs.”
The reaction of Danish public figures, European Union (EU) leaders, and United Nations (UN) officials during the Cartoon Crisis particularly disgusted Rose. Their pandering to Muslim representatives recalled the “fawning Danish media’s appeasement of the Nazis” in Denmark’s powerful neighbor Germany during the 1930s. “And how did the EU respond to that challenge to its fundamental values? Basically, it left Denmark high and dry,” Rose lamented.
This appeasement played into longstanding ambitions of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), a grouping of 56 Muslim-majority nations, to suppress criticism of Islam globally. “The OIC has learned to adapt its demands to modern human rights jargon. It no longer demands the protection of Islam as such. Instead, it pleads protection of Muslims,” Rose wrote. Within this scheme, “Islamophobia” is an “ambiguous concept that had wormed its way into UN documents, covering a hodgepodge of legitimate criticism of religion and illegitimate discrimination against Muslims.”
The OIC thus joined in the chorus of those who accused that Jyllands-Posten had with the cartoons “misused its right to free speech to step on a group generally held in low esteem and often kicked around by the media,” Rose noted. These charges often invoked the “nonsense” that Europe’s Muslims had a position equivalent to the Jews in the 1930s in the face of rising Nazism. Some even suggested prosecuting Jyllands-Posten under Danish blasphemy or hate speech laws.
Such laws in Denmark and elsewhere made Rose worry that the “lack of a universally accepted definition of ‘hatred’ in international law” threatens free speech. Indeed, “intolerance and hatred toward others may, in many contexts, be quite legitimate emotions,” he noted. This includes Muslims and others “who commit violence, oppress women, persecute homosexuals, or indeed in any number of contexts involving gross injustice and abuse of power.”
Dissidents from Muslim backgrounds joined Rose in challenging the narrative of Jyllands-Posten and other critical voices as victimizers of Muslims, such as Maryam Namazie, an Iranian-born Marxist in the United Kingdom. “I don’t think women who are stoned to death would see those responsible for their deaths as representatives of a persecuted and oppressed minority,” stated this woman who experienced Islamic theocracy’s rise to power in Iran in 1979. “People are slaughtered in the name of religion by Islamic governments and movements,” she added.
Namazie’s fellow Iranian émigré, University of Leiden law professor Afshin Ellian, meanwhile noted that “Muslims in Europe are a powerful minority with representatives in European parliaments and governments.” His fellow immigrant to Holland, the Somalia-born Ayaan Hirsi Ali, also doubted that questioning Islam harmed Muslims. This ex-Muslim atheist noted that many of Europe’s disadvantaged Muslims, “who live in ghettos in Europe, are being brainwashed with totalitarian doctrine” promoted by a “rich oil state” such as Saudi Arabia.
Ali and others reminded Rose, who met his Russian wife during his many years as a foreign correspondent in the Soviet Union, of the human rights struggle under Communism. “A line of continuity runs from Eastern Bloc dissidence through the triumph of freedom in the Soviet Union in 1989—1991 to the struggle for civil rights that is going on today” against a “new totalitarian movement based on Islam,” he noted. “Freethinking forces exist in the Islamic world, insisting on free religious exercise and freedom of speech,” such as the Iranians who emailed Rose in support of the cartoons’ publication.
Rose’s experience has given him the insight that “no fundamental distinction exists between offending the feelings of communists or Muslims.” He noted Politburo archives released after the Cold War that revealed the anger of Soviet leaders towards Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the Russian dissident whose multivolume Gulag Archipelago in the 1970s exposed Soviet tyranny. The denunciations of him by “communist high priests were riddled with religious metaphor.”
Rose accurately concluded that the Cartoon Crisis was “about how to coexist in a world in which old boundaries have crumbled.” Modern technology and immigration have created a globalized world where “societies everywhere are becoming more multiethnic, multicultural, and multireligious.” Thus “if freedom and tolerance are to have a chance of surviving in the new world, we all need to develop thicker skin.”
More speech, not less, was Rose’s answer to inevitable culture clashes. “Words are a democracy’s way of dealing with conflict,” he noted. In reality, the “violence, destruction, and killings that occurred during the Cartoon Crisis took place in countries without freedom of speech and religion” such as Nigeria.
Rose admired how “freedom of speech enjoys a hallowed status in the United States.” Here in modern times racism had subsided precisely as free speech legal standards had liberalized. This “undermines those who in Europe insist on a causal link between legalization of hate speech on the one hand and racist violence and killings on the other.”
Similarly, the “widely touted claim that hate speech against the Jews was a primary cause of the Holocaust has no empirical support,” Rose noted. Weimar Republic authorities prosecuted numerous Nazi leaders under hate speech laws. Yet these legal processes merely offered Nazis a “glorious opportunity to bait the Jewish community in the bully pulpit of the court.”
Yet free speech advocate and lawyer Deborah Weiss, who met both Rose and Westergaard in the course of her work, understands how often isolated their views are. She observed in a recent conversation that free speech has only become more imperiled in the years since Westergaard’s cartoon. All the more reason to return to Rose’s arguments about the late Westergaard’s legacy.
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