- Jan 31, 2005
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Pretty accurate. Why DO we pander and tip toe around some of the worlds most violent people? Why is it that people are so afraid to offend someone they cant call a spade for what it is? When will the world wake up and realize theres a very large subset of the Islamic religion that wants the entire world converted or killed, and will stop at nothing to accomplish that?
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Why Must We Be Silent in the Face of Such Outrages?
By Adrian Morgan
The past week has seen three incidents demonstrating Islamists? total hatred for Christianity and the values of the West. On Wednesday, April 18 in Malatya, central Turkey, three Christians were tied up, tortured for up to three hours, and then had their throats slit. Two of the victims, Ugur Yuksel amd Necati Aydin, were Turkish, and the other was a German national, Tilmann Geske. Their crime was to be Christians, working for Zirve, a publishing house which prints Bibles.
Four people were arrested at the scene. The suspected leader of the killers, 19-year old Emre Gunaydin, had thrown himself from a window to escape arrest, sustaining head injuries in the fall. On Saturday, Gunaydin?s girlfriend was also arrested. Malatya is the hometown of Mehmet Ali Agca, who tried to murder Pope John Paul II in 1981. Even though both Turks who died on Wednesday had abandoned Islam and converted to Christianity, Ugur Yuksel was buried as a Muslim.
Thousands of miles away on Jolo island in the southern Philippines, seven Christians were taken hostage by Muslim terrorists last Monday. Their kidnappers belonged to the group Abu Sayyaf, which has links with Al Qaeda and also the pan-Asian terror group Jemaah Islamiyah which has enacted numerous atrocities, including the Bali bombings of October 12, 2002, in which 202 people died, and of October 1, 2005, in which 20 people died.
The Abu Sayyaf group has a reputation for hostage-taking. It also has a reputation for decapitating hostages. The leader of Abu Sayyaf on the island of Jolo is Radullan Sahiron, a one-armed man who rides a horse. This individual would be easy to identify, but because he beheads local people whom he considers to be "spies", no one informs on him, and he has so far escaped arrest. He has a 5 million-peso bounty on his head, worth $89,000 US.
On Thursday, April 19, the severed heads of five of the Christian victims were left at one army camp, and the heads of the other two were left at another military camp later on the same day. Their bodies were found in a village on Friday.
Last Tuesday, in Peshawar, main city of Pakistan?s troubled North-West Frontier Province, a disturbing video was recovered by Associated Press. A bearded man, identified as Ghulam Nabi, is shown in a car, claiming his innocence. A ligature is tied around his neck. Nabi is then shown on his knees on the ground, his hands tied behind his back. A man pulls at his beard to expose his throat. He is then decapitated.
What makes this video more disturbing is that the killer is a fresh-faced boy, barely 12 years of age. The video (censored at the moment the knife touches Nabi?s throat) can be found here. The boy hacks at the victim?s neck, and when he finally severs the head, it is raised aloft, while the words "Allahu Ackbar" ("Allah is great") are chanted by onlookers. The soundtrack of the video has songs praising Mullah Omar (leader of the Afghan Taliban) and Osama bin Laden.
Ghulam Nabi was a Pakistani Taliban member from Baluchistan, southwestern Pakistan, who was accused of being a "spy" for the US. Nabi was blamed for the death of Akhtar Mohammad Osmani, an ex-governor of Uruzgan province in Afghanistan. Osmani, a senior leader in the Afghan Taliban, had been killed by a US airstrike on December 19 last year.
Slitting throats and beheading people are not the actions of honorable men, especially as in Turkey and the Philippines the victims were guilty only of belonging to another faith. Apologists for Islam will claim that such actions are not typical of Islam, yet these people are either deliberately lying or they are totally ignorant of Islam?s history.
In Turkey, the killings of the three Christians have been condemned by the most senior Muslim in the nation, Ali Bardakoglu, head of the Religious Affairs Directorate. On September 14, 2006, Bardakoglu had demanded that Pope Benedict XVI retract comments which had been made in a speech at the University at Regensburg. Bardakoglu called the pontiff?s words "extraordinarily worrying, saddening and unfortunate" and questioned if they reflected the "spite, hatred and enmity" of others in the Christian world.
In his Regensberg Address on September 12, Benedict had quoted a Byzantine emperor, Manuel Paleologos, who around the year 1391 had said "show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." Though the Pope did not condone this statement, Muslims around the world did what Muslims seem to do best - they whined about their victimhood and threatened violence.
In Pakistan, the US-designated terror organization Jamaat ud-Dawa (not outlawed by Pakistan) issued a fatwa, urging the Muslim community to kill the Pope. In Britain, Anjem Choudary, a former leader of Al-Muhajiroun claimed outside the Catholic Westminster Cathedral that the Pope should be executed. Choudary was not charged for this.
Killings of Christians ensued. In Iraq, an Assyrian priest, Father Paulos Iskander, was beheaded, and a 14-year old Christian boy was crucified in Albasra. A group calling itself "Kataab Ashbal Al Islam Al Salafi" threatened to kill all Christians in Iraq if the pontiff did not apologize to Mohammed, the founder of Islam.
In Israel, churches were attacked. In Somalia on September 17 an Italian nun, Sister Leonella, was shot three times in the back while she worked in the SOS Hospital in the Huriwa district of Mogadishu. Three other nuns were subsequently evacuated for their safety. A Somali imam, Sheikh Abubukar Hassan Malin, urged Muslims to "punish" the Pope. He said: "Whoever offends our Prophet Mohammed should be killed on the spot by the nearest Muslim."
When Salman Rushdie received a fatwa against his life on February 14, 1989 for "insulting" Islam, Muslims across Britain, India and Pakistan called for his death. In July 1991, Hitoshi Igarashi, Rushdie?s Japanese translator, was stabbed to death. In the same month Ettore Capriolo, the Italian translator of the Satanic Verses, was seriously injured in a stabbing attack.
On November 2 2004, baby-faced Muslim killer Mohammed Bouyeri stabbed, shot and tried to behead film-maker Theo van Gogh on an Amsterdam street. Van Gogh had made a film about the appalling treatment of women in Islam. This film, called Submission, (Islam means just that) had been scripted by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali apostate from Islam. With a knife, Bouyeri had pinned a "hit list" to van Gogh?s chest. This list named people who had insulted Islam, including Hirsi Ali and Dutch politician Geert Wilders.
In February last year, Danish cartoons of the so-called prophet Mohammed led to violent riots from Indonesia to Gaza to Pakistan, Nigeria and India. At least thirty people died. The illustrators had to go into hiding. A Taliban commander in Pakistan claimed that assassins were traveling to Denmark to kill the artists. In Trabzon in Turkey on February 5, 2006, Catholic priest Father Andrea Santoro was shot in the back by a 16-year old youth who shouted "Allahu Ackbar". The youth was later sentenced to 18 years? jail.
In India, a Muslim state minister in Uttar Pradesh offered $10 million to anyone who beheaded any of the Danish cartoonists. In Peshawar in Pakistan Mohammed Yousaf Qureshi, imam of the Mohabat Khan mosque, offered1.5 million rupees ($17,000) and a car to anyone who killed one of the artists. Neither of these individuals was charged with incitement.
When Banglaldeshi author Taslima Nasreen wrote of the poor treatment of Hindus in her native country and criticized Islam?s treatment of women, an imam issued a fatwa against her, offering a bounty of $5,000 upon her head. In 1994 after mass protests against her, Taslima had to leave Bangladesh. She later went to Calcutta in India to care for her dying mother. In March 2004, the head of the Muslim Raza Academy threatened to burn her if she ever set foot in Mumbai (Bombay).
In January 2004, Syed Noor-ur-Rehman Barkati, main imam of Tippu Sultan Mosque in Kolkata said to a congregation of 10,000 that he would offer 20,000 rupees ($436) to anyone who would blacken Taslima?s face "with ink, paint or tar. Or she can be garlanded with shoes." In June 2006 the same imam offered on local TV the sum of 50,000 rupees ($1,175) to anyone who blackened her face and drove her out of Calcutta. Last month Taqi Raza Khan, president of the All India Ibtehad Council, issued a 500,000 rupee ($11,760) reward for anyone who would decapitate (sar qalam karna) or drive Taslima Nasreen from India.
In Pakistan, a malicious rumor that a Koran has been "desecrated" is enough to cause anti-Christian riots. On November 12, 2005, such a rumor led to a community at Sangla Hill in Punjab province being attacked by Muslim fanatics who were urged on by imams at mosques. Four churches were attacked, along with two priests? houses, a kindergarten school, a nunnery and a medical center.
On February 19, 2006 Muslims incensed by the Danish cartoons rampaged against Christian targets in Sukkur, Sindh province in south Pakistan. The St Saviour?s Church and St Xavier?s Church, as well as St Mary?s school which had been built in 1889, were set alight.
On September 19 last year, French philosophy lecturer Robert Redeker wrote an incisive piece on Islam for the newspaper Le Figaro. This included a statement that the Koran was "a book of unparalleled violence". As a result, he found himself and his family on the receiving end of death threats. Photographs of Redker?s family and maps of his home were circulated on the internet. He and his family moved location several times, and he lost his job.
Is there a pattern in the above incidents? Since the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, Muslims around the world have learned to exploit the politics of fear. Muslims have threatened, and continue to threaten, death against anyone who "insults" Islam or its founder. And what is the end result? People in the West buy into this thuggish barbarism. The ideological foundations of the West were built upon the finest principles distilled from ancient Greek, Christian and Jewish heritage. Yet now, those who represent us in the media and politics are intimidated into silence. Like cowards with no principles, we offer up our bellies to the beast of Islam.
Last week the biggest news in Lewiston, Maine, concerned a terrible "hate-crime", where a college student put a bag of pork onto a table where Muslim Somali students were eating. The incident was not something to praise, but compared to Islam?s intimidation of the entire Western world, it amounts to less than a hill of beans.
In Europe, the ideologues of the European Union have created a lexicon of words that politicians must never use - such as "fundamentalism", "jihad" and "Islamic terrorism", even though Islam was built upon terrorism and war. One EU commissioner, Franco Frattini, has even stated publicly that there is "no such thing" as Islamic terrorism.
Out of fear, people cave in before they are even threatened. In September 2005 the Tate Gallery in Pimlico, London, removed an artwork by conceptual artist John Latham, because it contained a copy of the Koran. In November 2005, a production of the play Tamburlaine the Great was deliberately censored at the Barbican in London. The producer, David Farr, omitted a scene where Tamburlaine burns the Koran, admitting he had done so for fear of offending Muslims.
When a 1740 play by Voltaire, entitled Fanatacisme, ou Mahomet le Prophete (Fanatacism, or Mohammed the Prophet) was due to be read out in Geneva in 1994, the authorities banned the performance. When the play was performed in the southern French town of Saint-Genis-Pouilly in December 2005, Muslims caused a small riot.
In Germany in September 2006, Deutsche Oper Berlin cancelled a production of Mozart?s opera Idomeneo. The revised production included severed heads of religious leaders, including Mohammed. This was thought by Kirsten Harms, the theater?s Director, to be too risky. She cited "questions of sensitivity, also questions of political diplomacy" for her actions. The opera was later staged with little fuss.
Dante Aligheiri (1265 - 1321) wrote the visionary book the Divine Comedy (Divina Commedia) in three parts. The Inferno features (in Canto 28) a description of Mohammed in Hell: "Rent from the chin to where one breaketh wind. Between his legs were hanging down his entrails; his heart was visible, and the dismal sack that maketh excrement of what is eaten." In the 15th century, artist Giovanni da Modena painted a fresco of Hell, including Mohammed as one its denizens, in the Basilica of St Petronio in Bologna, Italy (pictured). In 2002 a Muslim plot to destroy the fresco was foiled.
In Britain, appeasement of Muslims proliferates. Churches hold interfaith services, with Muslims leading prayers. So far, no mosque has reciprocated by holding interfaith services with Christians leading prayer. Judeo-Christian morality guided the West and helped it to grow, yet now Christians are weak in defense of their faith. Councils such as Lambeth in south London have purged all mention of Christmas in their Christmas illuminations.
Jews are regularly insulted and attacked by Muslims. I saw this at first hand when I lived in Stamford Hill, an Orthodox Jewish area of north London. Jews had lived there for a century but in the 1990s, Muslims from outside the neighborhood began to buy up properties in the area to create Islamic seminaries. In Casenove Road, N16, a Muslim boys? school was set up less than 15 yards from an Orthodox school, and fighting regularly occurred, instigated mostly by Muslim pupils. The media and the police ignore their plight, preferring to magnify the slights against Islam, which rarely involve violence. Jewish people are FOUR TIMES more likely to be on the receiving end of faith-based attacks than Muslims.
Rabbi Alex Chapper, from Ilford in Essex, was walking home from synagogue with three friends, when they were attacked by a group of seven Muslim teenagers, who had called them "Yehudi". One shouted: "We are Pakistani, you are Jewish. We are going to kill you," before punching Rabbi Chapper in the face. One Jewish man was hit over the head with a bottle, but police did nothing. Rabbi Chapper said: "We identified the youths and told the police but they were never prosecuted. They just did not seem interested. I feel very let down."
English language Islamic websites continue to produce anti-Semitic filth like the following from a Saudi site: "The Jews, who are the nation of pigs and monkeys, are nothing but a source of evil, corruption, tribulation and war. Hatred against the Muslims is inherited by every generation of Jews who in turn teach it to their children. Our enmity and hostility against them is based on our faith."
Abdulrahman al-Sudais (also spelled Sudeis or Sudayyis) is imam at the Grand Mosque at Mecca. He has called Jews "the scum of the human race, the rats of the world, the violators of pacts and agreements, the murderers of the prophets, and the offspring of apes and pigs."
This anti-Semitism was initiated by Mohammed himself, who according to Sahih Muslim said: "The last hour would not come unless the Muslims will fight against the Jews and the Muslims would kill them until the Jews would hide themselves behind a stone or a tree and a stone or a tree would say: Muslim, or the servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me; come and kill him..." Sura 5:60 of the Koran describes certain Jews transformed into apes and pigs, and in Sura 5:82 it is written: "Thou wilt find the most vehement of mankind in hostility to those who believe (to be) the Jews and the idolaters."
Two high street banks in Britain, the Natwest and Halifax, ordered that no pigs should be depicted in their branches or advertising, lest they offend Muslims. Jews have been a vital presence in Britain since the time of Oliver Cromwell, and though Jews do not eat pork, no bank had paused to consider if images of piggy banks might offend Jews. Dudley Council tried to ban all images of pigs in 2005, lest these "cause offense" to Muslims.
Schools also try to censor mentions of pigs, for fear of hurting Muslim feelings. In Batley, Yorkshire, a principal banned all telling of stories involving pigs to young children. Barbara Harris explained: "Recently I have been aware of an occasion where young Muslim children in class were read stories about pigs. We try to be sensitive to the fact that for Muslims talk of pigs is offensive."
This March, a children?s concert was altered by politically correct teachers, who objected to mention of the Three Little Pigs. These became the "Three Little Puppies", before public outcry reversed the decision. A spokeswoman for Kirklees Primary Music Festival said: "We feared that some Muslim children wouldn?t sing along to the words about pigs. We didn?t want to take that risk. If changing a few words avoids offense then we will do so."
A recent report from Britain?s Historical Association claims that in some UK schools, teachers have stopped teaching about the Holocaust or the Crusades. This is because the educators were unwilling to confront "anti-Semitic sentiment and Holocaust denial among some Muslim pupils."
We in the West (and particularly in Britain) have become deracinated, afraid to talk of our culture with any pride. "Heritage" in Britain merely celebrates a few old buildings, but not the thoughts, deeds, traditions, inventiveness, aspirations and inspirations of our forebears.
In the United States, Muslims have openly campaigned to demand that public buildings have no representations of Mohammed displayed. According to Bukhari, "whoever makes a picture, will be punished on the Day of Resurrection and will be ordered to put a soul in that picture, which he will not be able to do." In the 1950s, when the Muslim presence in America was minimal, a sculpture of Mohammed was removed from the steps of the Manhattan Appellant Courthouse in New York after lobbying by Muslim nations.
In 1935, when the current Supreme Court building was opened, it contained a frieze of historical law-givers, carved by architectural sculptor Adolph A. Weinman. This included an image of Mohammed (pictured). In 1997, CAIR petitioned Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, demanding that the statue be sandblasted or removed. CAIR, then only three years in existence, objected to the sword in Mohammed?s hand as it was viewed as "reinforcing long-held stereotypes of Muslims as intolerant conquerors."
The stereotype is not incorrect. According to the Koran, Mohammed himself was a warmonger. One entire Sura of the Koran, (Sura 8, Al-Anfal or "The Spoils of War") describes the caravan raiding committed by the "prophet" outside Mecca. The earliest biographer of Mohammed was Ibn Isshaq (d. 768). His work survives in redactions by Ibn Hisham (died 828). In one of the many battles waged by Mohammed, that of Udud (625 AD), the prophet offered a sword to the bravest fighter, saying of this weapon: "It is to strike the enemy?s faces with it until it is bent."
If Mohammed were alive today, he would almost certainly be in jail, guilty of war crimes. Suspecting a plot against himself, he ordered that the entire male population of a Jewish tribe in Medina, the Banu Qurayzah, should be decapitated, according to Isshaq?s testimony. Seven hundred males were beheaded in one afternoon while Mohammed watched. The wives and children of the tribe were distributed as slaves and "booty" to his followers.
Mohammed today would also be subject to the terms of Megan?s Law. When he was in his sixth decade of life, Mohammed consummated his marriage to Aisha. She was a child aged nine. Bukhari (810 to 870 AD) wrote (Vol VII, Book 62, Number 64): "Narrated Aisha: that the Prophet married her when she was six years old and he consummated his marriage when she was nine years old. Hisham said: I have been informed that ?Aisha remained with the Prophet for nine years (i.e. till his death)."
Tabari (d. 923) wrote (IX:131): (Aisha narrated) "My mother came to me while I was being swung on a swing between two branches and got me down. My nurse wiped my face with some water and started leading me. When I was at the door she stopped so I could catch my breath. I was then brought in while the Messenger was sitting on a bed in our house. My mother made me sit on his lap. Then the men and women got up and left. The Prophet consummated his marriage with me in my house when I was nine years old."
Personally, I can only describe such an individual as a monster, despite claims by Somali cleric Sheikh Ahmed Abdullahi that Mohammed was "the most honorable person who ever lived in the world."
Via the internet, I have twice been subjected to Muslim threats to have my head sliced off, because I was not "respectful" of Islam. While extremists terrorize people with their threats, so-called "moderate" political Muslims simultaneously work with their leftist allies to erode the social fabric of Western societies. I have been vilified by members of Britain?s left as a "frothing right-wing Islamophobe", even though I abhor any poor treatment of individual Muslims. Such is the price, it seems, of free speech in today?s world.
I am a citizen of a free country that is rapidly losing its sense of what freedom represents. Freedom of expression, freedom of speech, are fundamentals in a healthy democracy. Appeasement to an uncompromising 7th century ideology, especially when such appeasement is motivated more by fear than by genuine respect, is the fast route to totalitarianism or subjugation.
America is not nearly as far down the road to perdition as Europe and Britain. Unless people are allowed to speak freely, critically and openly about any dead religious figure, even if that speech causes offense to some, the very mainstays of our Western values will disappear. I would rather live free and forthright, even with death threats from barbarians, than be cowed into silence under PC servitude. Remember what your Constitution was built upon, and stand up for what it contains. I fear that Britain is already dying. Please do not allow this to happen to your great nation.
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Why Must We Be Silent in the Face of Such Outrages?
By Adrian Morgan
The past week has seen three incidents demonstrating Islamists? total hatred for Christianity and the values of the West. On Wednesday, April 18 in Malatya, central Turkey, three Christians were tied up, tortured for up to three hours, and then had their throats slit. Two of the victims, Ugur Yuksel amd Necati Aydin, were Turkish, and the other was a German national, Tilmann Geske. Their crime was to be Christians, working for Zirve, a publishing house which prints Bibles.
Four people were arrested at the scene. The suspected leader of the killers, 19-year old Emre Gunaydin, had thrown himself from a window to escape arrest, sustaining head injuries in the fall. On Saturday, Gunaydin?s girlfriend was also arrested. Malatya is the hometown of Mehmet Ali Agca, who tried to murder Pope John Paul II in 1981. Even though both Turks who died on Wednesday had abandoned Islam and converted to Christianity, Ugur Yuksel was buried as a Muslim.
Thousands of miles away on Jolo island in the southern Philippines, seven Christians were taken hostage by Muslim terrorists last Monday. Their kidnappers belonged to the group Abu Sayyaf, which has links with Al Qaeda and also the pan-Asian terror group Jemaah Islamiyah which has enacted numerous atrocities, including the Bali bombings of October 12, 2002, in which 202 people died, and of October 1, 2005, in which 20 people died.
The Abu Sayyaf group has a reputation for hostage-taking. It also has a reputation for decapitating hostages. The leader of Abu Sayyaf on the island of Jolo is Radullan Sahiron, a one-armed man who rides a horse. This individual would be easy to identify, but because he beheads local people whom he considers to be "spies", no one informs on him, and he has so far escaped arrest. He has a 5 million-peso bounty on his head, worth $89,000 US.
On Thursday, April 19, the severed heads of five of the Christian victims were left at one army camp, and the heads of the other two were left at another military camp later on the same day. Their bodies were found in a village on Friday.
Last Tuesday, in Peshawar, main city of Pakistan?s troubled North-West Frontier Province, a disturbing video was recovered by Associated Press. A bearded man, identified as Ghulam Nabi, is shown in a car, claiming his innocence. A ligature is tied around his neck. Nabi is then shown on his knees on the ground, his hands tied behind his back. A man pulls at his beard to expose his throat. He is then decapitated.
What makes this video more disturbing is that the killer is a fresh-faced boy, barely 12 years of age. The video (censored at the moment the knife touches Nabi?s throat) can be found here. The boy hacks at the victim?s neck, and when he finally severs the head, it is raised aloft, while the words "Allahu Ackbar" ("Allah is great") are chanted by onlookers. The soundtrack of the video has songs praising Mullah Omar (leader of the Afghan Taliban) and Osama bin Laden.
Ghulam Nabi was a Pakistani Taliban member from Baluchistan, southwestern Pakistan, who was accused of being a "spy" for the US. Nabi was blamed for the death of Akhtar Mohammad Osmani, an ex-governor of Uruzgan province in Afghanistan. Osmani, a senior leader in the Afghan Taliban, had been killed by a US airstrike on December 19 last year.
Slitting throats and beheading people are not the actions of honorable men, especially as in Turkey and the Philippines the victims were guilty only of belonging to another faith. Apologists for Islam will claim that such actions are not typical of Islam, yet these people are either deliberately lying or they are totally ignorant of Islam?s history.
In Turkey, the killings of the three Christians have been condemned by the most senior Muslim in the nation, Ali Bardakoglu, head of the Religious Affairs Directorate. On September 14, 2006, Bardakoglu had demanded that Pope Benedict XVI retract comments which had been made in a speech at the University at Regensburg. Bardakoglu called the pontiff?s words "extraordinarily worrying, saddening and unfortunate" and questioned if they reflected the "spite, hatred and enmity" of others in the Christian world.
In his Regensberg Address on September 12, Benedict had quoted a Byzantine emperor, Manuel Paleologos, who around the year 1391 had said "show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." Though the Pope did not condone this statement, Muslims around the world did what Muslims seem to do best - they whined about their victimhood and threatened violence.
In Pakistan, the US-designated terror organization Jamaat ud-Dawa (not outlawed by Pakistan) issued a fatwa, urging the Muslim community to kill the Pope. In Britain, Anjem Choudary, a former leader of Al-Muhajiroun claimed outside the Catholic Westminster Cathedral that the Pope should be executed. Choudary was not charged for this.
Killings of Christians ensued. In Iraq, an Assyrian priest, Father Paulos Iskander, was beheaded, and a 14-year old Christian boy was crucified in Albasra. A group calling itself "Kataab Ashbal Al Islam Al Salafi" threatened to kill all Christians in Iraq if the pontiff did not apologize to Mohammed, the founder of Islam.
In Israel, churches were attacked. In Somalia on September 17 an Italian nun, Sister Leonella, was shot three times in the back while she worked in the SOS Hospital in the Huriwa district of Mogadishu. Three other nuns were subsequently evacuated for their safety. A Somali imam, Sheikh Abubukar Hassan Malin, urged Muslims to "punish" the Pope. He said: "Whoever offends our Prophet Mohammed should be killed on the spot by the nearest Muslim."
When Salman Rushdie received a fatwa against his life on February 14, 1989 for "insulting" Islam, Muslims across Britain, India and Pakistan called for his death. In July 1991, Hitoshi Igarashi, Rushdie?s Japanese translator, was stabbed to death. In the same month Ettore Capriolo, the Italian translator of the Satanic Verses, was seriously injured in a stabbing attack.
On November 2 2004, baby-faced Muslim killer Mohammed Bouyeri stabbed, shot and tried to behead film-maker Theo van Gogh on an Amsterdam street. Van Gogh had made a film about the appalling treatment of women in Islam. This film, called Submission, (Islam means just that) had been scripted by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali apostate from Islam. With a knife, Bouyeri had pinned a "hit list" to van Gogh?s chest. This list named people who had insulted Islam, including Hirsi Ali and Dutch politician Geert Wilders.
In February last year, Danish cartoons of the so-called prophet Mohammed led to violent riots from Indonesia to Gaza to Pakistan, Nigeria and India. At least thirty people died. The illustrators had to go into hiding. A Taliban commander in Pakistan claimed that assassins were traveling to Denmark to kill the artists. In Trabzon in Turkey on February 5, 2006, Catholic priest Father Andrea Santoro was shot in the back by a 16-year old youth who shouted "Allahu Ackbar". The youth was later sentenced to 18 years? jail.
In India, a Muslim state minister in Uttar Pradesh offered $10 million to anyone who beheaded any of the Danish cartoonists. In Peshawar in Pakistan Mohammed Yousaf Qureshi, imam of the Mohabat Khan mosque, offered1.5 million rupees ($17,000) and a car to anyone who killed one of the artists. Neither of these individuals was charged with incitement.
When Banglaldeshi author Taslima Nasreen wrote of the poor treatment of Hindus in her native country and criticized Islam?s treatment of women, an imam issued a fatwa against her, offering a bounty of $5,000 upon her head. In 1994 after mass protests against her, Taslima had to leave Bangladesh. She later went to Calcutta in India to care for her dying mother. In March 2004, the head of the Muslim Raza Academy threatened to burn her if she ever set foot in Mumbai (Bombay).
In January 2004, Syed Noor-ur-Rehman Barkati, main imam of Tippu Sultan Mosque in Kolkata said to a congregation of 10,000 that he would offer 20,000 rupees ($436) to anyone who would blacken Taslima?s face "with ink, paint or tar. Or she can be garlanded with shoes." In June 2006 the same imam offered on local TV the sum of 50,000 rupees ($1,175) to anyone who blackened her face and drove her out of Calcutta. Last month Taqi Raza Khan, president of the All India Ibtehad Council, issued a 500,000 rupee ($11,760) reward for anyone who would decapitate (sar qalam karna) or drive Taslima Nasreen from India.
In Pakistan, a malicious rumor that a Koran has been "desecrated" is enough to cause anti-Christian riots. On November 12, 2005, such a rumor led to a community at Sangla Hill in Punjab province being attacked by Muslim fanatics who were urged on by imams at mosques. Four churches were attacked, along with two priests? houses, a kindergarten school, a nunnery and a medical center.
On February 19, 2006 Muslims incensed by the Danish cartoons rampaged against Christian targets in Sukkur, Sindh province in south Pakistan. The St Saviour?s Church and St Xavier?s Church, as well as St Mary?s school which had been built in 1889, were set alight.
On September 19 last year, French philosophy lecturer Robert Redeker wrote an incisive piece on Islam for the newspaper Le Figaro. This included a statement that the Koran was "a book of unparalleled violence". As a result, he found himself and his family on the receiving end of death threats. Photographs of Redker?s family and maps of his home were circulated on the internet. He and his family moved location several times, and he lost his job.
Is there a pattern in the above incidents? Since the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, Muslims around the world have learned to exploit the politics of fear. Muslims have threatened, and continue to threaten, death against anyone who "insults" Islam or its founder. And what is the end result? People in the West buy into this thuggish barbarism. The ideological foundations of the West were built upon the finest principles distilled from ancient Greek, Christian and Jewish heritage. Yet now, those who represent us in the media and politics are intimidated into silence. Like cowards with no principles, we offer up our bellies to the beast of Islam.
Last week the biggest news in Lewiston, Maine, concerned a terrible "hate-crime", where a college student put a bag of pork onto a table where Muslim Somali students were eating. The incident was not something to praise, but compared to Islam?s intimidation of the entire Western world, it amounts to less than a hill of beans.
In Europe, the ideologues of the European Union have created a lexicon of words that politicians must never use - such as "fundamentalism", "jihad" and "Islamic terrorism", even though Islam was built upon terrorism and war. One EU commissioner, Franco Frattini, has even stated publicly that there is "no such thing" as Islamic terrorism.
Out of fear, people cave in before they are even threatened. In September 2005 the Tate Gallery in Pimlico, London, removed an artwork by conceptual artist John Latham, because it contained a copy of the Koran. In November 2005, a production of the play Tamburlaine the Great was deliberately censored at the Barbican in London. The producer, David Farr, omitted a scene where Tamburlaine burns the Koran, admitting he had done so for fear of offending Muslims.
When a 1740 play by Voltaire, entitled Fanatacisme, ou Mahomet le Prophete (Fanatacism, or Mohammed the Prophet) was due to be read out in Geneva in 1994, the authorities banned the performance. When the play was performed in the southern French town of Saint-Genis-Pouilly in December 2005, Muslims caused a small riot.
In Germany in September 2006, Deutsche Oper Berlin cancelled a production of Mozart?s opera Idomeneo. The revised production included severed heads of religious leaders, including Mohammed. This was thought by Kirsten Harms, the theater?s Director, to be too risky. She cited "questions of sensitivity, also questions of political diplomacy" for her actions. The opera was later staged with little fuss.
Dante Aligheiri (1265 - 1321) wrote the visionary book the Divine Comedy (Divina Commedia) in three parts. The Inferno features (in Canto 28) a description of Mohammed in Hell: "Rent from the chin to where one breaketh wind. Between his legs were hanging down his entrails; his heart was visible, and the dismal sack that maketh excrement of what is eaten." In the 15th century, artist Giovanni da Modena painted a fresco of Hell, including Mohammed as one its denizens, in the Basilica of St Petronio in Bologna, Italy (pictured). In 2002 a Muslim plot to destroy the fresco was foiled.
In Britain, appeasement of Muslims proliferates. Churches hold interfaith services, with Muslims leading prayers. So far, no mosque has reciprocated by holding interfaith services with Christians leading prayer. Judeo-Christian morality guided the West and helped it to grow, yet now Christians are weak in defense of their faith. Councils such as Lambeth in south London have purged all mention of Christmas in their Christmas illuminations.
Jews are regularly insulted and attacked by Muslims. I saw this at first hand when I lived in Stamford Hill, an Orthodox Jewish area of north London. Jews had lived there for a century but in the 1990s, Muslims from outside the neighborhood began to buy up properties in the area to create Islamic seminaries. In Casenove Road, N16, a Muslim boys? school was set up less than 15 yards from an Orthodox school, and fighting regularly occurred, instigated mostly by Muslim pupils. The media and the police ignore their plight, preferring to magnify the slights against Islam, which rarely involve violence. Jewish people are FOUR TIMES more likely to be on the receiving end of faith-based attacks than Muslims.
Rabbi Alex Chapper, from Ilford in Essex, was walking home from synagogue with three friends, when they were attacked by a group of seven Muslim teenagers, who had called them "Yehudi". One shouted: "We are Pakistani, you are Jewish. We are going to kill you," before punching Rabbi Chapper in the face. One Jewish man was hit over the head with a bottle, but police did nothing. Rabbi Chapper said: "We identified the youths and told the police but they were never prosecuted. They just did not seem interested. I feel very let down."
English language Islamic websites continue to produce anti-Semitic filth like the following from a Saudi site: "The Jews, who are the nation of pigs and monkeys, are nothing but a source of evil, corruption, tribulation and war. Hatred against the Muslims is inherited by every generation of Jews who in turn teach it to their children. Our enmity and hostility against them is based on our faith."
Abdulrahman al-Sudais (also spelled Sudeis or Sudayyis) is imam at the Grand Mosque at Mecca. He has called Jews "the scum of the human race, the rats of the world, the violators of pacts and agreements, the murderers of the prophets, and the offspring of apes and pigs."
This anti-Semitism was initiated by Mohammed himself, who according to Sahih Muslim said: "The last hour would not come unless the Muslims will fight against the Jews and the Muslims would kill them until the Jews would hide themselves behind a stone or a tree and a stone or a tree would say: Muslim, or the servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me; come and kill him..." Sura 5:60 of the Koran describes certain Jews transformed into apes and pigs, and in Sura 5:82 it is written: "Thou wilt find the most vehement of mankind in hostility to those who believe (to be) the Jews and the idolaters."
Two high street banks in Britain, the Natwest and Halifax, ordered that no pigs should be depicted in their branches or advertising, lest they offend Muslims. Jews have been a vital presence in Britain since the time of Oliver Cromwell, and though Jews do not eat pork, no bank had paused to consider if images of piggy banks might offend Jews. Dudley Council tried to ban all images of pigs in 2005, lest these "cause offense" to Muslims.
Schools also try to censor mentions of pigs, for fear of hurting Muslim feelings. In Batley, Yorkshire, a principal banned all telling of stories involving pigs to young children. Barbara Harris explained: "Recently I have been aware of an occasion where young Muslim children in class were read stories about pigs. We try to be sensitive to the fact that for Muslims talk of pigs is offensive."
This March, a children?s concert was altered by politically correct teachers, who objected to mention of the Three Little Pigs. These became the "Three Little Puppies", before public outcry reversed the decision. A spokeswoman for Kirklees Primary Music Festival said: "We feared that some Muslim children wouldn?t sing along to the words about pigs. We didn?t want to take that risk. If changing a few words avoids offense then we will do so."
A recent report from Britain?s Historical Association claims that in some UK schools, teachers have stopped teaching about the Holocaust or the Crusades. This is because the educators were unwilling to confront "anti-Semitic sentiment and Holocaust denial among some Muslim pupils."
We in the West (and particularly in Britain) have become deracinated, afraid to talk of our culture with any pride. "Heritage" in Britain merely celebrates a few old buildings, but not the thoughts, deeds, traditions, inventiveness, aspirations and inspirations of our forebears.
In the United States, Muslims have openly campaigned to demand that public buildings have no representations of Mohammed displayed. According to Bukhari, "whoever makes a picture, will be punished on the Day of Resurrection and will be ordered to put a soul in that picture, which he will not be able to do." In the 1950s, when the Muslim presence in America was minimal, a sculpture of Mohammed was removed from the steps of the Manhattan Appellant Courthouse in New York after lobbying by Muslim nations.
In 1935, when the current Supreme Court building was opened, it contained a frieze of historical law-givers, carved by architectural sculptor Adolph A. Weinman. This included an image of Mohammed (pictured). In 1997, CAIR petitioned Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, demanding that the statue be sandblasted or removed. CAIR, then only three years in existence, objected to the sword in Mohammed?s hand as it was viewed as "reinforcing long-held stereotypes of Muslims as intolerant conquerors."
The stereotype is not incorrect. According to the Koran, Mohammed himself was a warmonger. One entire Sura of the Koran, (Sura 8, Al-Anfal or "The Spoils of War") describes the caravan raiding committed by the "prophet" outside Mecca. The earliest biographer of Mohammed was Ibn Isshaq (d. 768). His work survives in redactions by Ibn Hisham (died 828). In one of the many battles waged by Mohammed, that of Udud (625 AD), the prophet offered a sword to the bravest fighter, saying of this weapon: "It is to strike the enemy?s faces with it until it is bent."
If Mohammed were alive today, he would almost certainly be in jail, guilty of war crimes. Suspecting a plot against himself, he ordered that the entire male population of a Jewish tribe in Medina, the Banu Qurayzah, should be decapitated, according to Isshaq?s testimony. Seven hundred males were beheaded in one afternoon while Mohammed watched. The wives and children of the tribe were distributed as slaves and "booty" to his followers.
Mohammed today would also be subject to the terms of Megan?s Law. When he was in his sixth decade of life, Mohammed consummated his marriage to Aisha. She was a child aged nine. Bukhari (810 to 870 AD) wrote (Vol VII, Book 62, Number 64): "Narrated Aisha: that the Prophet married her when she was six years old and he consummated his marriage when she was nine years old. Hisham said: I have been informed that ?Aisha remained with the Prophet for nine years (i.e. till his death)."
Tabari (d. 923) wrote (IX:131): (Aisha narrated) "My mother came to me while I was being swung on a swing between two branches and got me down. My nurse wiped my face with some water and started leading me. When I was at the door she stopped so I could catch my breath. I was then brought in while the Messenger was sitting on a bed in our house. My mother made me sit on his lap. Then the men and women got up and left. The Prophet consummated his marriage with me in my house when I was nine years old."
Personally, I can only describe such an individual as a monster, despite claims by Somali cleric Sheikh Ahmed Abdullahi that Mohammed was "the most honorable person who ever lived in the world."
Via the internet, I have twice been subjected to Muslim threats to have my head sliced off, because I was not "respectful" of Islam. While extremists terrorize people with their threats, so-called "moderate" political Muslims simultaneously work with their leftist allies to erode the social fabric of Western societies. I have been vilified by members of Britain?s left as a "frothing right-wing Islamophobe", even though I abhor any poor treatment of individual Muslims. Such is the price, it seems, of free speech in today?s world.
I am a citizen of a free country that is rapidly losing its sense of what freedom represents. Freedom of expression, freedom of speech, are fundamentals in a healthy democracy. Appeasement to an uncompromising 7th century ideology, especially when such appeasement is motivated more by fear than by genuine respect, is the fast route to totalitarianism or subjugation.
America is not nearly as far down the road to perdition as Europe and Britain. Unless people are allowed to speak freely, critically and openly about any dead religious figure, even if that speech causes offense to some, the very mainstays of our Western values will disappear. I would rather live free and forthright, even with death threats from barbarians, than be cowed into silence under PC servitude. Remember what your Constitution was built upon, and stand up for what it contains. I fear that Britain is already dying. Please do not allow this to happen to your great nation.
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