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American Freedom Alliance mourns the sudden passing of its founder and president, Avi Davis.  
He was a great friend, a truly fine man, and an intellectual powerhouse whose sudden loss we all feel acutely.  
Avi and this organization have been a tremendous force for freedom, and the Board of Directors of AFA has been meeting to ensure that this important work continues.  We are committed to the mission, and to honoring Avi.  
Recently, Avi had written this:  
Happiness comes in life not by wanting but by giving; and then, of course, by expressing gratitude and humility for whatever small portion of good luck we are privileged to enjoy as a result. To BE happy, in the end, is to be grateful - thankful for our extraordinary good fortune to be alive.
If this is the case, and we believe it to be, Avi Davis must truly have been one of the happiest of men, and we are grateful to have known him. 
Roger Simon of PJMedia wrote this moving tribute, and this In Memoriam piece was written by Adelle Nazarian from Breitbart.com.  
American Freedom Alliance mourns the sudden passing of its founder and president, Avi Davis.
 
He was a great friend, a truly fine man, and an intellectual powerhouse whose sudden loss we all feel acutely.  
Avi and this organization have been a tremendous force for freedom, and the Board of Directors of AFA has been meeting to ensure that this important work continues.  We are committed to the mission, and to honoring Avi.  
Recently, Avi had written this:
 
Happiness comes in life not by wanting but by giving; and then, of course, by expressing gratitude and humility for whatever small portion of good luck we are privileged to enjoy as a result. To BE happy, in the end, is to be grateful - thankful for our extraordinary good fortune to be alive.

If this is the case, and we believe it to be, Avi Davis must truly have been one of the happiest of men, and we are grateful to have known him. 
Please read these heartfelt in Memoriam posts here and here.



AVI DAVIS
1958 - 2015

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A movement of concerned Americans advancing the values and ideals of Western Civilization

2007 News and Articles

Sharia by the Inch

Islamofascism: In a monumental nod to political correctness, the Empire State Building is to be lit up green in honor of the Muslim holiday Eid. The separation of Islam from terror is officially complete.

Six years ago, Islamic terrorists screamed "Allah is Greatest!" as they slammed fuel-laden jumbo jets into two other New York skyscrapers. Six years ago, New Yorkers were worried about the Green Menace.

Now, for the first time, New York's remaining famous skyscraper will be aglow in green — the color of Islam — to mark the end of Ramadan, a month of intense Islamic renewal. Officials say it'll be an annual event, in the same tradition of the yearly skyscraper lighting for Christmas and Hanukkah.

What's next, Ground Zero festooned with crescent moons and stars?

Political correctness is running amok. Last week, the White House held a Ramadan dinner for Muslim leaders and activists, even though we are still waiting for them to condemn Islamic terror groups by name.

To their delight, President Bush praised, and even suggested we all worship Allah. "I believe that all the world, whether they be Muslim, Christian or any other religion, prays to the same God," he said, adding "I believe that Islam is a great religion that preaches peace."

A nice sentiment. But militant Muslims believe peace cannot be attained until Islam dominates the globe. And they make up much of the Muslim establishment in America. We know this by the words they've been caught on tape mouthing to Muslim audiences. We know this by their radical associations.

But more damning, investigators recently uncovered smoking-gun documents revealing that many founders of the major Muslim groups in the U.S. were involved in a secret plot to take over the U.S. by using our religious and political freedoms against us.

They call themselves Americans, but they view our system of government, our way of life, as an abomination to Allah. They've devised a scheme to sabotage our "miserable house" from within and dismantle it piece by piece, replacing it with "Dar al-Islam" — the House of Peace.

Then, and only then, will there be the kind of peace the president believes Islam represents today.

Ignorance and blind tolerance only make it easier for the Islamists to make inroads. Inch by inch, sharia is creeping into our society. We see it:

  • At airports, where authorities have agreed to Muslim taxi drivers' demands to build footbaths in public restrooms for Islamic washing and praying.
  • On college campuses, where trustees have agreed to demands by the Saudi-tied Muslim Student Association to add Islamic holidays, prayer rooms and footbaths.
  • In Congress, where officials have set aside a room for a growing number of Muslims to meet and pray inside the otherwise high-security Capitol building.
  • At Quantico, where Marine brass have agreed to build an Islamic center at the request of a former Gitmo imam who previously insisted on Islamic meals, Qurans, prayer beads, oils and other amenities for the terrorists held there.
  • At West Point, where Army officials have followed Quantico's lead and set up their own mosque for Muslim cadets.
  • In Brooklyn, where school officials agreed to provide local Muslims and Arabs with their own publicly funded madrassa.
  • In Detroit, where city planners have caved to demands to let mosques broadcast the call to prayer in Arabic five times a day, including the early-morning hours, noise ordinances be damned.

And on and on . . . until we, too, resemble Eurabia.

A New Dreyfus Affair

On September 12, 2007, Philippe Karsenty of Paris will present his appeal of a judgment for defamation rendered in favor of Charles Enderlin, Jerusalem Bureau Chief for France 2, the television station responsible for airing the Mohamed Al Durah hoax which was adopted, at birth, as official informatiom in nearly every corner of the world. Karsenty, editor of Media-Ratings, www.m-r.fr, an internet service that monitors the French media, questioned Enderlin's veracity and challenged him to explain obvious defects and inconsistencies in the Al Durah story. Initially, the Israeli government had taken responsibility for the boy's death, but later concluded that it had reliable evidence that the case was a fraud. Daniel Seaman, Director of Israel's Government Press Office, openly calls the alleged "murder" of Al Durah a hoax. France 2 is holding 27 minutes of raw footage of the incident, which could resolve the controversy once and for all. But it refuses to release the tapes. The trial court, finding in favor of Enderlin, disregarded the evidence Karsenty presented. Instead, the judge relied on a two-year old letter from former French President, Jacques Chirac, that did not refer to the Al Durah incident at all, but simply complimented Enderlin as a journalist. Politics aside, the evidence stands on its own. Reminiscent of the Dreyfus Affair that occurred more than 100 years earlier, few have stepped forward to assist Karsenty in rebutting this lie—a lie with sufficient currency to defame every Jew alive in the world today. It is not really Karsenty, the individual, who is on trial, but the State of Israel and the Jewish people—for a staged "murder" that the world chose to accept as true. Seven years after the supposed "crime," the lie persists as if it had a life of its own. But, the real crime , the crime that did, in fact, occur and for which no one has been charged, nor punished, is the crime of defaming Israel and the Jews—a crime that has unleashed murder and terrorism in its wake and that has compromised the integrity of every journalist and public servant who has ever chosen to report the hoax as true. Some did so, deliberately, and without shame. Some disobeyed their conscience and chose convenience over honor. Still others went along with the hoax out of slothfulness, simply failing to exercise the diligence required of their profession. None can be excused for acting in good faith because the evidence was, and is, clear and unambiguous—impossible to ignore. Moreover, the evidence is substantive and overwhelming. The fact that the Al Dura story is a hoax is apparent to anyone who cares to cast a critical eye on the unedited, raw footage of the incident that has so far become available.

The Hoax and its Ramifications

On September 30, 2000, at the Netzarim Junction in the Gaza strip, Talal Abu Rahmeh, a stringer working for France 2 and CNN, filmed an Arab Palestinian boy, Mohamed al Durah, and his father, Jamal al Durah, crouching behind a concrete barrel, and cowering from a hail of bullets until the boy "dies" and the father is grievously "wounded." France 2 Jerusalem Bureau Chief, Charles Enderlin, who was also the vice president of Israel's Foreign Press Association, hand delivered copies of a 55 second excerpt of Talal's footage to all of the major foreign news agencies at the Jerusalem Studio House. Within hours, the 55 second abbreviated film clip was broadcast on France 2 Television, a French government controlled and financed station, and subsequently picked up by virtually every me dia outlet in the world. IDF soldiers were depicted as the willful perpetrators of the atrocity. However, they are never seen on film shooting at the pair. Strangely, they were accused of shooting at the boy and his father for an astounding 45 minutes.

In reality, Mohamed al Durah's "death" was a staged media event aimed at tarnishing the reputation of the State of Israel, and demonizing her in the eyes of the world community by depicting IDF soldiers as heartless killers who deliberately target children.

The Al Durah hoax is a weapon in the hands of Israel's enemies. It has not been dispelled and continues to cause her harm. As recently as August 21, 2007, the French Daily, Le Monde interviewed Hazem Sharawi, the creator of "The Pioneers of Tomorrow," a Hamas television program for children that typically incites hatred and violence against Israel and Jews. One of Sharawi's young viewers explains how The Pioneers of Tomorrow advises children to "photograph the Jews when they kill children." Despite his diploma in education, Sharawi has no problem teaching Palestinian Arab children to believe in lies. He says, "What we do only reflects reality. Look what happened to Mohamed Al Durah (a young boy killed by Israeli fire at the very beginning of the Intifiada) and Hoda Ghalia (a small girl killed with six other members of her family in a bombing on a Gaza beach in June of 2006)." The Ghalia family killing is yet another hoa x spawned in the wake of Al Durah. But the parentheses inside the quotation marks are Le Monde's. This internationally acclaimed French newspaper mechanically passes on the two lies to its readers without question, comment or criticism. In the hands of Le Monde, the path from hoax to reality is a one-way street.

It is also an endless chain. Respected human rights organizations such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International eagerly pick up the baton to accuse Israel of human rights abuse on the basis of groundless charges, such as these, that are endlessly broadcast over the media. Arab Palestinian violence is implicitly blamed on Israel, and measures that Israel takes in her own legitimate defense are condemned as unprovoked aggression against Arab civilians. The innumerable worldwide divestment campaigns against Israel, academic and economic boycotts and other indicia of pariah-hood are, in no small measure, due to her underserved reputation as a major human rights violator.

The Al Durah hoax has spawned countless other staged or faked atrocities that amount to nothing more, nor less, than authentic blood libels against the Jewish people. The world media, by and large, accept them without analytical scrutiny, indifferent to the falsity of their claims. Israel stood accused of massacring 5,000 Arab Palestinians during operation Defensive Shield in Jenin in the spring of 2002. The operation was launched to neutralize terrorist cells responsible for a series of ongoing attacks against Israelis, including the suicide bombing of the Park Hotel in Netanya that killed and severely wounded dozens of people. Eventually, the truth came out about Jenin. The Arab Palestinians finally admitted that only 56 people had died, most of whom were armed combatants. Furthermore, aerial photographs of the Jenin battle attest to the pinpoint accuracy of the Israeli operation. It only targeted areas in which terrorists were believed to be hidi ng. To further reduce the risk to civilians, the IDF did not bomb the terrorists from the air. Instead, it conducted house to house searches for the terrorists, thus greatly increasing the danger to Israel's own soldiers. Israel lost more than a dozen soldiers in Jenin, soldiers who deliberately placed themselves in harm's way out of concern for Arab Palestinian life. Nevertheless, the original charge of massacre, though false, went round the world countless times, thanks to journalists and their media outlets who should have known better, but cared little about the lies they told. The harm to Israel's reputation was irrevocable.

Moreover, the stigma attached to Israel as a major human rights violator, even surpassing such nations as China and Sudan, arouses world condemnation when she exercises her legitimate right and obligation to defend herself against the unrelenting terrorist attacks perpetrated by her Arab Palestinian neighbors—attacks implicitly justified by phony atrocities, not unlike the Al Durah "murder."

Two weeks after the Al Durah hoax was publicized as fact, garnering worldwide condemnation of Israel in diplomatic, media, religious and human rights circles, two IDF soldiers made a wrong turn and inadvertently wandered into Ramallah, an Arab enclave under the control of the Palestinian Authority. The consequences of their fatal error are well known: they were tortured and beaten to death in the Palestinian Authority police station, and their lifeless bodies thrown out of the station's second story window to a throng of men howling, Allahu-Akbar—God is great! They commenced to dismember and disembowel the soldiers' corpses, and then passed the entrails on a platter to a hysterical mob numbering in the thousands who rejoiced as they literally chewed and swallowed the remains of their hated Jews. What is lesser known is that while eating the flesh and blood of their victims, in satisfaction and triumph, the good citizens of Ramallah chanted, no t only, Allah hu-Akbar—but the name of Mohamed al Durah! The supposed "death" of the child had become a pretext for revenge.

Shockingly, former President Clinton, writing in his autobiography, My Life, referred to the carnage in the following terms: "As the violence persisted, two vivid images of its pain and futility emerged. A twelve year old Palestinian boy shot in the crossfire and dying in his father's arms, and two Israeli soldiers pulled from a building and beaten to death, with their lifeless bodies dragged through the streets and one of their assailants proudly showing his bloodstained hands to the world on television."

Evidently, the lie of Al Durah's death had been repeated often enough to be accepted as true by a former president of the United States of America. Clinton equates the Al Durah lie, with the real torture, mutilation, murder and even cannibalization of two young men whose horrific fate was meant to avenge a killing—but a killing that had not occurred.

Moreover, the Al Durah scam, successful as it is, has set the pattern for other famous pretended revenge atrocities. Daniel Pearl's murderers invoked Mohamed's "death" as they beheaded their victim. Osama bin Laden invoked the "dead" child's name in recruitment videos before and in celebratory fashion after 911. More recently, in June of 2005, a 21 year-old Arab Palestinian woman, Wafa Samir al-Bis, was stopped on her way to blow herself up and kill as many Israeli children as possible at the Soroka Medical Center in Be'er Sheva. She had been receiving treatment there for burns arising out of an accident at home. When asked why she specifically wanted to kill children, she replied that she was seeking revenge for the death of Mohamed al Durah.

On September 30, 2000, two hours after the boy's death was broadcast, by France 2, A French viewer, Mr. Redoine T. posted hate messages to numerous websites urging Muslims to kill Jews, any time, any place and in any manner, in order to avenge the killing of innocent Palestinian children. He was brought before a French tribunal the following year which cited messages such as: "Muslims of France, support the Palestinian resistance, French people, do not be an accomplice of the cowardly, Jewish assassins and thieves who kill innocent children [emphasis added]" He says that killing Jews by any means is good and he lists suicide bombing as a legitimate instrument of death.

The mythical "martyr" has now been immortalized as an icon to be emulated. Postage stamps bearing his crouched image have been issued in Jordan, Egypt and Tunisia. A street in Bagdad and a square in Morocco bear his name. Countless schools throughout the Arab world are named after him. His image was depicted on a designer dress in Saudi Arabia. Arab television programs in the Palestinian Authority and elsewhere portray him on his way to heaven and exhort children to seek "martyrdom" with all its attendant obligations and rewards: namely, the killing of Jews and the quid pro quo of 72 black-eyed virgins.

On September 28, 2000, Ariel Sharon ascended the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. According to pundits, journalists and statesmen, this is the undisputed event that triggered what is known as the Second Intifada. However, the world ignores the fact that the phony Mohamed al Durah "murder" occurred only two days later. It was only after the Al Durah incident was broadcast the world over, day and night, ad infinitum, with sympathetic commentary from nearly all governments, that the violence exploded in earnest.

Furious Arab Palestinian mobs attacked Israeli soldiers who were condemned for coming to the defense of their country and its citizens. The Al Durah hoax also inspired murderous rampages throughout the Arab/Muslim world which directed blame for the supposed "atrocity" not only at Israel but, also, against the United States. Al Durah's name was invoked in hateful demonstrations in Europe and the United States whose participants openly called for the killing of Jews and the destruction of Israel and the United States. Arson and vandalism against Jewish institutions worldwide skyrocketed, as did physical assaults, murder and terrorism. Attacks against Jews were regarded as "spill-over" from the Sharon visit to the Temple Mount. But, the name invoked by the rioters was less often Sharon, than, Al Durah.

The last few years have amply demonstrated that Jews and Israel are no longer terrorism's principle target of choice. Islamic terror justified by imaginary victim-hood is laying waste to a substantial portion of the globe, and its reach is growing. If the Al Durah hoax is bad for Israel and Jews, it is no less toxic for the free world. The specter of raging mobs whipped into murderous frenzy on the basis of false charges propagated by government leaders and media institutions does not bode well for the rule of law, the keystone of constitutional democracy. However, the Al Durah scam lends itself perfectly to the model of government practiced ubiquitously in the Arab/Muslim world: namely, corrupt, authoritarian and ruthless dictatorships who posit an imaginary foe on which to channel the public rage that would otherwise be directed against themselves. We jeopardize our own freedoms by imbibing the unvarnished propaganda on which such dictatorial re gimes rely in order to maintain their power.

Even so, Muslim rage is not only about politics. It is also religiously based. Just as Islamic terrorists justify their atrocities on the basis of religion, the raging, murderous, amorphous, Muslim mob gathers its forces in defense of Islam—and against the infidel. One only needs to recall a few instances in which Muslims rose up in defense of their religion: the publication of 12 Danish cartoons; Pope Benedict's criticism of Islam; the false charge that a Koran had been desecrated at Gitmo. In fact, the list of events that have triggered Muslim rage, even in recent years, is endless. However, suffice it to say that Muslim rage is never limited to words alone—or even to fighting words. It is always accompanied by violence, murder, arson and terrorism.

Proof of the Hoax

Despite nearly unanimous declarations from media worldwide, it is clear from viewing the film of the "shooting" that Mohamed al Durah did not die, as alleged, nor did he nor his father receive a single bullet wound during the time in which he was being "killed" and allegedly died.

Western audiences viewed a 55 second video of the supposed "killing," at the end of which news commentators dolefully announce the "death" of the boy. The 55 seconds shown on television is actually 7 segments of film pieced together. At the end of the 7th segment, two fingers appear in the viewfinder, indicating that this last segment was a second "take." The two fingers are only visible if the tape is played in slow motion. An additional 3 seconds of film exists—three seconds that television viewers were deprived of observing. In this segment, the "dead" boy and his father reappear. Then, something extraordinary occurs: The boy raises his elbow and right leg, turns his head and furtively looks around, replaces his head and elbow in the "dead" position, but appears to have forgott en about his leg. He leaves it suspended in the air for the duration of the clip.

The two fingers after the boy is pronounced dead, plus the clip of the boy's movements after he supposedly "dies," is widely available on the internet for all the world to see. Strangely, there has been little forensic, let alone, scientific and journalistic, curiosity about this novel phenomenon. Evidently, the fervent belief in life after death explains the absence of even a single collective guffaw—let alone any critical analysis of why a "corpse" would behave in so untoward a manner. Nor did the fact that Mohamed al Durah's "death" required two "takes" arouse any journalistic, or even theatrical curiosity.

France 2 retains 27 minutes of original footage which it has refused to release. It claims that it did not reveal the footage of the boy's movements after he supposedly "dies" because it did not want to subject its audience to the "agony of the child." In fact, no such footage of the child's supposed "agony" exists.

Although, the boy's posthumous movements should have pronounced the Al Durah Hoax dead on arrival, there is no shortage of further evidence of the deception. The Israeli soldiers are alleged to have continuously shot the boy and his father from their guard post for a duration of 45 minutes, with the intention of killing them. In the film, the Al Durahs are crouched against a wall. Immediately to the right of the screen is a cement barrel, topped by a concrete cinder block, also located against the wall. The Al Durahs, the wall, and the barrel are in plain view of the camera, and the Al Durahs appear to be using the barrel as a shield against fire coming from an unseen location on the other side of it. The unseen location is assumed to be the guard post from which, unseen assailants, presumably, Israeli soldiers, are, allegedly, "firing." However, the Al Durahs are concealed by the barrel and are, therefore, not visible to the soldiers in the g uard post.

Because the Israeli soldiers could not see the pair, they could not have fired on them deliberately. Furthermore, even if Mohamed al Durah were shot by bullets coming from an unseen location on the other side of the barrel, by unseen assailants, presumably, Israeli, there should be bullet holes on the section of the barrel that directly faces him. In fact, not a single bullet exited the barrel from the supposed Israeli direction to reach the boy. There are no bullet holes on the side of the barrel behind which Mohamed al Durah is "hiding."

On the contrary, seven bullet holes were found in the wall against which the Al Durahs were crouched. The bullets that created these holes appeared to have been fired from the same direction from which the pair were being filmed, that is, from a Palestinian position located behind the camera, and not from the direction of the Israeli position, as alleged.

The boy's father claimed that he had been shot in the hand, arm, elbow and leg and that he suffered a crushed pelvis. He also said that Mohamed received a bullet to his stomach that exited from the back. According to the cameraman, Abu Rahmeh, Mohamed bled for 20 minutes. But, in the film clip broadcast the world over, and in the additional 3 seconds not commonly seen by television viewers, there are no signs of blood on the Al Durahs, on the wall behind them, nor on the ground.

Three hours of raw footage from Reuters and AP, taken in the vicinity of the Netzarim junction in Gaza, on September 30, 2000—the very same day as the supposed "killing" of the boy—show dozens of Palestinian Arab children attacking the Israeli guard post, not only from the ground, but from adjacent buildings that looked down upon it, with Molotov cocktails, heavy objects, including appliances, stones, and other projectiles. Many of these landed on the roof directly over the heads of the approximately 20 soldiers inside. Surely, if they had desired to kill children, those in plain view, lobbing their Molotov cocktails, would have been easy targets—unlike the Al Durahs, who were not threatening the soldiers, were not attacking the soldiers, were not visible to the soldiers, were not in the line of fire of the soldiers, but were, in fact, impossible targets for the soldiers.

Despite the attempted arson and other violent aggression against the guard post, at no time are Israeli soldiers filmed firing upon the Arab Palestinian children. The dozens of reporters and cameramen observing the evil mischief of these "innocents" were waiting for them to provoke a shooting incident. If the Israeli soldiers had fired even a single shot at the children, it is impossible that the cameras would have missed it. Indeed, they were waiting for nothing else! In fact, other than the phony Al Durah "killing," not a single Arab Palestinian child was reported killed or injured by Israelis at the Netzarim Junction that day. It is beyond the realm of possibility that the Israeli soldiers in the guard post would have ignored these children in favor of shooting at Mohamed al Durah and his father who were not violent, not present and not even visible to them.

This raw footage, in other sequences, is rich with evidence of typically staged atrocities and is widely available on the internet.

One can see a phony ambulance evacuation and a pretend battle in which Arab Palestinians are firing into what turns out to be an empty building. There are scenes in which men dressed in civilian clothing are instructing others dressed in military uniform in the staging of heroic battle scenes with nonexistent Israeli soldiers. There are faked injuries. Phony "victims" are handled roughly and stuffed into ambulances while bystanders smile and give each other "high fives." The Al Durahs are seen crouching behind their barrel while a panicked crowd runs away. In another faked scene, a hoard of Arab Palestinians appears to be fleeing and scrambling to get out of the line of Israeli fire while other Arab Palestinians calmly stroll the streets, and go about their business with their children and families. If all the others are panicking, why aren't they? The answer: They know the scene is staged.

Staging atrocities is a matter of common knowledge in the Palestinian Authority. But, if ordinary Arab Palestinians know it, why do so many journalists appear not to know it? Of course, the question is rhetorical. Arab Palestinians can witness staged atrocities just by walking down the street in their neighborhood. Ditto for the journalists who are there to report on them. But, reporting a lie does not make it true. If the media are willing to accept the implausible lie of Al Durah, any amount of fakery can be concocted as true.

Recalling the words of a character in Leon Uris', The Haj, "there is nothing like the beauty of a well-placed lie." To the enemies of Israel and the Jewish people, the Al Durah lie is well placed and very beautiful, indeed. It has afforded them great satisfaction in the dishonor that has accrued to the State of Israel, in the hatred that has been directed at Jews worldwide, and in the terrorism and murder that has followed in its wake.

Conclusion

Philippe Karsenty has been sued in France under a criminal statute for questioning the veracity of a news story that has caused extensive damage to the honor and dignity of the State of Israel, and has unleashed gratuitous violence and terrorism against Jews, not just in Israel, but the world over who are seen as representatives of an evil entity that must be targeted and punished. Though questions about the case are troubling and abundant, few journalists have elected to grapple with it. France 2's case against Karsenty is an obvious attempt to silence and punish him for his determination to expose the Al Durah hoax to the light of reason and truth.

The Al Durah hoax is reminiscent of the Dreyfus Affair that occurred more than 100 years ago in France. A Jewish army captain was falsely accused and condemned for treason. Many years later, due to the intervention of writer and journalist, Emile Zola, the verdict was overturned and he was released from incarceration at the notorious Devil's Island. But, the day Dreyfus was publicly relieved of his office, his honors ripped from his uniform, and his sword broken in two, thousands upon thousands of Frenchmen gathered to chant and cry hysterically in the lovely boulevards of Paris, "Death to the Jews!" A young Austrian journalist was there to report the story. At that moment, he knew that the Jews of Europe were doomed and that it was imperative that they leave the continent. His name was Theodore Herzl and the year was 1894. Less than 50 years later, his words proved prophetic. Seventy-five thousand French Jews perished at the hands of the Nazi s and their French collaborators, and more than 6 million Jews died in Europe as a whole. It is a sad footnote to the Dreyfus Affair that France is the country that breathed life into the Al Durah hoax.

Though he is the one on trial, Philippe Karsenty is not Dreyfus. It is the State of Israel and the Jewish people who are Dreyfus today. Nor is Karsenty Zola. Why? Zola enjoyed wide acclaim as an important writer and was, thus, capable of stirring public opinion in support of Dreyfus. It was the storm of public outrage that finally won Dreyfus' freedom. But, that outrage was the product of a journalist who was willing to publicly question the lies on which Dreyfus' conviction was based. Karsenty is merely an ordinary citizen who, standing almost without allies, has elected to pit himself against yet another terrible lie. But, alas, there is not even one Emile Zola today. Nevertheless, the hope still remains that, even at this late hour, a new Zola will come forward to speak out, to demand justice, and to stake his honor and reputation on the truth.

Breaking Ranks - An Interview With Phyllis Chesler

My editor at Jossey Bass challenged me: Are you sure you ought to say this – that anti-Zionism is the new anti-Semitism and that Islamic anti-Semitism is lethal in nature? Are you really sure you’re right? And I said yes. I understood that in the past one could criticize Israel and not necessarily be anti-Semitic, but the way Israel had become completely demonized, and the attempts to isolate and punish only Israel in a world filled with so much evil, prompted me to write the book, which I began in 2002.

How do you react to the feminists and intellectuals who have criticized and shunned you?

Once you stand up for Jews and for Israel, and once you tell the truth about Islam – and that includes the mistreatment of women and independent thought under Islam – you are branded a racist, a neo-conservative reactionary, a right-wing nut. You have liberal Jews, feminists, who care more about the right to an abortion than the right not to have a second Holocaust.

I do think that what feminists are doing in areas like rape, battering, incest, employment discrimination, prostitution, pornography and the trafficking mainly of women and children is holy work. There are wonderful feminists who are doing important things for women. I just recently met the director of the shelter for battered women in Jerusalem. She had heartbreaking stories to tell, and she’s doing God’s work, in my opinion. She is not frum, but there are other feminists who are, and who are similarly looking for gender justice for women within Judaism here and in Israel.

But there is such a phobia among feminists about the Republican Party, about the Christian right wing, about the Jewish right wing. And the phobia mainly comes from a secular worldview as well as their having been Palestinianized – sort of mentally hijacked.

One feminist reviewer of The New Anti-Semitism was a Jewish woman who wrote that I grossly exaggerated the danger coming to us from Islam, which in her opinion is not really the problem. The real problem – get ready to laugh – is the danger posed by people like Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell and the Lubavitcher Rebbe. This is a well-educated woman. She’s a secular Jew who sees the anti-abortion agenda as so heinous, so atrocious, so horrifying. These people are not going to care about Israel. To them there is no God.

You write and speak extensively on the multicultural relativism espoused by the media and academia. Would you expound on that?

It’s easy to say, yes, the Muslims are against everyone who is not a Muslim. And it’s true. That’s part of what jihad is about, that’s part of the history of Islam. But it doesn’t account for the incessant, infernal feuds among the Muslim religious sects and tribes that are bloody, deadly. Here’s the thing. The West, and that means Jews and Israelis, would like to lead sweet and peaceful lives. We’re up against an enemy now that is dying to kill us, that lives to kill, and that at best merely wishes to impose on the rest of us its laws and strictures.

When I turn to people like Amy Goodman of WBAI or others on the airwaves, or to tenured professors at Western universities, and tell them what I just said, they say I’m a lunatic – completely biased, completely racist. Their point of view is that America is to blame and that the way we make up for our many errors and crimes is to become multicultural relativists, meaning that all cultures, you see, are equal or should be treated equally and we should have equal rights to cannibals.

How will a nuclear-equipped Iran affect Israel and the West?

Iran has to be stopped. I would only wish for an Osirak-like action, which I’m told is not quite possible because the nuclear plants that are in the process of being built in Iran, and there are at least 100, are buried all over the country in heavily populated areas.

Should the U.S. engage in direct negotiations with Iran to help curtail the threat of a potential nuclear holocaust?

Think of it from a woman’s point of view, or a psychologist’s point of view. If a man is a batterer, do you want him arrested and removed and sentenced, or do you want to sit down and talk to him? Sometimes talking is something you have to do, but it doesn’t always work, and I don’t think it will in this case.

Are there Arabs or Muslims who truly want peace with Israel and are willing to speak out against Islamic terrorism?

There are Arabs who are pro-Israel and strongly so, but we can’t count on these individual charismatic figures popping up with a movement. Let me praise Nonie Darwish, who’s written a book called Infidel and whose father was a leading military man. You have Walid Shoebat, a former terrorist, for Israel. You have Brigitte Gabriel, an Arab Christian for Israel. You have Wafa Sultan. We have Ibn Warraq, with whom I’ve been working. That’s a pseudonym. I know people who not only have bodyguards and live in exile or in hiding, but who have to write under pseudonyms. When you tell the truth about Islam, you’re a marked person, especially if you were once a Muslim.

Ironically, the people I mentioned, and there are others, are pro-Israel and yet we have Israeli Jews who are so savagely critical of Israel. We have American Jews on the unbalanced left of the Left who are so against Israel. We therefore have to recognize our friends and have to risk making at least conversation, if not outright alliances, with friends from the Muslim and Arab world. It’s also very important for Jews to forge alliances with Christian Zionists. I’ve been on Pat Robertson’s show, "The 700 Club," twice and I took holy hell for it from my former feminist friends.

You’ve commented on and written articles about films and documentaries that are exceptionally biased against Israel and the effects they have as propaganda.

One of the things I speak and write about is the war of ideas, the cultural war. It is a propaganda war and I don’t understand why the West – and now it’s bigger than the Jews, it’s bigger than the Israelis – why the West is not winning this war. One answer is that the West to some extent has been hijacked by its own beliefs about poverty justifying terrorism. Misery, which is presumably caused by America and Israel, supposedly leads to terrorism – as if Bin Laden is poor or as if the 9/11 hijackers were uneducated, illiterate, poor men, which of course is not the case.

There are hundreds of examples of visual propaganda. One of the classic cases is the film by Mohammed Bakri, "Jenin, Jenin," a fake documentary with plenty of doctored footage. I was just thinking about the new film about Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter who was kidnapped and beheaded by Al Qaeda. The film is not really about Daniel Pearl; he’s missing. The name of the film is "A Mighty Heart." It’s a woman’s film. It’s about Daniel Pearl’s wife waiting for him to return. This movie is, in my opinion, very dangerous propaganda, as I recently wrote in a Jewish Press op-ed column titled "Hollywood Airbrushes Jihad."

Then there was "Paradise Now," a brilliant movie hugely funded by a Palestinian who lives in exile in Europe. The film presents two would-be suicide terrorists who are both so sympathetic, so cute. The Israelis, meanwhile, are only in the shadows, helmeted, with bayonets and guns, anonymous and Nazi-like. The bad guys are these really soulful characters, one of whom ultimately blows up a bus and himself. Now, it won all kinds of awards, people loved it, and I myself viewed it as really a very good film as films go. But that’s precisely what makes it so dangerous. It’s based on a whole series of lies and omissions.

There is a film that is not out yet in which I interviewed terrorists who are intercepted and who are in jail, women as well as men. These people are not poor, and they’re not crazy. They are part of a culture that empowers them to unleash lethal hatred against the Other – the woman, the Jew, the modern Western outsider.

On a completely different note, should Israel absorb the Sudanese refugees seeking political asylum?

What a good and difficult question. In the Sudan they’re doing what I call gender cleansing and it’s Muslim-on-Muslim violent crime and it’s Muslim-on-Muslim genocide. The Arab Muslim militia is repeatedly raping women and children who have been genitally mutilated, which means that it is torture upon torture and they are often outcast and shunned. This kind of apartheid is characteristic of Islam.

What should Israel, already so burdened, so under siege with its own settlers still unsettled from the Gaza pullout, do? What should we, the bearers of the light and the truth of God, what should we do with these pitiful refugees – many of whom perhaps hate Jews and hate Israel?

We ourselves were slaves in Egypt, were liberated from slavery. Obviously the ethical thing, the Jewish thing, the right thing, for Israel to do would be to throw wide its doors to those in flight from Islamic persecution. Alas, who’s going to pay for it? Can Israel afford to do it? Can it do it only symbolically or for public-relations purposes, to show the world that Jews are helping their enemies? Jews are very good at that. We’re very good at subsidizing those who are trying to kill us, giving them a second chance. We’re practically the only true Christians in this turning of the other cheek.

As someone who once vocally opposed the settlement movement in Israel, what would you say to Jews living in Judea and Samaria who could suffer the same fate as the thousands of Jews still homeless as a result of the 2005 Gaza disengagement?

In the past I demonstrated against the "occupation"; I will not do so now. If we Jews have a history anywhere, it is in Shechem, among other places. We see more clearly now what the unilateral withdrawal from Gaza wrought. If there’s a good thing that came out of it, it’s that the world is forced to see who and what Hamas really is.

How can readers contact you or obtain information about your books and other work?

I welcome all comments and inquiries. Anyone can reach me by going to my website at

By: Fern Sidman

JIHAD'YA LATER

August 11, 2007 -- First the good news: Dhabah "Debbie" Almontaser yesterday quit as principal-designate of the city's new Arabic-themed public school - though not without blaming her resignation mostly on The Post (not by name, of course).

But here's the bad news: The Department of Education says it still plans to open the Khalil Gibran International Academy. And Almontaser herself will remain on the DOE payroll in an undetermined role.

After she defended the sale of T-shirts emblazoned with the slogan "Intifada NYC," and then issued a quasi-apology that only made things worse, it was inevitable that Almontaser would have to step down as head of the Arabic academy she'd first proposed.

Her words had brought a sharp rebuke from, among others, teachers-union head Randi Weingarten (until then a strong supporter of the Gibran school), who said, "Parents and teachers have a right to be concerned" about a school run by someone who didn't seem to understand the difference between "peace and war-mongering."

Chancellor Joel Klein's office refuses to release Almontaser's resignation letter. (Why not? Did she write something that would embarrass the department even further?)

But it did issue a statement attributed to Almontaser in which she complained, "This week's headlines were endangering the viability of Khalil Gibran International Academy, even though I apologized."

That is, she's blaming the media - in this case, Post reporters Chuck Bennett and Jana Winter and this page - for reporting and commenting on her foolishness.

Now she's been severed from any connection to the Gibran Academy, according to DOE. So what useful role can she continue to serve at the Department of Education?

As for the school itself, we continue to believe that it's a bad idea - one that runs counter to the notion of public education, which should be about pluralism, not self-segregation and separatism.

City Hall continues to defend the school: Deputy Mayor Dennis Wolcott yesterday insisted it's meant to "prepare students for the global community" by "exposing them to different cultures in our city and the world."

Indeed, he pointed to the fact that the city has more than 60 schools that focus on a single language and culture, including French, Chinese, Spanish, Russian, Korean and Greek.

Now, why the French, Chinese, Spanish, Russian, Korean and Greek kids aren't immersed in English and American culture - remember the Melting Pot? - remains a mystery.

Beyond that, however, Almontaser said the Gibran Academy is meant to focus primarily on the need for "creating cultural understanding of the complexity of Arab history and the diversity of Arab culture."

We don't have a problem with teaching students Arabic language, or even Arabic culture and history - as part of a regular public-school curriculum.

But we think it's wrong-headed to create an entire public school, supported by taxpayer dollars, that stresses a single language and culture - one aimed principally at fostering cultural pride, rather than simply providing instruction in a foreign language.

Yes, students need to be exposed to different cultures. But only to prepare them to be part of an integrated community - not members of an ethnocentric communal enclave.

DOE would do well to shelve the whole idea as a painful lesson learned.

http://www.nypost.com:80/seven/08112007/postopinion/editorials/jihadya_later_editorials_.htm

City University Of NY Trustee Blasts Khalil Gibran International Academy

August 8, 2007 - San Francisco, CA - PipeLineNews.org - Jeffrey S. Wiesenfeld a long time member of the City University of New York's Board of Trustees, who also spent four years serving in the FBI's foreign counter-intelligence division, today blasted both the Khalil Gibran International Academy and its Yemeni born principal designate, Dhabah Almontaser.

This represents somewhat of an epiphany for Mr. Wiesenfeld who had previously accepted assurances that the proposed institution - which is scheduled to open in a few weeks - would not become problematic, as critics have been charging.

In an interview with PipeLineNews.org, he stated:

"...based on what I had heard from other people and the Chancellor's public assurance that any polemics or infections if you will that would be a potential for this school would be exorcised or avoided, I was willing to give the benefit of the doubt, despite all my skepticism."

However all of this changed with it becoming public knowledge that at a recent Arab street fair, an organization closely allied to Almontaser - the Arab Women Active in Arts and Media [AWAAM] - was spotted selling t-shirts with "Intifada NYC" and "Future Palestinian Activist" emblazoned on them.

Almontaser initially denied that Intifada referred to the terrorist campaign of violence against Israeli civilians, claiming that it "basically means 'shaking off oppression.'"

Reacting to Almontaser's obvious disingenuousness, Mr. Wiesenfeld quickly made the transition from lukewarm supporter of KGIA to serious opponent.

"But when t
his comment about the innocuousness of Intifada tee shirts came about, I said to myself that I was really an idiot and I'm tired of the duplicity which some would argue which is itself a patronizing racist comment, that there is something so artful about Arabic culture and thought that they express themselves in this type of flowery language that can be interpreted in different ways. I don't buy any of it, I don't buy that she didn't get it. I don't buy that that she saw there was some other meaning…literal meaning that was more apt to Intifada, than what we know it to be."

About the rampant atmosphere of multiculturalism which has allowed KGIA and Almontaser to escape a reasonable level of public scrutiny, he stated:

"I'm tired of having a different standard for the Arab/Muslim world where for instance Arafat spoke one way to his adherents and then another way to the diplomats…where Asad does the same thing and in a smaller way we have this confusion...that Almontaser...she knew exactly what it meant...she knew exactly the consequences of this language."

Though chagrined that he didn't follow through on initial concerns over the school, Wiesenfeld was quick to credit Michael Meyers, President and Executive Director of the New York Civil Rights Coalition, as having had the vision to oppose the creation of sectarian public schools from the inception of the idea.

"[Though] "I was
 uneasy with the concept...I think that Michael Meyers here from the New York Civil Rights Coalition, who has been the most consistent and adamant against this concept of these sectarian schools. I have to bow to him. He was correct and I was wrong."

Indeed Mr. Wiesenfeld is now committed to actively opposing the creation of the Khalil Gibran International Academy saying, "I will fight it in every way that I can...the concept is bad, it's dangerous...It's a national security concern."

Concluding his thoughts on the controversy he stated:

"I think we
 have to get really serious about demanding that people say what they mean and mean what they say...especially in this era, this kind of duplicity has gone on for too long...She's [Almontaser] very smooth...there are a lot of these smoothies, they are all very good at this...we are just being sold a bill of goods."

Other influential members of the community are also expressing similar outrage over KGIA and Almontaser's repeated duplicity, extremist beliefs and troubling ties.

New York State Assemblyman Dov Hikind yesterday said, "It is an absolute outrage that she doesn't know what intifada is all about. This is not about shaking off - this is about carnage represented by blowing up pizza stores in Israel, blowing up buses."

When asked if he had come out against the Khalil Gibran school, Assemblyman Hikind clarified his position, stating that he supported "the removal of Almontaser."

"This woman should not be principal of any school" said New York City Councilman Peter Vallone Jr. Vallone quipped,"This shirt should read, 'I promote terror and


When contacted by these writers, the Councilman's office said that they had not seen the Executive Summary and were interested in reviewing it. A spokesman for Vallone stated that they were "watching" the situation. hate on a daily basis, and all I got for it is this lousy T-shirt."

Additional resources regarding KGIA.

KGIA's Executive Summary

Analysis of KGIA Exec. Summary - Brooklyn's Khalil Gibran Madrassah Will Function As Jihad Recruitment Center

Go here for a summary of information regarding the Khalil Gibran International Academy

Go here for a summary of information regarding the Stop The Madrassah Coalition

By William A. Mayer and Beila Rabinowitz

©1999-2007 PipeLineNews.org LLC, William Mayer, Beila Rabinowitz, all rights reserved.

Let's call God Allah

The Bishop of Breda, Tiny Muskens, wants people to start calling God Allah. He says the Netherlands should look to Indonesia, where the Christian churches already pray to Allah. It is also common in the Arab world: Christian and Muslim Arabs use the words God and Allah interchangeably.

Speaking on the Dutch TV programme Network on Monday evening, Bishop Muskens says it could take another 100 years but eventually the name Allah will be used by Dutch churches. And that will promote rapprochement between the two religions.

Retiring

Muskens doesn't expect his idea to be greeted with much enthusiasm. The 71-year-old bishop, who will soon be retiring due to ill health, says God doesn't mind what he is called. God is above such "discussion and bickering". Human beings invented this discussion themselves, he believes, in order to argue about it.

More than 30 years ago Bishop Muskens worked in Indonesia and, there, God was called Allah, even in Catholic churches. The Dutch should learn to get on spontaneously with different cultures, religions and behaviour patterns:

"Someone like me has prayed to Allah yang maha kuasa (Almighty God) for eight years in Indonesia and other priests for 20 or 30 years. In the heart of the Eucharist, God is called Allah over there, so why can't we start doing that together?"

In the Arab world God is called Allah. The long history of Christianity in the Arab world led to the development of a rich Christian-Islamic theological vocabulary, which makes God a normal equivalent to Allah. Both Muslims and Christians use the word in the Middle East.

ar-Rabb

Apart from Allah, the term ar-Rabb (the Lord) is also widely used, although this appears far more often in the Arabic version of the Bible than in the Qur'an. In the Islamic context, references to ar-Rabb are normally found in the possessive form, such as Rabbi (My Lord). Interestingly, the word Allah was already in use by Christians in the pre-Islamic period.

Bishop Muskens proposal will undoubtedly receive a warm welcome from the Islamic community in the Netherlands. Particularly as it follows last week's remarks by Geert Wilders about banning the Qur'an and, shortly before that, former Muslim Ehsan Jami's comparison of Muhammad with Osama bin Laden.

Attention

Perhaps this is the reason Bishop Muskens' remarks have received so much attention in the Dutch press. The bishop actually said exactly the same several years ago. He also suggested abolishing Whit Monday as a national holiday in favour of an Islamic religious day.

In the past, Bishop Muskens has offended many Muslims. In 2005 he said Islam was a religion without a future because it had too many violent aspects. The bishop is also responsible for a number of controversial remarks. He caused uproar in the Netherlands when he said the poor had a right to steal bread if they were hungry. And he put the Vatican's back up with an appeal for the use of condoms in the fight against AIDS.

by Mohammed Abdelrahman & Nicolien den Boer

'Dhimmification' on the march

If anyone wants to know why Muslims the world over tell pollsters the United States is at war with Islam, just read President Bush's speech at the Islamic Center of Washington, especially the part about American-style religious freedom — in the president's words, "what we wish for the world."

He began this way: "For those who seek a true understanding of our country, they need look no farther than here."

No, not the mosque itself, but down the street it occupies. "This Muslim center sits quietly down the road from a synagogue, a Lutheran Church, a Catholic parish, a Greek Orthodox chapel, a Buddhist temple — each with faithful followers who practice their deeply held beliefs and live side by side in peace," the president explained, standing in his Islamically observant stocking feet before a cool Muslim audience. "This is what freedom offers: societies where people can live and worship as they choose without intimidation, without suspicion, without a knock on the door from the secret police."

As one who has attended a Bar Mitzvah at that synagogue down the road, I have news for the president: Freedom, American-style, has changed. To enter, I passed an armed guard holding an automatic weapon manning the door. Armed guards like him man many such doors in many such cities. In fact, so common is it for religious worship (mainly, but not exclusively, Jewish worship) to require armed protection today that we miss the implications: the degree to which freedom to worship without fear in America has been curtailed by the open-ended threat of Buddhist violence.

Whoops, sorry. I mean, curtailed by the open-ended threat of Greek Orthodox violence. Or was that Catholic Lutheran violence?

No, the peril to the synagogue was, and remains, Islamic violence. The resulting diminution of freedom is a symptom of advancing dhimmitud e — the diminished cultural condition of non-Muslims living in relation to Islam.

So, freedom of worship ain't what it used to be. But even in its terror-constrained state, the spread of American religious freedom actually threatens religiously unfree Islamic cultures, which, for example, consider "apostasy" — deciding not to be Muslim — a capital crime.

But that threat is only on paper. Where Americans actually become involved in the Islamic world, Shariah (Islamic law) is protected, enshrined even, as shockingly attested by Shariah's primacy in the American-fostered constitutions of Iraq, Afghanistan and the Palestinian Authority. The president doesn't seem to understand that. I don't think he even understands Shariah, under which the primacy of Islam is absolute, and other religions are "tolerated," at best, at the high cost of dhimmitude. Nearly six years after September 11 — nearly six years after first visiting the Islamic Center and proclaiming "Islam is peace" — Mr. Bush has learned nothing.

In fact, his peroration on freedom at the Islamic Center mainly underscored "America's respect for the Muslim faith here at home." Abroad, too. Even as he was asking Muslim leaders (again) "to denounce organizations that use the veneer of Islamic belief to support and fund violence" (some veneer), the president announced the United States would send an envoy to the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), a global Islamic support group that does a large bit of that. "Our special envoy," the president said, "will listen and learn from representatives from Muslim states and share with them America's views and values."

What can the Free World learn from the Unfree World? Maybe something about the Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam adopted by the foreign ministers of the OIC in 1990. In dire contrast to the United Nation's 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Islamic document recognizes only human rights sanctioned by Shariah — which, basically, leaves women and non-Muslims without human rights.

Hmm. Might Mr. Bush — or anyone in our leadership, civilian or military — notice the unbridgeable cultural differences revealed by these disparate notions of human rights? Alas, probably not. Islam's still peace, according to the prez. Those pesky "extremists" fighting jihad are not, he said, "the true face of Islam."

There Imam Bush goes again. "I am astonished by President Bush when he claims there is nothing in the Qu'ran that justifies jihad violence in the name of Islam," jailed jihadi cleric Abu Qatada said under similar circumstances almost six years ago. "Is he some kind of Islamic scholar? Has he ever actually read the Qu'ran?"

No. He's just leader of the Free World — a Free World that has become less free and more dhimmified on his severely myopic watch.

Diana West

THE ISLAMIC SOCIETY'S MERITLESS LAWSUIT

Four weeks ago, the Islamic Society of Boston folded its cards. On May 29, it abandoned the sweeping defamation lawsuit it had filed in 2005 against 17 defendants -- journalists, scholars, activist groups, and others who had expressed concerns about the Islamic Society's leaders, some of whom had ties to jihadist extremism, and about the land the city of Boston had sold it at a cut-rate price in order to build a mosque.

The complaint had accused the defendants of despicable behavior -- lying about the Islamic Society, vilifying innocent people, conspiring to deprive Boston-area Muslims of their religious freedom and other civil rights. If even some of the charges were true, the defendants deserved to face harsh legal penalties and be shunned by the entire community. Instead, the Islamic Society dropped its suit without collecting a penny. Why?

Because the charges were false, that's why. And pretrial discovery -- the evidence being gathered through subpoenas and depositions -- was proving it.

For example, the Islamic Society claimed that publicity about its leaders' ties to Islamist extremism had "been devastating" to the organization's fund-raising. "Donations to the ISB have decreased," the lawsuit charged. In a press release, the organization lamented that negative media coverage had resulted in "donations trickling to a halt."

But in July 2005, well after the supposedly "devastating" news coverage had first appeared in the Boston Herald and on Fox 25 TV, a letter written by the Islamic Society's attorney and e-mailed by Chairman Yousef Abou-allaban conveyed a very different message. "Fund-raising has been robust," it reported, "and ISB has $2 million in cash."

Fund-raising had indeed been robust. Documents acquired during discovery revealed that some $4.2 million had been wired to an Islamic Society bank account in New Hampshire between April 2004 and May 2005 -- nearly all of it from Saudi Arabia. Another $1 million came from the Saudi-based Islamic Development Bank in late 2005.

Those ties to Saudi Arabia were a key reason for concern about the Islamic Society. Saudi Arabia's state religion is Wahhabism, a radical and belligerent form of Islam, and as the 9/11 Commission reported, Saudi money is used "to spread Wahhabi beliefs throughout the world, including in mosques and schools. . . . Some Wahhabi-funded organizations have been exploited by extremists to further their goal of violent jihad against non-Muslims."

But in its lawsuit, the Islamic Society had *denied* any Saudi connection to the mosque it was building in Boston. It said it had been libeled by the "false information" that it received money "from Wahhabis and/or Muslim Brotherhood and/or other Saudi/Middle Eastern sources." As the evidence amassed during discovery made clear, however, that wasn't libel. It was the simple truth.

Repeatedly, the Islamic Society sought court orders blocking the release of such evidence. In one case, it warned that publishing certain documents would "create serious security risks" for Muslim worshipers, since it would reveal the new mosque's architectural schematics. The court denied that request after the defendants pointed out that the schematics were not exactly a secret: They are publicly posted on the Islamic Society's own website.

And so it went. One by one, the Islamic Society's claims and accusations proved groundless. By the time it dropped its lawsuit on May 29, it was clear that it had no chance of winning.

And yet the Islamic Society spins its loss as a victory, noting that the construction of the mosque is going forward. "It was never about money," said Mahdi Bray of the Muslim American Society Freedom Foundation. "It was about religious freedom."

What the lawsuit was really about, it seems to me, was intimidation -- intimidation of anyone inclined to raise questions or express concerns about the Islamic Society's leaders and their connections to radical Islam. Libel suits have become a favorite tactic of Islamists, who deploy them to silence their critics. In yet another document produced during discovery, the head of the Islamic Center of New England advises Abou-allaban to "thwart" Fox 25 with a lawsuit. "If Fox is being sued for this story," he writes, "it stands to reason that they will be prevented from reporting on the story further while the case is in court."

Sad to say, such legal intimidation works. Once the lawsuit was filed, Fox 25 and the Herald essentially ended their investigative reporting into the Islamic Society's radical connections. Others felt the pressure, too. When an attorney for one of the defendants was interviewed about the case on the radio, the station received a threatening legal letter from the Islamic Society’s lawyer -- followed by a subpoena for tapes of the interview and the program host’s notes. A free-lance journalist who wrote an article about the case for The New Republic was likewise hit with a subpoena.

So while the Islamic Society's lawsuit was without merit, that doesn't mean it was without effect. Serious questions remain about the Saudi-funded mosque going up in Boston. Will journalists, public officials, and concerned citizens insist on getting answers? Or will they choose instead to look the other way, unwilling to run the risk of predatory litigation and bad-faith accusation?

By Jeff Jacoby

Malibu conference on Europe sees threats in 'multiculturalism'

It was a beautiful Sunday in Malibu, but the 300 people gathered at a Pepperdine University hilltop building had little time to appreciate the sparkling Pacific Ocean.

The scholars, journalists and concerned citizens were there for a conference whose title could hardly be weightier or more ominous: "The Collapse of Europe, the Rise of Islam, and the Consequences for the United States."

"We did not come here to declare the demise of Europe, whose strength is vital to the future of Western civilization," said Avi Davis, coordinator of the June 10-11 meeting and executive director of the recently founded American Freedom Alliance, which seeks to promote freedom of conscience among people of faith.

However, Davis and most of the speakers clearly meant "to raise a red flag that in its present state, Europe is too exhausted, too uncertain of its future and too unwilling to defend its basic values against Islamic insurgency."

Describing the conference as the most concerted intellectual effort to address this perceived danger, Davis said that the venue on the U.S. West Coast indicated that "Europeans either think there is no problem or are fearful of addressing it."

Instead, impressive numbers of European writers and thinkers from Britain, France, Germany, Holland, Belgium, Switzerland and Austria, who seek to "awaken" their countrymen, traveled to Malibu to join their like-minded American colleagues.

At just one of the 15 sessions, titled "Eurabia: Is Muslim Domination of Europe Inevitable?" the panelists included Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a native of Somalia, former Dutch Parliament member and fervent critic of Islam's treatment of women; Henryk Broder, an influential German Jewish journalist and author of "Hurray -- We Surrender," and Dutch filmmaker Leon de Winter.

They were joined by Americans Daniel Pipes, director of the Middle East Forum, and Gregory M. Davis, documentary film producer and author of "Religion of Peace?"

Among other well-known speakers at the conference were talk show hosts Hugh Hewitt and Dennis Prager, columnist Mark Steyn and professor James Q. Wilson of Harvard, UCLA and Pepperdine University.

While the "Eurabia" panelists did not give up Europe for lost, their indictments of the Continent's alleged spinelessness and inaction in the face of escalating Islamic immigration, birthrate and militancy pointed to grave dangers ahead.

According to statistics presented in the conference source book, there are now 6 million Muslims in France, 3 million in Germany and 1 million in both Spain and Holland.

A main culprit in the eyes of most speakers is "multiculturalism" taken to an extreme, in which the self-labeled "victim" is always right, and any criticism of Islamic beliefs or demands is politically incorrect.

"It is a fallacy of multiculturalism that all cultures are equally valuable and must be preserved," Hirsi Ali declared.

"Whether Muslims will take over Europe will depend on how far we let them go," Broder observed. "But most [Europeans] don't know what to do. They prefer capitulation to action."

Such inertia is due to Europe's loss of confidence in itself, various speakers agreed, and in a later session, Claire Berlinski, author of "Menace in Europe," blamed two main factors. One reason is the catastrophic bloodletting of the two world wars; a second is "the death of Christianity," Berlinski said.

"Christianity gave a framework to European life, and nothing has replaced it," she said. "Today, less than 10 percent of Europeans are Christian believers and more British people know about Britney Spears than Jesus Christ."

A recurrent analogy at the meeting was between European appeasement of Nazism in the 1930s and the current lack of resolve to confront radical Islam.

Judging from the question-and-answer exchanges, audience members warmly agreed with the speakers' viewpoints or found them not forceful enough, but organizer Davis rejected labeling participants as right wing or intolerant.

"We have been occasionally attacked as neocons or even racists, but that is simply not the case," he said. "This is an academic conference, and we have both liberal and conservative participants."

"Criticizing another religion is a sensitive issue, but we must break this taboo when our values and traditions are under assault," Davis emphasized. "We are absolutely committed to freedom of conscience and inquiry."

The American Freedom Alliance and its associated Council for Democracy and Tolerance plan a follow-up conference in November in Washington, D.C., focusing on the political and legal aspects of the European situation.

Next April or May, a further meeting is expected to be held in a European capital.

It's not Salman Rushdie I'm offended by, it's my fellow Muslims

Growing up in Vancouver, I attended Islamic classes every Saturday.There, I learned that Jews can't be trusted because they worship "moolah, not Allah," meaning money, not God. My teacher said every last Jew was consumed with business. But I noticed that most of the new business signs in my neighbourhood featured Asian languages: Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Hindi , Punjabi and plenty of Urdu, which is spoken in Pakistan.

That made me ask: What if I'm not being educated at my religious school? What if I'm being indoctrinated?

I'm reminded of this thanks to the news that Salman Rushdie, author of The Satanic Verses and 10 other works of fiction, will be knighted by the Queen. Pakistan's religious affairs minister responded to the news saying he could understand why, in light of how Mr. Rushdie has blasphemed Islam, angry Muslims would commit suicide bombings over his knighthood. Fellow MPs and the Pakistani government joined in condemning Britain, feeding cries of offence to Muslim sensibilities.

As a Muslim, you better believe I'm offended - by these absurd reactions.I'm offended that it's not the first time honours from the West have met with vitriol and violence. In 1979, Pakistani physicist Abdus Sala m became the first Muslim to win the Nobel Prize in science. He began his acceptance speech with a verse from the Koran. You'd think Mr. Salam's countrymen would have celebrated. Instead, rioters tried to prevent him from re-entering the country; parliament declared him a "non-Muslim" because he belonged to a religious minority. His name still is invoked by state authorities in hushed tones.

I'm offended that every year, there are more women killed in Pakistan for allegedly violating family honour than there are detainees at Guantanamo Bay. Muslims rightly denounced the mistreatment of Gitmo prisoners. But where's our outrage over the murder of Muslims at the hands of our own?

I'm offended that in April, mullahs at an extreme mosque in Pakistan issued a fatwa against hugging. The country's female tourism minister had embraced - or accepted a congratulatory pa t from - her skydiving instructor after she jumped from a plane to raise funds for victims of the 2005 Pakistan earthquake. Clerics said her touching a man was "a great sin." They demanded she be fired.

I'm offended by their fatwa proclaiming that women should stay at home and remain covered at all times. I'm offended that they've bullied music store owners and video vendors into closing shop. I'm offended that the government tiptoes around their craziness because these clerics threaten suicide attacks if confronted.

Above all, I'm offended that so many other Muslims aren't offended enough to demonstrate widely against God's self-appointed ambassadors.

We'll complain to the world that Islam is being exploited by fundamentalists, yet fall silent when faced with the opportunity to resist en masse their exploitation. In a battle between flaming fundamenta lists and mute moderates, who do you think is going to win?

I'm not saying that standing up to intimidation is easy. This past spring, the Muslim world made it that much more difficult. A 56-member council of Islamic countries pushed the UN Human Rights Council to adopt a resolution against the "defamation of religion." Pakistan led the charge. Focused on Islam rather than on faith in general, the resolution allows repressive regimes to squelch freedom of conscience further - and to do so in the guise of international law.

On occasion the people of Pakistan show that they don't have to be muzzled. Last year, civil society groups vocally challenged a set of anti-female laws, three decades old and supposedly based on the Koran. Their religiously respectful approach prompted even mullahs to hint that these laws are man-made, not God-given.

This mo nth, too, Pakistanis forced their government to lift restrictions on the press. My own book, translated into Urdu and posted on my website, is being downloaded in droves. Religious authorities won't let it be sold in the markets. But they can't stop Pakistanis - or other Muslims - from satiating a genuine hunger for ideas.

It's high time to "ban" hypocrisy under the banner of Islam. Salman Rushdie isn't the problem. Muslims are.

After all, the very first bounty on Mr. Rushdie's head was $2-million. It rose to $2.5-million; then higher. Iran's government claimed the money was profitably invested. Looks like Jews aren't only the only people handy at business. http://www.muslim-refusenik.com

IRSHAD MANJI

From Wednesday's Globe and Mail June 20, 2007 at 3:45 AM EDT

Dark clouds on the European horizon

Europe is on the verge of imploding: Radical Muslims are moving there in droves. Europeans have all but given up on their Christian roots. Moral absolutes are no longer relevant. National pride is a thing of the past.

The European economy is sluggish, but welfare entitlements continue to expand. Indigenous birthrates are plummeting, and immigration is supplying the continent's work force.

Those were some of reasons for "The Collapse of Europe," an academic conference held here last week. Participants said that unless Europe reverses course, it could be headed for a civil war, taken over by Islam's Shariah law or destroyed in some other way.

"Europe is facing tensions, which, unless are seriously addressed, will tear it apart," said Mark Steyn, author of "America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It."

"Permanence is the illusion of every age," he said. "Today, Europeans find the idea that ... their European Union cannot endure inconceivable. ... We're not here celebrating the collapse of Europe. It's real, and it could hurt America."

The conference was hosted by Pepperdine University and sponsored by the American Freedom Alliance, the Council for Democracy and Tolerance, and the university's school of public policy.

One of the main themes of the event was the Islamic stronghold Europe has become. Although the number of Muslims living in Europe was not available because of questionable census figures and poor data tracking in some countries, panelists estimated it at about 50 million.

"The European political class is not ready to confront the reality of this," Mr. Steyn said. "If they don't get serious about correcting their course, their next generation of Europeans — the last generation — will end their place in a very dark world."

He said one of the biggest problems is Europe's reliance on a largely Muslim immigrant work force.

"Demography, in the end, underpins everything," Mr. Steyn said. "The dependence of mass immigration is always a sign of weakness."

Philippe Karsenty, a French journalist who founded Media-Ratings, which often monitors the failure of the French press to document the rise of militant Islam in France, said his countrymen are in denial about their state of affairs.

"Europe is collapsing, but don't even think of telling anyone in Paris; they'll think you're a fool," he said.

Mr. Karsenty described a France in which many of its citizens are obsessed with the Palestinian cause, calling some of Frenchmen "more extremist than Arabs."

Europeans have lost their sense of nationalism, and thus care less about the large and growing number of devout Muslims who are slowly taking over their countries, the panelists said.

"Islam is a political project and a supremacist movement," said Ayaan Hirsi Ali, an ex-Muslim, a former member of the Dutch parliament and author of "Infidel." "In order to expand, you need an enemy."

Author and filmmaker Greg Davis, who produced the documentary "Islam: What the West Needs to Know," compared Islam to the Cold War threat of communism.

Several panelists also noted the Shariah law of Islam, as far as most Muslims are concerned, trumps all civic laws. Some conference participants expressed concern that Islamic leaders intend to eventually take over Europe.

They noted, for example, that Muhammad is the second most common name for newborns in Britain, and that Muslim leaders are demanding that large mosques be built in the middle of major cities.

"The greatest factor in this equation is what Europe wants to do," Mr. Davis said. "What will its people fight and die and kill for? ... If Europe will not fight for its Christian heritage, will it fight for its secular heritage?"

Several panelists noted a so-called "white flight," saying Europeans are moving to places such as Canada and Florida to avoid problems in their homeland.

"The talented folks want to get out," Mr. Steyn said, adding that these are the future bankers, politicians and business leaders.

Several Europeans at the conference weren't ready to concede Europe is doomed, or that its residents have given up all hope.

"We allow [Muslim immigrants] to go very far, and that is the problem," said Henryk Broder, a German journalist and author of "Hurray — We Surrender," which deals with European appeasement toward Islam. "What can we do? The number of people asking that question is rising."

His colleague, Dutch writer, filmmaker and producer Leon de Winter, agreed.

"There is a vast undercurrent among the general public of the feeling that we have had enough of it, we're fed up," said Mr. de Winter, a critic of what he calls Europe's appeasement of Muslim militancy.

Ms. Ali said Europe's strength and hope lie in its freedom and civil society.

She said Muslims who move to Europe may become aware of the opportunities afforded by a free and progressive society and turn their backs on what she describes as an oppressive religion. She and others already have, she said, but she is also the target of death threats.

Ms. Ali is quick to point out her concerns about Islam in Europe, noting that Islamic leaders are abusing Europe's welfare state and "justify bigoted sermons as freedom of religion."

"Muslim leadership understands it is more effective to exploit a system from within than to attack it from the outside," she said. "But it's not so much what a relatively small minority do or don't do; it's the Europeans who allow it."

Mr. de Winter also put the onus for change on Europeans, saying they must re-examine their priorities. He said Muslim immigration isn't Europe's biggest threat.

"It's a crisis of European civilization, of our identity," he said. "What is sacred in our lives? This is a crisis about values, ethics."

Mr. Davis said Europe needs to rediscover its core beliefs.

"Europe has stopped believing in stuff because if you believe in stuff it's dangerous," he said. "If you believe in stuff, you might disagree with someone. ... [America] is not as far down the slope as Europe, but we're getting there."

Phyllis Chesler, author and professor emeritus at City University of New York, said the embrace of secularism among Europeans is doing nothing to reverse the trend toward Islam. What's more, she said, America's role in educating people about the situation is falling short, that the radical professors who have taken over college campuses constantly side with Islam.

Panelists agreed the crisis in Europe has gone largely unnoticed by Americans. Talk of what Americans could do to help Europe get back on track rounded out the day's discussion.

Hugh Hewitt, the host of a syndicated radio talk show, a law professor and a contributor to Townhall.com, said a variety of steps need to be taken. Among them, Americans should support nonprofits working to alleviate problems in Europe, and Christians should think of the continent as a place where missionary work is needed, he said.

"We are going to end up exactly where Europe is if we don't defend what is sacred," he said.

By Jennifer Kabbany

September Demonstration Against Islamification of Europe

Europe, once so strong in defending its culture and traditions, has over the past decade or more apparently given up the political and cultural will to survive, handing over decisions upon its future to those who would institute "Multiculturalism" as a substitute for its own traditional culture. Many commentators assert that Europe is committing cultural suicide, and giving away its power to Islam. One coalition of groups is planning to voice its objections, and wants those of you who can, to attend the September 11 demonstration at Brussels.

The following is a Press Release from SIOE, the campaign to Stop the Islamisation of Europe:

STOP ISLAMISATION OF EUROPE (SIOE) DEMONSTRATION 11th SEPTEMBER OUTSIDE THE EU PARLIAMENT
ENOUGH IS ENOUGH!
NO SHARIA HERE!
DEMOCRACY NOT THEOCRACY!

These are the rallying cries that people all over Europe are shouting far and wide to Islamists both within Europe and in other countries who seek to impose Sharia law upon European citizens.

It is not only to Muslims, who seek to expand Islam across the whole of Europe, that Europeans are saying "Enough" it is also to our politicians who connive with Islamists to establish Sharia law by stealth .

From building regulations to burial rights, the majority of Europe's population is increasingly expected to adhere to Sharia law.

"Hate" laws now make it a crime to speak out against Islam even though it is just another totalitarian political system.

Our free speech, which has been gained over many centuries by defeating tyrannical regimes through many bloody wars, is now being removed solely to protect Muslims from being offended. Nobody has the right to not be offended.

SIOE is a Pan-European movement determined to not merely stopping the surreptitious Islamisation of Europe, but reversing it.

The first step in this reversal is a march comprising people, from many European countries, all demanding that all non-Islamic European nations remain non-Islamic and a halt to encroachment of Sharia law .

Anders Gravers (Founder of SIOE Denmark and leader of the political party SIAD-- Anti-Jihad Denmark) said: "We do not believe in the concept of 'moderate Muslims' . The evidence points to Islam being the opposite of moderate. The h eart of Sunni Islam is Saudi Arabia and the centre of Shia Islam is Iran. No rational person can describe these two countries as 'moderate'; at least not when compared to European values. We now have children in Danish schools being forced to eat Halal meat so that Muslim pupils are not offended. What next? Are Danish women to be stoned to death for being raped as they are in Iran? Or are people to be beheaded for leaving Islam as they are in Saudi Arabia? No! We will not allow Europe to become a huge Saudi Arabia or Iran"

Dr. Udo Ulfkotte (Founder and president of the non-profit charity "Pax Europa") said: "We clearly feel the pressure of Islamisation in Germany . German police and courts are more tolerant to Muslims than to non-Muslims. One of the highest German courts (Bundesgerichtshof) has just downgraded the punishment for Islamists who publicly declare and ask fo r violent Jihad in Europe . Unacceptably, some judges have quoted the Quran and not German law in court cases. Polygamy, once illegal in Germany, is now permitted only for Muslim men, who may even claim state benefits for their wives.

German life is changing to appease Muslims. For example, Christian crosses in our public institutions are being removed and there are separate swimming times for Muslims in supposedly public pools (which non-Muslims' taxes pay for).

German Muslims demand a quota for "positive reports" from the German media, but they kick out the religious group Bahai from an inter-religious conference because they refuse to accept them within the "dialogue".

All this was once described as hypocrisy, but is now actually promoted by our feeble politicians .

Stephen Gash (Founder of SIOE England) said: "Appeasement of Islamists has become ridiculous . Non-Muslims are expected to be buried facing Mecca and to sit on toilets facing away from Mecca because cemeteries and new homes have to conform to Muslim sensitivities. Toy pigs are banned from offices and Christmas lights must now be called 'Winter Festival lights' so as not to offend Muslims. None of these oppressive measures were even contemplated when Jews were the only ones who could possibly be offended by pigs and 'Merry Christmas'.

Absurdly, to criticise Islam results in accusations of 'racism'. Well, I've always considered racism as being the lowest form of human stupidity, but Islamophobia to be the height of common sense."

Charlotte Westergaard (SIAD board member) said: "The biggest danger comes from our own politicians who promote Islamic values at the expense of our own values. The way things are going all European non-Muslim citizens will be paying the Jizzya tax to Muslims as they did during the days of the Ottoman Empire. Of course the politicians believe they will be exempt—u ntil the local Imam knocks on their door."

Anti-totalitarian stance of SIOE:
http://sioe.wordpress.com/brussels-demo-2007
http://sioe.wordpress.com/ New website under construction
http://siad.wordpress.com/ < /a>
http://siad.dk/--Anti-Jihad Denmark --15,500 hits per day average
http://akte-islam.de/1.html

Contacts:
Anders Gravers
SIAD and SIOE Denmark
Tel: 0045-9-677-1784 / 0045-6-191-6026
E-mail sioe@siad.dk

Dr. Udo Ulfkotte
Pax Europa e.V.
Phone: 0049 173-329-1840
Fax: 0049-721-1-5151-2200
E-mail udo@ulfkotte.de

Stephen Gash
SIOE England
Tel: 0044-122-854-7317
E-mail sioe.nsh@btinternet.com

(c) 2007 by Faith Freedom International

All opinions expressed in the articles belong to their respective authors, and do not necessarily represent the opinions of Faith Freedom International.

All articles are (c)2007 by Faith Freedom International, unless stated otherwise. Permission is hereby granted to translate and reproduce the articles in this site which are copyright by FFI. For all others, please contact the copyright holder. Please provide a link to the original article.

Author: SIOE

Memorial for Tashbih Sayyed 1941-2007
Tashbih Sayyed, 1942-2007

Dear Friends of AFA:

It is with deep sadness that I inform you of the passing of Tashbih Sayyed, an associate fellow of the American Freedom Alliance, Editor of Muslim World Today and founder and president of the Council for Democracy and Tolerance.

Tashbih was the personification of all that is truly noble in the human spirit. He was vigorous in defense of human freedom, unremmitting in his love of humanity and committed for most of his life to denouncing the extremists who laid claim to the Islamic faith and perverted it.

The extremely successful Heroes of Conscience dinner on Sunday, May 20 was held while Tashbih lay gravely ill in hospital. It is deeply ironic that this fund raising event, conceived and executed in order to support the work of his organization, came at the end of his life and not when he was able to savor the outpouring of love and tribute offered for his lifetime of toil. Nor was he exposed to the hope and sense of united purpose that Sunday night's event generated.

Those who worked beside him will remember his humor, patience, honesty and humility as he fought for his love of freedom and his rejection of opppression in the Muslim world. We vow to continue his work and fight for the cause he held so dear.

Our love and support goes out to his wife Kirin, his daughter Supna, his son Wahaj and all his friends and family.

Tashbih will be laid to rest Sunday, May 27th, at 1:00 p.m. at Harbor Lawn Mount Olive Memorial Park and Mortuary 1625 Gisler Ave, in Costa Mesa, 92626

The phone number for the Memorial Park is 714-540-5554 There will be traditional Muslim prayers from 1:00 to 1:20, followed by a brief graveside service.

Avi Davis


With great sorrow I must inform you that Tashbih Sayyed, a courageous foe of the global jihad, has passed away.

After a long career at Pakistan Television, Tashbih's differences with the Zia ul-Haq regime in Pakistan (which gave the Islamization of Pakistan its first great boost) led him to come to the United States, where he founded two newspapers, Pakistan Today and Muslim World Today, and wrote eight books, including Mohammad – A Secularist's View. He appeared in documentaries including Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West. He was the President and founder of The Council for Democracy and Tolerance, an adjunct fellow of the Hudson Institute, and a member of the Jihad Watch Board.

Tashbih was insightful, humorous, and above all, fearless in his opposition to the jihad ideology of Islamic supremacism. Despite numerous threats and a relentless barrage of insults and personal attacks, he kept on trying to awaken the world to the magnitude of the threat we face, never trimming his truth-telling to fit current fashion.

He was a dear friend, and he will be greatly missed.

May his memory be eternal.

Robert Spencer

Tashbih Sayyed was that most rare of human beings: a man absolutely fearless in his commitment to the truth. After 9/11, American Muslim advocacy groups began, with the willing complicity of the mainstream media, to flood the airwaves with a huge mass of disinformation and misinformation about jihad activity in the United States and around the world, and above all about its provenance within Islamic theology and tradition. Instead of acknowledging that there was a mandate to wage war against unbelievers that was rooted in the Qur’an and Islamic tradition, Islamic spokesmen routinely denied this, and castigated those who contended otherwise as “bigots” and “Islamophobes.”

Amid all this Tashbih stood virtually alone as an honest man. He stood out sharply among contemporary Muslim spokesmen and activists by admitting that there was a problem within Islam that needed to be solved. As he once told me: “My whole life is devoted to one end: to make the Muslims understand that their theology needs to be reformed and reinterpreted. Anybody who thinks that there’s nothing wrong with their theology is either a blind person or an apologist. There are many things in Muslim Scripture that need to be reshaped and reframed and reinterpreted, so that they cannot be used by terrorists to justify homicide bombings and honor killings.”

This stance, of course, earned him ostracism and threats, but Tashbih was undaunted. I will never forget his reaction when I asked him whether he thought I should go ahead and write a sira – a biography of Muhammad – as I had been considering doing. He said “Of course you should” so quickly that it took me aback: usually when I broached the idea with people their reaction had been to tell me that if I did write such a book I would be threatened and possibly even killed. But Tashbih never flinched. He went on to explain to me that it needed to be done, that the truth needed to come out about these issues -- and clearly that was all that mattered, as far as he was concerned. He knew that if the world was going to prevail against the global jihadist threat, we would all have to take certain risks. And he himself never hesitated to put his life on the line for the truth.

Would that now we had hundreds, and hundreds of thousands, and millions like him, with his quiet strength, his good humor, and his indomitable and unshakeable love for the truth. If we did, the outcome of this present conflict would not be in the slightest doubt.

Tashbih, I am honored that you called me your friend, and I will miss you tremendously. And the forces of civilization have lost a warrior who cannot be replaced.

Robert Spencer

The most frightening words in the English language: "Should I call someone or is that being racist?"

A plot to attack Fort Dix in New Jersey was broken up, and six men were arrested earlier this week, charged with planning to carry out violent Jihad in the US homeland. The intelligence that led to the plan being successfully averted before it reached the operational stages came out of a report from a private citizen, a teenager working at a Circuit City who was tasked with converting a video tape onto a DVD.

According to published reports, when the teen began converting the video, he "freaked out". His reaction, according to a co-worker, was:

"Dude, I just saw some really weird s-. I don't know what to do. Should I call someone or is that being racist?"

If you're law enforcement, that should be the one of the scariest phrases you'll ever hear.

This young man, faced with images of young Muslim men running around, firing automatic weapons, and screaming Allah Akbar, did the right thing and notified law enforcement.

Click her to read the full article

Our World: Hirsi Ali's challenge to humanity

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is arguably the bravest and most remarkable woman of our times.

To understand why this 37-year-old woman is extraordinary, she must be assessed in the context of the forces pitted against her in her twin struggles to force the Western world to take note of Islam's divinely ordained enslavement of women, and to force the Islamic world to account for it.

A series of incidents this week placed the forces she battles in stark relief. Sunday Muslims shot up the Omariyah elementary school in Gaza. One man was killed and six were wounded in the onslaught. The murderers attacked because the UN-run school in Rafah had organized a sports day for the children, in which little boys would be playing with little girls.

The idea that that boys and girls might play sports together was too much for the righteous believers. It was an insult to Islam, they said. And so they decided to kill the little boys and girls.

On May 3, in Gujrat, Pakistan, Muslims detonated a bomb at the gate of a girls' school. Their righteous wrath was raised by the notion that girls would learn to read and write. That too, they felt, is an insult to Islam.

On April 28, US soldiers in Iraq discovered detonation wires across the street from the newly built Huda Girls' school in Tarmiya, north of Baghdad. They followed the wire to its source and discovered the school had been built as a deathtrap. The pious Muslims who constructed the school had filled propane tanks with explosives and buried them beneath the floor. They built artillery shells into the ceiling and the floor. To save the world for Allah, they decided to butcher little girls.

And the brutality is not limited to the Middle East. Last month in Oslo, Norway, Norwegian-Somali women's rights activist Kadra was brutally beaten by a crowd of men piously calling out "Allah Akhbar." She was attacked for exposing the fact that inside their mosques in Norway, Norwegian imams praise female genital mutilation in the name of Allah.

LATE LAST year Hirsi Ali published her memoir, Infidel. In describing her own life, what she actually explains are the two competing human impulses - conformity and individualism. In her own life, the clash of the two has been played out on the stage of Islamic ascendance and Western cultural collapse.

Hirsi Ali was born in Somalia to a politically active father who sought to free his country from Said Barre's Marxist dictatorship. Forced to flee the country with her family, Hirsi Ali's childhood in Arabia and Africa revolved along the axis of Islamic ascendance at the hand of the Saudi-financed Muslim Brotherhood and Khomeini's Iran.

Hirsi Ali's rebellion against Islam was personal, not political. As a young girl and later as a young woman, she found herself abused and stifled by the dictates of Islam just as her youthful spirit wished most to take flight. As a five-year-old in Somalia, she screamed in pain and shock when her grandmother tied her down and had a man with a knife mutilate her genitals.

Living in Saudi Arabia she was struck by the oppressiveness of the "true Islam." Why, she wondered were she and her mother and sister prohibited from leaving their apartment without a male relative escorting them? As an adolescent in Nairobi she wondered why the enjoyment she felt in the company of boys was sinful.

Why did her mother need to suffer the humiliation of polygamy? Why could she not choose her own husband? Why was she told by one and all that her normal human impulses to seek love, respect and compassion and think for herself were sinful and evil?

AS SHE puts it, "I could never comprehend the downright unfairness of the rules, especially for women. How could a just God - a God so just that almost every page of the Koran praises his fairness - desire that women be treated so unfairly? When the [Islamic teachers] told us that a woman's testimony is worth half of a man's, I would think, Why? If God is merciful, why did He demand that His creatures be hanged in public? If He was compassionate, then why did unbelievers have to go to Hell?"

In her words, "The spark of will inside me grew even as I studied and practiced to submit." Ali credits Harlequin romance novels for her initial mental deliverance from submission. These books, with their passionate loves and steamy sex scenes were her first glimpse at the possibility of freedom. The novels showed her that the emotions and desires she was told to repress were natural and could even be beautiful and right.

Her impulse to rebel was matched by her impulse to conform. As a teenager, Hirsi Ali tried to be a faithful Muslim and even joined the Muslim Brotherhood. Embracing the notion of submission she began wearing a full-body burka.

But try as she might, she could not accept that her own will had no inherent value. She blamed the preachers for the terror she saw as a Muslim girl, believing they must be distorting the Koran. "Surely," she writes, "Allah could not have said that men should beat their wives when they were disobedient? Surely a woman's statement in court should be worth the same as a man's?"

Yet, when she sat down and read the Koran on her own, she found that everything the preachers had said was written in the book.

AT 21, HIRSI Ali emancipated herself. Fleeing from an arranged marriage to a Somali immigrant in Canada, she sought and received asylum in Holland. There, she embraced Dutch society and freedoms and quickly flourished in a true rag-to-riches immigrant tale. She learned Dutch fluently and began supporting herself as a translator. In just four years she had bridged the cultural divide between Africa and Europe and began studying political science with the creme de la creme of Dutch society at the University of Leiden.

A mere decade after her arrival, as a naturalized Dutch citizen, she was a pubic figure, an outspoken social critic of Islam in Europe. In January 2003, she was elected to Parliament as a member of the conservative Liberal Party.

IN HOLLAND, Hirsi Ali found herself confronted by a kinder, gentler type of cultural tyranny - the moral relativism of political correctness and multiculturalism dictated by the Left. Just as she rejected Islamic oppression in Africa, so in Holland she refused to submit to the will of the majority not to notice, judge or take action against the misogynist tyranny and anti-Western culture of the Muslim minority.

Hirsi Ali's labors brought her to Theo Van Gogh. In 2004 the two produced the film Submission, Part One. The short film shows a young Muslim woman wearing a see-through burka. Passages of the Koran permitting the abuse of women are written on her body. The woman prays in submission to Allah all the while noting her abject suffering in his name. At the end of the movie, the woman raises her head to Allah and calls into question the reasonableness of her submission.

The film's provocative message placed both Hirsi Ali and Van Gogh's lives in imminent danger. And on November 21, 2004 Van Gogh was butchered by a Dutch Muslim on the streets of Amsterdam. The murderer stabbed a letter into Van Gogh's chest in which he threatened to murder Hirsi Ali "in the name of Allah Most Gracious and Most Merciful."

While Hirsi Ali was forced to flee her home and live under armed guard in army installations, her message proved too much of a challenge for the Dutch establishment which vomited her out last year. Her own party found a formality on which to revoke her citizenship and throw her out of the country and the parliament. Although the public outcry that ensued forced the government to restore her citizenship, the message was clear.

HIRSI ALI moved to Washington, DC. As a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute she continues to warn the West of the dangers of Islam and of Western cultural disintegration under the tyranny of multiculturalism. Just last month, her work brought an imam from Pittsburgh to call for her murder for the crime of apostasy.

In her life and work, Hirsi Ali personifies the central challenges of our times. She holds a mirror up to the Islamic world and demands that it contend with the evil it propagates in the name of divinity.

She holds a mirror up to the Free World and demands that we defend our freedom against the onslaught of moral relativism and cultural decline.

So too, she demands our compassion for the women of Islam. She says we must see the suffering beneath the veil and work to alleviate it. Whether it means that we must mass produce and distribute Arabic and Urdu copies of Harlequin romance novels throughout the Islamic world; challenge veiled women to explain why they ascribe to a faith that gives men the divine right to beat and rape women; or simply hold Muslim communities in the West to the standards of freedom on which our civilization is based, the West must help these women free themselves from oppression.

Finally, in our own societies we must protect and uphold voices like Hirsi Ali's. For the past five years, Hirsi Ali has lived under threat of death for her views.

We must understand that only when she, and people like her can walk on the streets unafraid will we have properly defended our freedom.

This article can also be read at http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1178431592731&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

The Dark Ages Comes to Manhattan

They come to America to escape this kind of Dark Ages misogyny—but even here, they aren’t safe: In Secret, Polygamy Follows Africans to NY.

Notice that even though they recognize there’s a serious problem, The New York Times determinedly shies away from the M word in this article.

She worked at the Red Lobster in Times Square and lived with her husband near Yankee Stadium. Yet one night, returning home from her job, Odine D. discovered that African custom, not American law, held sway over her marriage.
A strange woman was sitting in the living room, and Ms. D.’s husband, a security guard born in Ghana, introduced her as his other wife.
Devastated, Ms. D., a Guinean immigrant who insisted that her last name be withheld, said she protested: “I can’t live with the woman in my house — we have only two bedrooms.” Her husband cited Islamic precepts allowing a man to have up to four wives, and told her to get used to it. And she tried to obey.

Read the full article here!

Column One: The road to serfdom

In Israel, as in the rest of the free world, we are witnessing the death by a thousand cuts of free thought.

Last month, two students at Cambridge University's Clare College became victims of this state of affairs. The students dedicated an edition of their satire magazine to the one-year anniversary of the global Muslim riots which followed the publication of caricatures of Muhammad in the Danish Jyllands Posten newspaper. As the students recalled, those riots led to the deaths of more than a hundred people.

Read the full article here!

Islam's big "catch" in Britain: Prince Charles

A London Sunday Telegraph report of March 4 questioned Prince Charles' fitness to be king. The report stated that the "Prince stands accused of being 'too political' and of 'meddling' in the affairs of state in a documentary from Channel 4."

Besides Prince Charles' dispute with television bosses, there are far more serious reasons to question "Charlie's fitness to be king."

If Bonnie Prince Charlie were ever to become king of England, it would be his duty, as it has been for centuries for former kings and queens, that he remain Keeper of the [Anglican] Faith. However, he has indicated that should he become king, he would then become "Keeper of the Faiths." Charles stated several years ago that there should be more Islamic studies in British schools. Words similar to those were spoken by former Secretary of State Colin Powell when he said that the United States should bring in more clergy, more teachers, and more journalists from Islamic countries.

Little notice was given when the Queen accommodated a Muslim female gift shop employee by designating an Islamic prayer room at Windsor Castle. Some years ago, there was a demonstration in front of British Parliament with signs that read, "Islam, our religion today; your religion tomorrow." The Guardian in 2001 reported that the demonstrators boasted, "We will replace the Bible with the Koran in Britain." This extraordinary possibility is not far fetched when you consider the following:

A 1997 Middle East Quarterly article titled "Prince Charles of Arabia," by Ronni L. Gordon and David M. Stillman, looked at evidence that Britain's Prince Charles might be a secret convert to Islam. They sifted through his public statements (defending Islamic law, praising the status of Muslim women, seeing in Islam a solution for Britain's ailments) and actions (setting up a panel of twelve "wise men" to advise him on Islamic religion and culture), and concluded that "should Charles persist in his admiration of Islam and defamation of his own culture," his accession to the throne will indeed usher in a "different kind of monarchy.

Prince Charles is not the only possible convert to Islam among Britain's upper classes. As reported in The Sunday Times of 22 Feb. 2004, some of the country's top landowners and celebrities, as well as the offspring of senior Establishment figures, have embraced Islam after becoming disillusioned with Western values. Radiance Viewsweekly also reported that "Jonathan Birt, the son of Lord Birt, and Emma Clark, the granddaughter of former liberal Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, are only two of 14,000 mostly-elite white Britons who have reverted to Islam."

Bruce Bawer's book While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West From Within claims that well before 2050, most of Europe is likely to become an outpost of Islam, governed by Sharia. In a childish display of appeasement, one bank in Britain even banned piggy banks so as not to offend Muslims.

Yet despite the London bombing by Muslim terrorists on 7 July 2005, which hit London's public transport system during rush hours and killed 52 commuters, there are today no efforts to confront the impact of a growing and restive Muslim population in Britain. Today, there are more practicing Muslims in Britain today than there are practicing Anglicans.

To the Brits I say, "if we do not defeat these Muslim extremists, the jihadist enemy that is trying to destroy us, you, too, will be involuntarily praying five times a day to Mecca, and your women will be veiled in Londonistan."

Suggested Reading:

Charles' fitness questioned to be king -- see: WashingtonTimes

Britain's Queen Elizabeth gives orders to allow room at Windsor Castle to be used by Muslim employee as a prayer zone during the holy month of Ramadan -- see: Britain's Queen Elizabeth gives orders

Prince Charles Promotes Islam to President Bush -- see: Prince Charles Promotes Islam

Prince Charles in Islamic dress -- see: http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/119

A report by Stella L. Jatras

Free Radical

NEW YORK--Ayaan Hirsi Ali is untrammeled and unrepentant: "I am supposed to apologize for saying the prophet is a pervert and a tyrant," she declares. "But that is apologizing for the truth."

Statements such as these have brought Ms. Hirsi Ali to world-wide attention. Though she recently left her adopted country, Holland--where her friend and intellectual collaborator Theo van Gogh was murdered by a Muslim extremist in 2004--she is still accompanied by armed guards wherever she travels.

Ms. Hirsi Ali was born in 1969 in Mogadishu--into, as she puts it, "the Islamic civilization, as far as you can call it a civilization." In 1992, at age 22, her family gave her hand to a distant relative; had the marriage ensued, she says, it would have been "an arranged rape." But as she was shipped to the appointment via Europe, she fled, obtaining asylum in Holland. There, "through observation, through experience, through reading," she acquainted herself with a different world. "The culture that I came to and I live in now is not perfect," Ms. Hirsi Ali says. "But this culture, the West, the product of the Enlightenment, is the best humanity has ever achieved."

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Europe's Stark Options

Europe's long-term relations with its burgeoning Muslim minority, the continent's most critical issue, will follow one of three paths: harmonious integration, the expulsion of Muslims, or an Islamic takeover. Which of these scenarios will most likely play out?

Europe's future has vast importance not just for its residents. During a half-millennium, 1450-1950, this 7 percent of the world's landmass drove world history; its creativity and vigor invented modernity. The region may have already lost that critical position sixty years ago, but it remains vitally important in economic, political, and intellectual terms. Which direction it goes in, therefore, has huge implications for the rest of humanity, and especially for its daughter countries, such as the United States, which historically have looked to Europe as a source of ideas, people, and goods.

Here is an assessment about the likelihood of each scenario.

Read the full article here!

Sri Lanka Says Rebels Tried to Assassinate Diplomats

Sri Lanka's government said an attack by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam that wounded the U.S. and Italian ambassadors was an attempt to "assassinate'' diplomats after the rebels suffered military losses.

The Tigers, being severely beaten by the security forces in the east, showed their desperation once again by trying to assassinate high-level foreign diplomats by shelling them with mortars,'' the Media Center for National Security said late yesterday on its Web site.

The ambassadors received minor injuries when rebels yesterday shelled an air force base near the eastern port of Batticaloa. The LTTE expressed shock and sadness'' at the incident, saying the government was to blame because it failed to inform the rebels the envoys would be in the area.

Click here to read full article!

Record immigration to Sweden in 2006

Immigration to Sweden in 2006 reached its highest level since records began. At the same time emigration also soared to a level not seen in over 100 years, according to official figures published by Statistics Sweden.

Swedish citizenship was granted to more people than ever before in 2006, a year in which the country's population increased by 65,505. The total population recorded on 31st December was 9,113,257.

Immigration last year increased by 47 percent compared to 2005, reaching a total of 95,750 people. This constituted just over 12,000 more immigrants than the previous record year of 1994, when Sweden took in large numbers of refugees fleeing the war in Yugoslavia.

Last year's increase can primarily be explained by temporary asylum legislation, which gave asylum seekers the right to have their cases reassessed. The legislation covered the period from 15th November 2005 to 31st March 2006 but a backlog meant that work continued throughout 2006.

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AFA Cinema Gateway:
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Tuesday, November 30, 2010
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Tuesday, December 9, 2010
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