10 Questions Liberals Must Ask Themselves
Monday, July 6, 2009
posted by Dr. Tawfik Hamid In my opinion, there are self-explanatory answers to all of the following questions: Question #1: What would liberals say to women who are stoned to death for adultery, to gays facing capital punishment, and to Muslims beheaded for converting from Islam to another faith, all according to Islamic law? Will liberals say that they must show “tolerance” and accept this barbarism as a matter of respect for religious values or stand against inhumane laws? Question #2: Where can we find sharia books that clearly stand against the above violence? Instead of trying to convince the world that sharia law is peaceful and that it is all a matter of different interpretations, it would be much better if the Liberals asked the leading Islamic scholars to unambiguously declare that stoning women, killing gays, and beheading apostates are unacceptable. Question #3: Why do the liberal thinkers try to find justifications for terrorism such as poverty, lack of education, and the historical “feeling of injustice” among Muslims at the hands of the West? The Jews were exposed to some of the worst forms of suffering and torture in human history at the hands of the Nazis yet they have not performed terrorist acts against German civilians. Question #4: Muslims in the West enjoy rights as equal citizens. However, Jews in the Muslim world are called pigs and monkeys by leading Islamic scholars, Christians are not allowed easy access to build churches, and the Baha’i community is discriminated against in many parts of the Muslim world. Who should really feel angry? Question #5: Why are socioeconomic conditions and political circumstances often used to justify acts of terrorism committed by Muslims? Christians, Buddhists, and Hindus live under the same circumstances and do not instigate such a level of violence. What is the reason for this selectivity? Question #6: Why do liberals demonstrate against Israel for killing Palestinian civilians, which is unintentional and happens because Palestinian terrorists hide among the victims, yet do not use their passion to demonstrate against Hamas, who has intentionally killed ‘Palestinian’ civilians? Note: Hamas assassinated three children of their opponent Dahlan who was the head of Intelligence of the Palestinian authority. Question #7: The Arab-Israeli conflict is often viewed as a historical source of modern day terrorism, yet how could this possibly explain why Muslims have killed and mutilated the dead bodies of fellow Muslims in areas such as Iraq and Algeria? Question #8: If non-Muslims were to begin promoting the idea that “Muslims are pigs and monkeys,” would the liberals stand against this or would they remain silent as they usually do when Muslims call Jews by these names? Question #9: If a Muslim decided to follow in the “footsteps” of the Prophet Muhammad by marrying and having sex with a 9 year-old girl, would liberal thinkers stand against this or allow it to happen out of respect for religious freedom? Note: This story is mentioned in Al-Buchary, the most authentic hadith book in the Sunni world, but it is not in the Quran and the age of marriage is different in Sheia books. Question #10: How would liberals respond if radical Muslims declared war on them and used the standard sharia rule to offer the three choices of conversion to Islam, paying a humiliating tax called the jizya, or be killed? Would liberals respect these religious values by accepting one of these options OR stand against such barbarism in order to protect human civilization? Source: TawfikHamid.com via Lisistrata.com
1. Barbarians kill as West drifts
August 25, 2007 - Salim Mansour, Toronto Sun There comes a point at which diminishing returns on most issues begin to go negative. Such a point in denouncing Islamist terrorism and equally the Muslim majority's silence against this menace was reached sometime ago. As Islamist terrorism, however despicable, became mundane occurrence in the daily news cycle, the deafening silence of Muslims -- except for lonely voices of feeble opposition -- has given credence to growing numbers of non-Muslims that Islam is as much a religion of peace as the Klanmen's politics is an expression of multiculturalism. But there is another side to this abject reality. The Muslim majority's silence is greatly compounded by the appeasement mentality in the West of the mainstream liberal-left media, politicians trolling for ethnic votes and bureaucrats running public institutions.
An evidence of this comes from Scotland. Theodore Dalrymple, a retired physician and prolific writer, in New York's City Journal reports: "In an effort to ensure that no Muslim doctors ever again try to bomb Glasgow Airport, bureaucrats at Glasgow's public hospitals have decreed that henceforth no staff may eat lunch at their desks or in their offices during the holy month of Ramadan, so that fasting Muslims shall not be offended by the sight or smell of their food. Vending machines will also disappear from the premises during that period." It is as if more diversity training for public officials, more accommodation of demands made by fundamentalist Muslims, greater willingness to self-flagellate for sins long past of western colonialism, more policing of what might be politically incorrect speech and writing about Islamists or Saudi Arabia's official cult (Wahhabism) of bigotry masquerading as a world religion, will somehow mysteriously translate into taming suicide-bombers and their masters to reciprocate kindly to the liberal-left sensibilities of people in the West. Dalrymple observes stories such as the one from Scotland tell us something about how civilizations commit suicide -- they "collapse not because the barbarians are so strong, but because they themselves are so morally enfeebled." What do barbarians do? Kill indiscriminately as in the recent Aug. 14 massacre in northern Iraq reported by the New York Post with the headline "Savages Kill 175 in Iraq Bombings." Four trucks were exploded west of Mosul -- Iraq's third largest city in the Kurdish north -- in an area predominantly inhabited by Yazidis, a people practising pre-Islamic faith. The toll of dead and wounded among this poor dwindling minority living at the edge of the Iraqi society far exceeds the numbers first reported.
This savagery is the work of al-Qaida associates preparing more predictable bombings ahead of the mid-September report in Washington to be given by Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq. BOMBINGS AND OPINION There is now a pattern in al-Qaida bombings arranged to influence American public opinion during key moments in public policy debates and general elections. But the liberal-left media, such as the New York Times, remains fixated with faulting the Bush administration for the savagery of Islamists while providing oxygen to apologists of terror spinning their endless refrain of "root cause" being oil and Israel for violence originating in the Middle East. How morally enfeebled, as Dalrymple opines, is the West? Imagine the uproar denouncing any suggestion that the mainstream liberal-left media, in appearance at least, is treasonously on side with the newest enemies of freedom and democracy. Source: http://www.islamicpluralism.org/articles/2007a/070825drift.htm 2. Europe placates foes of freedom31st January 2009 - Salim Mansour Europe, or a significant segment of Europe, unfailingly discloses its frequent willingness to appease totalitarian foes of freedom.
In modern times Europe gladly has served as a cradle of fascism on the right, communism on the left and in between all sorts of variations of the two, joined at the hip with a common blood-soaked bigotry directed at Jews.
Since 9/11, and despite Muslim terrorists striking on European soil, that segment of Europe ready to appease any totalitarian assault on freedom has contorted itself to accommodate the Islamist agenda. The latest evidence of this is the Amsterdam Court of Appeal's decision to prosecute Geert Wilders, an elected member of the Dutch Parliament, for hate speech offending Islam and Muslims.
Wilders is the most daring critic of the Islamist assault on Holland, and Europe, since the murder of Theo van Gogh in November 2004 by a self-confessed Muslim fanatic of Moroccan origin, and the marginalization in Dutch politics of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born critic of Islam.
What brings Wilders into legal trouble with Dutch jurists is the 15-minute video he produced last year on Islam titled Fitna. In this short film Wilders juxtaposed verses from the Koran with passages from Hitler's rant, Mein Kampf, and urged Muslims to push for reform by removing "hate-filled" verses from their sacred text.
I do not share Wilders' views on the Koran, or on Islam, and I would be quite prepared to engage him if an opportunity presented itself. But I categorically disagree with the Amsterdam Court of Appeal's decision to prosecute him on the grounds of hate speech, thereby abridging the principle of free speech, for expressing his views on the Koran.
It is ironic that the announcement to prosecute Wilders comes on the eve of the 20th anniversary of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's notorious incitement (fatwa) to murder Salman Rushdie, the Indian-born writer, for his satirical novel The Satanic Verses.
Khomeini's incitement was an opening salvo in the Islamist agenda to silence any critic, Muslim or non-Muslim, of Islam and Arab-Muslim history.
Following Khomeini's directive to murder, Farag Foda -- a courageous and brilliant Egyptian critic of fundamentalist Muslims and Islam -- was gunned down in Cairo in April 1992. However Foda's compatriot and winner of the 1988 Nobel Prize in literature, Naguib Mahfouz, survived a knife assault by Islamists in 1994.
Islamist effort to silence critics is part of a larger agenda for the full and unreformed imposition of Sharia -- laws derived from the Koran and codified in the first millennium of the Christian era -- within the Arab-Muslim world, and its acceptance by governments in Europe and North America to enable Muslims residing in the West to live by a pre-modern legal code.
'DEFAMATION'
This push is backed by the 57-member Organization of Islamic Countries (OIC) at the UN to combat "defamation of religions" under the international human rights code for the purpose of judicially silencing critics of Islam and Muslims.
The prosecution of Wilders, as the Dutch judges contort themselves to do the bidding of the OIC, will warm the hearts of Islamists everywhere. But Europe and the West could not be more warned of what embracing the Islamist agenda means than taking full measure of the Arab-Muslim world turned into a cultural wasteland by the unremitting Islamist assault on civilization.
 A Palestinian woman wearing a hijab veil.The deadly face of Muslim extremism
Tarek Fatah and Farzana Hassan, National Post
Published: Wednesday, December 12, 2007 The tragic death of a Mississauga, Ont., teenage girl -- allegedly at the hands of her own traditionally minded Muslim father -- has sent shock waves across the world. Canadians are justified in raising concerns as to whether this is a sign of the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in their own backyard.
Aqsa Parvez, a sprightly 16-year-old, beloved of her friends and peers at Applewood Heights Secondary School, was only trying to be herself, was only wishing for a normal adolescence amid Canada's rich cultural mosaic. Her father has now been charged with murder, and his son with obstruction, while a young life has been snuffed out -- likely in the name of honour and Islam.
Radical Muslim men consider themselves ultimately responsible for the conduct of the womenfolk. This outlook is rooted in a medieval ethos that treats women as nonpersons, unable to decide for themselves what they should wear, where they must go and what they must accomplish in life. If their conduct is seen as contravening this austere religious outlook, they are invariably subjected to abuse.
The hijab in particular has become a thorny issue among Muslim families. It has been elevated as a sort of "sixth pillar of Islam" among militant sects. Young teenage girls are often lectured over the virtues of the hijab by their family members. Once they hit puberty, compliance is deemed a non-negotiable religious requirement.
Go on reading here: http://www.nationalpost.com/news/story.html?id=162281
 February 12
The more the British Left indulges antisemitism, the more kosher I feel.
My name is Nick Cohen, and I think I’m turning into a Jew. Despite being called “Cohen”, I’ve never been Jewish before. It’s not simply that I am an atheist. My Jewish friends tell me that it is hard to find an educated London Jew who is not an atheist, but that I have no connection with Jewish culture.
The Jewish side of my family is my father’s (which is not a help, I gather). My great grandparents fled from the Tsarist Empire at the time of the pogroms, but their son, my grandfather, revolted. He became a Communist and married outside the faith. My father was brought up with no connection to Judaism and, inevitably, so was I.
My sole interest in Jewish concerns came from being a left-wing opponent of the far Right, and the blood-soaked antisemitic superstitions which turned Europe into a graveyard. When I was young, such attitudes seemed unproblematic. You did not have to be a Jew to oppose fascism; everyone I knew did that regardless of colour or creed.
Today the old certainties have gone because there are two far-right movements: the white neo-Nazi parties that the Left still opposes; and the clerical fascists of radical Islam which, extraordinarily, the modern Left succours and indulges. I am not only talking about Ken Livingstone, George Galloway and their gruesome accomplices in the intelligentsia. Wider liberal society is almost as complicit. It does not applaud the Islamist far Right, but it will not condemn it either. From the broadcasters, through the liberal press, the Civil Service, the Metropolitan Police, the bench of bishops and the judiciary, antisemitism is no longer an unthinkable mental deformation. As long as the conspiracy theories of the counter-enlightenment come from ideologues with dark rather than white skins, nominally liberal men and women will not speak out.
Fight back and you become a Jew, whether you are or not. Mark Lawson recently described an argument at the BBC over the corporation’s decision not to screen the charity appeal for Gaza. His furious colleague declared that the only reason Lawson supported the ban was because he was Jewish. Lawson had to tell him that he was, in fact, raised a Catholic.
A furious Labour MP was no different when he told a colleague of mine that I had gone off the rails when I married a “hard-right” Jewish woman from North London. My friend replied that this would be news to my wife, a liberal Catholic from Stoke-on-Trent.
It was kind of him to point that out, but I would no longer protest that I wasn’t Jewish, and I don’t think Lawson should either. It is cowardly to stammer that you are not a Jew because you concede the racist’s main point — that there is something suspect about being Jewish — as you do it.
In any case, my experience of left-wing antisemitism has changed the way I think and made me, if you like, more Jewish.
Although I want to see every Israeli settlement on the West Bank dismantled, it was clear to me that when Hamas fired thousands of rockets into Israel it had declared war and had to accept the consequences. I would not have thought that five years ago.
You do not need me to add that mine is a minority point of view among liberals, and that British Jews are living through a very dangerous period. They are the only ethnic minority whose slaughter official society will excuse. If a mass murderer bombed a mosque or black Pentecostal church, no respectable person would say that the “root cause” of the crime was an understandable repulsion at the deeds of al-Qaeda or a legitimate opposition to mass immigration. Rightly, they would blame the criminal for the crime.
If a synagogue is attacked, I guarantee that within minutes the airwaves will be filled with insinuating voices insisting that the “root cause” of the crime was a rational anger at the behaviour of Israel or the Jewish diaspora.
Put like this, the position of British Jewry sounds grim.
Remember, however, that the first aim of radical Islam is to subjugate Muslims. When brave feminists, gays, democrats and liberals in the Muslim world and in Britain’s Muslim communities make a stand, they, too, are accused of being the tools of Zionists.
As the struggle between theocracy and liberalism intensifies, I can see some being pushed into taking the same journey I have taken and finding their views towards Judaism and Israel softening as they realise that antisemitism helps drive the fascistic ideologies of the 21st century just as it drove the Nazism of the 20th.
I will tell them that the opponents of totalitarianism must never be frightened. If their enemies say they are Jews, they should shrug and say: “All right, I am.” As long as readers of the Jewish Chronicle don’t object, of course.
Nick Cohen is a columnist for The Observer. His latest collection of essays, ‘Waiting for the Etonians: Reports from the Sickbed of Liberal England’, is published this week Source: Jewish Community Online
Tucker Carlson on MSNBC recently interviewed Sam Harris, author of "Letter To A Christian Nation" and "God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything." In his books, Harris launches sharp arguments against religion. The point of the Carlson interview, however, was not about Harris' books, but rather a recent post on The Huffington Post in which Harris criticizes liberals for making excuses for fundamentalist Islam. (By the way, HuffPo published it after The Washington Post refused to due to fear of his words being too offensive, ironically making Harris' point.) In his post "Losing Our Spine To Save Our Necks", Harris lashes out at the lack of Western criticism against radical Islam's horrendous deeds, beginning with the underwhelming absence of support for Dutch politician Geert Wilders' right to produce his film "Fitna" even in super liberal Holland, to the embarrassing lack of defense for the Danish cartoonists, to the painful vacuum of public outcry over various Muslim dissidents who must live in hiding. Where are the liberals to fight for these people's rights? Harris writes (emphasis added): "The connection between the doctrine of Islam and Islamist violence is simply not open to dispute. It's not that critics of religion like myself speculate that such a connection might exist: the point is that Islamists themselves acknowledge and demonstrate this connection at every opportunity and to deny it is to retreat within a fantasy world of political correctness and religious apology. Many western scholars, like the much admired Karen Armstrong, appear to live in just such a place. All of their talk about how benign Islam "really" is, and about how the problem of fundamentalism exists in all religions, only obfuscates what may be the most pressing issue of our time: Islam, as it is currently understood and practiced by vast numbers of the world's Muslims, is antithetical to civil society. A recent poll showed that thirty-six percent of British Muslims (ages 16-24) believe that a person should be killed for leaving the faith. Sixty-eight percent of British Muslims feel that their neighbors who insult Islam should be arrested and prosecuted, and seventy-eight percent think that the Danish cartoonists should have been brought to justice. And these are British Muslims."He continues: "The position of the Muslim community in the face of all provocations seems to be: Islam is a religion of peace, and if you say that it isn't, we will kill you. Of course, the truth is often more nuanced, but this is about as nuanced as it ever gets: Islam is a religion of peace, and if you say that it isn't, we peaceful Muslims cannot be held responsible for what our less peaceful brothers and sisters do. When they burn your embassies or kidnap and slaughter your journalists, know that we will hold you primarily responsible and will spend the bulk of our energies criticizing you for "racism" and "Islamophobia.""Will the next President of the United States be of the same politically correct, brainwashed thinking, blindly leading us into more trouble? For me, an American citizen, my top priority in our present election campaign is national security. I worry that Liberals will not "get it", not understand, until we suffer more terrorist attacks. Meanwhile, the Politically Correct here continue their propaganda campaigns of "tolerance" and "multiculturalism" while sticking their heads in the sand. [Submitted by kmacginn of Hummers & Cigarettes]
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