Aside from legitimacy and control the new millennium is sweetly crashing against the world’s despotries - horrid and benign and stirring things up faster than wearing a thong to Church.

Like in Saudiland. Corrupt royalty which draw the nation’s wealth right out of the ground (via devices designed, developed and deployed by daemonic foreign women worshippers) royal cats owe their people nothing. No services or benefits.

Thanks to divine right Kings and nearly 5K Princes enjoy the plundering of natural resources while their own people suffer under the weight of unfree, unfun and nigh unhinged mohammedist rule.

Thanks to really cool tech (created by Great Satan - natch!) inmates or citizens of Saudiland can cable up nearly anything on TV to satiate desires subtle and gross.

Baywatch, American Idol - tons of classic and au currant satellite TV stuff (probably a few laffy taffy channels too) make their way straight into the living rooms (and , uh, bedrooms?) of Saudilanders.

And that’s a prob. How can the religious police and their cleric commanders keep young people on the path to whatever, when they can go home, tune in and soak up wicked Western ways via Viacom.

Easy! Issue a fatwah.

“A fatwa is issued by a recognized religious authority in Islam. But
since there is no hierarchical priesthood or anything of the sort in Islam, a fatwa is not necessarily “binding” on the faithful.

The people who pronounce these rulings are supposed to be
knowledgable, and base their rulings in knowledge and wisdom. They need to supply the evidence from Islamic sources for their opinions, and it is not uncommon for scholars to come to different conclusions regarding the same issue.”

Fatwahs are awesome - whenever one is issued, fatwah fans can go on a bloody rampage, killing, looting, jihad, raising pure heck - as long as the fatwah is appealing binding.

Like in Saudiland. Wicked TV stuff (broadcast from Gulf States) is a matter of concern for the Ministry of Virtue and Vice Prevention.

Saudi State Media (alas, there is no other type in Saudiland) has a really interesting show on shortwave radio called “Light in the Path”.

Featuring Saudi Arabia’s Chief Witchfinder General Judge - Sheik Saleh al-Lihedan.

A while back, this ancient hysteric cleric called for a fatwa against Great Satan in Iraq. Essentially Surge bait - suckering in hundreds of silly Saudi jihadis that were routinely incarcerated, incinerated or simply shot to pieces and left on the side of the road for a stranger to bury.

Listeners can call in and ask questions and a certain call really kicked things up a notch RE: Fatwa fallacy.

Asking about unmohammedist TV shows during Ramadan, Preacher Command nearly blew a fuse!

“I want to advise the owners of these channels, who broadcast calls
for such indecency and impudence and I warn them of the consequences. What does the owner of these networks think, when he provides seduction, obscenity and vulgarity?

Those calling for corrupt beliefs, certainly it’s permissible to
kill them. Those calling for sedition, those who are able to prevent it but
don’t, it is permissible to kill them.”

Whoa! Hold up! Obviously the 80 yo preacher judge guy - had no clue that State Media in Saudiland is owned by the Royal family! Kill the king?!

Faster than one could say “Don’t touch that dial - We’ll be right back” Royal family deployed a cadre of clerics that disputed the Preacher Judge in chief’s fatwa.

And the most convincing weapon they used could eventually be turned against a ton of Saudiland’s control mechanisms like the secret police, the religious police, the fashion posse and the unfun brigades.

Freedom of choice.

Counter cleric Sheik Hazim Awad in liberated and starting to function democratic Iraq, points out such a threatwah is suspect, retarded and ultimately flawed.

‘Our religion prevents Muslims from watching films that provide
seduction, obscenity and vulgarity - the real Muslim can just cancel these channels’

This is significant.

The burden for discouraging this questionable unmohammedist eye candy and witchcraft (which is a very nice way of nom de guerring Baby Jesus, Xianity and concepts like ‘who so ever will’), is not on the State or the mosque - but individual will!

Those remotes can change channels and turn off TV’s.

Free choice as a raison d etre could easily be applied to any control mechs, techs, fatwahs, preachers, militias - even corrupt, kleptocratic, autocratic despotic tyranny monarchies.

The regional reach of the most likely soon to be retired Witchfingerer General Shiek is interesting. Counter clerical cussing from Iraq, Jordan, Palestine and the Gulf States reveal that alien concepts from the wild wacky wicked West - like free choice, fun and prepping for this life instead of racing to the next are taking hold.

Great Satan brought more to the ME than ballots, M 16’s and Surge.

“TV Police” all original, fake, doctored up pic inspired by the sweet crunchy pop rock of Cheap Trick from their CD “Dream Police”

~cross-posted at Great Satan’s Girlfriend

By Andrew L. Jaffee, netwmd.com

Sareve Dukat kept her composure, even though the United States was under attack by Islamo-fascists, drunk on religion, hatred, and a lust for power. The date was September 11, 2001. An airliner full of civilians was just cynically rammed into tower #1 of the World Trade Center in New York City. Ms. Dukat would not survive the day that has become the defining moment for a generation of Americans, myself included.

Sareve Dukat, victim of 911.

Dukat, who was working on the 87th floor of tower #2, calmly called her family to tell them that she was alright and that she would stay at her desk. But the brief calm would not last, as Islamic lunatics drove another plane full of innocent passengers into WTC tower #2, and into the heart of one of the world’s greatest and most diverse cities, stealing the miraculous gift of life away from Sareve, and 2,995 other people.

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The Jewel of Medina

This is a pretty apt description of the lefties whose apologism to Islamist radicals has gotten so out of hand, that publishers, theatres, and art venues have all started pre-censoring just about anything critical of Islam from Mozart to the new book “The Jewel of Medina” by Sherry Jones.

(note: the link to Amazon above results in a dead search)

Mick Hume writes for the Times Online, and published an article recently decrying this abandonment of our freedoms.  He writes:

The threat to freedom here does not come from a few Islamic radicals, but from the invertebrate liberals of the cultural establishment who have so lost faith in themselves that they will surrender their freedoms before anybody starts a fight.

Indeed, though the Islamists are responsible for initially causing a great deal of noise about the publication of various cartoons and pictures, it is the Left that has buckled, along with corporations fearful for their profits and employees’ safety.

Hume goes on to say: “Of course, such pre-emptive grovelling only encourages any zealot with a blog to demand even more censorship.”

And this is the crux of the argument.  Had the West from the very outset been unapologetic about publishing freely as they always have, had we stood up for that freedom of speech that we hold so dear, then it is likely the Islamists would have given up, tried a new tact, perhaps gone and gotten some poor sap to blow himself up in protest.

We have been bullied by the Islamists, and now we’re being choked by the liberal fear-mongers who at

the mere suggestion of causing offence to some mob of imagined stereotypes is enough to have them scurrying for a bomb shelter, their creative imaginations blowing up small protests into the threat of a big culture war.

Hume says it all so well.  His prose is powerful, clear.  His argument is forceful.

“Who needs book burners” he asks, “if ‘offensive’ books are not allowed to be published in the first place?”

Here is the statement by Randomhouse regarding the axing of “The Jewel of Medina”

After sending out advance editions of the novel THE JEWEL OF MEDINA, we received in response, from credible and unrelated sources, cautionary advice not only that the publication of this book might be offensive to some in the Muslim community, but also that it could incite acts of violence by a small, radical segment.

We felt an obligation to take these concerns very seriously.  We consulted with security experts as well as with scholars of Islam, whom we asked to review the book and offer their assessments of potential reactions.

We stand firmly by our responsibility to support our authors and the free discussion of ideas, even those that may be construed as offensive by some.  However, a publisher must weigh that responsibility against others that it also bears, and in this instance we decided, after much deliberation, to postpone publication for the safety of the author, employees of Random House, booksellers and anyone else who would be involved in distribution and sale of the novel.  The author and Ballantine subsequently agreed to terminate the agreement, with the understanding that the author would be free to publish elsewhere, if she so chose.

The statement says “we received in response, from credible and unrelated sources, cautionary advice not only that the publication of this book might be offensive to some in the Muslim community, but also that it could incite acts of violence by a small, radical segment.”

Well good Lord!  Muslims may find it offensive.  Since when do Muslims get such special treatment?  Are all animals created equal, only some more equal than others?  Do we now stop publishing critiques of Christians?  Should we have never published that awful trash The Davinci Code?

Salman Rushdie was haunted for decades after his publication of The Satanic Verses.  Yet his sacrifice in the name of free speech is being burned by the cowards in the publishing industry, by the apologists in government, and by a new culture of moral relativism that will allow the radicals to take what they want, while voluntarily casting aside our own rights and freedoms.

Americans and lovers of freedom the world over need to stand up to the censors and apologists.  If we can’t stand up to them, how will we ever stand up to the violent lunatics in the Islamist movement?

[hat tip: NetWMD]

Roland Dodds, of “But I Am a Liberal” warns us secular (I wont’ say moderate) conservatives against a Jindal vice-presidential ticket:

Jindal is a member of the Republican Study Committee (RSC), a group of right wing Republicans. The groups is in favor of the Marriage Amendment Act which would make gay marriage a constitutionally forbidden act, and believed the government should intervene in the Terri Shivo case. The man is a supporter of “intelligent design theories,” and has advocated that they be used as an alternative theory in public science classrooms. I can’t begin to explain how how foolish this really is, and I don’t plan to debate it here. I will say that anyone who believes spiritual beliefs should replace the scientific method in a class that is based on that very procedure is a moron, a shameless politician playing to their base of support, or a deluded individual that has little understanding of what the scientific method really entails.

Add to this Jindal’s lack of experience, and you begin to see just how utterly nonsensical it would be for McCain to pick him.  Roland’s alternative?

Lieberman.

Now, I like Lieberman a lot.  He’s extremely principled and very smart–and a great pick for national security, support of Israel, and American centrists.  But of course, it’ll never happen…McCain, sadly, will more than likely pander to the “base” which for some reason means appeasing the religious right despite their lack of anything even remotely resembling true conservatism.

Tidbits

The New Centrist gives us an interesting selection of opinions on the prisoner exchange between Israel and the terrorist group Hezbollah.

Added Bob From Brockley to my Links page.  In fact, I thought I’d done this already, but I guess I was wrong…Apparently he is blogging too much as well…

Harry’s Place has given a somewhat tepid “thank you” to my efforts at rallying the blogs around him.  Admittedly, I’m not a fan of the really, really hateful anti-Islamic sites either, but I think Harry could have been just a bit more gracious.

Much of the backing comes as a result of an item posted by Glenn Reynolds at the very popular right-of-center blog Instapundit, who linked to a “Support Harry’s Place Blogburst” set up by the conservative blog NeoConstant. Although I haven’t done a thorough review of all the blogs that have signed up, at a glance they appear to be overwhelmingly on the political right. In most cases, I have no problem with this– for the most part I welcome the support of anyone who opposes the BMI’s dishonest efforts to suggest that we deliberately misconstrued the meaning of what Al-Jazeera originally reported Sawalha as saying about the Jews in London celebrating Israel’s 60th anniversary. (I hope they would all be equally supportive if, for some reason, we were being unfairly sued by Mark Steyn or Rush Limbaugh, but I live in the real world.)

However there appear to be some anti-Muslim hate sites on this list– this one, for example– whose support we can easily manage without. In fact I would be quite pleased if those blogs would remove themselves from our list of supporters. We have no more use for their support than we would for support from racist or antisemitic sites.

Colonel Robert Neville had a few things to say about Harry’s response, and managed to describe NeoConstant as “grovelling” which didn’t entirely please me.  (This because I removed Texas Fred from the list after he called illegal immigrants “wetbacks” and some site called Islam Idiot after Harry mentioned they were a hate site).  Guess you can’t please everyone.

Guess I don’t really give a damn.

And so the blogging world rumbles on…

Nujood Ali is ten, but unlike most ten-year-olds she’s already been married and divorced.  Also, unlike most

ten-year-olds, she’s suffered horrors almost unimaginable at the hands of her “husband” who beat her and

raped her, even though according to the deal struck with her parents he promised to wait until she was 20 to have any sort of physical relations with her.  Nujood describes the experience as a nightmare:

“When I got married, I was afraid. I didn’t want to leave home. I wanted to stay with my brothers and sisters and my mom and dad,” she said, I didn’t want to sleep with him, but he forced me to. He hit me, insulted me.”

This is a horrifying tale, but it is also a remarkable one.  CNN reports that:

In Yemen, there is nothing new or extraordinary about Nujood’s story because children have been married off for generations. The country’s legal minimum age for marriage was 15 till a decade ago, when the law was changed to allow for children even younger to be wed.

But what is most unusual is that this young girl took such an intensely private dispute and went public with it.

Nujood said she made up her mind to escape from her husband, describing how on a visit to her parents’ home she broke free and traveled to the central courthouse across town and demanded to speak to a judge.

“He asked me, ‘What do you want?’ And I said, ‘I want a divorce.’ And he said, ‘You’re married?’ And I said, ‘Yes,’” she recalled.

This is a victory for the modern world, and at the hands of a ten-year-old girl.  To show how far we have to go to overcome the brutality and anti-woman nature of Islamic Law (or Sharia) read on…

Nujood got her divorce, but based on the principles of Islamic Sharia law, her husband was compensated, not prosecuted. Nujood was ordered to pay him more than $200. The human rights lawyer who represented her donated the money.

“I did this so that people would listen and think about not marrying their daughters off as young as I was,” she said with a shy smile.

It’s heartbreaking and incredible all at once.  Nujood is my new hero.  She should be a hero to all the oppressed women in the Islamic world, many of whom are married off to older men as child brides, submitted to a life of oppression and inhumanity, and oftentimes much worse.

[photo courtesy of CNN]

The Jerusalem Post has published an incredible interview with writer Bat Ye’or.  She is an historian and a prolific critic of the rise of Islamic extremism, especially in Europe.

She is the author of eight books, including The Dhimmi: Jews and Christians under Islam (1985); The Decline of Eastern Christianity: From Jihad to Dhimmitude (1996); Islam and Dhimmitude: Where Civilizations Collide (2001); and - the one which captured international attention and catapulted her into the center of controversy - Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis (2005). Saying that Europe is basically finished, due to its kissing up to the Arabs, will do that.

Eurabia was an instant hit, and has added real intellectual power to the counter-jihad movement.  It describes Europe as having shifted from its Judeo-Christian Post-Enlightenment grandeur, into one increasingly subservient to the oppression of Islamic law, or Sharia, where all non-Muslims live as dhimmis.

Bat Ye’or is a powerful, controversial writer, and I think the interview should be read in full at the Jerusalem Post, but I’ve reprinted a bit of it here to give you a sense of the woman’s character:

When you heard about the peace treaty that Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin signed with Egyptian president Anwar Sadat in 1979, how did you feel?

I wasn’t following it that carefully, due to family problems. Nor was I familiar with Israeli politics at the time. But I trusted Begin to do the best thing for Israel. So, I did have hope. Still, what you have to understand is that the problem is much larger than Egypt. The whole Muslim world is becoming more and more radicalized - more rooted in Shari’a, and less open to anything outside the religion. This is due to the policies of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), with 57 Islamic member states and a permanent delegation to the UN. At its last summit in December 2005, it decided upon a 10-year plan, one of whose resolutions was to root the Islamic uma - the world Muslim community - in the Koran and the [oral tradition of the] Hadith, which, of course, means Wahabbism. They also resolved to make the Palestinian issue the central issue of international politics. This is why we see relentless pressure on Israel from different countries. Because the OIC is an extremely powerful body, demographically, politically and economically.

The OIC is an Islamic body. How has it managed to turn the Palestinian issue into a Western focus? And to what do you attribute the political and cultural success of its ideology in Europe and the United States?

First of all, a distinction has to be made here between Europe and America, which have chosen opposite paths in relation to the Middle East.

As for OIC influence on Europe: It is visible in immigration policy toward Muslims, and in the Muslims’ refusal to integrate into European societies.

The OIC considers nationalist-European movements, European history, European culture, European religions and European languages as Islamophobic. Why? Because Europeans have begun to feel that they are losing their own identity, due to their efforts to welcome immigrants who don’t want to integrate. As a result, they have adopted measures to stop illegal immigration, to control legal immigration and to curb terrorism. Europeans fear losing their historical and cultural assets - particularly those of democracy and human rights - to Shari’a law. They want one law for everybody - and it’s not Shari’a, which involves things like honor killings. It is thus that in all international forums, the OIC attacks Europe and demands that it apply multiculturalism.

Now, Europeans do not want multiculturalism. But this is a problem, because European governments - and especially the European Union - do not want to fight the OIC, and so they collaborate with it. Therefore, what we have inside Europe is a clash of interests between the European citizens and their governments.

A similar claim is often made about Muslim-Arab citizens and their governments - that a majority of the former is moderate, while the latter is extremist. Do you agree with this assessment?

No, I don’t agree with it at all. In fact, the opposite is the case. In the Arab world, it is the governments - as we see so well in Egypt - that are at the mercy of the radicalized, Islamized, anti-Western, anti-American and anti-Israel masses who are in a dynamic of jihad. Certainly the majority of Muslims follow the ideology of conquest; it is in the Koran and the Hadith! And every time they go to the mosque, they hear it. I mean, the first shura, that is recited five times a day, is anti-Christian and anti-Jewish. So they cannot escape from it.

Unfortunately, the Muslims who are against this trend don’t have the courage to make the effort to change it. And those who do have the courage are threatened with losing their jobs and having harm done to them and their families. So Islamism is the natural culture of the Arab-Muslim world. Even in Turkey an Islamist government has taken over. So, how can we deny the reality? And anyway, if the moderates were in the majority, they would be making protests and issuing manifestos against Osama bin Laden, instead of against America and Israel.

The environment is one of jihad on the one hand and of dhimmitude [the state of being a non-Muslim subject living in a country governed by Shari'a law] on the other. European countries are becoming dhimmi countries, and people don’t realize it, because they don’t know what jihad and dhimmitude are, so they don’t recognize what condition they’re in. When you have an illness, but are unfamiliar with its symptoms, you don’t know that you are sick. You feel sick, but you don’t know what you’ve got. You therefore can’t make a diagnosis or embark upon a method of treatment to cure yourself. This is the current condition of Western civilization right now.

How, then, do you explain the electoral victories of France’s Nicolas Sarkozy, Germany’s Angela Merkel, Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi and London’s replacement of mayor Ken Livingstone by Boris Johnson? Wouldn’t you consider this phenomenon as indicative that Europeans are making a diagnosis of and seeking a cure to the illness you say they suffer from?

Oh yes, they are extremely important developments which prove what I am saying about European citizens having had enough of this attempt to merge - culturally, religiously and demographically - the Arab and European sides of the Mediterranean. But the pressure exerted by the OIC on European governments is very strong. In addition, there is the pressure of terrorism inside and out of Europe, and that of the oil. So the task of these new governments you refer to will not be easy, to say the least. I don’t doubt their good intentions. But I don’t know if they will succeed in bringing about the change their citizens want.

Furthermore, unlike President Bush - who recognizes that Israel has a legitimate right to exist as a normal nation in its homeland - the Europeans think that Israel’s legitimacy should be granted by the Palestinians and the Arab states. In other words, Europe is putting Israel into a position of dhimmitude, whereby it will be recognized by Muslims if it abides by certain rules and duties.

This is in keeping with its own mentality. When the European community, in December 1973, published its document on European identity in the Copenhagen Declaration, they themselves were adopting a dhimmi mentality toward the Arab League countries. After World War II, Europeans decided that they didn’t want any more wars. Then, when they suffered aggression, such as the oil boycott and Palestinian terrorism that emerged in Europe in the late 1960s, instead of fighting, they joined their aggressors. This was their concept of multilateralism - thinking that by joining those who attacked them, they would be protected. This is when a tremendous Muslim immigration into Europe began.

Read the rest at the Jerusalem Post…

As you can see, Ye’or is not one to play into the hands of apologists.  She describes the Muslim world as being in a “dynamic of jihad” wherein the it is the governments themselves “as we see so well in Egypt - that are at the mercy of the radicalized, Islamized, anti-Western, anti-American and anti-Israel masses.”

Brilliant interview all around–and important words.  Europe has let the thief in through the front door, and now they have no way of turning him out again…

Read about this at EuropeNews and it should be a shocking reminder of just how perverted the justice systems of the West have become.

The picture is an affront to all victims of terrorism and their families. Abu Qatada, Al Qaeda’s ambassador in Europe, strolls along a busy London street fondling his prayer beads.

This is the first photograph of the greying 47-year-old - said to be one of the world’s most dangerous terrorist suspects - since he was released on bail from a high-security prison after the courts ordered that he could not be sent home to Jordan because his human rights would have been breached.

It was taken on July 7, hours after the families and friends of the 52 innocent people killed in the London transport suicide bombings three years ago remembered their loved ones at a memorial service.

The radical cleric was freed three weeks ago when a judge ruled that there were no grounds to detain him after previous attempts to deport him to Jordan, where he was convicted of terror attacks and bomb plots, were defeated in the courts.

So apparently if you’re a terrorist and you can’t be deported that also means you can’t be detained.  Hell, it’s much easier just to let you go so that you can do it again–perhaps your freedom will inspire other would-be terrorists to blow up innocents as well!  What a win-win situation all around…

The fanatical preacher, who was 20 stone but slimmed down on prison food, was pictured on a shopping trip near the £800,000 home he shares with his wife and children.

Exact details of the location where the Qatada family are living on benefits of an estimated £50,000 a year are protected by court orders.

Indeed, the more one reads the more one thinks to oneself…hmmm…the life of a radical Islamist cleric/terrorist doesn’t sound so bad.  Sure, one could find oneself hiding in the Pakistani hills, but then again, if one could only make it to the UK, one could instead lead a life of luxury and relaxation…

Neighbours who came forward soon after Qatada was freed spoke of their outrage over having such a man in the area while British soldiers are being killed in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The decision to free Qatada has left Britain’s anti-terror laws in tatters and the taxpayer facing a bill of tens of thousands of pounds to keep the preacher under surveillance by the security services.

Truly, nothing is certain but death and taxes, and Abu Qatada is surely the man who will make both those outcomes far more likely for far too many innocent people…

Read the full article here.

In 2004, Scotland Yard detectives slept on the floor of their offices as they gathered evidence that could be used in court against a terrorist network led by Dhiren Barot. The intelligence was overwhelming but it was only in the final moments of the two week time period that they were able to prevent the release of Al Qaeda terrorists onto the streets of London.

As The Telegraph noted: “Two years later, they pleaded guilty to plotting to make a dirty bomb and to kill fellow citizens in huge numbers.”

Many journalists, politicians and bloggers like to make comparisons of Islamic terrorism to the atrocities of the IRA. Former British Prime Minister Sir John Major made the astoundingly naive claim that the United Kingdom had, “faced far more regular - and no less violent - assaults from the IRA”.

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There’s an impression that Muslims suffer disproportionately from the rule of dictators, tyrants, unelected presidents, kings, emirs, and various other strongmen - and it’s accurate. A careful analysis by Frederic L. Pryor of Swarthmore College in the Middle East Quarterly (”Are Muslim Countries Less Democratic?”) concludes that “In all but the poorest countries, Islam is associated with fewer political rights.”

The fact that majority-Muslim countries are less democratic makes it tempting to conclude that the religion of Islam, their common factor, is itself incompatible with democracy.

I disagree with that conclusion. Today’s Muslim predicament, rather, reflects historical circumstances more than innate features of Islam. Put differently, Islam, like all pre-modern religions is undemocratic in spirit. No less than the others, however, it has the potential to evolve in a democratic direction.

Such evolution is not easy for any religion. In the Christian case, the battle to limit the Catholic Church’s political role lasted painfully long. If the transition began when Marsiglio of Padua published Defensor pacis in the year 1324, it took another six centuries for the Church fully to reconcile itself to democracy. Why should Islam’s transition be smoother or easier?

To render Islam consistent with democratic ways will require profound changes in its interpretation. For example, the anti-democratic law of Islam, the Shari’a, lies at the core of the problem. Developed over a millennium ago, it presumes autocratic rulers and submissive subjects, emphasizes God’s will over popular sovereignty, and encourages violent jihad to expand Islam’s borders. Further, it anti-democratically privileges Muslims over non-Muslims, males over females, and free persons over slaves.

For Muslims to build fully functioning democracies, they basically must reject the Shari’a’s public aspects. Atatürk frontally did just that in Turkey, but others have offered more subtle approaches. Mahmud Muhammad Taha, a Sudanese thinker, dispatched the public Islamic laws by fundamentally reinterpreting the Koran.

ATATÜRK’S EFFORTS and Taha’s ideas imply that Islam is ever-evolving, and that to see it as unchanging is a grave mistake. Or, in the lively metaphor of Hassan Hanafi, professor of philosophy at the University of Cairo, the Koran “is a supermarket, where one takes what one wants and leaves what one doesn’t want.”

Islam’s problem is less its being anti-modern than that its process of modernization has hardly begun. Muslims can modernize their religion, but that requires major changes: Out go waging jihad to impose Muslim rule, second-class citizenship for non-Muslims, and death sentences for blasphemy or apostasy. In come individual freedoms, civil rights, political participation, popular sovereignty, equality before the law, and representative elections.

Two obstacles stand in the way of these changes, however. In the Middle East especially, tribal affiliations remain of paramount importance. As explained by Philip Carl Salzman in his recent book, Culture and Conflict in the Middle East, these ties create a complex pattern of tribal autonomy and tyrannical centralism that obstructs the development of constitutionalism, the rule of law, citizenship, gender equality, and the other prerequisites of a democratic state. Not until this archaic social system based on the family is dispatched can democracy make real headway in the Middle East.

Globally, the compelling and powerful Islamist movement obstructs democracy. It seeks the opposite of reform and modernization - namely, the reassertion of the Shari’a in its entirety. A jihadist like Osama bin Laden may spell out this goal more explicitly than an establishment politician like Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, but both seek to create a thoroughly anti-democratic, if not totalitarian, order.

Islamists respond two ways to democracy. First, they denounce it as un-Islamic. Muslim Brotherhood founder Hasan al-Banna considered democracy a betrayal of Islamic values. Brotherhood theoretician Sayyid Qutb rejected popular sovereignty, as did Abu al-A’la al-Mawdudi, founder of Pakistan’s Jamaat-e-Islami political party. Yusuf al-Qaradawi, Al-Jazeera television’s imam, argues that elections are heretical.

Despite this scorn, Islamists are eager to use elections to attain power, and have proven themselves to be agile vote-getters; even a terrorist organization (Hamas) has won an election. This record does not render the Islamists democratic but indicates their tactical flexibility and their determination to gain power. As Erdogan has revealingly explained, “Democracy is like a streetcar. When you come to your stop, you get off.”

Hard work can one day make Islam democratic. In the meanwhile, Islamism represents the world’s leading anti-democratic force.

~by Daniel Pipes

~by Churchill’s Parrot

“In history every nation that watered-down it’s Judeo-Christian heritage was taken over by Islam. Every single one.”
-Walid Shoebat, former Islamic terrorist, on The Gathering Storm Report 3/14/08
————–
Christendom - the concept of nations or families of nations united through their mutual devotion to the teachings of Christ and thus comprising a formidable foe to the forces of evil - is a concept which no doubt strikes terror in the hearts and minds of secularists and multi-culturalists presently at the helm of Western Civilization (and driving it straight into the wall.) For to them, if “evil” exists at all, it comes in no greater form than Christianity. In part, we feel their pain. The prevailing caricature of Christianity is that of a vapid, bubbleiscious, painted-smile cult offering all the spiritual depth of an Osmond family reunion on the Lawrence Welk show. To this we would most assuredly say, “no thank you.” We would also say to secularists as well as to Christians who have helped facilitate this caricature, this is NOT Christianity.
Even more terrifying for non-believers are proposals for the formation of some kind of structured world body defining and defending an official Christendom. “The Global Christian Alliance” as illustrated by Mr. Timothy Furnish, or the “Shire Strategy” of Mr. James Pinkerton. Both strategies, these gentlemen propose, would redefine the Judeo-Christian heritage shared by the vast majority of the free world and better enable it to defend itself against enemies of that heritage, most particularly Islam.

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