Jihad

• Censored from today's campuses is discussion of another, in various respects competing, intersectionality: That of the shared, intersecting, predicaments of today's victims of Islamist aggression, including terrorism.

• Hamas's operatives have trained in Sudan and worked with Sudanese forces, including those that have been engaged in the Darfur genocide. This is the organization whose supporters are leading movers behind the campus intersectionality/boycott campaign and have become the moral arbiters of campus political correctness.

• Of those killed at the Twin Towers on 9/11, 215 were black (136 men, 79 women). Other African Americans were murdered in subsequent Islamist-inspired terrorist attacks in California and Florida and elsewhere, and are as likely to be victims of future such terror attacks as anyone else. But work to prevent, and minimize the impact, of such assaults apparently counts for no more to Black Lives Matter, when weighed against promoting an anti-Israel agenda, than it does to SJP and other Hamas-linked groups.

• The "intersectionality" promoted on campuses and beyond by Hamas/SJP and their fellow travelers seeks, in pursuit of its anti-Israel agenda, to distract attention from the Islamist onslaught, its ongoing savaging of populations in Africa, Asia and America.

642 AD Burning of the Great Library of Alexandria. Several historians told varying accounts of a Muslim army led by Amr ibn al 'Aas sacking the city in 642 after the Byzantine army was defeated at the Battle of Heliopolis, and that the commander asked the caliph Umar what to do with the library. He gave the famous answer: "They will either contradict the Koran, in which case they are heresy, or they will agree with it, so they are superfluous." The Arabs subsequently burned the books to heat bathwater for the soldiers. It was also said that the Library's collection was still substantial enough at this late date to provide six months' worth of fuel for the baths.

651AD According to an account in Al-Tabari, the Arab Commander Sa`d ibn Abi Waqqas wrote to Caliph `Umar ibn al-Khatta-b about what should be done with the books of the Royal Library at the Persian capital of Ctesiphon in the province of Khvârvarân (today known as Iraq). Umar wrote back: "If the books contradict the Qur'an, they are blasphemous. On the other hand, if they are in agreement, they are not needed." All the books were thrown into the Euphrates.

In 1984, George Orwell wrote: “The two aims of the Party are to conquer the whole surface of the earth and to extinguish once and for all the possibility of independent thought. When people ‘disappear’ no one is allowed to mention it, no one is mourned, no one person is important, only the Party and Big Brother are important.”

Today, Orwell’s Thought Police are, rather ominously, everywhere. There is a definite intellectual chill in the air. Reason and civility are all but gone in the public square. In its place, we have insults, shaming, censorship and self-censorship that is meant to “pass” for thought. Hotly internalized propaganda rules the day online. We have met Big Brother, and he is us.

In my view, people seem to develop some kind of psychoanalytic transference to their Listserv groups. In a way, the connection is an umbilical one. The darker side of this connection isn’t hard to find. Internet Listserv groups bully and purge dissident members—this has happened to me and to many others. Sometimes, a small group of people (teenage “mean girls” and their mothers, academics, journalists,) attack the same person over and over again, day after day, for months, even for years. Meanwhile, hundreds of onlookers remain silent. No one stops the attacks or calls for a more civilized fight.

My esteemed ally and sister Ayaan Hirsi Ali has been disinvited from lecture dates and awards ceremonies many times; her dishonorable disinvitations have sometimes been spearheaded by feminists. I have also been dishonorably disinvited, more than once. The point of these de-platforming rituals, of course, is to demonstrate the difference between a Thought Crime and the Party Line. Over and over again, universities and institutions that are supposedly devoted to the free exchange of ideas fail this basic test, strengthening the extremists and the censors by handing them the victories they seek.

So what was brave Steve’s response to this? What was his trenchant embrace of blasphemy in solidarity with Charlie Hebdo and in defiance of Islamic fundamentalists? Well obviously, it was to have a really good go at Christianity. There followed a characteristically unpleasant series of cartoons lampooning God the Father – I don’t even want to go there – and the Pope, with a savage little skit on Francis for not taking the whole freedom of expression thing sufficiently seriously. As for similarly disobliging depictions of Mohammed? Yes, I looked for those in vain, though brave Steve did take a very hard line on Isis individuals decapitating infidels.

So the considered response of a prominent liberal cartoonist to the murder of cartoonists for alleged blasphemy and disrespecting Islam, was to go for Christianity, lampooning both God the Father and God the son. Plus the Pope. Yes, that’s just about where we’re at when it comes to blasphemy in an age of unbelief. Rather a hit and miss affair, wouldn’t you say?

• It is important to emphasize that radical Islamists use means other than terrorism to gain ground.

• This week, the unelected judges of the European Court of Human Rights submitted to the demands of Sharia blasphemy laws and decided not to allow criticism of Muhammad, lest Muslim feelings be hurt. The court actually chose hurt feelings over freedom of expression and truth as a defense.

• "As someone who has known what it is to live without freedom, I watch in amazement as those who call themselves liberal and progressive – people who claim to believe so fervently in individual liberty and minority rights – make common cause with the forces in the world that manifestly pose the greatest threats to that very freedom and those very minorities... We need to say to Muslims living in the West: if you want to live in our societies, to share in their material benefits, then you need to accept that our freedoms are not optional". — Ayaan Hirsi Ali, 2016.

A random survey of 100 representative mosques in the U.S. was conducted to measure the correlation between Sharia adherence and dogma calling for violence against non-believers.  Of the 100 mosques surveyed, 51% had texts on site rated as severely advocating violence; 30% had texts rated as moderately advocating violence; and 19% had no violent texts at all.  Mosques that presented as Sharia adherent were more likely to feature violence-positive texts on site than were their non-Sharia-adherent counterparts.  In 84.5% of the mosques, the imam recommended studying violence-positive texts.  The leadership at Sharia-adherent mosques was more likely to recommend that a worshipper study violence-positive texts than leadership at non-Sharia-adherent mosques.  Fifty-eight percent of the mosques invited guest imams known to promote violent jihad.  The leadership of mosques that featured violence-positive literature was more likely to invite guest imams who were known to promote violent jihad than was the leadership of mosques that did not feature violence-positive literature on mosque premises. 

See also: https://www.meforum.org/articles/2011/shari-a-and-violence-in-american-mosques