Category Archives: Islam

Update 4: Huffing Over Hagee

Christian Right, Islam, John McCain, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Media, Neoconservatism

Desperate to create a Rev. Wright parallel in John McCain’s political universe, liberal madmen have been gleeful about uncovering Reverend Hagee’s many controversial statements. Hagee, an enormously powerful evangelical who’d endorsed McCain, has since withdrawn his endorsement.

Keith Olbermann, who barks orders AT his viewers as a Soviet commissar might do—but not as a TV talker ought to—offered up Hagee’s words:

“God sent Adolf Hitler to help Jews reach the promised land”; the Roman Catholic Church is “the great whore”; “Hurricane Katrina was God’s retribution for homosexual sin.”

Olbermann had a giant “gotta moment” when it transpired too that Ohio megachurch pastor and author Rod Parsley, an “evangelical supporter of McCain,” had “sharply criticized Islam, calling the religion [an] inherently violent,” “anti-Christ religion,” and “the Muslim prophet Muhammad ‘the mouthpiece of a conspiracy of spiritual evil.’”

So? Many respectable scholars concur. Many more Americans agree.

As to the first thing that had Olbermann elated: As I understand them, many Christians believe that, good or bad, God controls events and that there is a method in the madness around us, and in unfolding events in general.

Hagee, moreover, is an eschatological scholar. As such, his raison d’être is an overriding concern with “the end of the world or of humankind,” and all that stuff.

Update 1: Obama clearly wants a quid pro quo. He has implied that, just as he doesn’t hold Hagee against McCain, so too should the Arizonan not be encumbered by Hagee. Meanwhile, McCain is bending over backwards to denounce Hagee, which only helps legitimize the media-manufactured parallels between Hagee and Wright. McCain is stupid. (But then I’ve said so before.)

Update 2 (May 23): PARSING PARSLEY. First off, to be anti-Islam is not to be anti-Muslim. This distinction is conveniently collapsed by the left-liberals piling on Hagee. Islam is indeed a violent creed, conducive to violence. Come back to me on that, when you’ve perused our Islam Archive, where you’ll find references to many reliable sources. We’re not going to reinvent the wheel here for those who do not want to do the reading.

Pastor Rod Parsley also said that “America was founded with the intention of seeing this false religion [Islam] destroyed.” We live in the YouTube age, when every botched, unfortunate utterance by a public figure is dissected ponderously, after which denunciations are issued and apologies exacted.

Please calm down to a blind panic.

The estimable Robert Spencer has parsed Parsley’s statement. I take a different tack to the tack taken in the first part of Robert’s assessment: “Statements like that give the anti-jihad movement a wingnut patina that, of course, ABC is happy to perpetuate in this anti-McCain hit piece.”

Parsley, clumsily, was probably referring to the hard-core Christianity that early Americans espoused. They would surely never countenance Islam.

I see Parsley and Hagee, with all their faults, as “ours,” if you know what I mean. They’re warrior Christians. Granted, I’m not; besides being an irreligious Jew, I oppose aggressive wars. Still, Hagee is a crusader of sorts. He belongs squarely within the tradition of a vigorous, fighting Christendom. He’s an anachronism (but so am I in many ways) and he’s indubitably of the West.

Rev. Wright, on the other hand, is not “ours” in any way. His thinking is non-western, alien. He comes to destroy the West, as he hates with all his might the men who founded it.

The kind of rabbis who condemn Hagee as an anti-Semite—they’re engaged in grand-scale projection, for they, not Hagee, will help bring about the end of a West, after which Jews will be even less secure. Very many liberal rabbis are honorary Muslims, or dhimmis, as far as I’m concerned. Hagee is an honorary Jew.

Update 3 (May 24): Sigh. There are those who argue against Hagee and all else they dislike by declaring themselves and their opinions as the norm, the magical mean. Evangelicals are, apparently, outside the norm. Now there’s a rational argument. That’s profoundly annoying to this writer, especially when contributors do so in defiance of facts.

Revivalism, evangelicalism, the faith of happy-clappers, whatever—this branch of Protestantism, and its beliefs, is as American as apple pie. Ever heard of the First and Second Great Awakenings? “Historians have debated whether the Awakening had a political impact on the American Revolution [no less], which took place soon after.”

Afrocentrism, on the other hand—Wright’s creed—is as American as Idi Amin. African-Americans, I suggest, are morel likely to be evangelicals than Afrocentrists.

Update 4 (May 25): This is not a statement of support for either tradition, but merely a statement of historical truths vis-à-vis America’s creedal nature. (If I am not wrong, revivalists were active in the abolitionist movement.) Do I personally have more affinity for a Zionist Christian (Hagee) than an anti-Zionist, Afrocentrist of the left (Wright)?

You bloody bet.

But that’s because I’m a woman of the Right, not a neoconservative. Neoconservatives have very little patience or affinity for “their own.” As I’ve written, “Neo-con nirvana is a U.S.-supervised world where Afghani and Israeli alike are fashioned into global democrats, citizens of the world.” (A mold, incidentally, to which Wright would be infinitely more suitable than Hagee.) I’ve long maintained that neocons—they’re crypto-leftists—are as deracinated as any good left-liberal.

Neoconservatives, moreover, have always evinced contempt toward the Religious Right. You’d think the likes of Hagee would have learned. In fact, neocons consider the Religious Right a bunch of rube hicks. I’ll take the rubes any day over the wretched neocons, the two factions’ philosophical overlap notwithstanding.

Updated: Judenräte Turns on Geert Wilders

Free Speech, Islam, Judaism & Jews, libertarianism, The West

In “Nitwork Solutions Suspends Wilders Site,” you read about a heroic Dutchman by the name of Geert Wilders who is fighting Islam’s suffocating strictures. In a country of dhimmis, this Dutchman is a rare breed (so is Ayaan Hirsi Ali); he is trying to reclaim his country.

When the self-anointed Jewish leadership is not reaching out to libertines and left-liberals, it is siding with Jew haters. Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League is still mum about the dangers to the American Jewish community of Muslim immigration.

On the other hand, Foxman had a fit over Mel Gibson, a man who has never hurt a Jew (unless hurt feelings count—and they don’t; sticks and stones and all that). But when a Seattle Jihadist murdered a Jewish woman and critically injured five other women at the downtown Jewish Federation building, our defender issued only the tersest of statements, making no mention of the dead, the injured, and the Muslim.

By the ADL’s telling, this was a random killing.

Now the Dutch Judenräte has turned its back on a friend of the Jews, Geert Wilders:

“In a statement following the film’s online release, the board said that Wilders – the leader of the Party for Freedom – was guilty of serious generalizations. ‘Wilders presented demographics on the increase of Muslims in Europe with pictures from scenes of terrorist attacks, suggesting all Muslims are potential terrorists,’ head of the Hague-based Center for Information and Documentation on Israel, Dr. Ronny Naftaniel, Saturday told Haaretz.”

Dr. Ronny Naftaniel’s incorrect deduction aside, Jews who side with him and his ilk ought not to complain when increased Muslim immigration coincides with more hate crimes against them. Nor should they be surprised when the many Dutch who secretly consider Wilders a patriot think of Jewish representatives as unpatriotic, and worse.

By the way, the response of the Muslim world and its representatives to “Fitna,” the Wilders film, proves irrefutably that Wilders is right about Islam. To deny that he is correct about the dangerous, dampening effects of Islam on a free society is to deny reality.

Wilders would have been shown to be wrong had the Muslim world and its proxies refused to bring pressure to bear on organizations that screened “Fitna,” and adopted a western live-and-let-live stance toward this form of speech.

Had Wilders not been subjected to death threats for his speech; and had the Dutch government not been pressured by Muslim leaders to denounce Wilders—I’d have been the first to concede that the Muslim Ummah is indeed benign, peaceful, and presents no threat to the West.

Speaking of the Ummah; where is my libertarian community on this? Have those few errant folks repented yet?

Update (April 1): “LiveLeak restores Fitna. Score one for freedom,” reports the intrepid Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch. LiveLeak had previously removed the piece.

Update 3: Nitwork Solutions Suspends Wilders Site

Free Speech, Islam, libertarianism, Media, Morality, The West

A hosting service has suspended the site erected by the heroic Geert Wilders to popularize his film about the Quran. Wilders is the only politician I know of, aside Ayaan Hirsi Ali, to speak truth to power about Islam.

We all recall the tragic fate another brave Dutch film maker met. Vincent van Gogh’s great-great-grandson—more authentically Dutch you cannot get—was “stuck like a pig” on an Amsterdam street by a Muslim immigrant.

So who has curtailed Wilders in his heroic efforts? An American company, of course:

“Network Solutions has received a number of complaints regarding this site that are under investigation … The company could not immediately be reached for comment. Its terms of service contain a sweeping prohibition against ‘objectionable material of any kind or nature.’”

(I’ve just asked the designer of our new fabulous website under construction to check up that the server to which we will be migrating tolerates speech. American companies are becoming oppressive.)

The Herald Tribune has characterized Wilders as heading “a reactionary party with 9 seats in the 150-member Dutch Parliament, which was elected on an anti-immigration platform. He lives under police protection because of death threats.”

If by reactionary the Tribune means that Wilders would dearly like to prevent Sharia from becoming the law of the land in his beloved homeland, and that he doesn’t rah-rah for Muslim rioters, then yes, I guess he could be called a “reactionary.”

The fact that a man who voices unpopular opinion is required to “live under police protection” in a western, liberal society—this, the Herald Tribune doesn’t find the least bit “reactionary.”

Update (March 25): Posted over at Jihad Watch is an interview with “Nitworks Solutions.” That is if long pauses and pregnant silences from the company’s representative constitute an exchange.

My contact for all things webular tells me that “Network Solutions has a long history of screwing people. They were the first—and for a long time the only—people who registered domain names for the Internet in the early years.” They had a government granted franchise or monopoly [like Comcast in certain regions] and, consequently, charged very high fees. “Down the road, when people became savvier and other high-tech companies wanted the ability to sell domains as well, the latter had to go to court to get the ability but they won. Today Network Solutions still sells domain names and they are about a tenth of what they used to charge but they still cost more than most everywhere else. The markup is ridiculous.”

In any event, if Mr. Wilders contacts us, we’ll put him in touch with someone who’ll fix him up in no time with a reliable, willing host.

Libertarians who fail to protest such intimidation are a sad joke. Sure, a host is a private company and ought to be able to host or not host at will. However, this is an example of intimidation at the threat of death. (By the same token, neither did the ousting of Imus have anything to do with private property or market forces. Rather, mob forces shaped that event.)

In “Those Cartoons: A Reply To Walter Block,” I addressed the moral confusion that led some libertarians to shirk the responsibility to defend the great Danes in what I termed “one of the defining libertarian issues of our times,” and that is:

“Speaking and publishing under the threat of injury or death … what is becoming a matter of life and death for writers, filmmakers, comics, and caricaturists in the West.”

Update 2 (March 27): I am disappointed that some libertarians construed the protest on this post as a call for censorship. You really have to develop the ability to distinguish between a debate about libertarian law vs. one about morality and ethics. Or values, as an Objectivist would put it. Objectivists often complain that libertarians are incapable of bridging this void. I can see the merits of their complaint.

I believe I’ve done this exercise once before, but here goes again: It has to be manifestly clear that no one on this blog has called on the state to intervene with Nitwork Solutions, which, by the way, was operating by grant of a government privilege when it monopolized domain licensing; that’s another problem some correspondents clearly struggle with: telling the free from the fettered market.

In any event, the debate here is about this new phenomenon we in the West are subjected to, and that is publishing under the threat of death. What Nitwork did to the heroic Wilders is perfectly licit in libertarian law. Some libertarians, however, go so far and say it is moral; they even lend their imprimatur to Muslims in terrorizing writers for doing no more than “hoisting their epistolary pitchforks.” For this perspective, I have nothing but contempt.

That said, let’s move on to a letter from my mother, our correspondent in The Netherlands:

Wilders: A Principled Man

Holland has a hero. Geert Wilders represents many Dutch people who are anxious about the growing power of Islam in Holland. He is a member of the Dutch Parliament and has won 9 seats in the parliament.

The parliament members have done everything to stop Wilders legitimate objection to the growing power of Muslims in all spheres in this country. The government is terrified that the Arab states will object and will take measures to decrease monetary gains. This terrifies all Dutch parliamentarians and, as a result, they have done everything to stop Wilders from speaking out about this Islamization, have tried to stop him from releasing the film he has made about Islam; and have done all in their power to intimidate him into silence and threaten him to keep his mouth shut.

And this in the “Great democratic Holland,” where, supposedly, “Freedom of Speech” is a holy right of all. It is clear to all of us who support this brave man that freedom of speech in Holland is only allowed to those who agree with government policy—their fear of reprisal from Arabs, in the manner used against Denmark, is the only thing they can think about.

Wilders holds onto his principles, even though his life is threatened—he is indeed a man who is prepared to sacrifice himself for his principles—and for his country.

—Ann

Update 3 (March 29): ACCEPTING THE TERMS OF SURRENDER. As I’ve said, we’ve arrived at a stage in the West’s demise where we are publishing under duress—under the threat of death, to be precise. This state of affairs has arisen due to our welcoming into our midst a culture and faith that doesn’t comport with life and liberty. Philosophical disagreements will henceforth be settled by the kafia-clad hit squad, or their proxies, CAIR and their ilk.

LiveLeak.com has folded. Here you can find a statement of cowardice and capitulation from this outfit as to why they’ll not be honoring the courage of Geert Wilders, and posting his film, Fitna (Fatwa).

Those who threatened LiveLeak.com have rejected the way philosophical battles are fought by westerners (to distinguish from their governments). What they’re doing is laying down the law under Islam. Each capitulation brings us closer to a time when this space, and spaces as outspoken, will cease to exist.

What’s worse; westerners, with few exceptions, are accepting the terms of surrender.

Foreign Interventionism Chickens Come Home to Roost in Balkans

America, Foreign Aid, Islam, Neoconservatism, The West

Europeans take a little longer than Middle Easterners to get lathered up over American meddling. Clinton and his coterie of left-liberal neoconservative advisers led the 1999 NATO intervention into Yugoslavia, intervening in this centuries-old, ongoing dispute on the side of the ethnic Albanians (and their terrorist arm, the al Qaida-backed Islamic Kosovo Liberation Army).

There was no genocide. The killings were of the large scale craven kind the locals had engaged in for centuries. Soon after the “salve” we Americans applied to solve the problem, Serbs were ethnically cleansed from Kosovo, leaving only approximately 120,000 under NATO protection. Ancient churches were burned to the ground by the triumphant Albanian Muslims who turned on the Serbs.

America’s national interests were not served in choosing Albanian Muslims over Christian Orthodox Serbs, although Kosovars promise they practice what they term euphemistically “Islam lite.”

Bush followed in Clinton’s trails to hail Kosovo’s recent declaration of independence. Kosovo is home to the most sacred of Serbian relics and lands. It was Christian before it was Islamized.

Up-to-the-minute reports speak of close to a million Serbians gathering in Belgrade to protest the Kosovo declaration of independence and to express anger at the US. It’s all very well when a handful of people on the Side We Don’t Like break into the U.S. embassy and wreck it. But when close to a million march in solidarity against American policies—a decade hence, no less—they become harder for neocon think tanks to dismiss and diss.

For once, the blame lies squarely at the feat of Hillary’s husband. Former Clintonite, James Rubin, Christiane Amanpour’s toy boy, blames the Russians for the fever that is gripping Serbians—the Russian and Serb leadership. We all know that the people upon whom we visit our policies are but puppets manipulated by evil marionettes–unless those pulling the strings are American. Then the puppets—or puppies—are praised.