by David J. Rusin*

Media outlets tiptoeing around Islam are a dime a dozen, but the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) stands apart for the egregiousness of its self-censorship and bias. Even more striking than the number of controversies involving suppression of Islam-critical speech on its channels are the frank acknowledgements that BBC policy is shaped by fear.

During a recent interview (full transcript) for a University of Oxford project, BBC director general Mark Thompson provided the most in-depth admission yet of the BBC’s double standards with respect to faith. Christianity, he explained, receives less sensitive treatment because it is “a broad-shouldered religion, compared to religions which in the UK have a very close identity with ethnic minorities.” Specifically, Islam in Britain is “almost entirely a religion practiced by people who may already feel in other ways isolated, prejudiced against, and where they may well regard an attack on their religion as racism by other means.” Thus, when asked whether the BBC would run a Muhammad-mocking program on a par with the Jesus-ridiculing Jerry Springer: The Opera, which it aired over Christian protests in 2005, Thompson answered that it would not. Depictions of Islam’s prophet, he maintained, could have “the emotional force” of “grotesque child pornography” for Muslims.

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by Raymond Ibrahim*

Anders Breivik, who went on a shooting spree in Norway last year, killing some 70 people, recently confessed his inspiration: al-Qaeda, the jihadists par excellence of the modern world.

According to AFP, “The gunman behind the Norway massacres said he was inspired by al-Qaida as he took the stand Tuesday [4/17] at his trial…. he described himself as a ‘militant nationalist’ and, using the pronoun ‘we’ to suggest he was part of a larger group, added: ‘We have drawn from al-Qaida and militant Islamists. You can see al-Qaida as the most successful militant group in the world.’”

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by Phyllis Chesler

A very gallant Dr. Charles Asher Small just delivered an important lecture at the 92nd St Y. in New York.

Yes, this is the same Dr. Small who, in 2004, founded the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP), which he housed at Yale University from 2006-2011–until the Yale Corporation decided that the Center’s work on Islamic Judeophobia and specifically on Iranian genocidal Judeophobia threatened Yale’s “scholarly commitments” in the region.

Who could make this up?

This was the first time that Dr. Small spoke about this publicly.

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By Barry Rubin

Author’s note: Every Yom HaShoah I try to write something from my family’s own history as an illustration of wider themes. The material below, that happened almost 70 years ago to the day, is from my manuscript, Children of Dolhinov.

Before dawn of Monday, March 28, 1942, German SS and Einsatzgruppe B units accompanied by a Latvian police detachment boarded a convoy of vehicles. Before dawn, they surrounded the town of Dolhinov, Poland.

The town awoke to the sound of stamping boots, barked commands, the wails of children, and sobs of women. The Kazovitz family hid, but David, the baby, was crying and his mother feared the noise would give the hiding place. So she ran to a Christian neighbor, handed over her fur coat and promised if the woman would conceal her she’d bring a gold watch afterward. The woman refused; the Germans killed the mother and baby.

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by David J. Rusin*

Claude Guéant, the French interior minister, sparked a firestorm last month when he praised Western values as “superior” to the oppressive ones found elsewhere, namely the Islamic world. Yet the controversy did more to spotlight an area in which the West clearly trails its rivals: self-confidence. If a government official cannot extol the unique virtues of freedom and equality that define Western life without being cast as a bigot by the politically correct, how can they be safeguarded against the highly motivated forces of Islamism, which doubt neither the superiority of their own principles nor the righteousness of imposing them on others?

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by Adam Turner*

Starting on March 11 and ending on March 19, a terrorist wearing a motorcycle helmet that covered his face conducted a vicious killing spree in Toulouse, France, murdering three French military officers (two of Arab ancestry, one of Caribbean ancestry) and four French Jewish civilians (a 30-year-old Rabbi, his 5-year-old son, his 4-year-old son and an 8-year-old girl). Much speculation as to the possible motives and background of the terrorist followed. On March 21, 2012, the French armed forces surrounded an apartment in Toulouse where the killer lived and released his identity: It was a French Islamist named Mohammed Merah. On March 22, Merah was shot dead while jumping out of his apartment window

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By Gary Gerofsky

Did you know that the murder of a Rabbi and children in Toulouse, the mutilation and killing of a Rabbi and his pregnant wife in Mumbai, the beheading of Daniel Pearl, and all wars and terror in the Middle East happened because Israel exists? Did you also know that Jews are responsible for anti-Semitism because, without Jews, there would be no cause for people to hate Jews? How’s that for reasoning?

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Question: What enabled the slaughter of Jewish children and soldiers in the French city of Toulouse by a Muslim steeped in radical, victim-centric, warped Islamist ideology? Answer: People like EU Foreign Policy Chief Catherine Ashton, an apologist for terrorist hate. She is the epitome of ignorant, bigoted, cowardly, politically correct, morally relativistic trash allowed by decadent, fearful Westerners to run amok at the top of their societies. This combination of a disconnected public and crazy political elite creates an atmosphere where lying bullies — Islamo-fascist-leftists — trample Western values, commit horrendous acts of ultra-violence, and shut down free speech. Meanwhile, people of conscience have to fight to even be heard, and sometimes fear for and lose their lives. This is the upside-down, Animal Farm-like world to which Westerners are acclimating. How could the depraved Ashton become EU Foreign Policy Chief? Just read about her — she’s lost her mind:

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By Alexander Maistrovoy

An Arab/Muslim caliphate is not a figment of the imagination anymore: Fragments of Middle Eastern regimes will soon form a group of islands called “The Muslim Archipelago.”

“A specter is haunting Europe — the specter of Communism.” These were the first words of Karl Marx’s The Communist Manifesto. More than a century later a different specter has appeared on the threshold of the Old World — the specter of an Islamic Caliphate. (Ed. note: “Caliphate, the political-religious state comprising the Muslim community and the lands and peoples under its dominion in the centuries following the death [ad 632] of the Prophet Muḥammad. …”)

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By Barry Rubin

Is there going to be a “third intifada?” I have no idea. That is a question most likely to be determined by those who set Palestinian strategy and they will surely differ among themselves. What interests me is the question of what factors would determine their choice.

When this issue is discussed publicly it is attributed almost entirely to the idea that frustration will motivate revolt. This is certainly the point made by Palestinian Authority (PA) leaders. The argument is that unless they get their way diplomatically violence will be the logical outcome.

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Hitler’s Nazi Germany signed a “non-aggression” agreement with Stalin’s USSR in 1939 (the “Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact”). It meant nothing. It was a worthless peace of paper designed to ease the Nazi’s eventual conquest and extermination of all peoples in the Soviet sphere of influence: “Of the Soviet Union’s 190 million people, Hitler intended to kill 150 million and the rest would be made slaves for the invaders.” The Nazis did kill millions of Russians and Eastern Europeans. In the same way, Nazi Germany’s “alliance” with segments of the Arab/Muslim world was a short-term lie: The Germans considered North African Arab Semites to be sub-human inferiors whom I’m sure they would’ve eventually exterminated. As is so common in the current Arab/Muslim world, ignorance reigns, and Libyans don’t even know that Allied soldiers actually saved them from eventual extermination by defeating the Nazis in WWII’s north African theater. Libyan Islamists have ignorantly desecrated Allied soldiers’ tombs because of the silly, accidental Koran-burning incident in Afghanistan:

A furious mob has desecrated dozens of Commonwealth War Graves in a Libyan cemetery amid continuing fury in the Middle East over the burning of the Koran by U.S. soldiers.

Headstones commemorating British and Allied servicemen, killed during World War II campaigns in the Western Desert, lay smashed and strewn across Benghazi Military Cemetery. …

There is no “Arab Spring.” It is indeed an Arab winter in which hateful, violent Islamo-fascists are trying to take over the Middle East.

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The times, they are a’ changin’… This time, it’s France warming up to Israel. Not only is the Big Lie about Israel losing ground, but Americans, Canadians, and Europeans are taking notice of Israel’s incredible societal and economic successes — even as the tiny nation is surrounded by enemies. From the Jerusalem Post entitled, ‘We need to beef up imports and exports with Israel:’

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by Daniel Pipes*

It is the far-flung, easternmost island of Greece, 80 miles from Rhodes, 170 miles west of Cyprus, but just 1 mile off the coast of Turkey. Kastelorizo (in Greek, Καστελόριζο; or officially Megisti, Μεγίστη) is tiny, comprising just 5 square miles, plus some yet smaller, uninhabited islands. Its 430 inhabitants are way down from 10,000 in the late nineteenth century. The Lonely Planet travel guide has picked it as one of the four best Greek islands (out of thousands) for diving and snorkeling. There’s no public transportation from nearby Anatolia, only from distant Rhodes by airplane or ferry.

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Reports emerged yesterday warning that, “Iran had been working on developing a missile capable of striking the United States.” In addition, one source claims that, “Iran’s nuclear arms program is complete, its missiles can reach US.” The general consensus already assumes that the Islamist regime has missiles, “capable of reaching Israel and Europe.” This obvious existential threat to Israel and the West has been confirmed by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)’s, “growing concerns of possible military dimensions to Iran’s nuclear program,” bolstered by the fact that the the European Union (EU), U.S., and to some part Japan and South Korea, have imposed an oil embargo on Iran. It must be emphasized that the EU, South Korea, and Japan all depend at least partially on Iranian oil, meaning the Western bloc takes Iran’s nuclear program seriously. All the above evidence is even more worrisome considering the fanaticism of the Islamist regime:

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For those self-loathing Westerners seeking to destroy the great democracies in which they live: The times, they are ‘a changing. Go peddle your self-destructive policies somewhere else (like the outhouse). Now here’s some good, old common sense from France’s Interior Minister Claude Gueant, a member of President Nicolas Sarkozy’s government:

… “We reject … cloistered lives lived along ethnic and religious grounds, those that live by their own laws,” Gueant told reporters. “The foreigners that we welcome here must integrate themselves. It is up to them to adapt to us, not the other way around.” …

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