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.
Muslims who kill in the name of their religion frequently evade punishment in Western courts by pleading insanity or mental incompetence. Jurors, judges, and forensic psychiatrists are prone to accept the claim that some form of mental incapacity, not religious belief, accounts for “homegrown” jihadist terrorism in North America and Europe.
This state of affairs results from the failure by prosecutors to frame acts of jihadist violence as expressions of faith. This failure to prosecute jihadists vigorously stems from several sources: a deep-rooted, Western reluctance to impugn religion; a cult of political correctness; and culturally naïve wishful thinking. Viewing jihadists as crazy offers a comfortable conceit that ignores the stark reality that disaffected but sane Muslims are seduced by an ideology that espouses violent hatred of Western civilization.
… “The heckling [of civilized pro-Israel advocates] continued unabated for the next 15 minutes. The speaker did his best to continue, but it was impossible to hear what he was saying…”
The police standing by did nothing to intervene and stated, “we have been instructed by our supervisor not to stop hecklers, and if you try to stop the hecklers, we have been instructed to close down the program.” …
An Israeli tries to speak at an American university, and he is not civilly accorded time to talk; rather, he is shouted down with grotesque slander: “How many women have you raped? How many children have you raped? You are a child molester.” He was invited to the university under legitimate auspices. What do university police do to ensure his right to speak? Nothing; they protect the disruptors, not the disrupted.
“We were just following orders.” Sound familiar? At the end of WWII, scores of German Nazi civilians and soldiers tried to hide their murderous guilt and stay out of trouble by using this refrain, often accompanied by, “nicht Nazi!” (I’m not a Nazi!). Often, they were standing next to piles of Jewish bodies while they cowardly prevaricated. I know. My dad was there. He didn’t make this up. Similarly, UC-Davis police were “just following [the] orders” of the school’s administrators. If the administrators support the “hecklers” who won’t even consider dialog with Israelis, how could they be interested in peace? Sounds like fascism to me.
These “administrators” believe that disrupting anything pro-Israel — squelching free speech — is fine despite academia’s claim to open debate. Don’t believe me? Watch the video below from patch.com. Here’s the usual rule by the Arab/Muslim/leftist thug/mob, who exercise control because weak, cowardly Westerners are afraid to stand up to them:
With the Obama administration strengthening its ties with the Muslim Brotherhood, home and abroad, and with a new focus on aligning America to anything and everything Islamic, including permitting operatives in America who influence the administration on Iranian policy, citizens now have almost as much to worry about with regard to the Obama Administration as the mullacracy in Teheran. If Obama is not a Muslim by birth, then his passion and his sympathies lie, nonetheless, with the re-establishment of the Islamic Caliphate.
Is the problem Islam or Islamism? Muslims or Islamists?
These and related questions regularly foster debate (see the exchange between Robert Spencer and Andrew McCarthy for a recent example). The greatest obstacle on the road to consensus is what such words imply; namely, that Islamism and Islamists are “bad,” and Islam and Muslims are good (or simply neutral).
Some observations in this regard:
Islamism is a distinct phenomenon and, to an extent, different from historic Islam. The staunch literalness of today’s Islamists is so artificial and anachronistic that, if only in this way, it contradicts the practices of medieval Muslims, which often came natural and better fit their historical context.
Google speaks with a forked tongue. The Internet giant is a hypocritical company, censoring valid news because of political correctness while at the same time urging its customers to act to oppose those whom want “the power to pick and choose what you will be able to see and do on the Internet.” Google has shut down the venerable Palestinian Media Watch’s (PMW’s) YouTube account because PMW dares to translate anti-Jewish violent hate-speech produced by Palestinian media from Arabic into English. This is not the first time Google has stifled PMW — the Internet portal has also permitted, “YouTube [to] host… genocidal antisemitic videos.”Important point: There’s a difference between 1) exposing hatred for the purpose of enlightening the public, as PMW does, and 2) groups whom are actually posting videos to promote hatred. Does Google understand this?
Here’s the scoop: “In response to yesterday’s PMW video-bulletin which showed the PA Mufti’s speech that Muslims’ destiny is to kill Jews, YouTube has frozen PMW’s account. All PMW videos are working except this one but the account is frozen and PMW cannot upload new videos for the next two weeks.” WRITE TO GOOGLE AND ASK THEM TO PRACTICE WHAT THEY PREACH.
PMW is pleased to report that YouTube has reopened PMW’s account. Thanks to those of our subscribers and supporters who contacted YouTube on our behalf, the video of the PA Mufti saying Muslim destiny is to kill Jews is once again available for viewing. …
The Obama administration’s censoring of photographs of the late Osama bin Laden, lest they offend Muslims, is one thing; but what about censoring words, especially those pivotal to U.S. security?
The Daily Caller reveals that “the Obama administration has been pulling back all training materials used for the law enforcement and national security communities, in order to eliminate all references to Islam that some Muslim groups have claimed are offensive.”
Recently, French Islamists (presumably) firebombed the office of French satirical weekly magazine Charlie Hebdo for its speech. Simultaneously, Charlie Hebdo’s website was also taken down in a cyber-attack by a Turkish hacker. The firebombing and hacking occurred just one day after the magazine, which has a history of equal opportunity offensiveness, cheekily announced that the Islamic Prophet Mohammed was going to be a guest editor for this week’s edition, “(i)n order fittingly to celebrate the Islamist Ennahda’s win in Tunisia and the NTC (National Transitional Council) president’s promise that Sharia would be the main source of law in Libya.”
Kudos to American television comedian David Letterman! On June 5, 2011, Letterman smiled and drew his finger across his own throat on his CBS program “Late Show with David Letterman” to celebrate the U.S. military’s reported killing of Ilyas Kashmiri, an Islamist terrorist who apparently was the head of Harkat-ul-Jihad al-Islami and a senior al-Qaeda leader. Kashmiri reportedly was one of the leading organizers of the deadly November 2008 Mumbai attacks in India, which killed 164 innocent people and wounded at least 308. He was also recently indicted in U.S. federal court for conspiring with other terrorists to plan a Mumbai-style attack in Denmark, directed at the newspaper Jyllands-Posten, the newspaper that had published the infamous Mohammed cartoons. For good measure, Letterman also insulted Osama bin Laden during the same broadcast.
Over the past few months, a “mosque” in Toronto has inspired quite a hubbub in the blogosphere and Canadian press, even prompting demonstrations, including some in September. As in many mosques, the genders are segregated, with males sitting in the front and females in the back, but it is the location of the “mosque” — a public school — that initiated the controversy. The Valley Park Middle School basically converts its cafeteria to a temporary mosque in which Muslim students hold Friday (jum’ah) prayers.
The California Chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations recently published an article expressing the “Travesty of Justice” involved in the sentencing of the so-called “Irvine 11″. The “Irvine 11″ case grew out of a conspiracy by a group of Muslim students who planned the disruption of a presentation by the Israeli Ambassador at UC-Irvine. This group consisted of very confused Muslim youth who can neither appreciate common civility nor clearly understand the first amendment to the Constitution.
The 2001 attacks on the United States have intensified the debate that has existed since the dawn of Islam: How is the West to respond to the followers of Muhammad? Some — most famously Bernard Lewis and Samuel Huntington — held that the contest is between two rather monolithic civilizations that are bound to clash. In a 2007 award acceptance speech at the American Enterprise Institute, Lewis described a history of clashes between Islam and the West. He stated that at first Muslims sought to spread their nascent faith through conquest throughout the then-Christian world; then the Christians invaded the Muslim world (the Crusaders); then the Muslims pushed back into Europe (the Golden Age of Islam); then the West retaliated by colonizing the Muslim world; and now the Muslims are again rising against Christendom by terrorism and flooding Europe with immigrants.[1] Huntington argued that “Islam’s borders are bloody, and so are its innards. The fundamental problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is Islam, a different civilization whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power.”[2] By contrast, President George W. Bush stated in the wake of the 9/11 attacks that “Islam is peace,”[3] while British prime minister Tony Blair argued that the problem was not Islam but “extremists trying to hijack it for political purposes.”[4]
All forms of mass murder and terrorism are evil and repugnant, whatever the source, whether from Tim McVeigh, Anders Behring Breivik, a German Third Reich gone mad under Hitler or a huge representative group of Islamists who think that their holy books command them to commit violent jihad against the infidels. The Islamist situation dominates the terror scene today notwithstanding the exceptions such as this recent insane mass murder by Breivik in Norway. Yet the mainstream media (MSM) go out of their way to avoid using terms like “terrorism” (banned by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation or “CBC” in Canada) and the Obama administration (specifically Janet Napolitano) has advised the government to use “man-caused disaster” so as not to offend Muslims by stating the truth about terrorism and calling it what it actually is. This manipulation of truth and language is a tactic to close debate and discussion about immigration, Islamic terrorism, misogyny, sharia, and jihad. In a similar way, debate is being closed down by labeling this tragedy a right-wing Christian conspiracy.
We live in ominous times. Our government embraces false “allies” while betraying true ones; our right to be armed is threatened; our religious freedoms are threatened by unethical political dogmas and nefarious foreign funding; our entertainment is dominated by a depraved group of money-hungry, unethical anthopomorphs; our primary and secondary schools are poisoned with political correctness that teaches that no one is responsible for his/her own actions; our academia is dominated by anti-Semitic, Islamo-philic bigots; and, our government is filled with self-serving, lying, unethical thieves. It is time to remember the sacred words penned by this great nation’s Founding Fathers, the American Declaration of Independence:
The video entitled, “Shariah Muslims Hate Free Speech,” filmed at an Israel “Apartheid” Week (IAW) hate-fest at the University of California (UC) at San Diego is a typical example of what is happening on North American campuses. This video is a microcosm of how some people, with a pathological need to appear to be fair-minded and even-handed, play into the hands of Islamists. This radical Muslim hate-speech goes unchallenged. These Islamists enjoy the right to free speech protected by the American constitution but, beyond that and for no good reason, are encouraged to spew the hate speech to which they feel entitled. People who should know better are abusing the Constitution by upholding local and campus rules and regulations in higher regard than the Constitution which has been effectively supplanted and undermined. Hate speech is being protected by bureaucrats, Islamist sympathizers, the peace-at-any-cost gang and the ignorant. Free speech is being challenged only when it comes from those who are seen to be interfering with hate as expressed by Islamists in venues such as IAW. Hate speech is seemingly being protected more than is the free speech to challenge the insidious hate.
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