Thursday, January 10, 2008

Open Letter to Mr. Ibrahim Hooper, Communications Director, CAIR

[CAIR is the Council on American Islamic Relations.]

Dear Mr. Hooper:

Your e-mail message yesterday, 8 January 2008, began with this: "Anti-Muslim bigotry is at an all time high with politicians and radio talk show hosts leading the way. What should we do in response? What can we do?"

In this open-letter response, with the help of Mr. David Rusin, I point out lots of things Muslims can do to receive more favorable media coverage and the pointlessness of your media reformation efforts. It's really pretty simple: Have Muslims stop behaving badly, from routine incivilities to intimidation, maiming, and murder. Stop that, and what you wrongly call bigotry will stop. There's your job, not changing politicians and radio hosts, but changing Islam. I wish you well.

Mark E. Roberts, Ph.D.

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MEF News Mailing List January 10, 2008



"Portrait of the Artist as a Dhimmified Man"

by David J. Rusin
Pajamas Media

http://www.meforum.org/article/1825
[Visit this link to see many links in the following article that did not copy onto this blog.]


"Art is not what you see," noted Edgar Degas, "but what you make others see." Ninety years after his death, a new maxim applies to Europe: The art that you do not see reflects what everyone already sees. And what we see is the preemptive surrender of public freedoms in the name of appeasing the continent's restive Muslim underclass.

Grayson Perry serves as the ideal poster boy — or perhaps poster girl — for this discomfiting trend. A Turner Prize recipient and England's most famous cross-dressing potter, Perry has been heralded for his controversial explorations of religious imagery, which include a vase entitled "Transvestite Brides of Christ" and a portrayal of the Virgin Mary that is best left to the imagination. Yet apparently there are some boundaries that even groundbreaking artists dare not cross.

"I've censored myself," Perry told the Times, admitting that he treads lightly around radical Islam. "With other targets you've got a better idea of who they are but Islamism is very amorphous. You don't know what the threshold is. Even what seems an innocuous image might trigger off a really violent reaction so I just play safe all the time." Self-censorship thus boils down to self-preservation. "The reason I haven't gone all out attacking Islamism in my art is because I feel real fear that someone will slit my throat." [Mr. Hooper: I won't be subtle: here's your Islam/Muslim PR problem: murder, allegedly in the name of G-d. Until that stops, worldwide, Islam will be revealed for what it is -- not what pundits opine it to be, but what these who fill graves have experienced the religion of the crescent and scimitar to be -- to many thousands of victims worldwide -- angry and unmerciful.]

His fears are not without logic. On the morning of November 2, 2004, hours before Americans would vote in an election shaped by the conflict between radical Islam and the West, that conflict violently manifested itself on the streets of Amsterdam. There, filmmaker Theo van Gogh succumbed to a rain of bullets from the gun of Mohammed Bouyeri, a Dutch Muslim of Moroccan extract. Bouyeri proceeded to slash his victim's neck to near decapitation before leaving a pair of knives impaled in his chest. [Mr. Hooper: Does the press malign Islam when it reports the truth about this murder; or does Islam prolong its record of unjustified, vigilante violence, motivated not by God but by the one who has been a killer and deceiver from his beginning, the satan?] One pinned a letter outlining his grievances and threatening ex-Muslim activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

The controversialist's life and death form a microcosm of Europe's new realities. An equal-opportunity offender, van Gogh loathed all religions and never missed a chance to insult the faithful — Christians, Jews, and Muslims alike. However, his demise was directly linked to Submission, a short film written by Hirsi Ali that depicts the abuse of women in Muslim cultures. The contrast is striking. Christians and Jews responded to van Gogh's provocations with the occasional letter or picket sign, but a young Muslim chose an HS 2000 firearm as his instrument of "protest." [Mr. Hooper: Here's the challenge for you and any Muslims motivated by sincere good will toward infidels {if such good will toward infidels is even virtuous in Islam. Is it?}: Can Islam contribute to contemporary life, outside the lands where it dominates, civilly? Or does it play a temporary role on the stage of western democracy, biding its time until armed jihad will seek to grasp power in today's non-Muslim lands? The evidence worries Christians and Jews, who are learning to live together peacefully, without diluting their sincere religious convictions.]

Van Gogh's murder was neither the first nor the most recent case of Islamists employing violence to intimidate the Western creative class. Just ask Salman Rushdie, the British author of The Satanic Verses, who is now completing his second decade of sequestration following the death sentence pronounced by Iranian clerics. Renewed pledges of retaliation rose up on the heels of his knighting in 2007. The danger is undeniable. Several translators of Verses were assaulted at the behest of the 1989 fatwa; one, Hitoshi Igarashi, was killed.

Violence also erupted in the wake of the infamous Mohammed cartoons, first printed by the Danish broadsheet Jyllands-Posten in fall 2005. Dozens perished across the globe, consulates were set ablaze, threats of murder and kidnapping were issued, and several of the artists went into hiding. Islamists also marched on Denmark's London embassy, raising placards that read "Europe you will pay, your 9/11 will come," "Behead those who insult Islam," "Freedom go to hell," and "Be prepared for the real holocaust." [Mr. Hooper, are you there? What treatment would you ask of the media for this barbarism?]

Ironically, the cartoons were put forth as a protest against the type of self-censorship described by Grayson Perry. Jyllands-Posten editor Flemming Rose commissioned them after learning that a Danish writer had been unable to find an artist willing to illustrate his book about the life of Mohammed. A report noted that "one [declined] with reference to the murder in Amsterdam of the film director Theo van Gogh, while another [cited the attack on] the lecturer at the Carsten Niebuhr Institute in Copenhagen." The latter victim was assaulted for reading passages from the Koran to an infidel audience. [Mr. Hooper, Couldn't Muslims find a way to rejoice that infidels are reading the Koran; or is this another event that the media got all wrong in its, according to you, intent to malign Muslims?]

The cartoon controversy has only accelerated self-censorship. A museum in The Hague recently declined to display a photograph by Sooreh Hera that shows two gay men wearing masks of Mohammed and Ali, based on fears that "certain people in our society might perceive it as offensive." Though critics of this action were assured that "all Dutch museums are free to choose what they exhibit," Hera disagreed. "Apparently a Muslim minority decides what will be on display in the museum." The artist has now retreated to an "unspecified location" following emails promising to "burn you naked or put a bullet in your mouth."Similarly, in October 2006 London's Whitechapel Art Gallery removed erotic works by the surrealist Hans Bellmer. According to the curator, "the motive was simply to not shock the population of the Whitechapel neighborhood, which is partly Muslim." The pictures were pulled merely one week after a Berlin opera house had cancelled — then sheepishly reinstated — performances of Mozart's Idomeneo, in which the title character grandstands with the severed heads of Poseidon, Buddha, Jesus, and Mohammed. Needless to say, the severed heads of Poseidon, Buddha, and Jesus were never an issue.

Amir Taheri has compiled other disturbing cases from across the continent: German carnivals prohibiting costumes that might look "Islamic," Spanish towns canceling traditional festivals marking the victory over the Moors, the blacklisting of books deemed critical of Islam, and the removal from public view of illuminated manuscripts that feature images of Mohammed. [Mr. Hooper: Should journalists vet their articles with you or CAIR and receive your Islamic imprimatur before publishing anything that might touch on Islam? Is this what you mean by a free press; or are you seeking a free pass?]

Even art aimed at children has not been immune, as evidenced by a British school that excised the pigs from The Three Little Pigs to forestall Muslim objections. "If changing a few words avoids offense then we will do so," a teacher explained. The school later reversed the decision. Likewise, British author Kes Gray just postponed a reprinting of his "inclusive" children's book so that Mohammed the Mole could be renamed Morgan. "I had no idea at all of the sensitivities of the name Mohammed until seeing this case in Sudan," he said, referencing the teacher imprisoned over a class teddy bear. "As soon as I saw the news I thought, 'Oh gosh, I've got a mole called Mohammed — this is not good.'"

Particularly "not good" is the preemptive nature of these capitulations. "At this point, it seems, terrorists don't even need to issue a specific threat in order to intimidate us," observed Der Spiegel. Indeed, many of the above productions or exhibits faced no threats at all. Some Muslims are even helping to expose the hypersensitivity for what it is. Regarding the Pigs fiasco, the Daily Mail reported that "Islamic leaders condemned the politically correct move as misguided and said decisions like this were turning Muslims into 'misfits' in society." [Mr. Hooper: Have you joined -- or will you join -- these Islamic leaders in condemning such intimidation? If not, don't ask the media to favor you with puffery that air-brushes Islamic incivility and worse into coffee-table art.]

There can be no true freedom in a climate of fear. Given the history of Islamist violence directed at European artists, a significant portion of that fear is justified. However, the continent's groveling cultural elites have needlessly exacerbated this atmosphere. Their inability or unwillingness to distinguish between Islam and Islamism magnifies the perceived strength of the radicals, while their eagerness to assume the role of dhimmis — subjugated infidels living under Islamic rule — can only demoralize the population and embolden the extremists. [Mr. Hooper: How are you, and how is CAIR, distinguishing between Islam and Islamism? And in what ways is it using its PR megaphone to condemn Islamism? If it is silent when condemnation is called for, why should its own misuse of media warrant CAIR's insistence that non-Muslim media portray Islam more favorably?]

Will Europe ultimately choose to preserve the foundational values of classical liberalism forged during its Renaissance and Enlightenment? Or will it suffer a long, slow decline into the dark ages of dhimmitude? For now, only one conclusion appears certain: somewhere in a Dutch prison cell, Mohammed Bouyeri is smiling. [Mr. Hooper: I truly wonder -- behind the web sites, the restrained press releases, the game face on camera and microphone, away from the PR/media machine, are you secretly smiling with Bouyeri? Here's where you and CAIR can do some good: Say and do the truth. That's what freedom in and of the West is for. Join us in this noble endeavor, and you and we may be able to mutually enrich our lives, to the glory of God.]

David J. Rusin is a research associate at Islamist Watch and a Philadelphia-based editor for Pajamas Media.
He holds a Ph.D. in Physics and Astronomy from the University of Pennsylvania.
Please feel free to contact him at djrusin@gmail.com.

Monday, January 07, 2008

Refresher Course for 2008 Politics: 24 Truths

1.

A government which robs Peter to pay Paul
can always depend on the support of Paul.
--George Bernard Shaw


2.

A liberal is someone who feels a great debt to his fellow man,
which debt he proposes to pay off with your money.
--G. Gordon Liddy


3.

Democracy must be something more than
two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner.
--James Bovard (1994)


4.

Foreign aid might be defined as a transfer
from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries.
--Douglas Casey (1992)


5.

Giving money and power to government
is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.
--P.J. O'Rourke


6.

Government is the great fiction, through which
everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.
--Frederic Bastia


7.

Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases:
If it moves, tax it.
If it keeps moving, regulate it.
And if it stops moving, subsidize it.
-- Ronald Reagan (1986)


8.

I don't make jokes.
I just watch the government and report the facts.
--Will Rogers


9.

If you think health care is expensive now,
wait until you see what it costs when it's free.
--P.J. O'Rourke


10.

If you want government to intervene domestically, you're a liberal.
If you want government to intervene overseas, you're a conservative.
If you want government to intervene everywhere, you're a moderate.
If you don't want government to intervene anywhere, you're an extremist.
--Joseph Sobran (1995)


11.

In general, the art of government consists in taking as much
money as possible from one party of the citizens to give to the other.
--Voltaire (1764)


12.

Just because you do not take an interest in politics
doesn't mean politics won't take an interest in you.
--Pericles (430 B.C.)


13.

No man's life, liberty, or property are safe while the legislature is in session.
--Mark Twain (1866)


14.

Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress.
But I repeat myself.
--Mark Twain


15.

Talk is cheap--except when Congress does it.
--Author Unknown


16.

The government is like a baby's alimentary canal, with a happy appetite at one end
and no responsibility at the other.
--Ronald Reagan


17.

The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of the blessings.
The inherent blessing of socialism is the equal sharing of misery.
--Winston Churchill


18.

The only difference between a tax man and a taxidermist
is that the taxidermist leaves the skin.
--Mark Twain


19.

The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools.
--Herbert Spencer (1891)


20. There is no distinctly native American criminal class save Congress.
--Mark Twain


21.

There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you please.
And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences.
--P.J. O'Rourke (1993)


22.

We contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity
is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle.
--Winston Churchill


23.

What this country needs are more unemployed politicians.
–Edward Langley O'Rourke


24.

When buying and selling are controlled by legislation,
the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.
--P.J. O'Rourke (Jack Carey)