Tag Archives: Islamism

Speaking Freely when the Guns Go Off

07 Thursday Jan 2016

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[Play the brief clip above]

“This is what it’s like for peaceful people to gather in a cafe and attempt to have a conversation about our basic freedoms in an open society.

You have to ask yourself: what kind of a world do you want to live in? What kind of world do you want your kids to live in?

This is the world you’re living in now. And as someone who is spending a fair amount of time dealing with these issues, I can tell you that I no longer feel safe doing so… And this is not just me. I’m talking about those people in Copenhagen. I’m talking about those people in open societies everywhere, who have to deal with this growing menace of Islamic jihadism.

Unless we can speak honestly about this, unless we can resist the theocratic demands being placed on us, we will lose our way of life. In fact, we have already lost it in many respects.

We have to reclaim our freedom of speech. So if you care about living in an open society that doesn’t more and more resemble Jerusalem or Beirut, if you care about free speech, real freedom of speech, not just its political guarantee — the reality of being able to speak about what you need to speak about in public, without being murdered by some maniac or without having to spend the rest of your life being hunted by a jihadist mob…

If you care about my work, or the work of other secularists, or of other Muslim reformers like Maajid Nawaz or Ayaan Hirsi Ali; if you care about our ability to notice and criticize and correct for bad ideas, then you have to condemn [the dishonesty of the regressive left]. Please push back against this. Please lose your patience at shocking displays of intellectual dishonesty used to excuse it. Your response to this really matters.”

__________

Sam Harris’s reflections on the shooting at the Krudttoenden cultural center in Copenhagen last February, in which 40 people had assembled to discuss the state of free expression in post-Hebdo Europe.

The audio clip records the horrific seconds when a gunman burst through the door, letting off a hail of bullets that would kill one and injure several others. The woman’s voice you hear in the opening is that of Inna Shevchenko, the Ukrainian feminist activist, who had just taken the stage and was discussing the excuses many Westerners make on behalf of those who kill because of cartoons.

Today is the one year anniversary of the Hebdo massacre, and Saturday will be the anniversary of the Hypercacher Kosher supermarket shooting (but who remembers that?). I’ve just ordered the posthumously published book — completed three days before the attacks — by Charb, with a forward from Adam Gopnik, Open Letter: On Blasphemy, Islamophobia, and the True Enemies of Free Expression.

Go on:

Freedom of Speech by Norman Rockwell

Sam Harris: The Meaning of the Paris Attacks

16 Monday Nov 2015

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Paris Terror Attacks

“This is the big story of our time, and it is an incredibly boring one. Let the boredom of this just sink into your bones: realize that for the rest of your life, you’re going to be reading and hearing about, and otherwise witnessing, hopefully not firsthand, the lunacy and attendant atrocities of jihadists.

Please pay attention to the recurrent shrieks of Allahu Akbar. This is the cat call from the Middle Ages, or from Middle Earth, that we will have to live with for the rest of our lives. So this fight against jihadism — this is a generational fight. This is something we are doing for our children, ultimately, and for our children’s children.

We have a war of ideas that we have to wage, and win, and unfortunately we have to wage it and win it with ourselves first. And again, this requires an admission that there is such a war of ideas to be waged and won.

We have grown so effete as a civilization as to imagine that we have no enemies — or if we do, that they are only of our own making… It is not mere wartime propaganda that we will one day look back on with embarrassment to call ISIS a death cult. To call them barbarians. To call them savages. To use dehumanizing language.

They are scarcely human in their aspirations. The world they want to build entails the destruction of everything we value, and are right to value. And by “we” I mean civilized humanity, including all the Muslims who are just as horrified…

We have a project that’s universal, that transcends culture; that unites everyone who loves art and science and reason generally, who wants to cure disease, who wants to raise each new generation to be more educated than the last. And this common project is under assault…

And unfortunately, most of us have to keep convincing ourselves that evil exists, that not all people want the same things, and that some people are wrong in how they want to live and the world they want to build. And if we can’t convince ourselves of this once and for all, well then we’ll have to wait to be convinced by further acts of savagery of the sort we just saw in Paris. Why wait?”

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Comments from Sam Harris on the preface to his newly republished essay “Still Sleepwalking toward Armageddon”.

You’ll find more of Sam’s takes on these issues in his newest book, coauthored with Maajid Nawaz, Islam and the Future of Tolerance. I was lucky enough to meet Maajid two weeks ago in Washington and can enthusiastically recommend this quick, clarifying read. Watch Sam and Maajid talk about the roots of their conversation and the conclusions they’ve made in the following clip from The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell:


The photograph was taken this weekend as mourners gathered at The Place de la République in Paris.

More for the Francophiles:

The Psychological Scar of the Six Day War

25 Sunday Oct 2015

Posted by in Current Events, History, War

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Six Day War Western Wall

“After years of rhetorical attacks on Israel, Nasser demanded the removal of UN peacekeepers in the Sinai and then blockaded the Strait of Tiran to Israeli shipping. [In the summer of 1967] Israel responded with an overwhelming preemptive attack that destroyed the entire Egyptian air force within two hours. When Jordan, Iraq, and Syria joined the war against Israel, their air forces were also wiped out that same afternoon. In the next few days Israel captured all of the Sinai, Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights, while crushing the forces of the frontline Arab states.

It was a psychological turning point in the history of the modern Middle East. The speed and decisiveness of the Israeli victory in the Six Day War humiliated many Muslims who had believed until then that God favored their cause. They had lost not only their armies and their territories but also faith in their leaders, in their countries, and in themselves. The profound appeal of Islamic fundamentalism in Egypt and elsewhere was born in this shocking debacle. A newly strident voice was heard in the mosques; the voice said that they had been defeated by a force far larger than the tiny country of Israel. God had turned against the Muslims. The only way back to Him was to return to the pure religion. The voice answered despair with a simple formulation: Islam is the solution.

There was in this equation the tacit understanding that God sided with the Jews. Until the end of World War II, there was little precedent in Islam for the anti-Semitism that was now warping the politics and society of the region. Jews had lived safely — although submissively — under Muslim rule for 1,200 years, enjoying full religious freedom; but in the 1930s, Nazi propaganda on Arabic-language shortwave radio… infected the area with this ancient Western prejudice. After the war Cairo became a sanctuary for Nazis, who advised the military and the government. The rise of the Islamist movement coincided with the decline of fascism, but they overlapped in Egypt, and the germ passed into a new carrier.

The founding of the state of Israel and its startling rise to military dominance unsettled the Arab identity. In the low condition the Arabs found themselves in, they looked upon Israel and recalled the time when the Prophet Mohammed had subjugated the Jews of Medina. They thought about the great wave of Muslim expansion at the point of Arab spears and swords, and they were humbled by the contrast of their proud martial past and their miserable present. History was reversing itself; the Arabs were as fractious and disorganized and marginal as they had been in jahiliyya times. Even the Jews dominated them. The voice in the mosque said that the Arabs had let go of the one weapon that gave them real power: faith. Restore the fervor and purity of the religion that had made the Arabs great, and God would once again take their side.”

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Pulled from the second chapter of Lawrence Wright’s 2006 book The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. The above photo shows Motta Gur’s paratroopers, the first wave of Israeli troops to reach Jerusalem’s Old City during the conflict.

I apologize for the brief hiatus. I’ve been busy in my time off, reading (Pale Fire, the news) and adding to an already massive drafts folder. Your regular programming will resume this week.

You can watch Wright discuss the subjects of Tower with the University of California’s Harry Kreisler below. It’s lulling to listen to such mellowed, Peter Sagal-type tones describe the world’s most notorious barbarians.

Then read on:

Lawrence Wright

The Problem with Qatar

07 Tuesday Jul 2015

Posted by in Current Events, Debate, Freedom, Religion

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Qatar World Cup

“In Doha last Friday, the sermon given by the Imam at the biggest mosque in Qatar. Just reflect on this: biggest mosque in Qatar. You might have noticed Qatar is doing quite a lot of business in this city these days.

But what did the Imam say at Friday prayers? He said, among other things, this:

Allah strengthen Islam and the Muslims and destroy your enemies — the enemies of the religion. Allah destroy the Jews and whoever made the Jews, [and destroy the Christians and Alawites and the Shiites.]

This has been and is being pumped around by the ministries of the Qatari government. They’ve been sending around the video. They’re proud of it!

Is any leader in this country going to raise their voice about this sort of thing? I doubt it, because people don’t even raise them when it gets preached in this city, which it does. It really does.

[…]

It’s as bad as Je suis Charlie, which I’m deeply, deeply aggrevated and upset by… People weren’t Charlie, ladies and gentlemen. They really weren’t. They aren’t. If they were, Charlie Hebdo cartoons would’ve been published in every newspaper and on every TV station.

You know when Nick Clegg and David Cameron and all the other political leaders say Je suis Charlie, no they’re not. No they’re not. If Charlie Hebdo had been published here, it would have been decried as a far right wing, racist, Islamophobic magazine, and would have been shut down years and years ago. And don’t think when people say Je suis Juif that they mean that any more. They really don’t. It doesn’t mean anything more than Je suis Charlie. It’s a bit of sentimentality.

But hold them to it. Hold them to it, for God’s sake.”

__________

Pulled from Douglas Murray’s spot on, fervent opening on a recent panel with Maajid Nawaz and others discussing radical Islamism in Modern Europe:

The bracketed part of the pulled quote above is sourced from Jamie Dettmer’s article in the Daily Beast “An American Ally’s Grand Mosque of Hate,” which I’m assuming is where Murray found the quote.

Here is Dettmer’s more detailed account:

On the Friday before ISIS posted the horrific footage of the burning [Jordanian] pilot, a preacher sermonizing from the [Doha] Grand Mosque’s minbar prayed for the destruction of the faithful of other religions. “Allah, strengthen Islam and the Muslims, and destroy your enemies, the enemies of the religion,” intoned Saudi cleric Sa’ad Ateeq al Ateeq. “Allah, destroy the Jews and whoever made them Jews, and destroy the Christians and Alawites and the Shiites.”

His comments wouldn’t have been out of place in ISIS-controlled Mosul or Raqqa. He also beseeched Allah to save the al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, the third-holiest site in Islam, from the “claws of the Jews.”

Al Ateeq, who was on his sixth visit to the state-supervised Grand Mosque since 2013, reserved his most bellicose remarks for the part of the sermon called the du’aa, when the preacher encourages the faithful to join in guided prayer.

Within minutes, Qatar’s Ministry of Endowments and Islamic Affairs promoted al Ateeq’s remarks on Twitter. And the sermon was broadcast on several local television channels, including Qatar TV, the official state channel, signaling another stamp of approval…

If the thousands of dead slave laborers, gross violations of basic human rights and criminal extortion involved in Qatar’s hosting the 2022 World Cup are not enough to force us into even threatening to boycott the games, then surely the above facts and their attendant, sordid details should. Our only consolation so far is that hosting the World Cup is an enormous economic boondoggle.

Read on:

Inside the Mind of Muhammad Atta

14 Tuesday Apr 2015

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9:11 Security Camera

“What the [9/11 hijacking] recruits tended to have in common — besides their urbanity, their cosmopolitan backgrounds, their education, their facility with languages, and their computer skills — was displacement. Most who joined the jihad did so in a country other than the one in which they were reared… The imams naturally responded to the alienation and anger that prompted these men to find a spiritual home. A disproportionate number of new mosques in immigrant communities had been financed by Saudi Arabia and staffed by Wahhabi fundamentalists, many of whom were preaching the glories of jihad. […]

Although they would often be accused of being a fascistic cult, the resentment that burned inside the al-Quds mosque, where Atta and his friends gathered, had not been honed into a keen political agenda. But like the Nazis, who were born in the shame of defeat, the radical Islamists shared a fanatical determination to get on top of history after being underfoot for so many generations.

Although Atta had only vaguely socialist ideas of government, he and his circle filled up the disavowed political space that the Nazis left behind. One of Atta’s friends, Munir al-Motassadeq, referred to Hitler as ‘a good man.’ Atta himself often said that the Jews controlled the media, banks, newspapers, and politics from their world headquarters in New York City; moreover, he was convinced that the Jews had planned the wars in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Chechnya as a way of holding back Islam. He believed that Monica Lewinsky was a Jewish agent sent to undermine Clinton, who had become too sympathetic to the Palestinian cause.

The extreme rigidity of character that everyone detected in Atta was a Nazi trait, and no doubt it was reinforced in him by the need to resist the lure of this generous city. The young urban planner must have admired the cleanliness and efficiency of Hamburg, which was so much the opposite of the Cairo where he had grown up. But the odious qualities that Sayyid Qutb [the founder of modern Islamism] had detected in America — its materialism, its licentiousness, its spiritual falsity — were also spectacularly on display in Hamburg, with its clanging casinos, prostitutes in shop windows, and magnificent, empty cathedrals…

Atta was a perfectionist; in his work he was a skilled but not creative draftsman. Physically, there was a feminine quality to his bearing: He was ‘elegant’ and ‘delicate,’ so that his sexual orientation — however unexpressed — was difficult to read…

On April 11, 1996, when Atta was twenty-seven years old, he signed a standardized will he got from the al-Quds mosque. It was the day Israel attacked Lebanon in Operation Grapes of Wrath. According to one of his friends, Atta was enraged, and by filling out his last testament during the attack he was offering his life in response.

Although the sentiments in the will represent the tenets of his community of faith, Atta constantly demonstrated an aversion to women, who in his mind were like Jews in their powerfulness and corruption. The will states: ‘No pregnant woman or disbelievers should walk in my funeral or ever visit my grave. No woman should ask forgiveness of me. Those who will wash my body should wear gloves so that they do not touch my genitals.’ The anger that this statement directs at women and its horror of sexual contact invites the thought that Atta’s turn to terror had as much to do with his own conflicted sexuality as it did with the clash of civilizations.”

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An excerpt from Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11.

If you’re yet to see it, spend two hours watching the new HBO documentary Going Clear, based on Wright’s book of the same title. It’s an eerie, engrossing, and absolutely scandalizing look at the Church of Scientology and its hucksterish origins and practices.

Wright is interviewed throughout the film. His speech is always clear, never hyperbolic, and tuned to challenge viewers’ easy assumptions and reflexive piety. His command of the material shows through. I was impressed and liked the guy, so I decided to read his book on 9/11 — and I encourage you to do the same. It reveals the origins of not only that day — the most important day of any of our lifetimes — but also of the kind of fiendish, extremist worldview (what Martin Amis once called “the dependent mind”) that we’re now confronting in nearly every country on earth. It’s a stranger and even less coherent creation story than you’d expect.

Read on:

Lawrence Wright

Douglas Murray: “I Don’t Have an Israel”

25 Wednesday Mar 2015

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Douglas Murray - writer

“There’s a book that came out at exactly the same time as the Charlie Hebdo atrocities. It’s by Michel Hollelbeq, and it’s called Submission — some of you have read about it.

There’s a point in this book which I think is extremely important for what we must think of, which is how to impart an urgent concern for free speech beyond the people in this room and to wider society.

The most critical point in this novel… not to give away the whole plot, but there’s a French professor. It’s 2024 and France is becoming a Muslim country. The Jews are all leaving, and this professor who’s not Jewish — he’s an atheist Frenchman, likes his pleasures, you know — and he’s speaking to a Jewish friend who says she’s off to Israel.

And there’s a very, very important point in the novel where this man realizes he doesn’t have an Israel.

Now, this is a very, very important thing to tell people in this country, and it goes far beyond the Jews.

I don’t have an Israel. This is it. If you care about a decent, democratic, broadly pluralistic society in which you can live the life you want to live, this is the best deal and I don’t have a get out option. Now other people need to know that.”

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(Slightly modified) remarks from Douglas Murray during last month’s panel on free speech and the future of Europe at London’s Central Synagogue.

There’s more on the topic:

Maajid Nawaz: Why Not Calling ISIS “Islamic” Hurts Muslim Reformers

06 Friday Mar 2015

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Maajid Nawaz

“When President Obama gave his speech, he said, ‘We will not allow these people to claim they are religious leaders. They have nothing to do with Islam.’

No. They are not “Islam” — of course they’re not. Nor am I, nor is anyone, really, because Islam is what Muslims make it. But they have something to do with Islam. If you’re going to argue with one of them — and I do all the time — you’re not discussing Mein Kampf. You’re discussing Islamic texts…

And just to clarify — one sentence:

What is Islamism? Islam is a religion; Islamism is the desire to impose any version of that religion on society.

It’s the politicization of my own religion. What is Jihadism? The use of force to spread Islamism.

The danger of not naming this ideology is twofold. Firstly, within the Muslim context, those liberal Muslims, reformist Muslims, feminist Muslims, gay Muslims, dissenting voices, minority sects, the Ismailis, the Shia — all these different minorities within the minority of the Muslim community — are immediately betrayed.

How are they betrayed? Because you deprive them of the lexicon, the language to employ against those who are attempting to silence their progressive efforts within their own communities. You surrender the debate to the extremists…

The second danger is in the non-Muslim context. What happens if you don’t name the Islamist ideology and distinguish it from Islam?

President Obama in his speech said there’s an ideology we must challenge, and he didn’t name it.

So, think about it, you’re sending out the message to the vast majority of Americans: there’s an ideology you must challenge, but you don’t tell them what it’s called. What are they going to assume? The average American is going to think, ‘Yeah, I’ve got to challenge an ideology — it’s called Islam.’

You’re only going to increase anti-Muslim hatred, increase the hysteria, like ‘he who must not be named’ — the Voldemort effect, I call it — by not naming the ideology. Because the average guy out there is going to assume the President is talking about the religion itself.

But if you distingiush Islamist extremism and say, ‘Look, Islam’s a religion. We’re not going to tell you whether Islam is good or bad, peaceful or not. We’re not going to define that for you. What we can say is you mustn’t try to impose that on anyone else. If you do, that’s called Islamism, and that’s what we have a problem with.'”

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Recent comments from Maajid Nawaz, a former Islamic extremist who was imprisoned for several years in Egypt and escaped to denounce radicalism and found the London-based counter-extremism group Quilliam. If the west is going to make it out of its conflict with Islamism in tact, we need a Muslim voice like Maajid’s to pop up for every extremist mullah. At the moment I don’t think the ratio is in our favor.

I encourage you to watch the entire discussion, which includes the brilliant Douglas Murray, and to buy Maajid’s remarkable book about the making and unmaking of a terrorist Radical: My Journey Out Of Islamist Extremism.

More on the subject:

The Cartoons the Media Will Show Us

16 Friday Jan 2015

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Douglas Murray - Private Eye

“This is about freedom of speech.

What is going on at the moment, worldwide and particularly in Europe, is an attempt to shut down any and all criticism of Islam — one religion alone.

I’ll hold up for a moment — don’t worry it’s not a cartoon of Muhammad, you don’t have to get scared.

This is the Christmas edition of Private Eye. An image which, on the front cover, lampoons — quite amusing, not very — the Virgin Mary and Jesus and has various jokes about where the frankincense should have been bought from and so on.

That’s perfectly commonplace. But you know what: if anyone had gone into Private Eye’s offices yesterday and massacred the staff because of it in the name of Christianity or Jesus, I think that not only would all the papers today have been a lot more robust, they would have shown — at the very least, shown — this image to give us a sense of what the person who did the killing was so irate about.

The fact is that there is something going on, which we have to identify. It is an attempt, in our society, to make Islam and in particular the founder of Islam immune from any criticism.

It cannot be allowed to continue.”

__________

Douglas Murray, debating Asghar Bukhari on Britain’s Sky News last week.

The Excuses Terrorists Haven’t Asked For

16 Friday Jan 2015

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Charlie Hebdo cover

Interviewer: You hear the excuse that the Muslim community is not integrated into the larger French community, they’re stuck out in the banlieues. But is that really the cause of this terror?

Douglas Murray: It has nothing to do with whether you like the suburb you live in or not, whether you’re rich or whether you’re poor. Most of the terrorists who have been coming from Britain in recent years: very well off.

The man who tried to bring down a plane over Detroit: a student at University College London, millionaire Nigerian family.

The man who decapitated your colleague at the Wall Street Journal, Daniel Pearl, ten years ago: very well off, private school educated, London School of Economics.

I’m fed up with people trying to give excuses to the terrorists that the terrorists themselves have not asked for.

__________

A quick section from Douglas Murray’s interview with the Wall Street Journal, given the day of the Charlie Hebdo massacre.

Terrorism Works

14 Wednesday Jan 2015

Posted by in Freedom

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150114_EM_CharlieHebdoEbay

Interviewer: In a sense the terrorists are winning, aren’t they? They’ve cowed the Western media into not reprinting the cartoons.

Douglas Murray: Not only are they winning, they’ve won. They’ve won. Terrorism works — that’s the brutal fact of it.

And a lot of people will take lessons from that today.

You know, after the 2005 Jyllandsposten cartoon, by the conservative paper in Denmark, the only paper in Europe, really, that was still willing to draw pictures of Muhammad in the same way they’re willing to draw pictures of every other religious, political — you name it — figure, was Charlie Hebdo.

So Charlie Hebdo stood alone. Charlie Hebdo was attacked.

That’s why I’ve suggested that there’s really only two options that the press can choose from here.

The first is that we all agree that we live under an element of Islamic blasphemy law. I think that would be highly regrettable. I don’t think that is what our society should live under. I think we should do everything possible to avoid it.

But if we are going to avoid it, I think that it’s going to have to be done unanimously. All of the newspapers, all of the magazines — the BBC, Sky, Channel 4 — should unanimously publish the Charlie Hebdo cartoons at a particular hour, because as Ayaan Hirsi Ali said after the Danish cartoons row, we have to spread the risk around.

It cannot be that a single cartoonist is holding the line for all freedom of speech. Or that a single, small satirical magazine is doing it.

It has to be everybody.

__________

Douglas Murray, the clearest voice on the issue of Islamism in Europe, speaking during a BBC discussion with Maajid Nawaz.

Christopher Hitchens: Resisting Radical Islam 101

08 Thursday Jan 2015

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Christopher Hitchens

“It’s coming to a place near you.

The Qurans that are given out in our prison system, to Muslim prisoners by Muslim chaplains, paid for by Saudi Arabia, are Qurans written to the Wahabi tune. They’re not just your everyday Quran; they’re the Qurans that the Wahabis want you to read, containing direct incitement.

They’re being given out with taxpayers’ money in the prison system, where militias are forming. Next you’ll have militias of this kind with their own chaplains within the United States armed forces. Are you ready for that? Are you ready to have Wahabi preachers in the U.S. armed forces?

You better get ready for it, unless you’re going to take the James Madison view that there shouldn’t be any chaplains in the U.S. armed forces to begin with, or in the prison system. People want to pray, you can’t stop them. But we cannot have state subsidized prayer. We cannot have state subsidized preachers or chaplains.

Give it up, or give it to your deadliest enemy and pay for the rope that will choke you.

This is very urgent business, ladies and gentlemen, I beseech you: resist it while you still can and before the right to complain is taken away from you, which is the next thing.

You will be told, you can’t complain – because you’re Islamophobic. The term is already being introduced into the culture, as if it’s an accusation of race hatred or bigotry, whereas it’s only the objection to the preachings of a very extreme and absolutist religion.

Watch out for these symptoms… The barbarians never take a city until someone holds the gates open to them. And it’s your own multicultural authorities who will do it for you.”

__________

Christopher Hitchens, riffing in a Q&A before his debate with John Lennox in Birmingham, Alabama in 2009.