Tag Archive for: Fitna

Islam’s ‘Reformation’ Is Already Here—and It’s Called ‘ISIS’ by Raymond Ibrahim

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The idea that Islam needs to reform is again in the spotlight following the recent publication of Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s new book, Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now.  While Hirsi Ali makes the argument that Islam can reform—and is in desperate need of taking the extreme measures she suggests to do so—many of her critics offer a plethora of opposing claims, including that Islam need not reform at all.

The one argument not being made, however, is the one I make below—namely, that Islam has already “reformed.”  And violence, intolerance, and extremism—typified by the Islamic State (“ISIS”)—are the net result of this “reformation.”

Such a claim only sounds absurd due to our understanding of the word “reform.”  Yet despite its positive connotations, “reform” simply means to “make changes (in something, typically a social, political, or economic institution or practice) in order to improve it.”

Synonyms of “reform” include “make better,” “ameliorate,” and “improve”—splendid words all, yet words all subjective and loaded with Western connotations.

Muslim notions of “improving” society can include purging it of “infidels” and “apostates,” and segregating Muslim men from women, keeping the latter under wraps or quarantined at home. Banning many forms of freedoms taken for granted in the West—from alcohol consumption to religious and gender equality—is an “improvement” and a “betterment” of society from a strictly Islamic point of view.

In short, an Islamic reformation will not lead to what we think of as an “improvement” and “betterment” of society—simply because “we” are not Muslims and do not share their first premises and reference points.  “Reform” only sounds good to most Western peoples because they naturally attribute Western connotations to the word.

Historical Parallels: Islam’s Reformation and the Protestant Reformation

At its core, the Protestant Reformation was a revolt against tradition in the name of scripture—in this case, the Bible.  With the coming of the printing press, increasing numbers of Christians became better acquainted with the Bible’s contents, parts of which they felt contradicted what the Church was teaching.  So they broke away, protesting that the only Christian authority was “scripture alone,” sola scriptura.

Islam’s current reformation follows the same logic of the Protestant Reformation—specifically by prioritizing scripture over centuries of tradition and legal debate—but with antithetical results that reflect the contradictory teachings of the core texts of Christianity and Islam.

As with Christianity, throughout most of its history, Islam’s scriptures, specifically its “twin pillars,” the Koran (literal words of Allah) and the Hadith (words and deeds of Allah’s prophet, Muhammad), were inaccessible to the overwhelming majority of Muslims.  Only a few scholars, or ulema—literally, “they who know”—were literate in Arabic and/or had possession of Islam’s scriptures. The average Muslim knew only the basics of Islam, or its “Five Pillars.”
In this context, a “medieval synthesis” flourished throughout the Islamic world. Guided by an evolving general consensus (or ijma‘), Muslims sought to accommodate reality by, in medieval historian Daniel Pipes’ words,

translat[ing] Islam from a body of abstract, infeasible demands [as stipulated in the Koran and Hadith] into a workable system. In practical terms, it toned down Sharia and made the code of law operational. Sharia could now be sufficiently applied without Muslims being subjected to its more stringent demands…  [However,] While the medieval synthesis worked over the centuries, it never overcame a fundamental weakness: It is not comprehensively rooted in or derived from the foundational, constitutional texts of Islam. Based on compromises and half measures, it always remained vulnerable to challenge by purists (emphasis added).

This vulnerability has now reached breaking point: millions of more Korans published in Arabic and other languages are in circulation today compared to just a century ago; millions of more Muslims are now literate enough to read and understand the Koran compared to their medieval forbears.  The Hadith, which contains some of the most intolerant teachings and violent deeds attributed to Islam’s prophet—including every atrocity ISIS commits, such as beheading, crucifying, and burning “infidels,” even mocking their corpses—is now collated and accessible, in part thanks to the efforts of Western scholars, the Orientalists.  Most recently, there is the Internet—where all these scriptures are now available in dozens of languages and to anyone with a laptop or iphone.

In this backdrop, what has been called at different times, places, and contexts “Islamic fundamentalism,” “radical Islam,” “Islamism,” and “Salafism” flourished.  Many of today’s Muslim believers, much better acquainted than their ancestors with the often black and white teachings of their scriptures, are protesting against earlier traditions, are protesting against the “medieval synthesis,” in favor of scriptural literalism—just like their Christian Protestant counterparts once did.

Thus, if Martin Luther (d. 1546) rejected the extra-scriptural accretions of the Church and “reformed” Christianity by aligning it exclusively with scripture, Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahhab (d. 1787), one of Islam’s first modern reformers, “called for a return to the pure, authentic Islam of the Prophet, and the rejection of the accretions that had corrupted it and distorted it” (Bernard Lewis,The Middle East, p. 333).

The unadulterated words of God—or Allah—are all that matter for the “reformists,” with ISIS at their head.

Note: Because they are better acquainted with Islam’s scriptures, other Muslims, of course, are apostatizing—whether by converting to other religions, most notably Christianity, or whether by abandoning religion altogether, even if only in their hearts (for fear of the apostasy penalty).  This is an important point to be revisited later.  Muslims who do not become disaffected after becoming better acquainted with the literal teachings of Islam’s scriptures, and who instead become more faithful to and observant of them are the topic of this essay.

Christianity and Islam: Antithetical Teachings, Antithetical Results

How Christianity and Islam can follow similar patterns of reform but with antithetical results rests in the fact that their scriptures are often antithetical to one another.   This is the key point, and one admittedly unintelligible to postmodern, secular sensibilities, which tend to lump all religious scriptures together in a melting pot of relativism without bothering to evaluate the significance of their respective words and teachings.

Obviously a point by point comparison of the scriptures of Islam and Christianity is inappropriate for an article of this length (see my “Are Judaism and Christianity as Violent as Islam” for a more comprehensive treatment).

Suffice it to note some contradictions (which naturally will be rejected as a matter of course by the relativistic mindset):

  • The New Testament preaches peace, brotherly love, tolerance, and forgiveness—for all humans, believers and non-believers alike.  Instead of combating and converting “infidels,” Christians are called to pray for those who persecute them and turn the other cheek (which is not the same thing as passivity, for Christians are also called to be bold and unapologetic).  Conversely, the Koran and Hadith call for war, or jihad, against all non-believers, until they either convert, accept subjugation and discrimination, or die.
  • The New Testament has no punishment for the apostate from Christianity.  Conversely, Islam’s prophet himself decreed that “Whoever changed his Islamic religion, then kill him.”
  • The New Testament teaches monogamy, one husband and one wife, thereby dignifying the woman.  The Koran allows polygamy—up to four wives—and the possession of concubines, or sex-slaves.  More literalist readings treat all women as possessions.
  • The New Testament discourages lying (e.g., Col. 3:9).  The Koran permits it; the prophet himself often deceived others, and permitted lying to one’s wife, to reconcile quarreling parties, and to the “infidel” during war.

It is precisely because Christian scriptural literalism lends itself to religious freedom, tolerance, and the dignity of women, that Western civilization developed the way it did—despite the nonstop propaganda campaign emanating from academia, Hollywood, and other major media that says otherwise.

And it is precisely because Islamic scriptural literalism is at odds with religious freedom, tolerance, and the dignity of women, that Islamic civilization is the way it is—despite the nonstop propaganda campaign emanating from academia, Hollywood, and other major media that says otherwise.

The Islamic Reformation Is Here—and It’s ISIS

Those in the West waiting for an Islamic “reformation” along the same lines of the Protestant Reformation, on the assumption that it will lead to similar results, must embrace two facts: 1) Islam’s reformation is well on its way, and yes, along the same lines of the Protestant Reformation—with a focus on scripture and a disregard for tradition—and for similar historic reasons (literacy, scriptural dissemination, etc.); 2) But because the core teachings of the founders and scriptures of Christianity and Islam markedly differ from one another, Islam’s reformation is producing something markedly different.

Put differently, those in the West calling for an “Islamic reformation” need to acknowledge what it is they are really calling for: the secularization of Islam in the name of modernity; the trivialization and sidelining of Islamic law from Muslim society.  That is precisely what Ayaan Hirsi Ali is doing.  Some of her reforms as outlined in Heretic call for Muslims to begin doubting Muhammad (whose words and deeds are in the Hadith) and the Koran—the very two foundations of Islam.

That would not be a “reformation”—certainly nothing analogous to the Protestant Reformation.

Habitually overlooked is that Western secularism was, and is, possible only because Christian scripture lends itself to the division between church and state, the spiritual and the temporal.

Upholding the literal teachings of Christianity is possible within a secular—or any—state.  Christ called on believers to “render unto Caesar the things of Caesar [temporal] and unto God the things of God [spiritual]” (Matt. 22:21).  For the “kingdom of God” is “not of this world” (John 18:36).  Indeed, a good chunk of the New Testament deals with how “man is not justified by the works of the law… for by the works of the law no flesh shall be justified” (Gal. 2:16).

On the other hand, mainstream Islam is devoted to upholding the law; and Islamic scripture calls for a fusion between Islamic law—Sharia—and the state.   Allah decrees in the Koran that “It is not fitting for true believers—men or women—to take their choice in affairs if Allah and His Messenger have decreed otherwise. He that disobeys Allah and His Messenger strays far indeed!” (33:36).   Allah tells the prophet of Islam, “We put you on an ordained way [literarily in Arabic, sharia] of command; so follow it and do not follow the inclinations of those who are ignorant” (45:18).

Mainstream Islamic exegesis has always interpreted such verses to mean that Muslims must follow the commandments of Allah as laid out in the Koran and the example of Muhammad as laid out in the Hadith—in a word, Sharia.

And Sharia is so concerned with the details of this world, with the everyday doings of Muslims, that every conceivable human action falls under five rulings, or ahkam: the forbidden (haram), the discouraged (makruh), the neutral (mubah), the recommended (mustahib), and the obligatory (wajib).

Conversely, Islam offers little concerning the spiritual (sidelined Sufism the exception).

Unlike Christianity, then, Islam without the law—without Sharia—becomes meaningless. After all, the Arabic word Islam literally means “submit.”  Submit to what?  Allah’s laws as codified in Sharia and derived from the Koran and Hadith—the very three things Ali is asking Muslims to start doubting.

The “Islamic reformation” some in the West are calling for is really nothing less than an Islam without Islam—secularization not reformation; Muslims prioritizing secular, civic, and humanitarian laws over Allah’s law; a “reformation” that would slowly see the religion of Muhammad go into the dustbin of history.

Such a scenario is certainly more plausible than believing that Islam can be true to its scriptures and history in any meaningful way and still peacefully coexist with, much less complement, modernity the way Christianity does.

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Egypt: Underage Coptic girl abducted, Muslim neighbor suspected

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A 17-year old Coptic Christian girl named Tihani al-Nur Hakim was kidnapped in late April in the village of al-Kom al-Qibliyya in Samalout, Upper Egypt.

Her family accuses the next door neighbor, a Muslim man named Ahmed Khalifa.

An eyewitness said he saw the Muslim man seizing the girl.  Although the family planned on organizing a protest, village elders counseled against it, lest it backfire by provoking more of the area’s Muslims to retaliate against the Christian minority of the region, as often happens whenever Copts demand their human rights.

Two days earlier, a young Coptic man named Abu Noub Zarif Yusif also disappeared from the region and then reappeared saying that he had converted to Islam.

RELATED ARTICLE:

Egypt: Gunmen kidnap 8-year-old Copt from mother’s arms

Obama’s Middle East Debacle

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Saudi Arabia's King SalmanI had to laugh when I heard that the new King of Saudi Arabia, Salmon, told the White House he wasn’t going to attend Thursday’s photo-op get together of Arab leaders. Some lesser Saudi officials will attend. The message is clear enough, so long as Obama continues to make nice with Iran, the center of the problems in the Middle East, the Saudis and the others are going to be wary of any proposal that comes out of the White House.

As far as the Middle East is concerned, Obama seems to have no idea of the history or the dynamics that affect all the actions there. His Secretary of State, Kerry, is no better. He met with Arab officials last Friday and they told him they want a defense treaty in the event they were attacked by “external forces”, something that the Congress will not approve so long as Obama is in the White House.

One would think that any President at this point would have concluded that the Palestinians have no intention of signing onto a peace treaty with the Israelis.

Writing in The New York Times on May 8, Jonathan Schanzer, vice president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, put it bluntly, “It doesn’t matter what these politicians think now or have said in in the past. Peace between Israel and the Palestinians is not happening in the next two years.” That’s how long we all have to wait until Obama leaves office.

David P.Goldman, a Senior Fellow of the Middle East Forum, writing in Asia Times Online on May 10, spelled it out. “It is inconvenient for diplomats to say so, but the Palestinian Authority collapsed quite some time ago,” noting that “President Mahmoud Abbas’ term in office began in 2005 and ended six years ago, and he has not called new elections for the simple reason that Hamas—the Palestinian branch of the Egypt-based Muslim Brotherhood—would win those elections.” These days the Egyptians label Hamas a terrorist organization and have taken steps to eliminate the Brotherhood. At least they know who the enemy is.

Obama has been antagonistic to Israel from before he was elected and has made little effort to hide it. Consider this, as Goldman notes, “Hamas fired over 4,000 rockets at Israel in 2014, prompting Israeli counterstrikes during the summer.” Its declared intention and the reason for its existence is to eliminate the State of Israel. Why are we surprised to hear that Obama wants to take the statehood issue to the United Nations, a hotbed of anti-Semitism, and has little to say of the Palestinian Authority’s assertion that it wants to drag Israel in front of the International Criminal Court for having defended itself against the attacks by Hamas!

Not only has the Saudi King sent Obama a message, but so did the Israelis when they overwhelmingly reelected Benjamin Netanyahu as their Prime Minister. “The Israelis look around the Middle East and see nothing but conflict, carnage, instability and danger,” said Schanzer. “The Obama doctrine—which includes a deliberate contraction of American power in the Middle East—has undeniably made Israel less safe.”

It has made the U.S. and the world less safe too.

One of the most obscene aspects of the Obama obsession with Iran is that, in return for any deal—which Iran would ignore and cheat—they are ready “to provide as much as $120 billion in sanctions relief to satisfy the narrow technical parameters of a nuclear deal, which would legitimize Iran as a threshold nuclear state. These funds,” said Schanzer, “will flow to Hezbollah, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and other Iran terror proxies dedicated to Israel’s demise.”

To put all this in perspective, as Goldman reminds us, “From Israel’s standpoint, the Palestinian Authority was offered 95% of Judea and Samaria in return for a final peace agreement, and both times (at Camp David in 1999 under Ehud Barack and in 2008 under Ehud Olmert) the offer was rejected.”

“The U.N. Security Council,” said Goldman, “will punish Israel for the failure of negotiations that were meaningless to begin with, and establish a Hamas-controlled state within nine miles of the Mediterranean coast. Iran has already promised to arm West Bank Arabs, just as it armed Hezbollah and Hamas.”

Israel which has enjoyed the support of the United States since it declared its independence in 1948 is now put at risk by the first administration to deliberately turn its back on it in preference for a deal with the leading terror-sponsor, Iran, in the Middle East.

You cannot make a greater mess of the mess that already exists in the Middle East, but Obama is doing his best to add to it. What else should we expect from a President who refuses to utter words like “Islamic terrorism”?

© Alan Caruba, 2015

You’re on the Front Line of the Islamic War

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Does anyone remember what happened on September 11, 2001? Or is it just “ancient history” at this point? Some three thousand totally innocent Americans were murdered by a sneak attack on the Twin Towers in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. Who did it? The same murderous Islamists who attacked an event in Garland, Texas to focus attention on the insanity that passes for one of the world’s great “religions.”

Islam is not a religion. It is a cult around the so-called prophet Mohammad and his assertion that the Koran was the word of Allah. The name Islam means “submission” and the purpose of Islam is the tyrannical control over the entire world’s population. Within this alleged holy faith, two sects, Shiites and Sunnis, have been at war almost from its inception, never failing to kill one another.

The turmoil in the Middle East is the direct result of this murderous cult and those Muslims who oppose the killing that flows from Islam must keep their silence or become its victims. Jews and Christians can speak out and debate about aspects of their faiths, but Muslim risk death when they do so. For those Jews and Christians living in Middle Eastern nations, death is always a prospect for no other reason than not being Muslim.

Americans have not yet fully embraced the fact that they are on the front lines along with other Western nations in a global war with Islam.

Will it take another 9/11? Surely the recent attack by two Islamists on May 3rd in Garland, Texas, was another wake up call. They arrived intent on killing as many of those attending the American Freedom Defense Initiative event. A Garland police officer killed both before anyone had to die in the name of the Bill of Rights.

AA - Garland TX and IslamBut why Garland, Texas? Because, as my friend Amil Imani noted in a recent commentary, “The venue was chosen as a defiant response to a Muslim group that had held a conference entitled ‘Stand With the Prophet Against Terror and Hate.”’ Ironic, eh? Their response to the event that invited cartoons of Muhammed as to want to kill the participants. If that is not war, I do not know what is.

If Muslims feel hatred, they have earned it here in the United States and elsewhere they have attacked any criticism or defiance, from Charlie Hebdo in France to the countless attacks around the world from Mumbai, India to Bali. A website, the Religion of Peace, com, posts news of the daily assaults by Muslim on both other Muslims and those they call “infidels”, unbelievers.

Pamela Geller who leads the American Freedom Defense Initiative has been widely assailed for her event that was intended to respond to the earlier one in Garland that Amil Amani noted “was convened to eliminate free speech or any expression, verbal and/or artwork depicting the Islamic prophet Mohammad in a negative light.”

“As a life-long expert on the subject of Islam, I felt that this event—more than anything else Pamela could have done—would be the target of a violence terrorist attack in the name of the religion of peace, either real and explosive or on social media at the very least.” It was real.

The Garland police were taking it seriously. Amani said “I was astonished at the large police presence already there. Some of the cops were dressed in tactical gear and carrying AR-15s. The security was ubiquitous, almost as if something untoward had already happened.”

Speaking in an interview with Sean Hannity on May 6, Geller noted that neither the FBI nor the Department of Homeland Security has yet to have contacted her about the thwarted attack. “This is a serious threat” said Hannity. “Basically a Fatwah, a death threat, has now been issued.” Geller noted the lack of interest or concern expressed by those in our government one might expect to at the least make an inquiry, adding that “I have a team now, private security, and NYPD counterterror has been in touch with me.”

Now I call that a level of courage for which Pamela Geller should be praised, but I heard too many criticisms that she was being “provocative.”

“Provocative”?????

When are Americans going to realize that the Islamists do not need any provocation? When are we going to start acting like we are at war? A good first step would be to stop inviting Muslims to immigrate to America. The Obama administration has been importing as many as possible. The next step is to understand that it is Obama and his administration that are part of the Islamic war.

It is the Pamela Geller’s that are crying out to us. We need to listen. We need to support them. We need to arm ourselves if we have not done so already. Then we need to secure “concealed carry” laws in every State of the Union. We are at war.

© Alan Caruba, 2015

Pamela Geller — America’s Churchill

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When Adolf Hitler published “Mein Kampf” in 1926, he spelled out his vision for Germany’s domination of the world and annihilation of the Jews. Germany would not have lost WWI, he wrote, “if twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebrew corrupters of the people had been held under poison gas.”

In 1933, Hitler’s Nazis took power. The few people who had read Hitler’s manifesto and took him seriously fled in time to save their lives. But most – including most Jews – didn’t. Comfortable, often prominent, and fully accepted, they believed in German society and could not fathom that a madman actually meant what he said and intended to fully carry out his malevolent vision.

Even as things grew increasingly menacing – through Kristallnacht, book burnings, the stultifying restriction of civil liberties, the expulsion of Jewish children from schools, the construction of Dachau, Auschwitz, Treblinka, and other death camps – there were Jews and others who downplayed Hitler’s ominous threat. Worse, they derided and vilified those who took him seriously, calling them fear-mongers and haters and liars. Sound familiar?

Today, the entire world faces the threat of galloping Islamic terrorism. We see this every day in every newscast – grisly individual and mass beheadings, people chained in cages and set on fire, hundreds of schoolgirls kidnapped, raped, and worse; Christian churches burned to the ground with their desperate congregants locked inside; innocent cartoonists shot dead and their colleagues gravely injured in France, Jewish babies murdered in their cribs and strollers. Increasingly, we see “honor killings” in the United States, as well as other freedom-smothering manifestations of Sharia law.

What happened in Germany in the 1930s and ’40s is happening in America today, except the assault on our system is not coming from Nazism, but rather from radical Islam. The mullahs in Iran and their surrogates around the world stand at podiums and declare boldly: Death to America, Death to Israel! They tell us outright that their goal is to create a caliphate in which Sharia law is the law of the land, in which all infidels – anyone who does not practice or has not converted to Islam – are relegated to second-class citizenship, draconian taxes, and groveling servitude, if not outright enslavement. Some of our own elected officials echo their words. All of them, like Hitler, rely on apologists who flagrantly lie about this escalating threat. Shame on them!

During WWII, Winston Churchill was the proverbial canary in the coal mine, repeatedly issuing the earliest warnings to the Western world of Hitler’s psychotic megalomania and evil intentions. Again, few listened, while prominent, educated, and sanctimonious types derided and vilified Churchill and called him a fear-monger and a hater and a liar. Sound familiar?

Since 2004, when she founded the Atlas Shrugs website (now PamelaGeller.com), Pamela Geller has been our Winston Churchill, warning of the increasingly aggressive actions of radical Islamists, the terrifying acts they commit, and their fervent goal to eviscerate our Constitution and Bill of Rights – you know, those little documents that afford us spoiled Americans the right to say what we want, be it in speech, drawings, art, movies, and music, without fear of being murdered!

That is why, as journalist Jonah Goldberg points out, the First Amendment applies to things that people find offensive, for instance Andreas Serrano’s “Piss Christ,” in which the “artist” urinated in a glass and then placed a plastic icon of Jesus on the cross into it, or the Brooklyn Museum of Art’s exhibition of a portrait of the Virgin Mary, which was partly comprised of pornographic pictures and elephant dung.

As I recall, all the holier-than-thou hypocrites who are calling for Geller’s head were bleating their support of “free speech” back then.

That is also why people who cherish the First Amendment agreed that it was okay to have a loathsome Nazi contingent walk the streets of Skokie, Illinois (with its formidable Jewish population) in the mid 1970s, and why other protest movements have been so powerful and important: for instance Patrick Henry’s bold declaration, “Give me liberty or give me death”; the Yo No rebellion in Cuba against its repressive government; the Boston Tea Party’s “no taxation without representation” protest; Susan B. Anthony’s “illegal” vote for women’s suffrage; Henry Thoreau’s demonstrations against slavery; the history-changing actions of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rosa Parks against racial discrimination…the list of heroic people sounding the alarms is endless.

Throughout history, all of these crusaders for freedom have been insulted by the cowardly accommodators among us, the appeasers, the apologists, and the deluded masses who thought, as Churchill said, that “the crocodile [of tyranny, fascism, murder, even genocide] would eat them last.”

Pamela Geller succeeded in literally flushing out the enemy within, two of the many jihadists in our midst. Only days after their failed assassination attempt, ISIS claimed credit for the attack and embarrassed our Department of Homeland Security into increasing security conditions at U.S. military bases and elevating the threat level in the U.S. to BRAVO – not the highest level, but pretty damn high!

But instead of praising Geller for her foresight and courage, cowards and apologists on both the left and right used the tactics of radical Saul Alinsky (described in his own manifesto, “Rules for Radicals”), which are to: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” Hurling gratuitous epithets and insults and lying are also in their repertoire.

But in spite of it all, Geller is not intimidated, because like Churchill she has truth on her side! She awarded First Place to a graphic artist who left Islam for the freedom that the First Amendment offers.

Still, it is clear that few people have learned the lessons of September 11th and the 14 years that have followed about the increasingly urgent need for vigilance against a deadly serious enemy, and for the equally compelling need to thank and to celebrate people like Pamela Geller for risking everything to protect our priceless freedoms.

As journalist and author Mark Steyn reminds us, “you’ve heard them a zillion times this last week: ‘Of course, I’m personally, passionately, absolutely committed to free speech. But…and the minute you hear the ‘but,’ none of the build-up to it matters.”

“…all the nice respectable people are now telling us,” Steyn adds, what Mohammed Atta told the passengers on 9/11: “Stay quiet and you’ll be okay.”

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared in Renew America.

MIT’s Muslim chaplain raised money for al-Qaeda groups

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Everyone at MIT no doubt assumed that Laher was a “moderate.” To question that assumption would have been “Islamophobic.”

“Al Qaeda’s Base at MIT,” by Ilya Feoktistov and Charles Jacobs, Breitbart, May 11, 2015 (thanks to The Religion of Peace):

At the end of April, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology unveiled a permanent memorial to MIT Police Officer Sean Collier. Officer Collier was gunned down by the Boston Marathon bombers, Chechen refugees Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, three days after they blew up the Marathon.

It is painful to learn that in the late 1990s, there were students at MIT who helped recruit for the Chechen jihad and raised funds for Al Qaeda-affiliated groups operating in the Tsarnaevs’ homeland. It is even more painful that the man who led this fundraising effort was still on MIT’s staff when Officer Collier was gunned down.

Suheil Laher had been MIT’s Muslim chaplain for almost 20 years. Today he continues to preach at the Islamic Society of Boston, the extremist mosque founded by MIT students near campus, where the Tsarnaevs worshipped during their radicalization.

Americans for Peace and Tolerance have just released a mini-documentary, “Al Qaeda’s Base at MIT,” showing how MIT Muslim chaplain Suheil Laher used his leadership of the MIT Muslim Students Association as a vehicle for raising money for Al Qaeda causes around the world. We especially focus on the Al Qaeda affiliate in Chechnya, which Laher and his associates lionized, even as MIT trusted him to be its Muslim students’ spiritual guide.

Suheil Laher came to MIT as a student in 1990 and by 1998, he became the MIT Muslim chaplain. By the year 2000, he also became president of a Muslim charity based in Boston called Care International, which was founded by Osama Bin Laden’s mentor Abdullah Azzam and was originally called “Al Kifah Refugee Center.” Care International was, in essence, a fundraising vehicle for mujahideen. After the leader of Al Kifah in Brooklyn, “the Blind Sheikh” Omar Abdel-Rehman, was convicted for his role in the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, Boston’s Care International took overas Al Qaeda’s main base in the United States. Laher, then, was quite an important figure in Al Qaeda’s leadership here. His perch at MIT meant that he had easy access to the best American Muslim minds – and their world-class technical skills.

As a religious scholar and an engineer, Laher was both the spiritual and technological leader of Care International. He pioneered the Jihadist use of the new Internet medium to fundraise and recruit for Al Qaeda causes online. Laher’s personal website prominently featured Abdullah Azzam’s notorious call to Jihad, a tract called “Join the Caravan:”

Beloved brother! Draw your sword, climb onto the back of your horse, and wipe the blemish off your ummah. If you do not take the responsibility, who then will?

That same Jihadist tract was found on Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s computer.

Laher’s website contained a large collection of his writings and of sermons he gave in the Boston area. These sermons are replete with calls for Jihad, such as this passage:

When the Muslim lands are being attacked, and the Muslims are being raped and killed, the only solution prescribed by Allah is jihad. Jihad is for all times. […] Jihad does not stop. Those of us who have not yet managed to go and physically help our brothers and sisters should support […] our mujahidin brethren with prayer, with money, with clothes, by taking care of their families, and at some point in person. Otherwise, we must face the wrath of Allah.

One of the MIT students who answered Laher’s call to join the Jihad in person was a bright young biologist named Aafia Siddiqui. She started out as a passionate and prolific fundraiser for Care International, but by the time she was arrested by the FBI in Afghanistan in 2008, she was known as “Lady Al Qaeda” and had become the most wanted woman in the world. She is now serving an 86-year prison sentence for attempting to kill the FBI agents arresting her. Her belongings upon arrest included two pounds of cyanide and plans for mass casualty attacks on New York using chemical and biological weapons, as well as literature about the Ebola virus.

While Laher’s sermonspreached the general Islamic obligation to do Jihad, Care International’s website along with its newsletter “Al Hussam” (“The Sword”) promoted what Laher and his fellow Care leaders saw as the concrete performance of that responsibility. In the late 1990s, Care International focused its fundraising activity on the Russian breakaway republic of Chechnya. Specifically, Care International backed the Al Qaeda-affiliated terrorists under the leadership of Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev.

Basayev can arguably be described as one of the cruelest Islamic terrorists in modern Jihadist history. Our documentary recounts one of his cruelest acts: the Beslan School Massacre. On September 1, 2004, during a ceremony marking the first day of school, Basayev’s men surrounded the school in the town of Beslan in southern Russia and took over 1,100 people hostage, nearly eight hundred of them children. They murdered several people on the spot in front of the children and herded everyone into a sweltering gymnasium, where the hostages were kept without food or water for three days as bombs were hung up from the rafters and basketball hoops above them. On the third day, the terrorists started setting off the bombs and Russian security forces stormed the school as shell-shocked children ran the other way and were shot in the back by the terrorists. Three hundred and eighty five people were murdered, among them one hundred and eighty six children. Subsequently, Shamil Basayev bragged about his “success” at Beslan and the fact that the attack only cost him 8,000 Euros to launch. He was killed by Russian security forces in 2006.

Care International raised huge amounts of money for jihad around Boston, $1.7 million according to Federal authorities. A large portion of this money came through checks that were specifically earmarked for “Chechen Muslim fighters.” Throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s, Care International hosted dispatches and communiques from Basayev and his forces in the field. A Care International “Al Hussam” newsletter praised a previous Basayev hostage operation against a Russian hospital’s maternity ward:

Minute by minute the whole world watched with agony, as some of the Mujahideen (not exceeding 80), under the leadership of Mujahid Shamil Basyev took 1500 Russians […] We cannot depend on anybody’s help; we have to fight evil with evil. The operation of the Mujahid Shamil Basayev is perfect proof.

How could MIT’s Muslim chaplain have led a group that applauded and funded such a savage?

In 2003, the FBI began investigating Care International for terrorism financing. At the same time, Basayev and his organization were designated as foreign terrorists. The flow of money from Boston to Chechnya stopped. After the Beslan Massacre, Basayev complained that the lack of funding prevented him from seizing more schools in Moscow and Leningrad. Because Basayev was not officially considered a terrorist before 2003, there was little the FBI could do to prosecute Laher and his fellow activists. Three Care leaders, including the group’s treasurer, received minor sentences for tax evasion. After being questioned by the FBI, Laher walked free and continued to influence students at MIT for more than another decade. His successor as MIT’s Muslim Chaplain, Hoda Elsharkawy, is herself closely linked through her husband to Laher and to Islamic extremism in Boston, which will be the focus of our future reporting.

While Laher officially stepped down from his post as MIT chaplain in 2014, he continues to preach at mosques in the Boston area, including the Tsarnaev’s own mosque, the Islamic Society of Boston – giving a sermon there as recently as May 1, 2015….

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Pamela Geller’s critics are proving her point

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“The fury against Pamela Geller is motivated mostly by fear — by the understanding that there are indeed many, many Muslims who believe that blasphemy should be punished with death, and who put that belief into practice.” The proper response to them is not surrender and submission.

“Pamela Geller’s Critics Are Proving Her Point,” by David French, National Review, May 7, 2015:

Let’s be clear: The great freak-out over Pamela Geller’s “draw Muhammad” contest isn’t about love for Islam or for robust and respectful religious pluralism. Indeed, many of those expressing anguish over blasphemy against Islam show no such concern over even the most vile attacks on the Christian faith. Beyond that, they’re among the leaders in movements designed to banish religious liberty — including Muslim religious liberty — to the margins of American life.

Instead, the fury against Pamela Geller is motivated mostly by fear — by the understanding that there are indeed many, many Muslims who believe that blasphemy should be punished with death, and who put that belief into practice. It’s motivated by the fear that our alliances with even “friendly” Muslim states and “allied” Muslim militias are so fragile that something so insignificant as a cartoon would drive them either to neutrality or straight into the arms of ISIS.

That’s why even the military brass will do something so unusual as call a fringe pastor of a tiny little church to beg him not to post a YouTube video. That’s why the president of the United States — ostensibly the most powerful man in the world — will personally appeal to that same pastor not to burn a Koran. They know that hundreds of millions of Muslims are not “moderate” by any reasonable definition of that word, and they will,in fact, allow themselves to be provoked by even the most insignificant and small-scale act of religious satire or defiance. After all, there are Muslim communities that will gladlyburn Christians alive to punish even rumored blasphemy.

Our nation’s “elite” knows of the 88 percent support in Egypt for the death penalty for apostasy, and the 62 percent support in Pakistan. They know of the majority support for it in Malaysia, Jordan, and the Palestinian territories. They know that even when there’s not majority support for the death penalty for exercising one of the most basic of human rights — religious freedom — that large minorities still exercise considerable, and often violent, influence on their nations.

The elite also knows this bloodthirstiness extends to supporting terrorists. The following Pew Research Center numbers should sober anyone who believes in the “few extremists” model of Muslim culture:

That’s a staggering level of support for a man who not only targeted innocent men, women, and children in the West, but who allied himself with the most medieval Muslim regime in the world: the Taliban. And, ominously, his support waned only as his power waned.Islamists have a new jihadist idol — ISIS.

Further, our elites also know that while ISIS’s brutality certainly repels many Muslims, it attracts many others — that there are Muslim young people who are so captivated by images of beheadings and burnings that they’ll defy the law and their own nations to make their way to the jihadist battlefronts of Iraq and Syria.

Unable or unwilling to formulate a strategy to comprehensively defeat jihad or even to adequately defend our nation, our elites adopt a strategy of cultural appeasement that only strengthens our enemy. Millions in the Muslim world are drawn to the “strong horse” (to use Osama bin Laden’s phrase), and when jihadists intimidate the West into silence and conformity, the jihadists show themselves strong.

In a sane world, our national elites would not only rally unequivocally around free speech, they would point to the events of Garland, Texas, as perfectly symbolic of the way we handle threats against our Constitution and our culture — by defeating our enemies and defending our liberty. Instead, they express fears that provocative speech not only threatens our troops abroad but our cities here at home.…

Islam has a serious problem. Silencing Pamela Geller isn’t the solution.

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Has Vatican newspaper converted to Islam?

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The Vatican daily L’Osservatore Romano ran a piece with the subtitle, “Shooting in Texas at an exhibition of blasphemous cartoons.”

Blasphemous? They’re blasphemous according to Islamic law, because Islam asserts that Muhammad is a prophet. So is the Vatican now submitting to Islamic law? Merriam-Webster defines “blasphemy” as “great disrespect shown to God or to something holy.” So does the Vatican now think Muhammad is holy? Has L’Osservatore Romano converted to Islam? Is Muhammad now considered a prophet by the Catholic Church, like Isaiah or Jeremiah or Ezekiel? Will he get a feast day on the Roman Catholic calendar?

They could have used any other word — offensive, tasteless, odious, whatever. But using the word “blasphemous” sends a hugely misleading message.

Meanwhile, here is an excellent evisceration of the idea that L’Osservatore Romano also puts forward — that our free speech event was needlessly provocative, throwing gasoline on the fire: “Do I Have to Draw You a Picture? The Cartoon Wars Come to America,” by William Kilpatrick, Catholic World Report, May 6, 2015:

…That brings us back to the L’Osservatore Romano article. Its authors decry provocation—“wanting to throw gasoline on the fire”—but have they paused to consider that many Catholic beliefs and practices are also provocative to Muslims? In Saudi Arabia, Bibles and rosaries are considered provocative and no churches are allowed. In some Muslim countries, ringing church bells is considered provocative. In other places it is provocative to rebuild a church that is falling down—so provocative that Christians have lost their lives for the offense. In still other Muslim areas it is considered provocative if a Christian won’t pay the jizya tax, and he can be killed in consequence. In some parts of the Muslim world, simply being a Christian is sufficient provocation for murder.

A large part of the “provocative intent” of the Garland exhibit is to prevent such things from ever happening here. It’s a reminder that the sharia ban on blasphemy is meant to apply not just in Iran and Arabia, but everywhere. Everyone is expected to submit. The event and its aftermath also serves to remind us that it’s not a good idea to let the most violent among us determine the limits of free speech. If the Muhammad Art Exhibit is dismissed as incendiary and needlessly provocative, it means that Muslim extremists get to call the shots about what is and is not a permissible form of expression in America. Today it will be Muhammad cartoons that offend. And tomorrow? Well, it could be anything, because Muslim radicals seem to have an unlimited capacity for being offended. It could even be church bells or rosaries.

Some will say that Geller and Spencer are needlessly stirring up trouble. In reality, they are saving us from much greater trouble down the road by flushing out the danger we face while there is still time to face it down. If Americans don’t pay attention to wake-up calls of the drive-by-jihadist variety, they will wake up someday to find that the time for defending their freedoms has already passed.

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Savages and The Civilized Woman

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Pamela Geller takes on the savages and smart people support her!

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Syrian Archbishop: “We expect Christians in the West to help us. They do not”

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Why don’t the Christians in the West help them? Because it might harm the dialogue: “Talk about extreme, militant Islamists and the atrocities that they have perpetrated globally might undercut the positive achievements that we Catholics have attained in our inter-religious dialogue with devout Muslims.” —Robert McManus, Roman Catholic Bishop of Worcester, Massachusetts, February 8, 2013

“Syrian Archbishop: ‘We expect Christians in the West to help us. They do not,’” by David Gibson, Religion News Service, May 4, 2015:

NEW YORK (RNS) Archbishop Jean-Clement Jeanbart of Aleppo is returning to the front line of the real war on Christians, which he calls home — that is, Aleppo in war-torn Syria, where his ancient church faces the threat of extinction.

I wrote here about Jeanbart, who was in the U.S. last week in an effort to raise awareness about the plight of Christians in Syria — they include his Eastern-rite Melkite Catholics as well or Eastern Orthodox and other churches — and to raise money for their survival.

The archbishop is a remarkable figure, facing the personal danger while trying to protect an entire community and tradition and way of life. He had controversial things to say (at least in the U.S. political context) about supporting Syrian president Assad; when faced with ISIS as the alternative, you understand his “devil-you-know” choice.

But Assad may be at risk of falling. Americans are not likely to shed a tear for him, and many have been pushing the administration to aid the Islamist rebels, who could wind up slaughtering what’s left of the Christians in Aleppo and elsewhere.

And American Christians know so little about their fellow believers in the region, or even that such Christians exist, that Middle East church leaders like Jeanbart face an uphill battle:

“We expect Christians in the West to help us. They do not,” as Jeanbart told Cardinal Timothy Dolan during the New York archbishop’s weekly radio show.

I couldn’t include all of the interview in the first version, so wanted to pick it up here with the question:
What does Archbishop Jeanbart want?

In short, he thinks the West, led by the U.S., should work to stop the flow of arms into the country. He does not want Western military intervention in terms of boots on the ground – just a ceasefire so that Syrians themselves have a chance to work out their problems in a way that respects each community. That’s how it was for centuries, and he says that’s how it can be again.

Most immediately, he wants material support for Syrian Christians.

A chief problem, church officials say, is that Christians who are among the nearly 8 million internally displaced people in Syria are afraid to go to refugee camps that receive the bulk of international humanitarian aid because they would have to register to enter and could then be pegged as Christians – and would be targets all over again.

So Christians wind up trying to stay put in war zones, or seek refuge in churches, Catholic hospitals or schools, or the homes of relatives. (Aid to the Church in Need has pledged $2.8 in emergency aid for Christians in Syria.)

“The church will support us in a way, morally and spiritually. But the church has very little material means,” Jeanbart said. “It doesn’t have armies. It doesn’t have budgets to help. Nobody has ever taken care of us.”

“We expect Christians in the West to help us. They do not,” Jeanbart, his voice rising in frustration, told Cardinal Timothy Dolan during the New York archbishop’s weekly radio show.

Jeanbart said that on the other hand, his Muslim neighbors and religious leaders in the city have often offered him a place to live or hold services….

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Kill Bill III — O’Reilly Defiles Islam says UK Imam

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mosesAccording to UK Imam Anjem Choudary, Bill O’Reilly has defiled Islam by displaying the image of the Islamic Prophet Isa (Jesus) in his movie and Killing Jesus. Choudary stated, “The depiction of Mohammad, Moses, or Isa requires the death penalty.”

The The United West team, who was a direct target of the two Islamic terrorists that were fatally shot by police for trying to murder us and other attendees in mass execution style in Garland Texas, has recommended that Bill O’Reilly, “donate all his profits from his book and movie to an Islamic charity in order to appease Islam.”

Note: Bill O’Reilly has denounced the sponsors and attendees of the draw Mohammad event in Texas as, “being stupid” for insulting Islam.

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FBI chief: Potentially ‘thousands’ of Islamic State followers in U.S.

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So don’t draw any Muhammad cartoons, people, and maybe they won’t hurt us.

Anyway, why are there potentially thousands of followers of the Islamic State in the U.S.? The FBI shows a remarkable lack of curiosity about that. Of course, Bureau policy is to ignore the ideology, motives and goals of the jihadis. Muslims are streaming into this Islamic group that the Obama Administration insists is not Islamic, and nary an Administration official stops even for a second to ponder how this strange phenomenon came to be.

“FBI Chief: Potentially ‘thousands’ of online ISIS followers in U.S.,” ABC News, May 7, 2015:

There may be as many as thousands of people inside the United States consuming online “poison” from ISIS alone, and, “I know there are other Elton Simpsons out there,” FBI director James Comey warned today, referring to one of the men who opened fire outside of an event in Texas earlier this week celebrating artists’ portrayals of the Prophet Mohammad.

“We have a very hard task” in trying to identify and stop anyone inspired to launch an attack inside the U.S. homeland, Comey told ABC News’ Pierre Thomas and a small group of reporters.

Such efforts have become particularly challenging because ISIS has reconfigured and redefined terrorist recruitment, according to Comey. In fact, while the FBI is trying to find that so-called needle in a haystack, “increasingly the needles are invisible to us,” he said.

As recently as two years ago, someone in the United States who wanted to consume “radical poisonous propaganda” would have to seek that out on the Internet, most likely on a jihadist web forum. So the FBI focused its investigative efforts on those jihadist web forums, Comey said.

But “that has changed dramatically, especially with [ISIS] and their use of social media,” where on phones in people’s pockets they ask Americans and other foreigners “to travel to the so-called caliphate to fight” but simultaneously say, “If you can’t travel, kill where you are,” according to Comey.

“It’s almost as if there is a devil sitting on the shoulder saying, ‘Kill, kill, kill, kill’ all day long,” he said. “[They are] recruiting and tasking at the same time. … In a way, the old paradigm between ‘inspired’ and ‘directed’ breaks down here.”…

Comey, meanwhile, warned that even when the FBI finds someone who has in fact connected with ISIS, keeping track of that person is becoming increasingly difficult.…

Especially since the FBI is bound as a matter of policy not to study or understand the motivating ideology of these people.

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Rare Look Inside The Garland Terrorist Attack Venue As It Unfolded

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Join The United West team as we take you step by step through what happened to us inside the event.

First we will hear 4 minutes of Robert Spencer explaining why the event was messaged like it was. He specifically addresses those who believe Pamela Geller’s event was unnecessarily provocative to the followers of Islam.

Next you will be inside the venue with us as a Garland SWAT leader explains to the audience that shots were fired and they will need to move all in attendance into the auditorium which is further away from the front entrance.

Next you will experience being moved to a safer offsite facility approximately 5 miles from the Culwell Center where we learn that we were targets of a terrorist attack and law enforcement needed our statements.

Then well after midnight we were released and the City Of Garland put us up in a hotel for the night because where we were staying was off limits due to proximity of the attack area.

Pamela Geller paid five figures for additional security. Little did she know the Islamic State would send two Muslim Jihadis to attack and try to kill as many people inside as possible in the first IS attack on domestic targets in the United States.

The United West team thanks the Garland Police Department and Garland Police SWAT Unit for keeping all the attendees safe during this terrorist event.

The two Muslim Jihadi shooters were wearing body armor, they were armed with 100 round drum fed fully automatic AK-47’s, and had grenades they did not have time to detonate. There mission, luckily for us, failed but imagine for a brief moment what would could have happened if these to Muslim Jihadis picked a softer location like a mall, restaurant, hospital, etc….

Interestingly there was not one single pro Islamist protester at the event. Conversely, at the Stand with the Prophet event in January close to 250 Muslim protesters and their sympathizers were protesting against the 2000+ patriots who were protesting the Muslim event being held at the Culwell Center.

It will be interesting to see if next year the school district of Garland, Tx denies Pamela Geller or anyone else access to their facility for the planned 2nd annual event for free speech.

If that should come to pass unfortunately the Jihadis will have won because the Garland School District will have submitted to the fear caused by Islamic violence.

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VIDEO: UK Imam Anjem Choudary Tells Pam Geller She Should Be Slaughtered

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UK Imam Anjem Choudary told Pamela Geller on the Sean Hannity Show that she should be tried in Shariah Court and slaughtered… for speaking out against Islam. Why did he say this?

The reason that Imam Choudary believes this is because the Quran says he must. What Imam Choudary is demonstrating is the Islamic strategy of Fitna. Fitna is defined as “[F]orces that cause controversy, fragmentation, scandal, chaos, or discord within the Muslim community, disturbing social peace and order.”

Quran versus 2: 191-193, reads:

And kill them wherever you overtake them and expel them from wherever they have expelled you, and fitnah is worse than killing. And do not fight them at al-Masjid al- Haram until they fight you there. But if they fight you, then kill them. Such is the recompense of the disbelievers.

And if they cease, then indeed, Allah is Forgiving and Merciful.

Fight them until there is no [more] fitnah and [until] worship is [acknowledged to be] for Allah . But if they cease, then there is to be no aggression except against the oppressors.

Imam Choudary is doing what the Quran demands. Slaughter any unbeliever who causes Fitna for the “fitna is worse than killing.”

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Pamela Geller: A Response to My Critics—This Is a War

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A succinct and compelling statement from my colleague Pamela Geller on why we do what we do, and what is at stake. “Pamela Geller: A Response to My Critics—This Is a War,” by Pamela Geller, Time Magazine, May 6, 2015:

Some are saying I provoked this attack. But to kowtow to violent intimidation will only encourage more of it.

Sunday in Garland, Texas, a police officer was wounded in a battle that is part of a longstanding war: the war against the freedom of speech. Some people are blaming me for the Garland shooting — so I want to address that here.

The shooting happened at my American Freedom Defense Initiative Muhammad Art Exhibit and Cartoon Contest, when two Islamic jihadists armed with rifles and explosives drove up to the Curtis Culwell Center in Garland and attempted to gain entry to our event, which was just ending. We were aware of the risk and spent thousands of dollars on security — and it paid off. The jihadis at our free speech event were not able to achieve their objective of replicating the massacre at the offices of the Charlie Hebdo satirical magazine last January — and to go it one better in carnage. They were not able to kill anyone. We provided enormous security, in concert with the superb Garland police department. The men who took the aspiring killers down may have saved hundreds of lives.

And make no mistake: If it weren’t for the free-speech conference, these jihadis would have struck somewhere else — a place where there was less security, like the Lindt cafe in Australia or the Hyper Cacher Kosher supermarket in Paris.

So, why are some people blaming me? They’re saying: “Well, she provoked them! She got what she deserved!” They don’t remember, or care to remember, that as the jihadis were killing the Muhammad cartoonists in Paris, their friend and accomplice was murdering Jews in a nearby kosher supermarket. Were the Jews asking for it? Did they “bait” the jihadis? Were they “provoking” them?

Are the Jews responsible for the Nazis? Are the Christians in the Middle East responsible for being persecuted by Muslims?

Drawing Muhammad offends Islamic jihadists? So does being Jewish. How much accommodation of any kind should we give to murderous savagery? To kowtow to violent intimidation will only encourage more of it.

This is a war.

Now, after the Charlie Hebdo attack, and after the Garland attack, what are we going to do? Are we going to surrender to these monsters?

The attack in Garland showed that everything my colleagues and I have been warning about regarding the threat of jihad, and the ways in which it threatens our liberties, is true. Islamic law, Sharia, with its death penalty for blasphemy, today constitutes a unique threat to the freedom of speech and liberty in general.

Freedom of speech is the foundation of a free society. Without it, a tyrant can wreak havoc unopposed, while his opponents are silenced.

Putting up with being offended is essential in a pluralistic society in which people differ on basic truths. If a group will not stand for being offended without resorting to violence, that group will rule unopposed, while everyone else lives in fear.

Islamic law as it’s interpreted by extremists forbids criticism of Islam, the Quran, and Muhammad. If they cannot be criticized in the United States, we are in effect accepting Islamic law as overriding the freedom of speech. This would establish Muslims as a protected class and prevent honest discussion of how Islamic jihadists use the texts and teachings of Islam to justify violence.

Some say that “hate speech” should be censored. But what constitutes “hate speech” is a subjective judgment that is unavoidably influenced by the political perspective of the one doing the judging.

Allowing this sort of censorship would mean nothing less [than] civilizational suicide. Many in the media and academic elite assign no blame to an ideology that calls for death to blasphemers — i.e., those who criticize or offend Islam. Instead, they target and blame those who expose this fanaticism. If the cultural elites directed their barbs and attacks at the extremist doctrine of jihad, the world would be a vastly safer place.

You can try to avoid reality, but you cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding reality. The shootings in Garland, Paris, and Copenhagen targeting defenders of free speech, and the raging jihad across the Middle East, Africa, and Europe, are the disastrous consequences of avoiding reality.

I encourage all Americans to watch the videos of the Garland event and see what Islamic supremacists wish to silence: basic, elemental free speech arguments.

But we are unbowed. Even when the venue was in lockdown and hundreds of attendees were ushered down into the auditorium, the crowd was singing the Star Spangled Banner and G-d Bless America. In the face of fear, they were staunchly and uniquely American.

To learn who rules over you, simply find out whom you cannot criticize. If the international media had run the Danish cartoons back in 2005, none of this could have happened. The jihadis wouldn’t have been able to kill everyone. But by self-censoring, the media gave the jihadis the power they have today.

We must take back our freedom.

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