Posted on 02/08/2006 6:16:44 AM PST by Dark Skies
THE insane violence of riots over religious cartoons is a flexing of muscles by those men of the Islamic world who have long felt emasculated and insulted by the West's economic superiority. Empowered by Osama bin Laden's September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, they have also been emboldened by the West's internal divisions and its feeble response to increasing acts of intolerance and provocation.
Similarly, a semi-official policy by NSW authorities of not antagonising groups of young Arab-Australian men behaving criminally or antisocially in Sydney has enfeebled police, while emboldening law-breakers to ever more audacious behaviour, such as the revenge attacks after the Cronulla riots.
The institutionalised weakness of the West is epitomised by its reaction to the riots over the cartoons: the apologies from governments, the sacking of an editor in France, the ready acceptance by newspapers of a limit to free speech, despite the fact the cartoons are so tame by the standards of Western satire. Two of the cartoons are comments on the "reactionary provocateurs" at Denmark's Jyllands-Posten who had commissioned the cartoons.
The most provocative cartoon is probably one that shows a Muhammad-like figure with a fuse coming out of his turban, or one with a queue of smoking suicide bombers on a cloud with an Islamic cleric saying "Stop. We ran out of virgins".
But the global over-reaction to the publication in a privately owned newspaper in a Western secular society shows that there are increasing numbers of Muslims who expect to be able to control what non-Muslims do in their own countries.
The murder of the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh in 2004 by a Muslim extremist enraged by his documentary about violence against Muslim women was just the start.
In Australia all but one newspaper has refrained from publishing the cartoons because of the uncharacteristically sensible desire not to inflame the madness, which has so far resulted in nine deaths.
But while we accommodate the intolerant, we seem ever more determined to ferret out any whiff of intolerance in ourselves. Witness the calls this week by a Victorian teachers union for cultural re-education of children after a survey of 551 high school students found a majority had negative attitudes towards Muslims.
An editorial in The Age even attempted to excuse the inexcusable, saying of the survey results: "Little wonder many Muslims see the 'war on terror' as a war on them. Their community is besieged by hostility and suspicion, which helps explain why they want to make their hurt felt "
Civilised people don't usually make their "hurt felt" by torching other people's embassies, stoning churches and waving the sort of banners reported at a protest over the cartoons in London last week: "Massacre those who insult Islam", "Europe, your 9/11 will come".
This creeping acceptance of intolerance in our midst is what Daniel Pipes, the director of a US think tank, the Middle East Forum, has warned about as the second prong of a radical Islamic attack on the West: a relentless demand for cultural change. This non-violent but incremental encroachment on Western secular society curtails freedoms and accords the Muslim minority special privileges.
For instance, during a visit to Australia after the September 11 terrorist attacks, Pipes warned against allowing driver's licence photos with faces obscured by veils.
Militant Islamists believe their totalitarian ideology is superior to our liberal democracy, he said at the time. "When there's a difference between their approach and the Australian approach, they want Australia to become like them and not vice versa," he said.
It was the hate-preaching imams of Denmark who were said to have ignited the controversy over the cartoons, four months after their publication in September, when they travelled to the Middle East with a dossier of cartoons aimed at bringing attention to Danish insensitivity and inflaming attitudes against the country they had made their home.
In Australia, a new generation of Islamic leaders who are antagonistic to their moderate elders (such as Sheik Taj el-Din al Hilaly, who has fought to keep extremists out of the Lakemba Mosque) have also been preaching the evils of the mainstream culture they live in and the need for "good Muslims" to disengage.
The now infamous Bankstown sermon last year by the Sydney-born Sheik Feiz Mohamed, in which he said rape victims have "no one to blame but themselves" because they dress provocatively, is but one example.
The American Sheik Khalid Yasin, a regular visitor to Australia, betrayed similar intolerance when he said last year: "There's no such thing as a Muslim having a non-Muslim friend." He also said homosexuality should be punishable by death.
But antagonism to Western culture appears in more subtle forms. In Melbourne recently the first training course for home-grown Islamic religious leaders was launched at the Minaret College in Springvale, funded by a reported $1.8 million of taxpayer money.
While it says it embraces a moderate 21st-century form of Islam, the college features on its website a fatwa, or official ruling, from Sheik Yusof Al-Qaradawi, professor at the University of Qutar, who is banned from entering the US and Germany because of his support for terrorist groups. The letter calls for donations because educational institutions for Muslims outside the Muslim world are "castles for jihad and shields of protection from surrounding evils".
Teaching young Muslims that Australian society is evil is not a recipe for cultural harmony.
devinemiranda@hotmail.com
ping
The camelhumpers haven't rioted in the U.S. -- they know they'd get the turbans blown off their fool heads if they tried.
We must be tolerant of their intolerance. Yep, that sounds like Islamic rationale.
True, we're not going to tolerate it very much here. They would if they could though.
They're on eggshells in the USA. Everyone knows it.
BTW, this article needs to remove the 'radical' from the title. It's a generalized plan of theirs. It's like saying 'Radical Soviets' wanted to beat the USA in the cold war.
Yep, "radical Islam" long ago became a redundancy.
It's the intolerance bit that boggles my mind....Islam is a 'religion' of intolerance.
So the entire extreme Islamic terror movement is a global case of economic penis envy....., Heck, it's as good as any other explaination I've heard and better than most.
Islamic leaders know exactly what they are doing and it is clicking along like clockwork. However, while the MSM may play dead, the internet will pick up the slack.
Yes, and useful idiots abound everywhere.
"It was the hate-preaching imams of Denmark who were said to have ignited the controversy over the cartoons..."
Time for some deportations.
> Yep, "radical Islam" long ago became a redundancy.
Sort of like "Arab civilian."
Paid for,support by,and given the spiritual tools necessary
-Jihad by terror...courtesy of...the so called MODERATES...
imo
And when your doctor is on the payroll of the germs...chances are he considers you terminial.
Never get between a man/woman in power and the money that keeps him/her there.
Mohammed Cartoon Violence Is Just a Smoke Screen For Islam's Real Intentions
By Kevin D. Korenthal
Feb 7, 2006Radical Islamic leaders are coming to realize that efforts to Islamatize Europe and the rest of the world are failing and that Europe is figuring out that no life, not even that which is sensitive to the Jihadists cause, is sacred. So its time for plan B.
Plan B involves creating (what the media is incorrectly calling) a row with which to create the cover for more intimidation and violence which is the Islamic way. If Muslims were really interested in stopping the cartoons from appearing, they would be using shame, not murder and mayhem to affect their demands. Christians, severely upset by a television show, The Book of Daniel did not take to the streets of New York burning effigies of NBC executives and the peacock. They organized a media and writing campaign that clearly and calmly explained why Daniel was an abhorrent program and threatened to boycott all of the companys fare should the show continue to be aired.
The fact that Muslims of the fascist variety really seek the subrogation of the human race and not a stop to silly cartoon images of a deity that even the Koran says was just a man of flesh and blood is clearly defined by the condition of Islam today. Total desperation, ass-backwardness and utter irrelevance in the global world are sentiments that describe where the religion of peace resides. Whereas Christians have drawn supporters to the War on Christmas against the secularists here in America, Muslims of the world continue to draw more ill will and condemnation for their violent acts and insolent demands. Even in Europe, once the cradle of secularism, is moving against the Muslim interlopers that seem to be demanding that Europe give up its own identity and fortunes for Islam. Science Fiction fans might call this the Borgification of Europe. The Borg was an enemy species in Star Trek that over the lives and culture of species to add to their own collective. Islam seeks an end to the culture of The West in exchange for what they seem to be implying will be a perfect Islamic Society. Can you understand that what Islam is saying is that if all of the world would just bow down to Islam and stop trying to fight its spread, all would be well in the world. The problem is that not only would the Islamification of the world remove the protections of Democracy and freedom of speech, but under Islam, all Jews and Christians (also known as enablers to the Jews) will have to die or pay massive taxes to the Islamic Super-State, where ever that would end up being.
Like in Star Trek, we must fight this enemy that seeks to end our way of life. Islam must be one of many religions that through freedom and Democracy are allowed to grow and thrive under their own power. It must not be allowed, as the Islamo-fascists are clearly demanding, to become the one-world religion. According to sources I trust, Europe appears to be waking up to Islams plans. They are beginning to see that the peaceful Islam they have purported to support is either in union with the fascists or never existed in the first place.
Knowing the truth about Islams ultimate intentions makes it laughable to believe that Islam seeks only to stop people from drawing pictures of a disgraced deity. The real plan is to continue to ratchet up the violence and chaos to the end of scaring Europe into bowing before Islam.
Hey liberals, your "tolerance" isn't being reciprocated...
This whole thing is interesting. It's only gonna get worse until someone raises the BS flag and we finally do something about it.
We have guarded poorly! Once muslims/islam is in, that's it. It's very difficult if not impossible to get it out again. Kind of like a bad stain.
If things hold sway, libs and the ACLU should be furious over that. LOL Yeah, right.
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