Silence=Acceptance (Mark Steyn Explains Islam's Judeophobia Alert)

Shortly after the London Tube bombings in 2005, a reader of Tim Blair, the Sydney Daily Telegraph’s columnar wag, sent him a note-perfect parody of a typical newspaper headline: “British Muslims Fear Repercussions Over Tomorrow’s Train Bombing.”

Indeed. And so it goes. This time round — Bombay — it was the Associated Press that filed a story about how Muslims “found themselves on the defensive once again about bloodshed linked to their religion.” ' Oh, I don’t know about that. In fact, you’d be hard pressed from most news reports to figure out the bloodshed was “linked” to any religion, least of all one beginning with “I-“ and ending in “-slam.” In the three years since those British bombings, the media have more or less entirely abandoned the offending formulations — “Islamic terrorists,” “Muslim extremists” — and by the time of the assault on Bombay found it easier just to call the alleged perpetrators “militants” or “gunmen” or “teenage gunmen,” as in the opening line of this report in the Australian: “An Adelaide woman in India for her wedding is lucky to be alive after teenage gunmen ran amok…”

The veteran British TV anchor Jon Snow, on the other hand, opted for the more cryptic locution “practitioners.” “Practitioners” of what, exactly?

Hard to say. And getting harder. Tom Gross produced a jaw-dropping round-up of Bombay media coverage: The discovery that, for the first time in an Indian terrorist atrocity, Jews had been attacked, tortured, and killed produced from the New York Times a serene befuddlement: “It is not known if the Jewish center was strategically chosen, or if it was an accidental hostage scene.”

Hmm. Greater Bombay forms one of the world’s five biggest cities. It has a population of nearly 20 million. But only one Jewish center, located in a building that gives no external clue as to the bounty waiting therein. An “accidental hostage scene” that one of the “practitioners” just happened to stumble upon? “I must be the luckiest jihadist in town. What are the odds?”

Meanwhile, the New Age guru Deepak Chopra laid all the blame on American foreign policy for “going after the wrong people” and inflaming moderates, and “that inflammation then gets organized and appears as this disaster in Bombay.”

Really? The inflammation just “appears”? Like a bad pimple? The “fairer” we get to the, ah, inflamed militant practitioners, the unfairer we get to everyone else. At the Chabad House, the murdered Jews were described in almost all the Western media as “ultra-Orthodox,” “ultra-” in this instance being less a term of theological precision than a generalized code for “strange, weird people, nothing against them personally, but they probably shouldn’t have been over there in the first place.” Are they stranger or weirder than their killers? Two “inflamed moderates” entered the Chabad House, shouted “Allahu Akbar!,” tortured the Jews and murdered them, including the young Rabbi’s pregnant wife. Their two-year-old child escaped because of a quick-witted (non-Jewish) nanny who hid in a closet and then, risking being mown down by machine-gun fire, ran with him to safety.

The Times was being silly in suggesting this was just an “accidental” hostage opportunity — and not just because, when Muslim terrorists capture Jews, it’s not a hostage situation, it’s a mass murder-in-waiting. The sole surviving “militant” revealed that the Jewish center had been targeted a year in advance. The 28-year-old rabbi was Gavriel Holtzberg. His pregnant wife was Rivka Holtzberg. Their orphaned son is Moshe Holtzberg, and his brave nanny is Sandra Samuels. Remember their names, not because they’re any more important than the Indians, Britons, and Americans targeted in the attack on Bombay, but because they are an especially revealing glimpse into the pathologies of the perpetrators.

In a well-planned attack on iconic Bombay landmarks symbolizing great power and wealth, the “militants” nevertheless found time to divert 20 percent of their manpower to torturing and killing a handful of obscure Jews helping the city’s poor in a nondescript building. If they were just “teenage gunmen” or “militants” in the cause of Kashmir, engaged in a more or less conventional territorial dispute with India, why kill the only rabbi in Bombay? Dennis Prager got to the absurdity of it when he invited his readers to imagine Basque separatists attacking Madrid: “Would the terrorists take time out to murder all those in the Madrid Chabad House? The idea is ludicrous.”

And yet we take it for granted that Pakistani “militants” in a long-running border dispute with India would take time out of their hectic schedule to kill Jews. In going to ever more baroque lengths to avoid saying “Islamic” or “Muslim” or “terrorist,” we have somehow managed to internalize the pathologies of these men.

We are enjoined to be “understanding,” and we’re doing our best. A Minnesotan suicide bomber (now there’s a phrase) originally from Somalia returned to the old country and blew up himself and 29 other people last October. His family prevailed upon your government to have his parts (or as many of them as could be sifted from the debris) returned to the United States at taxpayer expense and buried in Burnsville Cemetery. Well, hey, in the current climate, what’s the big deal about a federal bailout of jihad operational expenses? If that’s not “too big to fail,” what is?

Last week, a Canadian critic reprimanded me for failing to understand that Muslims feel “vulnerable.” Au contraire, they project tremendous cultural confidence, as well they might: They’re the world’s fastest-growing population. A prominent British Muslim announced the other day that, when the United Kingdom becomes a Muslim state, non-Muslims will be required to wear insignia identifying them as infidels. If he’s feeling “vulnerable,” he’s doing a terrific job of covering it up.

We are told that the “vast majority” of the 1.6-1.8 billion Muslims (in Deepak Chopra’s estimate) are “moderate.” Maybe so, but they’re also quiet. And, as the AIDs activists used to say, “Silence=Acceptance.” It equals acceptance of the things done in the name of their faith. Rabbi Holtzberg was not murdered because of a territorial dispute over Kashmir or because of Bush’s foreign policy. He was murdered in the name of Islam — “Allahu Akbar.”

I wrote in my book, America Alone, that “reforming” Islam is something only Muslims can do. But they show very little sign of being interested in doing it, and the rest of us are inclined to accept that. Spread a rumor that a Koran got flushed down the can at Gitmo, and there’ll be rioting throughout the Muslim world. Publish some dull cartoons in a minor Danish newspaper, and there’ll be protests around the planet. But slaughter the young pregnant wife of a rabbi in Bombay in the name of Allah, and that’s just business as usual. And, if it is somehow “understandable” that for the first time in history it’s no longer safe for a Jew to live in India, then we are greasing the skids for a very slippery slope. Muslims, the AP headline informs us, “worry about image.” Not enough.

The Hate Bus

By Joe Kaufman
FrontPageMagazine.com | Monday, December 08, 2008

CAIR and ICNA, two groups with documented ties to extremist groups overseas, have happened upon a new ploy to bring “non-believers” to Islam. The groups are using public transportation – subways and buses – to advertise their message. However, that message is one that is highly offensive and demeaning to those of other faiths, as it promotes Islam as a religion of superiority and spreads false information about revered Christian and Jewish figures.

CAIR or the Council on American-Islamic Relations was built out of Hamas. It was the brainchild of leaders from the American propaganda wing of Hamas, the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP). As well, it was established in 1994 as a part of Hamas leader Mousa Abu Marzook’s American Palestine Committee, a group whose mission was to raise money for Hamas from the United States.

CAIR, like all other radical Muslim groups, believes that Islam is superior to all religions and that the U.S. Constitution should be replaced by the Quran. This sinister belief and agenda were revealed in July of 1998, when then-CAIR National Chairman and current Chairman Emiritus Omar Ahmad was quoted in an article as saying, “Islam isn’t in America to be equal to any other faith but to become dominant. The Quran, the Muslim book of scripture, should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on Earth.”

ICNA or the Islamic Circle of North America was created in 1971 as an emulation of Jamaat-e-Islami (JI), also known as the Muslim Brotherhood of Pakistan. ICNA has been tied to the financing of Hamas, through JI’s charity, the Al-Khidmat Foundation (AKF). And the group continues to be a “partner” to AKF via its Al-Khidmat Welfare Society (AKWS).

ICNA’s religious outreach or dawah group in America is Why Islam (WI). But instead of spreading the faith, many times WI is used to propagate hatred and violence. Outrageous statements currently found on WI’s website, include [author corrected grammar for clarity]:

· “[W]e use the word ‘terrorism’ too loosely. Your terrorist is another’s freedom fighter... I agree with the act of resistance, whether it be through protest or violence.”

· “The Americans don’t care about their allies, even though speaking Islamically they are our enemies and not allies... Like Allah says in the Quran, Baqarah 2, ‘Never will the Jews nor the Christians be pleased with you… till you follow their religion’… Their friendship is an illusion.”

· “Siding with the Kuffar [unbeliever] to kill Muslims takes one out of the folds of Islam… The American empire needs to be destroyed once and for all… Allah has promised us victory… Islam is meant to rule the world.”

· “Don’t get fooled, Allah (sw) says a believer who may be a slave is better than a free/emancipated disbeliever, though you may like the free/attractive disbeliever… You will be held accountable for your kids, if G-d forbid they don't make it to heaven as a result of a Hindu mother.”

· “[T]he Christ that Christians believe will come before the Rapture is actually the anti-Christ who the Zionist-Jews will think to be their promised-Messiah… Most Christians don't know this. They live in their capsule of ignorance that is hardened by the western main-stream media… [T]heir greed and covetousness for consumption is likened only with Satan in the Bible.”

Recently, ICNA came up with a campaign to advertise WI throughout the New York City subway system. To promote the project, it used “unindicted co-conspirator” of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, Siraj Wahhaj, as a spokesman. Now, both ICNA and CAIR have come up with a new way to advertise their message of hate – via public buses.

In Chicago and South Florida, for an extended period of time, public buses will be draped with radical Islam. Across the top of each ICNA bus, passersby are able to read the words, “ISLAM: The way of life of Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jesus & Muhammad.”

At the same time, CAIR has sponsored its own bus project, nearly identical to ICNA’s. Across CAIR’s buses, one can read, “ISLAM: The Message of Abraham, Moses, Jesus & Muhammad.”

Both statements are incredibly offensive to Jews and Christians, as they imply that Abraham, Moses and Jesus – revered figures in Judaism and Christianity – were practicing Muslims and are solely part of Islam. Indeed, Islam came on the scene 2700 years after Judaism and 600 years after Christianity. And while there is no problem with Muslims praising their religion, there is certainly a problem with those denigrating the beliefs of others.

Furthermore, using absolutes, such as “the way of life” and “the Message,” displays an air of superiority over that of other faiths, a concept that all Muslim fanatics brainwash their children to believe.

CAIR and ICNA, in their attempt to bring new followers to Islam with their respective bus initiatives, have proceeded to offend members of other faiths. Their use of Christian and Jewish religious icons to prop up their own extremist agenda reveals their true nature, one of Islamist supremism.

If the subway system and bus companies allow these types of projects to continue, they should know that they are contributing to the downfall of America and its Constitution. They ought to remove the groups’ ads, and put an end to their aiding and abetting of radical Islam by refusing any future ones.

Beila Rabinowitz, Director of Militant Islam Monitor, contributed to this report.

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