Free Republic

This past September, Robert Redeker, a French high-school philosophy teacher... and the author of several scholarly books, published an op-ed article in the newspaper Le Figaro. The piece, a response to the controversy over remarks about Islam made a week earlier by Pope Benedict XVI, was titled "What should the Free World Do in the Face of Islamist Intimidation?" It was a fierce critique of what Redeker called Islam's attempt "to place its leaden cloak over the world." If Jesus was "a master of love," he wrote, Mohammad was "a master of hatred." Of the three "religions of the book,"...

THE HAGUE -- When Geert Wilders rose from his desk, his head almost touched the narrow ceiling. The tiny corner office underneath the parliament's roof wasn't selected for space but security. Possible assassins can only come from one direction, making life easier for the two bodyguards outside. Mr. Wilders has been living under 24-hour police protection ever since the assassination of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh two years ago. The Dutch-Moroccan who stabbed and shot van Gogh in Amsterdam left death threats behind against him and the Netherlands' other, more famous critic of Islam: Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Like the Somali-born...

Ambrose Bierce once quipped that war was God’s way of teaching Americans geography. He could have said “teaching us history,” for the enemy is emboldened by our ignorance not just of where he lives but of how he lives, his beliefs and values, and to understand these traditions we must understand their history. Unfortunately, in the current war against Islamic jihad we persist in ignoring the documented history of Islam and its beliefs, accepting instead the spin and distortions of various propagandists, apologists, and Western useful idiots. This imperative to know the enemy’s beliefs is particularly important for understanding the...

I should seriously write a book called, The Idiots Guide To Not Thinking Seriously About Islam. It’s hard to find a subject where mushy thinking is more in vogue – where political correctness conquers reality more thoroughly. People actually are afraid to think seriously on the subject, because the logical conclusions are too frightening for many to contemplate. And so, there’s no place where comfortable clichés are more readily deployed. Probably the most glaring illustration of inanity here were recent comments by his Holiness, the Dalai Lama. On leaving a meeting with Pope Benedict XVI, the leader of Tibetan Buddhists...

ARIS, Oct 17, 2006 (AFP) - French police are holding a man accused of sending a death threat to a philosophy teacher who was forced into hiding after writing an article critical of Islam, justice officials said Tuesday. Arrested on Monday in the central city of Orleans, the 25-year-old call-centre employee was held for 24 hours by anti-terrorist investigators, who found no evidence he was linked to a terrorist organisation. Remanded in custody, he faces up to five years in jail for "aggravated threats" over a threatening e-mail he sent last month to Robert Redeker, a 52-year-old father of three...

PARIS, Sept 29, 2006 (AFP) - French anti-terrorism authorities Friday opened an inquiry into death threats against a philosophy teacher who has been forced into hiding over a newspaper column attacking Islam, legal officials said. Robert Redeker, 52, is receiving round-the-clock police protection and changing addresses every two days, after publishing an article describing the Koran as a "book of extraordinary violence" and Islam as "a religion which ... exalts violence and hate". He told i-TV television he had received several e-mail threats targeting himself and his wife and three children, and that his photograph and address were available on...

Yesterday the Belgian authorities decided to give police protection to people working in the Brussels prisons of Vorst and Sint-Gillis. The decision was taken after two jailers, on their way to work, were attacked on a Brussels tram. Immigrant youths called them “assassins” and threatened them with knives. All the prison employees are now escorted by the police on their way to the car park or to the nearby train station. According to the youths the jailers “murdered” Fayçal Chabaan, a 25-year old Moroccan criminal, who was an inmate in Vorst Prison. Chabaan, died last Sunday after having been given...