It would be funny if it weren't so scary: Miliband and Vaz support Wilders ban but haven't seen Fitna

I have a piece up at Pajamas Media on the British government's appalling decision to ban Geert Wilders from entering the UK. In it I mention that the idiotic Labour MP Keith Vaz appeared on the BBC's Newsnight to condemn Wilders and his film Fitna, but then admitted he hadn't seen the film.

Here's the video. The fun starts around 3.00:

Also in the piece, responding to Foreign Secretary David Miliband's claim that Fitna contained "extreme anti-Muslim hate" I wrote:

If Miliband has seen the film, then he’s lying; if he hasn’t seen it, he’s guessing.

Turns out he was guessing. From Harry's Place, via Andrew Stuttaford at The Corner:

Miliband, having watched Fitna, obviously feels it does ’stir up hate, religious and racial hatred’.

But, hold on… When asked by the interviewer if he had actually watched Fitna he responded that he had not and didn’t need to as he already knew what was in it!

Fitna is a 16 minute film, easily accessible online. Is it really so much to ask that our political overlords bother to watch a film before condemning it and supporting its creator being barred from the country? How is Miliband any better than Muslims who screamed about The Satanic Verses without bothering to read it?

Also at The Corner, Mark Steyn has a good post on the subject:

If young Muslim girls are being kidnapped and forced into marriage with their first cousins, the British Home Office minister will suggest that these matters are best handled discreetly and informally. If young Muslim girls are being murdered in "honor killings", the Chief Commissar of the Ontario "Human Rights" Commission will explain that they're a "small commission" and they have to be able to prioritize and that Mark Steyn is a far greater threat to the Queen's peace than killers of Muslim women.

But, if you don't threaten violence, if you don't issue death threats, if you don't kill anyone, if you just make a movie or write a book or try to give a speech, the state will prosecute you, ban you or (in the case of Ayaan Hirsi Ali) force you to flee your own country.

In their appeasement of thugs, buffoons like Miliband and the Tory squishes across the House of Commons on the Opposition benches are making it very clear that the state accords more respect to violence than to debate.

It's truly terrifying that Britain is being run by people this ignorant, and this arrogant. With the Tories apparently not offering much more in the way of backbone than the fascist bureaucrats of Labour, it's hard to see how Britain can pull out of this tailspin towards what Steyn calls 'civilizational suicide'.

Update: Thanks to Hot Air for linking.

I've also been linked by a blog called Het Vrije Volk, which appears to be a conservative outfit based in the Netherlands - thanks guys, and welcome freedom-loving Dutchmen! If anyone would like to tell me what the blog's called in English (and what the '100%' line under the title means), I'd be grateful. And make sure you visit Pajamas Media too.

Update 2: From Ed in the Comments...

Hi,

"Het Vrije Volk" translates as: "The Free People". The "100%" line says that the blog is 100% free from any government control or interference. You may have noticed that the url links to a provider in the USA and that's why the Dutch Government can't touch it. It is, nevertheless, as sad sign of the state of my country that the blog's adminstrators thought that necessary.

Another unfortunate connection between Islam and the Nazis

The links between radical Islamists and the Nazis, forged when the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem allied himself with Hitler during World War Two, have been well documented.

And now it's emerged that Aribert Heim, a concentration camp 'doctor' who butchered hundreds of Jewish inmates, and who was number two on the Simon Weisenthal Center's wanted list, converted to Islam and apparently spent the last 30 years of his life in Egypt.

The Telegraph reports:

Nazi hunters had believed Aribert Heim, who reportedly killed hundreds of inmates with poison injections to the heart and removed his victims' organs without anaesthetic, was hiding out in Chile, where he was believed to have an illegitimate daughter.

However, the German state broadcaster ZDF announced on Wednesday that it had discovered that Heim spent nearly 30 years in the Egyptian capital before dying of bowel cancer.

In a joint investigation with the New York Times, ZDF said it had discovered that Heim became a Muslim in the early 1980s and renamed himself Tarek Fared Hussein.

After the war, he practised in West Germany as a gynaecologist but went missing in 1962 as police prepared to prosecute him.

The New York Times piece on Heim is here. It's a fascinating story, but the Times plays down the significance of Heim's moving to Egypt and conversion to Islam.

It's no coincidence that Heim made his home in a country that at the time was hell-bent on destroying the state of Israel, and found a spiritual home in a religion whose more radical adherents aspire to the mass-murder of Jews, and have a predilection for cruelty, murder and mutilation. But the Times apparently doesn't want its readers jumping to any conclusions.

Self-appointed spokesman for 'moderate' Islam apologises for calling Harry a 'thug'

Mohammed Shafiq is the spokesman for the Ramadan Foundation, which purports to represent young, moderate British Muslims. He's been omnipresent in the British media in recent days, condemning Prince Harry for using the word 'Paki' to describe an Asian fellow army officer. In several interviews, however, he apparently forgot that he was supposed to be the voice of reason, and called Harry a "thug". Now, just like Harry, he's apologized.

Shafiq normally does a better job of playing the 'moderation' game - so, for example, he was vocal in his condemnation of Sudan for arresting Gillian Gibbons, the British teacher who allowed her Sudanese pupils to name a teddy bear Mohammed. Shafiq has a good feel for mainstream public opinion, and doesn't try to defend the more outrageous behaviour of his co-religionists. But, as I've written in this piece on the Harry row for Pajamas Media, the mask slips when the issues become more nuanced (the article also touches on the double standards of other Muslim 'activists', and the media).

Shafiq has attacked Tony Blair for having the temerity to suggest that some British Muslims should do more to integrate, and the Pope for merely quoting a 14th-century emperor who was critical of Islam. He also criticized the decision to award a knighthood to Satanic Verses author Salman Rushdie, on the grounds that Rushdie’s exercising of his right to free speech was offensive to Muslims, and has condemned the publication of The Jewel of Medina, a 'racy' book about the Prophet Mohammed by U.S. author Sherry Jones (I wrote about that row here). Before the Harry story broke Shafiq was accusing the Israelis of behaving like Nazis in their assault on Hamas terrorists in Gaza.

And now the mask has slipped again. Like Harry, Shafiq has discovered the pitfalls of opening your mouth without first engaging your brain.

Saudi cleric calls for veils with one eye slit

…because seeing both a woman's eyes makes the guys sooooo horny!

From the BBC:

A Muslim cleric in Saudi Arabia has called on women to wear a full veil, or niqab, that reveals only one eye.

Sheikh Muhammad al-Habadan said showing both eyes encouraged women to use eye make-up to look seductive.

The question of how much of her face a woman should cover is a controversial topic in many Muslim societies.

The niqab is more common in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, but women in much of the Muslim Middle East wear a headscarf which covers only their hair.

Sheikh Habadan, an ultra-conservative cleric who is said to have wide influence among religious Saudis, was answering questions on the Muslim satellite channel al-Majd.

I can see his point – I came over all hot and bothered just looking at the photo that accompanies the story, and had to take a cold shower.

But surely this would make it difficult for the women to drive, or watch a movie… hang, on though, they're not allowed to do those things anyway are they? So that's OK then!

And why stop at one eye-slit? Why not have no slits at all? There are already versions of the niqab that have a mesh grille instead of slits, but while this might stop the men from thinking impure thoughts, it does have the disadvantage of allowing the women to see out, which means they could easily be corrupted if they were to cast eyes on one of those hot, 400-pound Saudi man-babies.

Why don't they just seal up all the holes, and mount a radar on the top so the women don't bump into things – like bats! Or give them guide dogs. Or to be on the safe side, why not just keep them chained up in the cellar?

The BBC – the web's one-stop-shop for all your 'Aren't those Muslims whacky?' stories. Just remember not to get judgmental, because who are we to say they haven't got it right?

Terrorists in Need

Lost amid the Obamamania at Pajamas Media, I have a new piece up on the revelation that £20,000 of BBC charity money ended up in the hands of the terrorists who bombed London in July 2005. Accidents can happen, but the episode is an inevitable consequence of the BBC's softly-softly attitude to most things Muslim. You can read it here.

UK Muslims launch group to counter extremism; extremists counter with said extremism

Unlike the rest of the BBC’s news operation, its Newsnight programme (it's on late in the evening on BBC2) isn’t afraid to tackle stories about Islamic extremism in Britain. Last night it carried a report on the launch of a think-tank set up by British Muslims to counter Islamic extremism.

The Quilliam Foundation (named after a 19th century British convert to Islam) aims to set up rehabilitation centres for former and ‘wavering’ radicals, organise training for preachers, and counter attempts to radicalise Muslims in colleges, prisons and mosques. Its website is here, and you can read more about the organisation, and the background of some of its members, here.

Its founders are former members of the radical group Hizb ut-Tahrir, and the organisation has the support of respected British politicians and academics, including Sir Paddy Ashdown and Conservative MP Michael Gove, author of Celsius 7/7 (which is akin to Mark Steyn’s America Alone but without the jokes).

After the report there was a pretty entertaining studio debate between Maajid Nawaz, the foundation’s director, and Azzam Tamimi of the Hamas-linked Institute of Islamic Political Thought.

You can watch the video of last night’s programme here (link at top-right). The video will be available until 10.30pm UK time today, although you may still be able to find the report elsewhere on the site after that. The report starts at around 22.40, and the debate between Nawaz and Tamimi starts a few minutes further on.

Nawaz – who while studying in Egypt was jailed for his membership of HT – basically runs rings around Tamimi, whose only contribution to the debate is to call everyone associated with the think-tank neocons and Zionist stooges.

At one point the presenter, Jeremy Paxman, asks the evasive, weasel-mouthed Tamimi: "Do you accept there is a problem with the interpretation of Islam if some young people thing that the only way to legitimately express it is to strap explosives to themselves and blow themselves up?"

Tamimi replies that the problem has to be dealt with within Islam – which of course is exactly what Nawaz’s organisation wants to do – and accuses the foundation of ‘attacking Islam’.

Nawaz highlights the Islamists’ (yes, he freely uses the term ‘Islamists’) inability to separate religion from politics, and asks how his colleague Ed Husain – a particular target of Tamimi’s ire – "can be at war with Islam for criticising people who want to blow themselves up in Palestine" – which, as he points out, is something Tamimi himself has publicly aspired to.

It’s too early too say how successful the Quilliam foundation will be, or whether their motives are entirely genuine, but I suspect they’re the real deal. At times during the debate Nawaz talks about ‘right-wingers on both sides’ and appears to equate ‘neocons’ with Islamists, but I think that’s a case of sloppy language – the word has after all been bandied about by the media to the point where few people know what it means. And he doesn’t fall back on the usual lazy arguments about Muslims being radicalised by Western foreign policy.

The fact that the foundation is already being attacked by the extremist–riddled Muslim Council of Britain (which the Government happily talks to and funds), and by leftist commentators, suggests they’re on the right track.

There’s more from Ed Husain here and here – the comments on the second piece, at the lefty Guardian's website, include some high-quality British moonbattery.

Ed at Hot Air has news of a similar, Europe-wide initiative here.

The self-loathing Brits who think teddy bear teacher deserves her fate

Updated for sentence: Gillian was spared the lashes – those Sharia judges are just big softies at heart. But 15 days in prison, and I'm guessing that won't be a room with cable. Bet she was glad of the deportation order though.

So it's just the two weeks in the roach pit, then bundled out of the country pursued by a lynch mob to spend the rest of her life wondering if some whackjob is going to catch up with her and give her the Theo van Gogh treatment.

Radical Islam: What's not to like?

Other than among Islamic hardliners, you would think that the plight of British teacher Gillian Gibbons, who faces jail and 40 lashes in Sudan for allowing her pupils to name a teddy bear Mohammed, would elicit near-universal sympathy.

Not so, judging by the comments of a sizable minority of commenters on the BBC's website, who appear to think that Mrs Gibbons deserves everything she gets. This is just a selection of their views (brackets are mine):

I am a British woman who has lived in an Asia country myself and I done my homework (hope she wasn't a teacher too). I checked the local laws and ensured I had a full understanding of the culture do's and don’ts. We always preach that when foreigners come to Britain they need to do their homework, learn our culture and abide by our laws. I think that if this woman is not charged then this is a clear case of double standards.
Louise, Edinburgh

If we expect people living or working in the UK to abide by our laws, British citizens working abroad should be expected to abide by the laws of the country they work in. Not only has the teacher shown her ignorance of other faiths but also a startling level of insensitivity.
Graeme, Fife (Scotland)

I have worked in many parts of the World. When working in a particular country it is imperative that you comply with and respect the rules of that country. This lady clearly did not comply and respect such rules and must suffer the consequences.
Mike Townend, United Kingdom

Any teacher who works today would know that this isn't a PC thing to do - more fool her - she has got exactly what she deserves - It isn't headline news - people are stupid every day (those Sharia courts! It's political correctness gone mad!).
Mary, Wolverhampton

Why do we think that anyone coming to the UK must abide by our rules and regulations, but that the same does not apply to us when we are abroad? She is in an Islamic country, and should have made herself aware of the political and religious sensibilities before going. I do not know a great deal about Islam (you don't say!), but would have guessed that naming a teddy after the prophet would cause offence. She is a teacher, and should know better.
Suzanne Jones, Liverpool

Her fault. She brought this upon herself!
George Cowley, Columbia, SC

The notion that "we expect them to abide by our laws, so we should abide by theirs" is worryingly prevalent, and an example of how the doctrines of multiculturalism and moral equivalence have corrupted the minds of many in the West. Of course we expect foreign visitors to comply with our laws – but our laws don't decree that a person should be flogged for giving the wrong name to a cuddly toy.

And there are plenty of other specious arguments on display in the comments. Some equate Mrs Gibbons' predicament with the offence taken by Christians over perceived slurs, and wheel out the tired claim that 'all religions are equally bad'. Predictably, one Brit brings up the killing of abortion clinic staff in the US, equating the actions of a few extremists with beliefs and laws observed by tens of millions of people.

Others suggest that Britain has no right to complain about Mrs Gibbons' treatment because of its actions in Iraq and Afghanistan, or claim that Westerners should not pass judgement on Islam because we 'don't understand' it. (And come to think of it, I haven't heard much on the subject from the Islam-admiring Archbishop of Canterbury.)

What's interesting is that while a few of the commenters who say they're Muslims are condemning Mrs Gibbons, or falling back on the 'Western foreign policy' excuse, the majority are either suggesting that she made a simple mistake, and should be treated leniently, or are condemning the Sudanese outright – "Stop hijacking the religion!" pleads Adil in Singapore.

By contrast, virtually all of the comments attacking Mrs Gibbons, and making excuses for Islamic extremism, are from people living in Britain, with a few from the US and elsewhere in Europe, and who, judging by their names – Louise, Graeme, Mike, Mary, Suzanne, George – are natives of those countries, and very probably white.

The opinions on display reflect the problems with, and attitudes to, radical Islam as a whole: a vociferous and violent minority (though apparently a sizable one) of extremists who shout down the moderates, and are supported by Westerners who so despise their own culture that they'll take the side of anyone who doesn't share our values, and who preferably seeks to subvert them.

It's no coincidence that several of the commenters say they've worked abroad, or claim to be 'widely travelled'. For many such people anything foreign, anything different, is by definition better. Any skin colour is better than white, any religion better than Christianity.

In the case of most of these people their guilt and self-loathing manifests itself as nothing worse than gloating over the misfortune of Westerners such as Mrs Gibbons. Others take things further, in extreme cases resorting to terrorism against their own people.

But worryingly for anyone who hopes for the downfall of repressive regimes, an awful lot of them end up working in their countries' foreign services, or for the UN and other international organisations obsessed with multiculturalism and conditioned to pursue appeasement.

And unfortunately for Mrs Gibbons, right now those people represent her best hope of freedom.

Update: Thanks to Charles at LGF for the fastest link ever. I have a couple of recent posts I think you lizards will enjoy while you're here: the post referenced above, on Britain's Archbishop of Canterbury blaming the US for the world's problems while giving Muslims a free pass; and another on the BBC's insistance that five Muslims who hacked three Christians to death in Turkey did so not because of their religion, but because they were nationalists.

And you heard about the Red Cross giving lessons to gunmen in Gaza – but have you seen the terrorist first aid manual?

Update 2: Thanks also Atlas, and Rusty at The Jawa Report – check out his deeply offensive Photoshop. And the court report is here.

Update 3: LissaKay has left a great comment, contrasting the teddy-related outrage with the lack of reaction to The Golden Compass:

I see no rioting in the streets, or calls for the head of Philip Pullman, who has publicly stated "My books are about killing God" and that he was "trying to undermine the basis of Christian belief."

Archbishop of Canterbury: I, for one, welcome our new Muslim overlords

Why doesn't Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury and nominal leader of the world’s 70 million or so Anglicans, just convert to Islam and get it over and done with?

In an interview with an Islamic ‘lifestyle’ magazine, Williams once again pins the blame for all the world’s problems on the US and Israel, and takes a swipe at Western civilisation in general for good measure, while, as ever, giving Islam a free pass.

The full interview is here. The Sunday Times reported:

In a wide-ranging interview with a British Muslim magazine, the Anglican leader linked criticism of the United States to one of his most pessimistic declarations about the state of western civilisation.

He said the crisis was caused not just by America’s actions but also by its misguided sense of its own mission. He poured scorn on the “chosen nation myth of America, meaning that what happens in America is very much at the heart of God’s purpose for humanity”.

Williams went beyond his previous critique of the conduct of the war on terror, saying the United States had lost the moral high ground since September 11. He urged it to launch a “generous and intelligent programme of aid directed to the societies that have been ravaged; a check on the economic exploitation of defeated territories; a demilitarisation of their presence”.

He went on to suggest that the West was fundamentally adrift: “Our modern western definition of humanity is clearly not working very well. There is something about western modernity which really does eat away at the soul.”

Williams suggested American leadership had broken down: “We have only one global hegemonic power. It is not accumulating territory: it is trying to accumulate influence and control. That’s not working.”

He contrasted it unfavourably with how the British Empire governed India. “It is one thing to take over a territory and then pour energy and resources into administering it and normalising it. Rightly or wrongly, that’s what the British Empire did — in India, for example.

“It is another thing to go in on the assumption that a quick burst of violent action will somehow clear the decks and that you can move on and other people will put it back together — Iraq, for example.”

The Times reports that Williams made only “mild criticisms” of Islam in the interview, saying that the Muslim world must acknowledge that its “political solutions were not the most impressive”, and commended the Muslim practice of praying five times a day.

No mention, of course, of the Muslim practices of according inferior status to women; the stoning and flogging of women for perceived immoral behaviour; or the jailing of non-believers for 'crimes' as trivial as allowing children to name a teddy bear Mohammed.

Not a word about the murder of apostates and insufficiently Muslim Muslims, the hanging of homosexuals or the ritual slaughter of Christians; and nothing on the reluctance of Muslim leaders to condemn the atrocities carried out in the name of their religion.

But then Williams has always been ready to make excuses for terrorists and their ideologies, and to blame their victims for bringing about their own misfortune. Before radical Islam it was communism. In the 1980s Williams took part in protests against the siting of American Cruise missiles in Britain, even managing to get himself arrested outside the US airbase at Lakenheath in Suffolk.

Like the rest of the international Left, with communism defeated Williams had to find another ideology to challenge the Western hegemony that so dismays him. Apparently it found him first.

Williams was in New York on September 11 2001, but far from the events of that day strengthening his resolve to stand up for Judeo-Christian values and culture in the face of an unprecedented attack, he took issue with the very idea of labeling the perpetrators as evil, writing in a pamphlet 'reflecting' on the biggest terrorist atrocity in history:

"We have something of the freedom to consider whether or not we turn to violence and so, in virtue of that very fact, are rather different from those who experience their world as leaving no other option."

As Anglican Priest and author Dr Peter Mullen wrote in the Wall Street Journal at the time (he's quoting Williams):

Once we have admitted that the atrocity was not the terrorists' fault, what next? "We begin to find some sense of what they and we might together recognise as good." Really? But how to make common moral cause between democracy's rule of law and nihilistic killing? Do sit down Osama. Have another éclair while we discuss the terms of trade.

In a speech in 2003 Williams claimed that terrorists can “have serious moral goals”, and denied that states have the right to unilaterally defend themselves. He's been relentlessly critical of the war in Iraq, and has warned the US against attacking Iran or Syria.

He's perfectly entitled to oppose the war in Iraq, but to talk about 'economic exploitation of defeated territories' is simply hysterical. What does he imagine the US has taken from Iraq? Why no mention of the removal of a dictator who killed hundreds of thousands, or of the free elections?

What about the billions the US has already spent on reconstruction in Iraq and Afghanistan, or the billions more it spends in aid to every corner of the globe. Who would he rather see as a "global hegemonic power"? China? Russia?

Many conservatives would share Williams' contention that elements of western modernity "eat away at the soul". But they would blame the cultural and political Left for it, while Williams prefers to pin most of the blame on America and capitalism.

With the notable exception of his strong pro-life views, Williams is an archetypal Western lefty, bashing the US and Israel, making excused for dictators and terrorists, and railing against the imagined evils of free-market democracy.

His views sound uncannily like the liberation theology that was preached by Catholic priests in Latin American in the 1970s and 80s. For a man of the cloth, he seems rather more in thrall to the notion of Heaven on earth than Heaven proper, and he's so riddled with guilt – for being white, for being a Christian, for being a member of Western civilisation – that his daily existence must be torture.

Maybe Williams would feel a little better if, instead of meddling in politics, rewriting history and making excuses for mass murder, he focused his energies on addressing the many problems of his church. Attendances have been falling steadily for years, churches in Britain are closing left, right and centre and revenues are falling – and the picture would be even worse if congregations weren't being propped up by increasing numbers of immigrants.

And then of course there's Williams' shambolic handling of the gay clergy controversy, which has raised the spectre of the disintegration of the worldwide Anglican communion.

Islam, meanwhile is booming – no pun intended – even without the help of glowing testimonials from the likes of Williams. It's quite probably the world's fastest-growing religion, both in terms of numbers of adherents, and the number of countries in which its followers make up a significant proportion of the population.

Islam isn't constrained by doubts about its place in the world, and doesn't appear to be unduly troubled by the growing number of people that cite its tenets as justification for doing evil. And in its most extreme form it combines religion with the totalitarian impulses of fascism and communism.

Dr Mullen, in his Wall Street Journal piece, concluded:

Dr. Williams is often described here as something of a saint. In fact, he is an old-fashioned class warrior, a typical bien-pensant despiser of Western capitalism and the way of life that goes with it. Perhaps this would not matter much in ordinary times, but when the future of Western civilization itself is under threat, such posturing is suicidal. What havoc this man might wreak from the throne of Canterbury.

Almost five years of havoc-wreaking later, perhaps Williams can see the writing on the wall for his religion, and is embarking on negotiations over a future takeover that he trusts won't be overly hostile. Hopefully the rest of Western civilisation won't succumb as easily.

Related: Victor Davis Hanson has some history lessons for Williams at The Corner (hat tip Instapundit).

Update: Mitt Romney on the Hugh Hewitt show:

…I think you have to go through piece by piece, and say with him, he’s entitled to his opinion, but he’s certainly not speaking for God, and that this is a nation which has sacrificed more than any nation in the history of the Earth to preserve peace, and certainly has saved the bacon of people in Great Britain, and people in Europe generally, and the entire world doesn’t speak German today because of the sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of Americans. So it’s not a great place for him to be making that kind of comment, and today, we are one of the nations that’s taking the lead to keep the spread of violent, radical jihad from developing nuclear weaponry, and potentially threatening the existence of great civilizations.

BBC: Turks who killed Christians are 'nationalists' not Islamists

Three Christians, including a pastor and a missionary were murdered by Muslims in Turkey in April. They were bound hand and foot, stabbed repeatedly, and had their throats cut.

The five killers, who are all Muslims, have admitted that they targeted their victims because of their religion, so you might think that the motive for the killings is not unconnected with the religion of the killers.

But according to the BBC you'd be wrong: they didn't carry out the killings because they were Muslims, but because they were 'nationalists'. Under the headline 'Turks in Christian murder trial' it reports:

Five men are to go on trial in eastern Turkey, accused of killing three Christians earlier this year.

The Christians, who included a pastor and a German missionary, were stabbed repeatedly and had their throats cut.

The suspects, aged 19 and 20, were detained at the scene of the crime, a Protestant publishing house in Malatya.

The M word finally appears in paragraph four, but not to tell us that the killers were Muslims, but rather that the victims weren't Muslims:

The murders prompted three Christian families to leave the town. Germany has accused Turkey of "unacceptable intolerance" towards non-Muslims.

The report continues:

The murder of the Christians in the eastern town of Malatya came months after the killing of the ethnic Armenian journalist, Hrant Dink, and a year after the killing of a Catholic priest in northern Turkey.

In all cases, the alleged killers were nationalist-minded young men or even teenagers.

The BBC conveniently omits to mention that Dink was a Christian. And here's an excerpt from an article in Spiegel Online on the killing of the priest, Father Andrea Santoro, in Trabzon, refering to the killer:

According to his family, Oguz, a high-school student, had recently become "very religious." "He prayed five times a day," says his brother Alpaznar. His father, who runs a dental laboratory in Trabzon, claims that he first heard about the Muhammad cartoons from his son. "He was very upset, but I told him that it was none of his concern."

Nothing there about Oguz becoming "increasingly nationalistic". But back to the BBC:

Turkish nationalists often view missionaries as a threat, especially in remote places like Malatya, says the BBC's Sarah Rainsford in Istanbul.

In Malatya, the defendants reportedly told police they were acting to foil a plot to undermine Islam and divide Turkey.

Again Islam gets a mention, but while a connection to the killers is implied, it's still not made explicit.

Back in April, Christianity Today was rather less obtuse in its reporting of the Malatya murders (what is it about those guys at Christianity Today and Christianity?):

In a gruesome assault against Turkey's tiny Christian community, five young Muslim Turks entered a Christian publishing office in the southeastern province of Malatya Wednesday and slit the throats of the three Protestant Christians present.

Two of the victims, Necati Aydin, 36, and Ugur Yuksel, 32, were Turkish converts from Islam. The third man, Tilmann Geske, 46, was a German citizen.

The Turkish press reported Thursday that four of the five young men arrested for the murders, all 19 to 20 years of age, admitted during initial interrogations that they were motivated by both "nationalist and religious feelings."

and

According to the newspaper Hurriyet, one of the suspects declared during police questioning, "We didn't do this for ourselves. We did it for our religion. May this be a lesson to the enemies of religion."

There's an awful lot of talk about religion going on there. And just to recap: the nationality of two of the victims was Turkish, which is the same nationality as the killers'; so it would require a series of semantic somersaults with a high degree of difficulty to reach the conclusion that nationalism was a motive for the killings.

Most reasonable people will, of course, be able to infer from the report that the killers were Muslim, but the BBC deliberately plays down the religious angle, and plays up the 'nationalism' line for all it's worth. And it's not hard to see why.

In the eyes of the BBC and other soft-leftists Islamism either isn't a danger at all; is a minor irritation that isn't worth confronting; or is perhaps a more serious problem, but one which can't be addressed due to considerations of multi-culturalism and political correctness.

Nationalism, on the other hand, is seen by the Left as an all-too-real and pressing threat; and fortunately for the world the solutions to the problem are simple: the transference of more power to transnational institutions like the EU and the UN, and the increased migration of peoples to the point where ideas of nationality become meaningless.

As well as insulting the intelligence of its readers, the BBC is also insulting the tens of millions of Turkish people who are able to make a clear distinction between the state and Islam. Despite growing pressure from Islamists, Turkey remains a secular state, with Turkish law guaranteeing the right to engage in religious evangelism as long as it's not politically motivated.

It's true that the Malatya killers, like others, expressed nationalitic as well as religious sentiments, but that's because for Islamists they're one and the same thing. Islam is the state - a notion embodied in the concept of the 'umma', or global Muslim community. Their allegiance is to Islam first, and nationality - Turkish or otherwise - second, and they make little distincition between the two.

But for the BBC it's quite the opposite, and it's a line of thinking that endangers people of every nationality, and every non-Islamic religion, the world over.

Update 3: A commenter has posted the text of a letter that was sent to churches and religious organisations worldwide by the church whose members were murdered. A shorter, and less gory version is here.

Update: Thanks to Rusty at Jawa Report for linking!

Update 2: I've received the following comment, which suddenly makes this feel very personal:

I am personal friends with the leader of this Christian mission in Turkey. His life was spared only because he was in another city that morning. I know the detailed account of what happened and can assure you that these men were targeted and killed SOLELY for their Christianity. The killers met the victims when they attended a Bible study and came to the publishing company that morning under the pretense of wanting to talk about converting to Christianity.

For the BBC to try a historical rewrite with the facts so fresh demonstrates more than hubris; they are deliberately lying to further their own agenda and, can rightfully be seen as being in bed with Islamofascist terrorists.

The Left and the Islamists

Walid Phares, the author of The War of Ideas: Jihadism against Democracy, on the marriage of convenience between the anti-war Western Left and the thoroughly warlike jihadis:

Despite all the mutual mayhem across the Mediterranean and throughout the Middle East, an unnatural alliance was established by elites of the two camps, even while blood was being shed in the 1990s. Setting ideologies and history aside, the Islamist tacticians and neo-Left pragmatists gradually converged on a two-lane path against liberal democracies and the specter of a free market and pluralist Middle East.

This tactical cooperation between radical Islam and the Left is also the subject of David Horowitz's Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left. While Horowitz focuses on the radicals behind the US anti-war movement, Phares looks at the phenomenon from the point of view of the Islamists:

The jihadi manipulation of the bourgeois-Neo-Marxist "struggle" has played a central role in the so-called "mass demonstrations" in the West since 2002, and the demonstrations themselves are an important component of the War of Ideas against democracy. On campuses, both in North America and Western Europe, the jihadi-antiwar axis has planted deep roots, and thanks to the skills of university-based anarchist groups, the jihadists have found a cover they can hide under, instead of simply becoming members of the typical Wahabi-contolled Muslim Student Unions.

The Islamists have about as much chance of restoring the Caliphate as the Left has of seeing off free-market democracy, but the former group is prepared to keep killing even when it knows it has no chance of victory, and the latter is prepared to tolerate the excesses of its allies because it knows that its opposition to the War on Terror is one of the few causes that gives it a semblance of legitimacy. Ultimately it may not be freedom-loving Westerners who defeat either ideology, but rather a desire for peace and prosperity by the majority of ordinary people in the Middle East that renders them irrelevant.

Rewriting the history of Britain and Islam

The head of the UK’s Commission for Equalities and Human Rights – a new, vast and largely unaccountable bureaucracy concerned with tackling the oppression of minorities, real or imagined – has called for British history to be rewritten to reflect the roles played by other races and religions – singling out, not surprisingly, Muslims for a bit of positive PR.

Trevor Phillips told a fringe meeting at the Labour Party conference in Bournemouth that the revisionism should start with the story of how Muslims helped the English fleet, led by Sir Francis Drake, to fight off the Spanish Armada in 1588. Phillips said forces of the Ottoman Empire delayed the sailing of the Spanish fleet so the English navy was better prepared, but claimed the story had been ‘airbrushed’ out of historical accounts.

Phillips' point is, of course, that we all got along then, so we should all get along now. He said the story could provide "an ideal that brings us together, so that it can bind us together in stormy times ahead in the next century." Unfortunately for Phillips’ theory, the suggestion that the British and the Ottoman empire were allies in the conventional sense, and that as a result Britons and Muslims have some kind of shared heritage, is absurd.

Around the time of the Armada the Ottomans were battling Spanish and other Catholic forces in the Mediterranean; in 1571 the Ottoman navy suffered a crushing defeat at the Battle of Lepanto. Historians are divided over what, if any, bearing Ottoman activity had on the plans of the Armada, but any alliance between the Ottomans and Protestant England would have been one purely of convenience against the common Catholic enemy.

However, although he may not realise it, Phillips is at least in the ballpark, both historically and geographically, if he’s looking for an account of interaction between Muslims and Britons that doesn't tend to be taught in British schools – albeit one that might not serve his purposes particularly well.

As Ottoman influence in the Eastern Mediterranean declined in the late 1500s, successive emperors sponsored the Barbary pirates of North Africa, who had already been plundering the coasts of Europe for 100 years. Between the beginning of the 16th Century and the early 1800s between one and two million Europeans were captured and sold into slavery by these Muslim raiders, including several thousand Britons; clearly the Ottomans forgot to tell their proxies that we were their allies.

The pirates, or corsairs, were eventually defeated largely due to the efforts of the fledgling US Navy and Marine Corps, as recounted in Jefferson's War: America's First War on Terror 1801-1805 by Joseph Whelan. Two other books that deal with this little-known episode are Giles Milton's White Gold and Robert C. Davis's Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters. Here's John Derbyshire at NRO writing about Davis’s book:

The slave trade really got going after 1492, the year the last Muslims were expelled from Spain — what Osama bin Laden calls “the tragedy of Andalusia.” Says the author: “In Barbary, those who hunted and traded slaves certainly hoped to make a profit, but in their traffic in Christians there was also always an element of revenge, almost of jihad — for the wrongs of 1492, for the centuries of crusading violence that had preceded them, and for the ongoing religious struggle between Christian and Muslim that has continued to roil the Mediterranean world well into modern times.”

It's perhaps not the best story to "bind us together in stormy times ahead in the next century", but if Phillips wants Britons to have a better understanding of our historical relationships with the Muslim world, then they should be given the full story, warts and all.

Phillips, who as head of the now-defunct Commission for Racial Equality did much to reverse that organisation's self-defeating policy of promoting multiculturalism, has understandable reasons for wanting to talk up the positive influence of Muslims on British history. But selectively re-writing the past is not the best way to confront the problems of the present.

Dogs, pigs and now cats…

Muslims have been rioting in Bangladesh over the publication of a cartoon featuring a boy and his cat, which they claim is offensive to Mohammad. Gateway Pundit has the reports, and Little Green Footballs has the cartoon.

Wishful thinking by the BBC?

UPDATE: They've changed it! Who tipped them off? If only I'd remembered to take a screen shot. Wait... what's this?

From a report on the difficulties faced by British Muslims observing Ramadan:

Thirty-one-year-old Sumaya Amra is just one of the billions of Muslims who takes part in the holy month of Ramadan by fasting in daylight hours, each day for 30 days.

Actual estimates for the number of Muslims worldwide are between one and 1.3 billion. This is probably just a Freudian slip by the BBC, which is regularly criticised for bias against Christianity and in favour of Muslims.

That said, if the multicultralism-obsessed BBC continues to boost the confidence of Muslim extremists around the world by playing down links between Islam and terrorism, and keeps promoting Islam as a fashionable lifestyle choice for feeble-minded left-leaning types, then the magic two billion figure can't be far off. And that's before we even start to count all those forced conversions.

The Talibanisation of UK mosques

Andrew Norfolk of the London Times has a couple of alarming reports on the rise of Islamic extremism in Britain. Yesterday Norfolk revealed:

Almost half of Britain’s mosques are under the control of a hardline Islamic sect whose leading preacher loathes Western values and has called on Muslims to “shed blood” for Allah, an investigation by The Times has found.

Riyadh ul Haq, who supports armed jihad and preaches contempt for Jews, Christians and Hindus, is in line to become the spiritual leader of the Deobandi sect in Britain. The ultra-conservative movement, which gave birth to the Taleban in Afghanistan, now runs more than 600 of Britain’s 1,350 mosques, according to a police report seen by The Times.

The Times investigation casts serious doubts on government statements that foreign preachers are to blame for spreading the creed of radical Islam in Britain’s mosques and its policy of enouraging the recruitment of more “home-grown” preachers.

There's more on ul Haq, including extracts from his speeches, here. There would seem to be ample grounds to prosecute him for inciting religious hatred, although as he came to Britain when he was three, I don't know where that puts us in terms of being able to deport him.

Today Norfolk has a follow-up report on an influential Islamic scholar who's a regular visitor to Britain. It makes uncomfortable reading for those who insist that the West can somehow reach an accommodation with the 'religion of peace'.

One of the world’s most respected Deobandi scholars believes that aggressive military jihad should be waged by Muslims “to establish the supremacy of Islam” worldwide.

Justice Muhammad Taqi Usmani argues that Muslims should live peacefully in countries such as Britain, where they have the freedom to practise Islam, only until they gain enough power to engage in battle.

His views explode the myth that the creed of offensive, expansionist jihad represents a distortion of traditional Islamic thinking.

It'll be interesting to see what, if any, response the British government has to these reports. Most likely it will stick to its policy of favouring dialog with hardliners at the expense of moderates, and bending over backwards to accommodate Muslim sensibilities.

Also in today's Times there's a report on government plans to bring more Muslim schools into the state system – it's hard to tell whether this would help efforts to encourage integration or hinder them.

Mormonism isn't the same as Islamism

The BBC news website has a feature on Mormonism in the context of Mitt Romney's presidential bid and the release of the film September Dawn, which deals with the 1857 massacre of settlers by Mormons at Mountain Meadow, Utah. It appears to be a fairly balanced and thoughtful piece, except for this foolish paragraph:

The harshest critics of Mormonism compare its base theology to that of the Taliban. How are Brigham Young's followers who murdered children any different than those who lop off heads for Allah?

The difference is, of course, that Mountain Meadow happened 150 years ago, and the Mormons have expressed shame and regret for the episode. Islamists, by contrast are 'lopping' (the writer's euphamism for hacking) heads off in various parts of the world right now, and many thousands, perhaps millions, of their co-religionists – including influential leaders – at best remain silent and at worst enthusiastically approve of their actions.

Equating the past misdeeds of Judeo-Christian religions with the atrocities currently being perpetrated in the name of Islam is a recurring theme of the secularist, moral equivalence-pushing MSM. Don't hold your breath waiting for the BBC's exposé of the atrocities committed by Mohammed and his followers.

72 pieces for 72 virgins

I won't be posting graphically violent videos on this blog; however I think this one falls into the Cartoon Violence category. Hot Air has a slow-motion version, although I don't think it has the same impact, if you'll pardon the pun.



Given what the guy's friends are shouting just before it all goes pear-shaped, I don't think Divine Intervention can be ruled out. Or maybe the mortar was made by ACME – if so those jihadis might be bringing a wrongful death suit.

Where's the outrage?

On Monday I posted on the controversy being caused by Jihad – The Musical at the Edinburgh Festival.

A petition complaining about the show has been set up on the No 10 Downing Street website, but apparently it isn't being taken as seriously as it ought to be. Where's the carefully orchestrated outrage? What's happened to the fabled Muslim street?