Here are
excerpts from three essays that appeared last week. You might not have seen
them.
From Legal
Insurrection:
“#CharlieHebdo
after-assessment: A bleak analysis of a bleak reality”
by William A. Jacobson
January 14,
2015
The Obama
administration has engaged in absurd linguistic gymnastics to pretend that the
terrorists who shot up Charlie Hebdo and the HyperCasher supermarket merely
were individuals who happened to adopt radical Islamic extremism almost by
chance. Could have been any extremism,
we’re told.
Generic
“extremism” is the problem, as if it lived out of body.
By playing
these word games, the administration does no favor to those in the Muslim world
who recognize the reality and want it to stop.
To the contrary, the administration’s word games constitute an
abandonment.
[One Arab voice against Islamic extremism is] Hisham Melhem,
the Washington bureau chief of Al-Arabiya.
In late September 2014, [William Jacobson] wrote about an article by
Melhem, “The Barbarians Within Our Gates”. Melhem made points as a Muslim
examining the Muslim world that would get him labeled “Islamophobic” and
“racist” by groups like CAIR and the Southern Poverty Law Center:
Arab civilization, such as we knew it, is all but gone. The
Arab world today is more violent, unstable, fragmented and driven by extremism…than
at any time since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire a century ago. Every hope
of modern Arab history has been betrayed….And let’s face the grim truth: There
is no evidence whatever that Islam in its various political forms is compatible
with modern democracy. …
From The
American Thinker:
“The
Proliferation of Online Anti-Semitism”
By: C. Hart
January 15,
2015
…With an
uptick in anti-Semitism, not just in Europe, but also in the United States and
throughout the world, concerned leaders are analyzing how to stop these vicious
acts against the Jewish People.
One place
that anti-Semites have been misinforming the public, encouraging negative
attitudes towards Jews, is on the Internet. But in the name of First Amendment
rights, Internet companies have refused to take material off of their sites
that encourage racism, incitement, and lies. Much of this classic anti-Semitism
is full of fabrications and blood libels. Moreover, cyber demonization of Jews
could be poisoning the minds of fanatics and fueling the fire for more attacks.
According to
Israeli Ambassador Gideon Behar, “Every new development in the cyber world is
being used to integrate this kind of hate”.
Behar is the
Director of the Department on Combating Anti-Semitism for the Israeli Ministry
of Foreign Affairs. He is raising public awareness of cyber discrimination and
prejudice against Jews, while also pressing Internet companies to get the hate
material off the Web.
In his
office, Behar and others conduct searches on You Tube, Facebook, Google, Yahoo
Answers, Instagram, and Wikipedia to prove how prevalent the bias is. The
propaganda is massive. Articles, caricatures, videos, and photos are aimed at
defaming the Jewish race and spreading falsehoods.
According to
Behar, the Internet is an important platform, especially for vulnerable school
children who are being given tasks by their teachers to find out information. A
child may pose a question on Yahoo Answers, and an anti-Semite may answer their
question. The answer is not challenged and the information remains on the
Internet. Behar says that anti-Semites use this for their own purposes in every
language.
For example,
an app was created about two years ago for The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
You could download it onto mobile phones in Arabic before the app was finally
removed from the Internet.
Another
example is that a Twitter account was created for Adolf Hitler. There were
770,000 followers before Twitter stopped it.
“The
Internet influences life on the ground,” Behar states. “It creates more
motivation to attack Jews. It gives legitimization to that. Then, you have more
motivation to attack them verbally or physically.”…
From Jewish
Journal:
“Tough love
for Islam”
by David
Suissa
January 13,
2015
We’re
conditioned to respect all religions. But what happens when we’re confronted
with a religion that looks more like a political ideology? When I criticize
Islam, I don’t criticize its spiritual beauty; I criticize the fact that in too
many places around the world, the religion has morphed into a violent and
totalitarian movement.
It’s not a
coincidence that, since 9/11, more than 24,000 terrorist acts have been
committed under the name of Islam. After the latest murderous attacks in Paris,
even a staunch liberal like Bill Maher had the politically incorrect nerve to
say what so many of us are afraid to say: “When there’s this many bad apples,
there’s something wrong with this orchard.”
What’s wrong
with this orchard? Well, for starters, it harbors an extremist and literalist
interpretation of Islam that has morally contaminated large segments of the
Muslim world.
While
practices and beliefs in Islam are hardly monolithic, it’s disheartening to see
such widespread support among Muslims for strict religious law (Sharia) as the
official law of their countries. According to polling from the Pew Research
Center, this support is most prevalent in places like Afghanistan (99%), Iraq
(91%), the Palestinian territories (89%), Pakistan (84%), Morocco (83%), Egypt
(74%) and Indonesia (72%).
When you
consider that a strict interpretation of Sharia law can often mean cutting off
the hands of thieves, lynching gays, stoning adulterous women and the death
penalty for apostates, it’s not a pretty picture.
And yet, in
much of the West, we act as if Islamic terrorism is simply the result of some
“bad apples,” and, well, every religion has its fanatics. This cozy and
convenient narrative has run its course. Islamic terrorism is not an isolated
phenomenon — it’s a violent outgrowth of a global, triumphalist and
totalitarian ideology that is on the march and hiding behind the nobility of
religion.
When French
President Francois Hollande says, “These terrorists and fanatics have nothing
to do with the Islamic religion,” he’s being politically correct, but not
accurate. Islamic terrorism has very much to do with the extremist
interpretation of classic Islamic texts. Until we acknowledge that inconvenient
truth, we have no chance of combating this disease. …
These are
excerpts. But there are also food for thought. Go ahead--Google the essays.
Read them in their entirety.
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