NIDRA POLLER: NOT WELCOME AT THE FREE PRESS SOCIETY

http://www.d-intl.com/not-welcome-at-the-free-press-society/

Not welcome at The Free Press Society

Ferocious jihad is not a deviation from “true Islam”

PARIS. The Copenhagen Post relays, at great length, the complaint of Jihad Taha whose reservation for a Free Press Association meeting was rejected for security reasons. The twenty year-old student says it’s discriminatory–based on his name– and hypocritical for the organizers to prevent him from freely disagreeing with Lars Hedegaard. This little incident speaks volumes about a war that seeps into every nook and cranny of our lives. On the 5th of February Lars Hedegaard opened the door to a killer disguised as a mailman; in the space of a few seconds his life, miraculously spared by a few millimeters as the bullet whizzed past his head, tumbled into the no man’s land of the endangered prime targets, shared with Charb, Redeker, Westergaard, Wilders, Vilks …

One man, presumably bearing jihad in his heart and trigger finger, tried to kill the co-editor in chief of Dispatch International and another man, of Palestinian-Egyptian origin, bearing jihad in his name, avails himself of every freedom a democratic nation has to offer but feels no shame about bearing a name that means death to all freedom.

Looking at the naked truth, no civilized person would espouse a political/ideological system that spawns endless brutality, chokes up the life force, spreads murderous hatred, wreaks havoc and destruction. On any given day in every corner of the earth, someone is plotting to murder writers, publishers, Jews, Europeans, women, infidels, miscreants or simple rivals. It doesn’t take a genius to say we don’t want it. So how do you describe someone who says we don’t want murder, mayhem, savagery and oppression? Ah! Put the label on that barbaric system and suddenly all tongues are tied. Now anyone who doesn’t want it is a scathing, controversial, offensive, hateful, divisive anti-Islam extremist. The ferocious jihadis, their heads wrapped in keffieh, spewing gunfire and allahu akhbars are “freedom fighters of the Arab Spring” and Lars Hedegaard is an inflammatory extremist?

Don’t we have a right to be anti-Islam without any “ism” additives or qualifying adjectives? A divine right to criticize anything, including a religion? At the risk of offending true believers? But of course we do! The thought police that would restrict this right when Islam is the question indulge it fully and obscenely on Israel and Judaism. BDS rallies (organized by the anti-Israel movement “Boycott, Divestment ans Sanctions”, ed.) flourish on campus, fiction films and documentaries twist the truth and win prizes, the UN feeds on it, the EU laps it up, the peace process disguises it, and the fact checkers are nowhere to be seen.

So what is the difference between the right to criticize Israel and the exquisite care taken to be nice to Islam? The difference is de facto anti-blasphemy laws enforced by ruthless killers. Apologists are fond of saying that Muslims are the primary victims of “radical Islam.” If so, they are not the victims of uninhibited criticism of Islam. They would be the beneficiaries if, in fact, the vast majority are decent law-abiding citizens who just want to get on with their lives.

The protective shield wielded by fanatical killers is extended, ever so gently, by our moderate Muslim friends and unwittingly upheld by the intended victims of jihad, ever so careful to avoid stigmatizing an ethnic-religious group. This tension was evident at an important colloquium organized by the BNVCA (Bureau national de vigilance contre l’antisémitisme) on February 18 in Paris, to examine and counter the “contemporary sources of anti-Semitism”. Daniel Sibony, a major Jewish thinker, born and raised in Marrakech, addressed the painful reality of vindictive antagonism to Jews as a sovereign nation, which is endemic to Islam. With obvious good humor he wished imams in France would add a modest prayer asking Allah to stop cursing the Jews. The next speaker, Imam Hassen Chalgoumi, addressed his outrage to the empty chair vacated by Sibony who was not able to remain for the rest of the debate. Admired and trusted, Chalgoumi is devoted to the cause of harmonious relations with the Jewish community. Targeted by the Sheikh Yassin cell, he is under constant protection. He recently led a delegation of French imams to Israel. Chalgoumi, deeply offended, castigated the absent Daniel Sibony, calling him a man of the Right, of the Far Right; he’s not a theologian, he doesn’t know what he’s talking about; I risk my life, I come here to you, I went to Israel, that’s not the discourse I heard in Israel, I got along with everyone, Muslims Jews and Christians.

Denying the very existence of scriptural Islamic Jew hatred, upholding the myth of the golden age of al-Andalus, the courageous, sincere, beleaguered moderate imam practices a milder form of beheading of infidels. Ecstatic citizens of Timbuktu liberated from the jihadis, declare: “We are Muslims, too. But that’s not Islam.” The bereaved mother of slain paratrooper Imad ben Ziaten, first victim of the Islamic murderer Mohamed Merah, declares, with utmost goodness in her heart and mind, “That’s not Islam, Islam is peace, Islam is liberté, égalité, fraternité.”

Daniel Sibony said there is one good thing about this Arab winter: the moderates and extremists are facing off. Whereas here, the moderates don’t want to be involved, don’t want to be tainted, and unwittingly create a protective cushion behind which the fanatics prosper.

The comforting thought that Islam is noble, innocent, and totally unrelated to the tiny minority of gangsters and hoodlums who hide behind its pristine robes to do their dastardly deeds is contradicted by reality. And the one-sided discourse directed to well-meaning non-Muslim friends that promotes a false sense of security in our democratic societies would be punishable as apostasy in lands where Islam has established its political dominion. Over the centuries and to the present day, hopes for reform are systematically dashed as sharia imposes its iron will and implacable logic as the accomplishment of, not a deviation from, true Islam.

How can we know, without facing this reality, whether our sincere loyal friends are saying “this is not Islam” or “I am not Islamic”?

 

 

Comments are closed.