Mike Jericho points out an interesting article posted last month by the UK Telegraph that has just recently been removed. He’s blaming the victim however when he calls it self-censorship, especially if the Telegraph has been threatened with violence or a lawsuit. Artists try not to offend Muslims as satire festival treads softly and It’s so cowardly to attack the church when we won’t offend Islam provide better examples of the kind of self-censorship we’re starting to see as a response to the Toonifada violence.

The yanked article, as it turns out, starts off talking about exactly this. It then goes on to lay out the uncomfortable reality of what Muslims want, and how they’re going about getting it. This is required reading for all infidels, whether you live in England or not.

ENGLAND: The day is coming when British Muslims form a state within a state

By Alasdair Palmer
The Telegraph Group
February 19, 2006

For the past two weeks, Patrick Sookhdeo has been canvassing the opinions of Muslim clerics in Britain on the row over the cartoons featuring images of Mohammed that were first published in Denmark and then reprinted in several other European countries.

“They think they have won the debate,” he says with a sigh. “They believe that the British Government has capitulated to them, because it feared the consequences if it did not.

“The cartoons, you see, have not been published in this country, and the Government has been very critical of those countries in which they were published. To many of the Islamic clerics, that’s a clear victory.

“It’s confirmation of what they believe to be a familiar pattern: if spokesmen for British Muslims threaten what they call ‘adverse consequences’ – violence to the rest of us – then the British Government will cave in. I think it is a very dangerous precedent.”

Dr Sookhdeo adds that he believes that “in a decade, you will see parts of English cities which are controlled by Muslim clerics and which follow, not the common law, but aspects of Muslim sharia law.

“It is already starting to happen – and unless the Government changes the way it treats the so-called leaders of the Islamic community, it will continue.”

For someone with such strong and uncompromising views, Dr Sookhdeo is a surprisingly gentle and easy-going man. He speaks with authority on Islam, as it was his first faith: he was brought up as a Muslim in Guyana, the only English colony in South America, and attended a madrassa there.

“But Islamic instruction was very different in the 1950s, when I was at school,” he says. “There was no talk of suicide bombing or indeed of violence of any kind. Islam was very peaceful.”

Dr Sookhdeo’s family emigrated to England when he was 10. In his early twenties, when he was at university, he converted to Christianity. “I had simply seen it as the white man’s religion, the religion of the colonialists and the oppressors – in a very similar way, in fact, to the way that many Muslims see Christianity today.

” Leaving Islam was not easy. According to the literal interpretation of the Koran, the punishment for apostasy is death – and it actually is punished by death in some Middle Eastern states. “It wasn’t quite like that here,” he says, “although it was traumatic in some ways.”

Dr Sookhdeo continued to study Islam, doing a PhD at London University on the religion. He is currently director of the Institute for the Study of Islam and Christianity. He also advises the Army on security issues related to Islam.

Several years ago, Dr Sookhdeo insisted that the next wave of radical Islam in Britain would involve suicide bombings in this country. His prediction was depressingly confirmed on 7/7 last year.

So his claim that, in the next decade, the Muslim community in Britain will not be integrated into mainstream British society, but will isolate itself to a much greater extent, carries weight behind it. Dr Sookhdeo has proved his prescience.

“The Government, and Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, are fundamentally deluded about the nature of Islam,” he insists. “Tony Blair unintentionally revealed his ignorance when he said, in an effort to conciliate Muslims, that he had ‘read through the Koran twice’ and that he kept it by his bedside.

“He thought he was saying something which showed how seriously he took Islam. But most Muslims thought it was a joke, if not an insult. Because, of course, every Muslim knows that you cannot read the Koran through from cover to cover and understand it.

The chapters are not written to be read in that way. Indeed, after the first chapter, the chapters of the Koran are ordered according to their length, not according to their content or chronology: the longest chapters are first, the shorter ones are at the end.

“You need to know which passage was revealed at what period and in what time in order to be able to understand it – you cannot simply read it from beginning to end and expect to learn anything at all.

“That is one reason why it takes so long to be able to read and understand the Koran: the meaning of any part of it depends on a knowledge of its context – a context that is not in the Koran itself.”

The Prime Minister’s ignorance of Islam, Dr Sookhdeo contends, is of a piece with his unsuccessful attempts to conciliate it. And it does indeed seem as if the Government’s policy towards radical Islam is based on the hope that if it makes concessions to its leaders, they will reciprocate and relations between fundamentalist Muslims and Tony Blair’s Government will then turn into something resembling an ecumenical prayer meeting.

Dr Sookhdeo nods in vigorous agreement with that. “Yes – and it is a very big mistake. Look at what happened in the 1990s. The security services knew about Abu Hamza and the preachers like him. They knew that London was becoming the centre for Islamic terrorists. The police knew. The Government knew. Yet nothing was done.

“The whole approach towards Muslim militants was based on appeasement. 7/7 proved that that approach does not work – yet it is still being followed. For example, there is a book, The Noble Koran: a New Rendering of its Meaning in English, which is openly available in Muslim bookshops.

“It calls for the killing of Jews and Christians, and it sets out a strategy for killing the infidels and for warfare against them. The Government has done nothing whatever to interfere with the sale of that book.

“Why not? Government ministers have promised to punish religious hatred, to criminalise the glorification of terrorism, yet they do nothing about this book, which blatantly does both.”

Perhaps the explanation is just that they do not take it seriously. “I fear that is exactly the problem,” says Dr Sookhdeo. “The trouble is that Tony Blair and other ministers see Islam through the prism of their own secular outlook.

They simply do not realise how seriously Muslims take their religion. Islamic clerics regard themselves as locked in mortal combat with secularism.

“For example, one of the fundamental notions of a secular society is the moral importance of freedom, of individual choice. But in Islam, choice is not allowable: there cannot be free choice about whether to choose or reject any of the fundamental aspects of the religion, because they are all divinely ordained. God has laid down the law, and man must obey.

‘Islamic clerics do not believe in a society in which Islam is one religion among others in a society ruled by basically non-religious laws. They believe it must be the dominant religion – and it is their aim to achieve this.

“That is why they do not believe in integration. In 1980, the Islamic Council of Europe laid out their strategy for the future – and the fundamental rule was never dilute your presence. That is to say, do not integrate.

“Rather, concentrate Muslim presence in a particular area until you are a majority in that area, so that the institutions of the local community come to reflect Islamic structures. The education system will be Islamic, the shops will serve only halal food, there will be no advertisements showing naked or semi-naked women, and so on.”

That plan, says Dr Sookhdeo, is being followed in Britain. “That is why you are seeing areas which are now almost totally Muslim. The next step will be pushing the Government to recognise sharia law for Muslim communities – which will be backed up by the claim that it is “racist” or “Islamophobic” or “violating the rights of Muslims” to deny them sharia law.

“There’s already a Sharia Law Council for the UK. The Government has already started making concessions: it has changed the law so that there are sharia-compliant mortgages and sharia pensions.

“Some Muslims are now pressing to be allowed four wives: they say it is part of their religion. They claim that not being allowed four wives is a denial of their religious liberty. There are Muslim men in Britain who marry and divorce three women, then marry a fourth time – and stay married, in sharia law, to all four.

“The more fundamentalist clerics think that it is only a matter of time before they will persuade the Government to concede on the issue of sharia law. Given the Government’s record of capitulating, you can see why they believe that.”

Dr Sookhdeo’s vision of a relentless battle between secular and Islamic Britain seems hard to reconcile with the co-operation that seems to mark the vast majority of the interactions between the two communities.

“Well, it isn’t me who says Islam is at war with secularisation,” he says. “That’s how Islamic clerics describe the situation.”

But isn’t it true that most Muslims who live in theocratic states want to get out of them as quickly as possible and live in a secular country such as Britain or America? And that most Muslims who come to Britain adopt the values of a liberal, democratic, tolerant society, rather than insisting on the inflexible rules of their religion?

“You have to distinguish between ordinary Muslims and their self-appointed leaders,” explains Dr Sookhdeo. “I agree that the best hope for our collective future is that the majority of Muslims who have grown up here have accepted the secular nature of the British state and society, the division between religion and politics, and the importance of allowing people to choose freely how they will live.

“But that is not how most of the clerics talk. And, more significantly, it is not how the ‘community leaders’ whom the Government has decided represent the Muslim community think either.

“Take, for example, Tariq Ramadan, whom the Government has appointed as an adviser because ministers think he is a ‘community leader’. Ramadan sounds, in public, very moderate. But in reality, he has some very extreme views. He attacks liberal Muslims as ‘Muslims without Islam’. He is affiliated to the violent and uncompromising Muslim Brotherhood.

“He calls the education in the state schools of the West ‘aggression against the Islamic personality of the child’. He has said that ‘the Muslim respects the laws of the country only if they do not contradict any Islamic principle’. He has added that ‘compromising on principles is a sign of fear and weakness’.”

So what’s the answer? What should the Government be doing? “First, it should try to engage with the real Muslim majority, not with the self-appointed ‘community leaders’ who don’t actually represent anyone: they have not been elected, and the vast majority of ordinary Muslims have nothing to do with them.

“Second, the Government should say no to faith-based schools, because they are a block to integration. There should be no compromise over education, or over English as the language of education. The policy of political multiculturalism should be reversed.

“The hope was that it would to ensure separate communities would soften at the edges and integrate. But the opposite has in fact happened: Islamic communities have hardened. There is much less integration than there was for the generation that arrived when I did. There will be much less in the future if the present trend continues.

“Finally, the Government should make it absolutely clear: we welcome diversity, we welcome different religions – but all of them have to accept the secular basis of British law and society. That is a non-negotiable condition of being here.

“If the Government does not do all of those things then I fear for the future, because Islamic communities within Britain will form a state within a state. Religion will occupy an ever-larger place in our collective political life. And, speaking as a religious man myself, I fear that outcome.”

http://www.opinion.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/02/19/nsharia219.xml Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2006.

Reproduced in full from a mirror of the original article at VirtueOnline.

If you’re not familiar with Tariq Ramadan you may be interested to read a bit more about him. The description fits many of the supposedly moderate apologists for Islam living amongst us whispering their sweet nothings:

“Doublespeak is the key to understanding Tariq Ramadan.” In his audio recording Islam and the West, Ramadan sets out his strategy as follows: “I must speak in a way that is appropriate for the ear hearing me… yet faithful to the religious sources of authority.” He advises his listeners to adopt a cautious media strategy: “We must know how to speak to those who do not share our history.”

Guindy explains that lying and misleading are prominent Muslim Brotherhood characteristics, and that the principle of taqiyya (hiding one’s true belief out of fear that it will be repressed), which is common amongst the Shi’a for historical reasons, is found in all streams of Islam. “Today, this method [of doublespeak and taqiyya] is used in the heart of the Western democracies, not due to fear of exposure, but in order to continue the secret advance [towards defined goals] without worrying anyone.

Apologists claim that the Islamofacist war on the West is motivated by desparation resulting from poverty or colonialism, or worse has been deliberately concocted by the US Military Industrial Complex to fill the void left by the Soviet collapse. On the contrary when you hear Islamist leaders talking to their followers they brim with triumphalism and superiority and clearly state that they are motivated to war by the simple fact that they wish to crush all that is not Islam and will not stop until they succeed. In other words no amount of infidel appeasement and diplomacy – withdrawing from Iraq, closing Gitmo, electing Gore, censoring cartoonists, letting Iran have nukes – will satisfy them. Erikson’s essays trace Islamist personalities and events back to the 1930s. The philosophy and methods of jihad trace back to Mohammed himself.

Islamism, fascism and terrorism
By Marc Erikson (Nov-Dec ’02)

Al-Zawahiri wrote several books on Islamic movements, the best known of which is The Bitter Harvest (1991/92), a critical assessment of the failings of the Muslim Brotherhood. In it, he draws not only on the writings of Sayyid Qutb to justify murder and terrorism, but prominently references Pakistani Jamaat-i-Islami founder and ideologue Mawdudi on the global mission of Islamic jihad.

Mawdudi had written, “Islam wants the whole earth and does not content itself with only a part thereof. It wants and requires the entire inhabited world. It does not want this in order that one nation dominates the earth and monopolizes its sources of wealth, after having taken them away from one or more other nations. No, Islam wants and requires the earth in order that the human race altogether can enjoy the concept and practical program of human happiness, by means of which God has honored Islam and put it above the other religions and laws. In order to realize this lofty desire, Islam wants to employ all forces and means that can be employed for bringing about a universal all-embracing revolution. It will spare no effort for the achievement of this supreme objective. This far-reaching struggle that continuously exhausts all forces and this employment of all possible means are called jihad.”

And further, “Islam is a revolutionary doctrine and system that overturns governments. It seeks to overturn the whole universal social order … and establish its structure anew … Islam seeks the world. It is not satisfied by a piece of land but demands the whole universe … Islamic jihad is at the same time offensive and defensive … The Islamic party does not hesitate to utilize the means of war to implement its goal.”

Via Spengler, who has quite of bit to say about Islam himself.

That’s the problem with Hollywood. Ann Coulter puts her finger on it when she cracks:

I shall grant my awards based on the same criteria Hollywood studio executives now use to green-light movies: political correctness. Also, judging by most of the nominees this year, the awards committee prefers movies that are wildly unpopular with audiences.

They took the trouble to film The Interpreter on location at the U.N. in order to give it a stronger sense of reality, but then they concocted an imaginary African country to provide villians to bomb New York City. Hmmmm.

The Constant Gardener is about Big Government and Big Pharma conspiring to test drugs on unwitting poor Africans. Nice theory, except that in the real world they test openly. Oddly enough, while it tries hard to whip up fear and loathing toward the greedy bastards who, let’s be honest, save more people than they kill, the film provides a brief glimpse into the hellhole otherwise known as Sudan, portraying the problems there as nothing more than random tribal violence. Of course the film makes no effort to describe the real human suffering and the real evil behind it. To do so would make a farce of the conspiracy bogeyman they’d like you to focus on instead.

Radio Blogger’s transcript of an interview with Baroness Caroline Cox by Hugh Hewitt may give you some idea what’s been going on in Sudan:

HH: Is it primarily Islamic on Christian violence? Or is it tribal?

CC: No, in Darfur, it’s not Islamic on Christian. Most of the people in Darfur are themselves Muslims. It’s racial. It’s of the age old African-Arab conflict, and particularly Africans being trampled on by the Arabs, who on the whole, see themselves as superior, and are trying to take out the African culture, and/or to Arabize the African people.

HH: Now the Christian and Animus of the South have reached a peace, but you were telling me before we began the interview, that peace may be much more destructive of their well-being and faith than the war.

CC: Yes, indeed. The war, which was initiated by the national Islamic front regime in Khartoum in 1989, a jihad, they called it a military jihad, or Islamic holy war, claimed the lives of 2 million dead, and 4 million displaced before Darfur. And these were the battles that were raged right across Southern Sudan. The weapons of that jihad were two-fold and formiddable: military offenses against innocent civilians, manipulation of aid, so the regime would carry out brutal military offensives, aerial bombardment, ground attacks against civilians, and declare those areas as no-go’s.

Hollywood isn’t likely to make a film about Sudan. Or not one at least that makes any mention of Islam or jihad.

Last but not least we have a dollop of narcissism from poor put-upon George Clooney.

Clooney relishes ‘traitor’ attacks
From Agence France-Presse correspondents in London
February 25, 2006

Interviewed on BBC television’s Newsnight about his latest films Syriana and Good Night, and Good Luck Clooney said that not only did he accept the right to be attacked for his views but he even relished them.

Clooney, who has weathered attacks since opposing the 2003 Iraq invasion, said at one point that it was “frustrating” to be listed as a “traitor” on a set of playing cards, but he also accepted people’s right to free speech.

He later admitted he relished the attacks.

“I think it’s important to be on the right side of history,” Clooney said.

He knows before it’s written that he’s on the right side of history. Maybe because he knows his posturing appeals to the academics who twisted the history of McCarthyism, and will twist today’s.

Clooney has received critical acclaim for Syriana – about oil politics and Islamic extremism – and for Good Night, and Good Luck a reminder of the threat to civil liberties through a story about the anti-communist hysteria in the US of the 1950s.

Then as now we’re to believe the “good guys” are the ones who do everything in their power to thwart the “bad guys” who want to seize absolute power under the guise of trying to defend us from an ideology whose evil is purely imaginary. 50 years ago it was Communism, today it’s Islamism. Unfortunately for the commie sympathizers the Venona papers and other Soviet documents that have since come to light vindicate McCarthy. Some day the value of the NSA wiretaps and other politically incorrect efforts revealed and destroyed by the self-righteous protestor-patriots will come to light too.

Clooney has said the chilling effect of the September 11, 2001 attacks on US politics had inspired Syriana and its unflinching look at the ways extremism and political instability are fostered by the interests of big oil.

Chilling effect? 9/11 pulled some heads out of the sand and drove others deeper. It stimulated political debate, it didn’t stifle it. And that’s a good thing, unless you suspect you’re actually on the wrong side of history.

UPDATE 4 March 2006: Charles Krauthammer had this to say about Syriana:

The political hero is the Arab prince who wants to end corruption, inequality and oppression in his country. As he tells his tribal elders, he intends to modernize his country by bringing the rule of law, market efficiency, women’s rights and democracy.

What do you think happens to him? He, his beautiful wife and beautiful children are murdered, incinerated, by a remote-controlled missile, fired from CIA headquarters in Langley, no less — at the very moment that (this passes for subtle cross-cutting film editing) his evil younger brother, the corrupt rival to the throne and puppet of the oil company, is being hailed at a suitably garish “oilman of the year” celebration populated by fat and ugly Americans.

What is grotesque about this moment of plot clarity is that the overwhelmingly obvious critique of actual U.S. policy in the real Middle East today is its excess of Wilsonian idealism in trying to find and promote — against a tide of tyranny, intolerance and fanaticism — local leaders like the Good Prince. Who in the greater Middle East is closest to “Syriana’s” modernizing, democratizing paragon? Without a doubt, President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, a man of exemplary — and quite nonfictional — personal integrity, physical courage and democratic temperament. Hundreds of brave American (and allied NATO) soldiers have died protecting him and the democratic system they established to allow him to govern. On the very night the Oscars will be honoring “Syriana,” American soldiers will be fighting, some perhaps dying, in defense of precisely the kind of tolerant, modernizing Muslim leader that “Syriana” shows America slaughtering.

It gets worse. The most pernicious element in the movie is the character who is at the moral heart of the film: the physically beautiful, modest, caring, generous Pakistani who becomes a beautiful, modest, caring, generous … suicide bomber.

And he concludes:

Most liberalism is angst- and guilt-ridden, seeing moral equivalence everywhere. “Syriana” is of a different species entirely — a pathological variety that burns with the certainty of its malign anti-Americanism. Osama bin Laden could not have scripted this film with more conviction.