Geert Wilders

(For everything on Geert Wilders, check out the Dutch site: Krapuul)

Here’s something scary from TimesOnline:

Poll favourite may put anti-Islam MP Geert Wilders in Cabinet

By: David Charter, The Hague

Geert Wilders, the far-right Dutch politician who wants to tax Muslim headscarves and ban mosque building, could join the next government, the leader of the country’s biggest party said.

Mark Rutte, who is tipped to be the next Prime Minister after Wednesday’s vote, told The Times that he was prepared to share power with the anti-Islamic MP in a new coalition.

Mr Rutte’s right-wing Liberal Party (VVD) is expected to win the largest number of seats in the general election and polls suggest that it could form a majority with the Christian Democrats and Mr Wilders’ Freedom Party.

Mr Wilders, 46, was prohibited from visiting Britain last year by Jacqui Smith, the then Home Secretary, because of his inflammatory views but managed to overturn the ban. His party is in fourth place after briefly topping opinion polls this year.

Mr Rutte dismissed suggestions that his country could suffer an international backlash if he offered a Cabinet post to Mr Wilders. He said that he saw the Freedom Party as “just another party”, and disagreed with its policies on headscarves and mosques. He and Mr Wilders agreed however that the Netherlands should restrict immigration and cut benefits to recent arrivals.

Speaking to The Times during a break in campaigning in The Hague, Mr Rutte, 43, said that he was open to forming a coalition with Mr Wilders, just as he was with the Labour Party led by Job Cohen, the former Mayor of Amsterdam, which is second in the polls. “For me, the Wilders party and the social democratic Labour Party — we do not rule out a coalition with any of the two,” he said. “With both of them, we have many points of difference. But I am not distancing myself from Wilders on the basis of morality, like the Labour Party leader Job Cohen. He is saying Wilders’ party is wrong.

“The problem with Wilders is that he is quite left-wing on the economy . . . while at the same time we agree with some of the measures we could take on immigration in the Netherlands. We disagree on this issue of Islam.”

Asked if he thought that the Netherlands would suffer from problems in the Islamic world if Mr Wilders were part of the government, he said: “I don’t think so. For me it is just another party.”

Latest polls for the 150-seat Parliament put the VVD on 36 seats, Labour on 29, the Christian Democrats on 24, the Freedom Party on 18 — double its current number of MPs — and the Socialist Party on 12.

Dutch commentators believe that Mr Rutte is keeping open the possibility of coalitions involving Mr Wilders and Mr Cohen to try to attract their voters.

Spencer resembles someone here.

Sheila Musaji and The American Muslim have done a great job in compiling different sources, including a number of links from Loonwatch for a concise piece on Robert Spencer with the apt title: The Politically Incorrect Guide to Robert Spencer.

by Sheila Musaji

Robert Spencer describes himself as an impartial scholar of Islam, and maintains that he is not an Islamophobe, and that in fact the term Islamophobia is either irrelevant or an attempt to silence critics.  He is only one of a number of individuals whose statements about Muslims and Islam can only be called alarming.  Although, he is not alone, he is perhaps the most prolific Islamophobe.

Clearly we have free speech in the U.S., and free speech must be defended.  The line between hate speech and free speech is difficult to draw, but I believe that we need to at least attempt to recognize when speech crosses that line as important, and to respond to that speech appropriately.  My hope as an American Muslim is that we are able to learn to have respectful speech that does not close off the possibility of dialogue and alienate the very Muslims who could act as a bridge between cultures.

The villification of Muslims, Arabs, and Islam has become relentless.  Repeating the same things over and over again has been shown to create credibility. False logic seems plausible, and even outright lies repeated often enough begin to sound like the truth.  Sadly, these stereotypes have replaced knowledge with ignorance and misperception, and ignorance fuels hatred of what we don’t know much about.  Muslims are consistently portrayed as “the other”, not part of us, and imposible to understand, and so not worthy of tolerance.  Just the mention of Islam creates a feeling of fear on the part of many non-Muslims because of what they have heard so often and causes them to believe that this fear is reasonable.

“The leap from deviant Muslims perpetrating atrocities to a religion being impugned for the sins of its supposed adherents is breath-taking in its audacity. This distinction has become critical ever since the ‘’showdown with Saddam” transmuted into the ‘’war on terror.” With the daily mind-numbing imagery of maniacal Muslim ‘’insurgents” savaging troops and civilians alike, a transformation rapidly took place: The problem was just not Muslim terrorists but an ‘’evil” Islam itself. This is a theme broadcast with malevolent glee by talk shows on a daily basis thereby intensifying suspicion, fear, contempt, and hatred of Islam. Demonizing Islam makes it the enemy in the ‘’war on terror.” … Ironically, it is us Muslims who have the greatest vested interest in eradicating terrorism. We need to do this to salvage our religion and our self-respect. As long as we are marginalized by the West and taunted by the extremists, we are made to feel as if we were part of the problem rather than of the solution, and our commitment becomes ambivalent. If the so-called war on terrorism has any chance of being won, there needs to be an immediate redefinition of the enemy.” Foe isn’t Islam, it’s Binladenism, Abdul Cader Asmal

And, the repetition of such statements results in seeing Muslims in a false light.

The most commonly repeated claims about Muslims are that “everyone knows” that most or all terrorists are Muslims, and there are no Christian and no Jewish terrorists (or terrorists of any other religious stripe), and that Muslims are inherently violent.  Everyone also knows that Muslims are not equivalent to real Americans, that they are the enemy within, and a fifth column,  that good Muslims can’t be good Americans, that they are not a part of our American heritage, that they are all militant,  that Islam makes Muslims “backward”, that Muslims have made no contribution to the West,  that Islam is “of the devil”, a Crescent menace, and an “evil encroaching on the United States”, and not a religion.  Everyone knows that this is a Christian nation, which everyone knows the Muslims are trying to take over, starting with getting an Eid stamp which is the first step towards shariah law, and by purposefully having more children than others to increase their numbers.  Everyone knows that Muslims have no respect for the Constitution.  Everyone knows that Muslims are given a pass by the elite media.  It’s “us versus them”.  They don’t speak out against extremism or terrorism, and even those Muslims who do speak up or seem moderate are simply lying or practicing taqiyyah.  The problem is that what “everyone knows” is wrong.  These self-righteous and incorrect statements are usually followed by a demand that the Muslim community do something about whatever is the false flag of the day or face the inevitable consequences.

In addition to these “everyone knows” statements of demonization and misrepresentation, there is also a whole industry of simply connecting with Islam or Muslims with any negative idea, event, or societal trend (even when there is no sane connection to make).  These I think of as “Through the Looking Glass” claims.  For example, lots of “news” items never happened, or are simply not true.

Arabs didn’t celebrate 9/11 at a Dunkin Donuts in New Jersey.  Budweiser did not pull all its product from the shelves of a convenience store where there was celebration of the terrorist attacks – this never happened.  The Muslim statement of faith (Shahada) is not an expression of hate.  An American Missionary in Africa didn’t face possible murder charges and hanging because of a traffic accident.  There is no verse of the Qur’an on “The Wrath of the Eagle”.  The supposed bomb threat made by an Arizona student that led to an evacuation of the school was a hoax by non-Muslim students.  The story that Iran was considering forcing Jews to wear a yellow star appeared in several publications and it was totally false.  The slaying of the New Jersey Coptic family was falsely charged to Muslims.  The story about the British banks banning piggy banks so as not to offend Muslims never happened.  Muslims are not more likely to support terrorism and violence than Christians or Jews.  Muslims did not destroy the Library of Alexandria.  Nurses in Britain were not “ordered to drop everything and turn Muslims’ beds toward Mecca five times daily”.  There is no Muslim sword through the 41-cents mark on the U.S. Eid stamp.  Sirhan Sirhan is a Christian, not a Muslim.  The Virginia Tech massacre had no connection with Islam.  A bus driver in Britain didn’t tell passengers to get off the bus so he could pray.  Rachel Ray’s Paisley scarf is not a symbol of “murderous Palestinian Jihad” (and neither is a Keffiyah).  A Muslim student in Florida did not refuse to stand for the pledge of allegiance.  There were no Muslims acting suspiciously on Air Tran flight 297. Wearing a tee-shirt with Arabic writing on it does not make a person dangerous.  A Madrassah is simply a school.  The zebibah (prayer bruise) on some Muslims foreheads is not a sign of a “commitment to jihad”.  Jihad is not terrorism. Ashura is not a “Muslim blood festival”.  Muslims are not forbidden to have non-Muslims as friends.  The Nuclear Security Summit logo is an atom on a circular path, not an Islamic symbol, the U.S. Missile Defense Logo is not evidence of Obama’s ‘Submission To Shariah’, and neither is the Flight 93 memorial.  Barack Obama is not a Muslim, but so what if he was?  (Note: click on the links to see responses to particular claims or incidents

The fact that these “news stories” and articles are simply wrong doesn’t change the fact that they are “out there” and that they will be read and believed by many of the same folks who believe the supermarket tabloids.  They will be forwarded or passed on, and commented on, and the stories will grow and more and more people will accept them as “facts”.  I would hope that not only Muslims would be concerned with the dangers in this sort of stereotyping and dehumanizing of any segment of our population.  Here is a link to a collection of English translations of Nazi Propaganda: 1933-1945.  Exactly how is this different?

Robert Spencer’s views on Islam are a part of this demonization industry, and lead to seeing Muslims as suspect and Islam as the source of every negative action.  If Muslims are so different from other human beings that there can never be any motive for any action they undertake other than Islam (no Muslim criminals, no political, economic, social, or cultural motives for actions), if you can’t tell a moderate from an extremist, and even the moderates are dangerous, then that really does seem to limit the options to either criminalizing Islam, or carrying out a “final solution” against the Muslims.  This is the only direction that Robert Spencer’s arguments lead.

In order to see where this sort of inflammatory rhetoric comes from and might lead see:  Terrorism and violence carried out by non-Muslims (the majority) – Jewish extremist statements and views – Religious extremism/ religious right – Incidents of Islamophobia by year – Prejudiced, racist, or violent incidents at mosques (by state and/or country) – Responses to particular incidents, events or claims A to L and M to Z (This includes: Responses to Claims Made ABOUT Islam and Muslims in General – Responses to Claims Made ABOUT Qur’an Verses, Arabic Terms, Prophet Muhammad – Responses to False Claims ABOUT Muslim Individuals & Organizations & Incidents Involving Muslims – Responses to Actual Extremist Statements & Incidents of Extremism or violence BY Muslims – Responses to Claims Made BY Specific Individuals and Organizations About Muslims.

The Runnymede Trust in Britain identified eight components that define Islamophobia:

1) Islam is seen as a monolithic bloc, static and unresponsive to change.
2) Islam is seen as separate and ‘other’. It does not have values in common with other cultures, is not affected by them and does not influence them.
3) Islam is seen as inferior to the West. It is seen as barbaric, irrational, primitive and sexist.
4) Islam is seen as violent, aggressive, threatening, supportive of terrorism and engaged in a ‘clash of civilisations’.
5) Islam is seen as a political ideology and is used for political or military advantage.
6) Criticisms made of the West by Islam are rejected out of hand.
7) Hostility towards Islam is used to justify discriminatory practices towards Muslims and exclusion of Muslims from mainstream society.
Anti-Muslim hostility is seen as natural or normal.

I personally believe that Robert Spencer is an Islamophobe, and that all of these eight components of Islamophobia are prevalent in his writings.  Consider his own statements and make up your own mind.

IN HIS OWN WORDS:

Robert Spencer said that Islam itself is an incomplete, misleading, and often downright false revelation which, in many ways, directly contradicts what God has revealed through the prophets of the Old Testament and through his Son Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh… For several reasons… Islam constitutes a threat to the world at large.

Spencer regarding Keith Ellison taking an oath on the Qur’an “I hope there will be some who have the courage to point out that no American official should be taking an oath on the Qur’an, since—as we have been pointing out here for over three years now—there are so many elements of traditional and mainstream Islam that are at variance with our system of government, our Constitution, and our entire way of life. But since that is blandly denied and unexamined by the mainstream media and government officials, it is much more likely that Qur’anic oath-taking will be allowed without any discussion at all.”

He wrote regarding the Arab Israeli Knesset member who had sold secrets to Hisballah that “I have maintained from the beginning of this site and before that that there is no reliable way to distinguish a “moderate” Muslim who rejects the jihad ideology and Islamic supremacism from a “radical” Muslim who holds such ideas, even if he isn’t acting upon them at the moment. And the cluelessness and multiculturalism of Western officialdom, which make officials shy away from even asking pointed questions, only compound this problem.” Then when the news came out that the Knesset member involved was Christian and not Muslim, a “correction” was posted:  “I have been reminded that Bishara is a Christian, which makes him instead of a false moderate, an example of what Hugh calls an “islamochristian,” or a dhimmi Christian who has imbibed the values of his Muslim overlords. I apologize for the error.” Amazing logic here.  If a Muslim did it, he’s guilty.  And, even those Muslims who are not guilty right now are just temporarily not acting on their negative impulses.  If a Christian did it, he was corrupted by the Muslims.

He said regarding the Hutaree militia arrests “For years now we have heard, in the indelible formulation of Rosie O’Donnell, that “radical Christianity is just as dangerous as radical Islam,” and yet proponents of this exercise in wishful thinking and ignorance have had precious little evidence to adduce in support of it. But now it is certain that for years to come this Hutaree group will be thrown in the face of anyone who takes note of jihad activity in the United States and around the world, as if this group in itself balances and equals the innumerable Islamic groups that are waging armed jihad all around the world today.  …  The Islamic jihad is global, well-financed (courtesy our friend and ally Saudi Arabia) and relentless. One self-proclaimed Christian group should not divert us from the ongoing need to defend ourselves against that jihad. But for many, it will.” This refusal to acknowledge the reality that terrorism, extremism, and violence are a problem that is not confined to Muslims.  In fact, the majority of such acts are carried out by non-Muslims.

He said at CPAC “It’s absurd” to think that “Islam is a religion of peace that’s been hijacked by … extremists”

Spencer said “The misbegotten term “Islamo-fascism” is wholly redundant: Islam itself is a kind of fascism that achieves its full and proper form only when it assumes the powers of the state.”

Spencer said “The term “Islamo-Fascists” no more blames the religion of Islam than the term “Italian Fascism” blames Italy for fascism. It merely refers to those Muslims—who obviously really exist—who invoke Islam to justify violence and supremacism, whether they are invoking Islamic doctrines correctly or not.”

Spencer said about Muslim population in Europe “And those who are talking about it are smeared and vilified as racists and bigots. When a nuclear-powered Islamic Republic of France threatens the U.S., however, some Americans may come to regret the ease with which they swallowed and even propagated defamation and lies about anti-jihad European politicians such as Geert Wilders.”
He totally missed the point of the unconstitutionality of Franklin Graham speaking at the Pentagon and called the decision to exclude Graham “the Army’s dhimmitude”

He wrote “Ever since I began doing this work publicly my point has been simple and consistent: that the jihad terrorists are working from mainstream traditions and numerous Qur’anic exhortations, and that by means of these traditions and teachings they are able to gain recruits among Muslims worldwide, and hold the sympathy of others whom they do not recruit. This explains why there has been no widespread, sustained, or sincere Muslim outcry against the jihad terrorist enterprise in general. The mainstream media, both liberal and conservative, does not want to face these facts.” His scholarship somehow doesn’t include the fatwas, statements by Muslim organizations, statements by Muslim individuals – or these quotes that clearly denounce extremism and terrorism.  He also clearly has never heard about the Muslim voices promoting Islamic non-violent solutions to political and social problems.

Spencer promoted the fraudulent Iranian yellow badge story and even after it was proven untrue, he couldn’t bring himself to issue an unqualified disclaimer:  “Untrue, or too hot for public consumption at this time? That remains to be seen. While Nazi analogies dominate analyses of this, as I pointed out yesterday it is actually a revival of traditional elements of Islamic law for dhimmis. That makes it entirely reasonable that an aggressive Islamic state like Iran would reinstitute such laws; but now that international attention has focused upon them for contemplating doing so, it is likely not that they will abandon the project, but simply implement it when the world media has turned to other matters.” He has a particularly hostile view of all things Iranian, as he also promoted the fraudulent August 22, 2006 “Doomsday” story.

Spencer wrote “I have written on numerous occasions that there is no distinction in the American Muslim community between peaceful Muslims and jihadists. While Americans prefer to imagine that the vast majority of American Muslims are civic-minded patriots who accept wholeheartedly the parameters of American pluralism, this proposition has actually never been proven.”, and as Islamophobia Watch has pointed out, this is the same man who has said “Islam is not a monolith, and never have I said or written anything that characterizes all Muslims as terrorist or given to violence.” There seems to be a disconnect in his logic.

During the incident with Debbie Almontaser and the Khalil Gibran Academy in NYC, he posted an article from the NY Post with his own heading reading “Does an Islamic supremacist have a right to head a New York City public school?”  This description does not appear in the referenced article, so it can only be assumed that this is his take on the question.

When Muslim Charities and individuals responded to the Haiti earthquake with humanitarian relief, Spencer posted an article with the title “Jihad groups set up camp in Haiti”, and another article saying that Muslim aid was conspicuous by its absence

RESPONSES TO SPENCER
- attacking Mark Levine’s ‘hudna’ article [1] (Mark Levine)

- about the Roxbury Mosque controversy[2]

- on Muslim feminism [3] (Khaleel Mohammed), [4a] (Tariq Nelson)

- statement about Arab Israeli spy [4] (Sheila Musaji)

- claim that terrorists are acting on Islamic teachings [5]

- statement about rape as Jihad [6] (Yusuf Smith)

- statement on meaning of jihad as holy war [7] (Yusuf Smith), Islamic war doctrine [7a] (Robert D. Crane)

- claim that Qur’an is anti-Semitic [8] (Khaleel Muhammad)

- Obsession With Islam [9] (Khaleel Muhammad)

- Spencer, the NDU scholars, the securocrat and his books [10] (Yusuf Smith)

- Smearcasting report on Spencer [11],

- American Library Assoc. incident [12],  [12a] (Ahmed Rehab)

- altercation with Svend White [13] (Svend White),

- on Rifka Barry case [14] (Loonwatch),

- on CAIR airbrushing woman’s photo [15] (Sheila Musaji),

- dodges debate with Loonwatch [16],

BOOKS
- book Politically correct guide to Islam & the Crusades[17],  [17a] (Loonwatch), [17b] (Loren Rosen)
- book The Truth About Muhammad [17c], [17d], and [17e] (Robert D. Crane), [19d] (Karen Armstrong)
- book Religion of Peace? — Why Christianity Is and Islam Isn’t [17f] (John Derbyshire)
- book Complete Infidels Guide to the Qur’an [17g] (John R Bowen)
- book Islam Unveiled [17h] (Danny Doueri)

- attack on Khaleel Muhammad [18] (Khaleel Muhammad)

- and EDL neo-Nazi’s [19] (CAIR), [19a] (Richard Bartholemew)

- attack on Louay Safi [20] (Louay Safi)

- accused of Islamophobia [21] (Carl Ernst), [21a] (FAIR)

- article mistranslating Ahmedinejad [22] (Loonwatch)

- on testimony of a rape victim [23] (Loonwatch)

- Spencer’s position on Kosovo [24] and his relationship with Serge Trifkovich [24a] (Kjeda Gjermani)

- views on the Qur’an and violence [25] (Louay Safi), 25a] (Aaron Hess)

- on confusing Buddhist Sri Lanka as a country “where the Shafi’i school of Islamic jurisprudence prevails” [26] (Richard Bartholemew)

- on Obama as a Muslim [27], on Obama using full name at his inauguration [27a] (Richard Bartholemew)

- on the cancellation of the LA Premiere of Geert Wilders Documentary [28] (Richard Bartholemew)

- involvement in the film Islam: What the West Needs to Know [29] (Zahir Janmohamed)

- on CPAC panel “Jihad: The Political Third Rail” [30] (Eli Clifton), [30a] (Christine Schwen), CPAC and the Freedom Defense Initiative [30b] (Kelly Vlahos)

- involvement with SIOA [31] (Eli Clifton)

- on his support of the conspiracy theory that Iran would nuke Israel on August 22, 2006 [32] (Andrew Sullivan)

- his endorsement of the book The Islamic Anti-Christ by Joel Richardson – a book claiming that the Bible predicts that the anti-Christ will be a Muslim [33] (Richard Bartholemew)

- on Virginia neo-Nazi license plate incident [34] (Sheila Musaji), [34a] (Loonwatch)

- comments on Hutaree militia group [35] (Sheila Musaji)

- comments on Pres. Obama’s Middle East peace initiative [36] (Hussein Ibish)

- misrepresentation of Qur’an 5:60 [37] (Hussein Ibish), misrepresentation of Qur’an by cherry picking verses to prove a point [37a] (Louay Safi)

- statements about “taqiyya” [38] (Hussein Ibish), [38a] (Sheila Musaji)

- his claim that Tariq Ramadan is a “stealth jihadist” [39] (Sheila Musaji)

- claim that Muslims don’t object strongly to extremists like Anjem Chaudary [40] (Shahed Amanullah)

-  views on what constitutes a “moderate” Muslim [41], [46a] (Sheila Musaji)

- on use of terms like “Islamofascist/Islamo-Fascist” [42] (Chip Berlet), [42a] (Sheila Musaji)

- on his views about Islam and Muslims generally [43] (Cathy Young), [43a] (Adem Carroll), [43b] (Tariq Nelson)

- on his op ed in Emory University paper [44] (Ali Eteraz)

-  attack on Prof. M. Cherif Bassiouni [45]

- promoting the false Muslim bus driver stopping bus to pray story [46] (Sheila Musaji)

- on his concept that radical Muslims are the “real” Muslims [47] (Dinesh D’Souza)

- on his smearing of Rashad Hussein [48] (Media Matters)

- on his posting a video on his site of a Hindu girl calling for wiping Pakistan off the map [49] (Chasing Evil)

- reprinting Danish cartoons on his site [50] (Sheila Musaji)

- claims about ISNA and the Muslim Brotherhood [51] (Louay Safi)

-  claims about Islam forbidding music [52] (Ali Eteraz)

- claim that the root of terrorism is Islam [53] (Mustafa Aykol)

- his views on “dhimmitude” and jizya [54] (Loonwatch), [54a] (Robert D. Crane)

- on Ayesha’s (Aisha) age at marriage [55] (Tarek Fatah)

- his comments on CAIR and GOP claims about Muslim interns on Capital Hill [56 (Sheila Musaji), [56a] (Loonwatch)

- his calling the Archbishop of Canterbury, the “Archdhimmi” of Canterbury [57] (Sheila Musaji)

- on Keith Ellison and oath on Qur’an [58 (Sheila Musaji)

- his alarmism over Muslim demographics [59] (Sheila Musaji) [59a] (Loonwatch)

- participation in David Horowitz’ Islamo-Fascism awareness week [60] (Sheila Musaji)

- his views on honor killings [61] (Omer Subhani)

-  on making Islamophobia mainstream [62] (Steve Rendall and Isabel Macdonald)

- on Cologne Conference and neo-fascists [url=http://www.kejda.net/2008/11/07/jihadwatchwatch-robert-spencers-amorous-flirt-with-european-fascism/][63] (Kjeda Gjermani)

- claims about suicide terrorism and Islam [64] (Loonwatch)

- connecting witchhunts and Islam [65] (Loonwatch)

- claim that radical Christianity is not as dangerous as radical Ilam [66], [66a] (Sheila Musaji)

- on his willingness to debate Muslims [67] (Omer Subhani) [671] (Loonwatch)

- his views on the Pace of Umar [68] (Loonwatch)

- his comments on Fiqh Councils fatwa on body scanners [69] (Loonwatch)

- his views on Muslims and Haiti humanitarian efforts [70] (Sheila Musaji), [70a] (Loonwatch)

- his blog post titled titled Uighur Muslims in China Stabbing Opponents with Tainted Needles [71] (Loonwatch)

- On the website url’s “f**kallah.com” & “f**kislam.com” which redirected people to Spencer’s Jihad Watch site [72], [72a], [72b] (Loonwatch)

- on his falling out with Charles Johnson of LGF [73] (Loonwatch)

- his views on the Fort Hood massacre [74], [74a] (Loonwatch), [74b] (Mehdi Hasan)

- on his support for Bat Ye’or [75] (Loonwatch)

-  confusing views on reliability/unreliability of hadith and sirah/seerah [76] (Robert D. Crane)

- views on “Satanic verses” [77] (Robert D. Crane)

- views on Muslim attitude towards Christians and Jews as friends (wali) [78] (Robert D. Crane)

- views on apostasy and Islam [79] (Robert D. Crane)

- views on Obama’s Cairo speech to Muslim world [80] (Chris Good)

- offensive comments by readers of his site [81]

- his views on Spanish Fatwa against bin Laden [82

- KFC controversy as creeping Sharia [83] (Edmund Standing & Yusuf Smith)

- his views on Bible verses on rifle scopes used by soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq [84] (Sheila Musaji)

- his views on Islam and violence against women [85] (Robert D. Crane)

- Spencer and the politics of fear [86]

- his views on the South Park incident and the Revolution Muslim lunatics [87] (Sheila Musaji)

- his views on slavery and Islam [88] (Sheila Musaji)

By Ruben L. Oppenheimer

Sheila Kamerman and Dirk Vlasblom have an interesting article about how Dutch Muslims are dealing with the ascendancy and rhetoric of Geert Wilders. Some are choosing to ignore him while others see what he is calling for as impossible and unactionable.  While they are concerned, some Dutch Muslims also think that the best thing might be for Wilders’ PVV to actually win elections and lead the country because the PVV would then be forced to confront and offer more than just anti-Muslim rhetoric. What are your thoughts?

(make sure to check out Krapuul.nl, which is an anti-hate site and ally of ours tracking everything Wilders does. You will need Google Translator for the site.)

Muslims Quietly Take Wilders’ Abuse by Sheila Kamerman and Dirk Vlasblom

Day in and day out, Dutch Muslims are told their religion is “a fascist ideology” and “a threat to Dutch society”. They hear their “so-called prophet Muhammad” is “a barbarian, a mass murderer and a paedophile”, or words to that effect. The indignities come from a member of parliament: Geert Wilders.

After leaving the right-wing liberal VVD party in 2006 and setting up his own Party for Freedom (PVV), Wilders has made criticism of Islam his one main issue. He is being heard by native Dutch people who fear the country of 16 million is suffering under the burden of its estimated one million Muslim citizens. Wilders obtained 5 of the 25 Dutch seats in European parliament last year. His PVV did very well in the two municipalities in which it participated in recent local elections. Some polls have predicted his party could become the biggest in parliament after the upcoming national election.

One wonders why the Muslims he is targeting are not standing up against his attacks and letting themselves be heard.

When asked this question, Islam expert Mohammed Cheppih immediately countered it: “Aren’t we all Dutch?,” he asked. “Society as a whole should stand up to Wilders. Wilders is destroying the Netherlands. We should all ignore him.”

Counterproductive?

Farid Azarkan, the director of an interest group of Moroccan-Dutch people, SMN, agreed. “Where are all the reasonable Dutch people who say: ‘This is not how we treat each other here’?” Ideally, non-Muslims would support their Muslim compatriots en masse, Azarkan ventured. “Suppose that all the women in Almere [the one city where Wilders' PVV won the most council seats in the local election] would don a headscarf.” Azarkan chuckled at the idea of such a form of protest against the PVV’s proposed headscarf ban in municipal buildings there: “But that is not realistic.”Azarkan has thought about instigating large-scale protest, but believes it would ultimately be counterproductive. “Imagine we would organise a mass demonstration, say, on the Malieveld in The Hague,” he said, referring to a meadow near buildings housing the national government. “It would suddenly be filled with thousands of headscarves. People who don’t fear Islam wouldn’t be bothered by it. But those are not the people we need to convince. The people who support Wilders however, will go ’Yuk, there they are’.”

The fear of rubbing native Dutch people the wrong way by lashing out at Wilders is one argument why Muslims aren’t organising themselves. Another is that a movement would be hard to establish because there is no single Muslim community in the Netherlands. Moroccans, Turks, Somalis, Surinamese, Iranians and Iraqis in the Netherlands all have their own religious lives and communities. They are impossible to mobilise, according to Azarkan.

Faith in democracy

A unifying, Dutch Islam has yet to develop, said Loubna el Morabet, who is a PhD researcher in social science at Leiden University. “This is an ongoing process. Muslims in the Netherlands are already very Dutch,” she said. “I have done research in the Netherlands and England and learnt that Muslim students here have adopted the Dutch mentality. This is their country.”

Arkazan offered the example of the lack of success of Muslim parties as an argument why any fear of Muslims “taking over” the Netherlands is “a joke”. In this month’s municipal elections, Islamic parties failed to obtain a single council seat anywhere but in The Hague. “Obviously, Muslims vote for a party that suits them, they don’t vote for a religion,” said Arkazan. “We call that integration.”

Many Muslims and non-Muslims in the Netherlands are uncomfortable with the things the PVV has been saying. The party has suggested Muslims who don’t adjust to the dominant Dutch culture should be deported. It has also talked about shooting criminals of Moroccan descent in the knees.

But for most who disagree with him, their faith in democracy is larger than their fear of Wilders.

“Of course I feel threatened when I hear Wilders speaking,” said Loubna el Morabet. “But if I take a step back, I realise he will never be able to carry out his ideas. Taxing headscarves is nonsense and halting immigration from Islamic countries is discrimination. The principle of equality is deeply embedded in Dutch law.”

Compromises

Even if he wins the upcoming national election, many Muslims don’t believe he can change Dutch, let alone European, laws that protect them. “And you can’t rule a country ranting and raving,” Farid Azarkan said about Wilders’ politics.

Several Muslims interviewed said they would welcome a large PVV after the June election. If Wilders were to be forced to take responsibility and make compromises, his rank and file would realise he can’t deliver, they said.

The Netherlands is always ruled by coalition governments and if Wilders were to form one “he would need to have clear ideas about other issues than just Muslims,” said El Morabet. “What does he really want for our country? The only statements he yells are anti-Islam, everything else is hazy.”

Cheppih, however, disagreed. “It is extremely frustrating that other parties don’t preclude governing with Wilders. It would be a clear sign if other parties would say: ‘We don’t want to cooperate with the PVV’. The party is empty and has hardly taken positions on anything.” Cheppih encouraged other political parties to rule out any coalition with the PVV after the election. “Society as a whole should hit back hard: we do not accept this! Make that clear. Otherwise, things could escalate. The fear he sows is imaginary, but he is being heard. The higher the minarets, the more frightened the people.”

Personal encounters

This fear of Islam is fuelled by the media hype surrounding Wilders, said El Morabet. “I think it is ridiculous that media pay so much attention to a party that has garnered a handful of seats in the municipal elections. [Left-wing liberal party] D66 was the real winner of the local elections and that happens to be the one party that tells Wilders: ‘You are shutting people out, you discriminate’. That gets relatively little attention.”

To counter the anxiety some native Dutch feel for Islam, Farid Azarkan thinks, Muslims need to try to remove this through personal encounters. “You have to reach out to people. A minority happens to be xenophobe. I don’t believe you can sway all of them. They have to notice out on the streets that you may be Muslim, but apart from that, you are all right.”

Manya Brachear

The Seeker, Manya Brachear’s blog about religion on the Chicago Tribune website has a post, Chicago welcomes once-banned Muslim Scholar, about the upcoming trip of Islamic scholar/reformer and Oxford professor Tariq Ramadan to the United States (hat tip: iSherif).

You may remember that Tariq Ramadan had his visa revoked by the Bush administration, ostensibly because he donated money to a charity organization that it was later charged had links to Hamas. The charge was clearly fallacious as the organization was not listed as a banned charity in America at the time that Tariq Ramadan made his contribution.

The real reason seems to be that Tariq Ramadan was banned by Bush due to a policy of ideological exclusion and Ramadan’s fierce opposition to the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. This was further confirmed when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton ordered Ramadan’s visa to be reinstated.

Unfortunately the blog post quoted Robert Spencer, one of the leading Islamophobes in the West today.

But author Robert Spencer says that popularity is dangerous. In interviews, he has criticized Clinton for making an exception to U.S. law that prohibits supports of terrorist groups from entering the country. Spencer said Ramadan should still be barred for donating money to a group that funds Hamas.

Spencer contends that the scholar has the same goals as Osama bin Laden–to impose Shariah law in the West. While Ramadan paints himself as a moderate intellectual, Spencer said, he is actually a “stealth jihadist.”

It is a severe lapse in judgement for Brachear to quote Spencer’s claims since they are false on their head. It is an attempt on Spencer’s part to “poison the wells.” The fact is Ramadan has never supported Hamas or terrorism, in fact he has been one of the most outspoken critics of both. “Stealth Jihad” is just paranoid new speak that serves bigots who wish to cast normal, law abiding Muslims as evil villains who are secretly working behind the scenes to take over the West. It is in fact the new “Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”

Our website has copiously dissected many of Robert Spencer’s blog posts exposing his unsavory associations, pseudo-scholarship and blatant bigotry against Muslims and Islam. One of our premiere contributors, Danios has gone through whole chapters in Spencer’s books and revealed how shoddy and inaccurate a lot of his work has been. To quote Robert Spencer on Muslims and Islam is equivalent to quoting David Duke on Judaism or Jews.

One instructive point in regards to all of this is that one of Spencer’s closest friends and a co-founder with Spencer of The Freedom Defense Initiative, Pamela Geller has gone to the extreme (and insane) level of calling Tariq Ramadan, “a cold blooded Jihadists.” An exercise in hyperbole that the worst enemies and strongest critics of Ramadan won’t even engage in. However, one must ask Spencer if he agrees with that characterization by his friend Geller who he cross-posts from regularly? It also seriously puts into doubt the objectiveness of Spencer and whether he should ever be quoted by mainstream media.

I urge our readers to contact Manya and to politely express their disappointment at the inclusion of a bigot such as Spencer on a professional blog such as hers.

Contact: mbrachear@tribune.com

Here is some information that may be helpful to share with Manya (remember to be polite and topical):

The fact is Spencer is not taken seriously by academia especially in the field of Islam: He has been repudiated over and over. Take a glance at our archives:

Academics and members of the American Library Association condemn Spencer and his work: Robert Spencer Rejected by Academics, still Supports Geert Wilders

DePaul Law Professor M. Cherif Bassiouni condemns Spencer

His former friend and ally Charles Johnson has also condemned Robert Spencer as an “Anti-Islamic Bigot:”

Robert Spencer goes postal on Charles Johnson

Spencer’s association and fervent support for anti-Muslim European neo-Fascists and supremacists also disqualifies him from being mentioned as a true neutral observer and commenter on Islam or radical Islam:

Robert Spencer Teams up with Euro-Supremacists Again

Spencer has also joined a genocidal Facebook group which called for the extermination of Turks:

Robert Spencer: Wanna be Conquistador

Robert Spencer’s arguments have been shown to be filled with errors and excessive prejudice:

The Church’s Doctrine of Perpetual Servitude worse than Dhimmitude

Robert Spencer Misrepresents Facts — Again

Robert Spencer Worried about ticking ‘Muslim Demographic Time Bomb’

There is more information exposing the bigotry and anti-Muslim motive that mars the work of Robert Spencer in our archives, if Manya Brachear truly cares about the information she wishes to present to readers then she should take a serious look at who she chooses to quote as an expert.

This is an awesome satirical song brought to us by Lucien Van Rooy that will be the new anthem for those opposing the Euro-supremacism of Geert Wilders and his buddies.

Enjoy! (For some of our sensitive viewers be aware that there are some raunchy pictures)

Translation:

Our Geert

I know exactly how things stand,

Don’t bore me with the facts.

Give me one of those lefty newspapers,

So that I can sh*t on it.

The Dutch broadcasting corporations,

Pretend to be journalists,

They don’t do anything but lie,

Those dirty socialists.

They hate our Geert,

We hate the government,

That is secretly heading

For islamization.

We were born stupid,

Never had any education,

But we don’t give a damn,

We’ll vote for Geert anyway.

The government doesn’t do anything

About all those Moroccans

Who are on the dole

And stealing our jobs.

They also have a god,

But ours is better.

Their women are all ugly,

Ours are much hotter.

They don’t have any respect

For rules and legislation,

But Geert is not at all afraid,

He’ll throw them out of the country.

We were born stupid,

Never had any education,

But we don’t give a damn,

We’ll vote for Geert anyway.

As soon as Geert is Prime Minister,

As he’s told us oftentimes,

He’ll ban the Koran,

Allah and His prophets.

But that’s not all,

Geert is not easily satisfied,

The Imams will have to go

He’ll close down all their mosques.

And if the Muslims

Start protesting

Geert will shoot them through the knee

And we’ll all chant:

We were born stupid,

Never had any education,

But we don’t give a damn,

We’ll vote for Geert anyway.

© Lyrics: Lucien Van Rooy

For more on the exposition of Geert Wilders please visit: Krapuul.nl (Use Google Translator)

Huib Reithof, a Brussels based blogger, historian and activist writes on the recent episode involving Geert Wilders and the Geller-Spencer axis. If our readers are unaware CAN, (Christian Action Network) a virulently homophobic and Christian supremacist organization which has had a long working history with Robert Spencer made a film, Islam Rising glorifying Geert Wilders.

Geller and Spencer both were giddy over their Hollywood debut, they had visions of red carpet treatment, sips of champagne and for Pamela maybe, mercifully some plastic surgery?

All kidding aside their Hollywood dreams blew up in their faces when the obvious despicable history of Martin Mawyer and CAN went viral in Holland and Europe. It was up to Geert Wilders to deliver the coup de grace as his carefully cultivated ‘legitimacy’ as the heir to Pim Fortuyn was threatened.

Huib gave us permission to reproduce his article with a few minor touches, enjoy:

LA Wilders Sanctification Movie Aborted: Yes We CAN*! by Huib Reithof

The May 1st launch of an one hour Wilders adoration movie, produced by Robert Spencer, Pamela Geller and Martin Mawyat’s Christian Action Network (CAN) in Los Angeles (Ca), fell lamentably through, two days after its proud announcement.

The “Islam Rising” video features Geert Wilders, posing as an Old Testament prophet, calling off the numerous mene tekels on the wall of dhimmi-ridden Christianity. Among the illustrations: The unavoidable Ground Zero, loony bearded hysterics and Barack Obama meeting an Arab authority.

Outrage rose in Geert Wilders’ home country, Holland, after the announcement. In Europe, he never shows off with the extreme right. He never disowns their support either. Wilders pretends to fight for abortion rights and gay rights. CAN’s homophobic and pro-life agitation does not rhyme well with that.

At first, Wilders tried to play down the issue but last night, the “21st century Churchill” (Pamela’s description) met his Dardanelles (1915) against the modern Turks. He backed off, telling the news agencies that he “did not know” about CAN’s ideas, that he would NOT go to LA, and disappeared behind a “no-comment” wall. At the website of his political “party” (no members, only Pipes-money), the jubilant references to the movie and its launch disappeared all at once.

Spencer received a very “Dutch Treat”

Spencer had to call off the May 1st event. The damage to his cause is immense. “Going Dutch: Never More!” and receiving a “Dutch Treat” will best describe his inner feelings.

Our inner feelings are quite the opposite. Something like: “Yes We CAN”. What CAN couldn’t, we achieved.

We, the men and women who time and again exposed Wilders’ hypocrisy, finally met with some acknowledgment:

• In Holland he is behaving like a middle of the road politician, denouncing a “dangerous ideology, the Islam”, denying that he is against Muslims or Arabs, adopting some progressive issues like women’s liberation, freedom of choice (abortion), gay rights, gay marriage and keeping the pension age at 65.
• Outside Europe, Wilders associates with Christian fundamentalists, Great-Israel religious ultra-Zionists and American Birthers and Tea Party ideologues.

Why does Wilders do so? I think, that in his heart, he agrees with the ideas of his foreign sponsors. But he cannot win the vote in Holland with statements like he made in Copenhague last year (“deportation of tens of millions of Muslims out of Europe” and “the Palestinians already have their state: Jordania”). His racist rants in some US synagogues were not adapted for home consumption either.

But, I think, he HAD to tell his sponsors from time to time the things they want to hear from him, so he did, leaving out the subjects they would certainly have objected to, like abortion, gay rights, etc. Wilders chose his locations as far away from Holland as possible. Hoping that the Dutch are too dumb to see the difference. Hoping that Daniel Pipes, Robert Spencer and Avigdor Lieberman do not master enough of the Dutch language, to see the fraud.

Well, this is the beginning of Wilders’ exposure as a Fraud. The stream of US money that helps him to stay out of Dutch party funding control and to run a no-member “party” without inner political discussion will wither away. Good for Holland.

The Loony Right will have to look for another, more reliable hero.

The movie will just be a collector’s item.

Anne Coulter is the well known crazy Conservative who stated that the US should invade “Muslim countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity” so I guess it isn’t much of a surprise that she told a Muslim student to ‘take a camel.’

Coulter Tells an Ont. Muslim to ‘take a camel’

It didn’t take long for firebrand U.S. conservative Ann Coulter to live up to her reputation on her Canadian tour, telling a University of Western Ontario Muslim student to “take a camel” as an alternative to flying.

Coulter made the comment Monday night after she received an email about the limits of free speech in Canada from the provost of the University of Ottawa, where she appears Tuesday.

The private email, which was leaked to conservative news organizations, noted that Canada’s Charter of Rights meant that “promoting hatred against any identifiable group would not only be considered inappropriate, but could in fact lead to criminal charges.”

Francois Houle, vice-president academic and University of Ottawa provost, invited Coulter to educate herself on Canadian free speech laws.

“We, of course, are always delighted to welcome speakers on our campus and hope that they will contribute positively to the meaningful exchange of ideas that is the hallmark of a great university campus,” wrote Houle,

The letter only added fuel to the fire of Coulter’s speaking tour, which is titled, “Political Correctness, Media Bias and Freedom of Speech.”

“I was the victim of a hate crime and plan to file a complaint with the Human Rights Commission,” Coulter said Monday.

Coulter, who wore a short black dress to her speech, is one of the most divisive characters in American conservatism.

She is well-known for her vehement views against Muslims. In a post-September 11 column, she wrote that the U.S. should invade Muslim countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.

It didn’t take long for her controversial views to emerge at Western.

The student, Fatima Al-Dhaher, asked Coulter about previous comments in which she said Muslims shouldn’t be allowed on airplanes and should take “flying carpets” instead. Al-Dhaher noted she did not own a flying carpet and asked what she should take as an alternative transportation.

Coulter did not deny making the flying carpet comment and replied to the university student: “What mode of transportation? Take a camel” to a mix of jeers and cheers.

Some students walked out after the comment.

“She stabbed me in the heart, she was rude,” Al-Dhaher said. “I walked out after she said that.”

“As a female, as a Muslim, as a student of this university, I felt an obligation to kind of represent that,” the student said of her question.

Coulter spoke in front of a packed audience of about 800 at the university.

It was a decidedly pro-Coulter audience. One man, who identified himself as a U.S. citizen, described U.S. President Barack Obama as a “Marxist.”

Wrong approach by U of Ottawa: MPs

Coulter, who often comments on Fox News, once said Canada is “lucky we allow them to exist on the same continent” after the Canadian government did not join the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Her tour was organized by International Free Press Society, a group whose website sets up Islam as the preeminent threat to democracy in the Western world.

“This jihad, like all jihads before it, will continue until a sharia-based caliphate rules the world, or until it is defeated,” the society’s policy statement says.

The group also sells one of the infamous Danish Mohammad cartoons, signed by cartoonist Kurt Westergaard, for $250. They are currently sold out.

Among the group’s board of advisers are Canadian conservative bloggers Ezra Levant and Kathy Shaidle, author Mark Steyn and far-right Dutch political leader Geert Wilders.

Coulter reportedly commands a $10,000 speaking fee. Her fee is being covered in part by the Claire Boothe Luce Policy Institute, an American group that calls itself the “home of conservative women leaders.”

Some critics say trying to quiet Coulter is the wrong approach to discrediting her views.

“In terms of putting limits on what she … should say or shouldn’t say, I’m not sure that helps,” New Democrat MP Paul Dewar, told The Canadian Press. “It might add fuel to the fire that she will be probably starting tomorrow.”

Liberal MP Scott Brison made a similar comment.

“If you don’t agree with what she has to say, then ignore her,” he said.

Coulter’s Canadian tour wraps up at the University of Calgary on Thursday.

Islamophobic violence is on the march as we continue to document hate crimes on Muslims and Muslim places of worship. Of course to Robert Spencer and company Islamophobia doesn’t exist.

In Leeds, we have the story of Muslim gravestones being desecrated:

Muslim Graves Damaged in Leeds Cemetery

Nineteen gravestones have been vandalised in a section of a Leeds cemetery used by Muslims.

One headstone was broken and a number of name plaques on wooden stands were damaged at Harehills Cemetery.

Police said they were “keeping an open mind” on whether the graves were deliberately targeted because they were linked to Muslim families.

The damage is believed to have happened overnight last Thursday. Witnesses are being asked to contact police.

Insp Nik Adams said: “This incident has caused a great deal of upset and distress to a number of people in the local community.

“Over the weekend we have worked alongside community and religious leaders to identify and contact the next of kin of those whose graves have been affected by this mindless vandalism.

“At this stage in the investigation we are keeping an open mind on whether the graves were deliberately targeted because they were linked to Muslim families or whether they were vandalised because of their proximity to a nearby path and two thoroughfares that run through the cemetery.”

In the Netherlands, that bastion of tolerance and liberty where polls have shown an increase in popularity for neo-fascist Muslim hater Geert Wilders we have the story of a pig head left by a Mosque which was also smeared with blood and animal intestines.

Groningen Mosque Smeared with Blood

A mosque in the Selward neighborhood of Groningen was smeared with blood Tuesday night, police reports. In addition to the blood, animal innards and the head of a wild boar were found by the mosque.

The Groningen city council responded in shock to the attack Thursday.

“We are deeply affected, because Groningen hadn’t known such outrages till now. Only expressions of indignation and disgust are proper here,” according to deputy mayor Frank de Vries. “This doesn’t belong in our city. We immediately promised the mosque board our support.”

The police opened an investigation and will keep extra watch for the mosque and the area.

Our final story comes from Canada, where someone obviously wants to intimidate the “Mooslims.” (via: Islamophobia-Watch)

Ontario Mosque Vandalized

Regional police are investigating a possible hate crime after the mosque of the Muslim Society of Waterloo & Wellington Counties was vandalized this week.

Two windows were broken and offensive graffiti painted around the Erb Street building, leaving many members to question why someone would do such a thing to a place of worship. Offensive pentagonal symbols and the numbers 666 were painted around the building. The windows that were broken were in the women’s prayer area. “It’s a hate crime,” said Faheem Uddin, president of the mosque. “It’s pretty bad. It’s upsetting.”

Yesterday, a large crowd attended a funeral at the mosque, with the graffiti and broken windows in plain view. “We just pray for the person who did this,” said Abdul Mannan. “May God guide him. We’re peace-living people. We love everyone and we want everyone to love us.”

A news release sent out by Waterloo Masjid public relations states that similar incidents have occurred at mosques in Hamilton and Montreal.

The Record, 20 March 2010

See also IQRA, 21 March 2010

So Who Are The Nazis? Meet Atlas’s Thugs by Max Blumenthal

In October, 2009, the EDL gave Nazi "Sieg Heil" salutes and the racists chants of, "If you all hate Pakis clap your hands."

In the days leading up to Israeli Apartheid Week’s opening event at Columbia University, leading anti-Muslim blogger Pam Geller posted an image of an SS officer with the name of one of the event’s speakers, Ben White, emblazoned on his uniform. (The image recalled placards held by far-right settlers depicting Yitzhak Rabin in an SS uniform just days before he was assassinated.) Geller was among the crowd at the Columbia event, making sure to catch White’s eye as he walked to the podium to speak. He told me that she mouthed to him, “You’re a Nazi.” The day after the event, Geller posted another characteristically juvenile screed describing White as “Nazi boy.”

There is little reason to engage a figure like Geller on the merits of her deranged characterizations. And it would be unfair to ascribe crude views like hers to the established pro-Israel groups working to discredit Israeli Apartheid Week. Their tactics are slightly more sophisticated, even if they have also demonstrated a reluctance to engage White and other participants on the facts about Israel’s systematic dispossession of the Palestinians. (Canadian pro-Israel students have united around a vaguely pornographic counter-campaign called “Size Doesn’t Matter” that invokes insecurities about penis length and equates traveling to Israel with the pleasure of oral sex.)

Geller’s attacks on White are worth discussing only in light of their irony. She is, after all, a fervent supporter of a British fascist group comprised of soccer hooligans and skinhead thugs who have delivered sieg heil salutes en masse at their rallies while also displaying Israeli flags — a most bizarre melange. Geller’s endorsement of the shadowy fascist group, called the English Defense League, highlights the reorganization of the British far-right around an anti-Muslim, pro-Zionist platform designed to cultivate alliances with influential online fanatics like her.

On the same day Geller posted her smear of White, she promoted a rally in defense of the Dutch anti-Muslim extremist Geert Wilders by the English Defense League (EDL) (Wilders has called for a “head rag tax” on Muslim women who wear hijab).

So what happens at a typical EDL rally? According to a report by Wales Online, at an October 2009 rally in Swansea by the EDL’s Wales-based affiliate, the Welsh Defense League, “onlookers were confronted with scenes of jeering men giving Nazi salutes.” At another rally in Stoke on Trent in January, intoxicated EDL activists in black masks attempted to break through police lines to assault anti-racist protesters around the block, injuring several police officers in the process.

Who belongs to the EDL? The group’s muscle is provided by thugs affiliated with the right-wing football hooligan club, Casuals United. The Casuals are led by an infamous thug who goes by the name “Tommy Robinson” and who will only appear in public in a balaclava. The Casuals are themselves a front for another violent football hooligan gang called Soul Crew. Soul Crew’s former leader, Jeff Marsh, is now the head of the Welsh Defense League and a recruiter for the Casuals.

According to the Daily Mail, neo-Nazis from Combat 18 and the British Freedom Front have insinuated themselves into the ranks of the EDL along with activists from the incipient neo-fascist British National Party (BNP), which is led by former white supremacist organizer Nick Griffin.

Though the BNP has distanced itself from the EDL, the two groups enjoy clear membership cross-pollination. For example, BNP activist Chris Renton helped set up the EDL’s website. While the EDL remains amorphous, its leadership appears to be following the organizational techniques employed by neo-Nazi groups like the British Peoples Party, which attempted to translate its acts of street terror into political power; and the BNP, which declared a “race war” on Muslims at a 2001 meeting. (Go here for a comprehensive look at ties between the EDL and BNP.)

British extremist right groups like the BNP have reorganized around a pro-Zionist, anti-Muslim platform to broaden their support. Israeli flags are a routine sight at EDL rallies.
Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the EDL is its identification with Israel. EDL activists routinely wave Israeli flags at rallies and carry placards declaring the groups support for Israel’s “right to exist” (go to :50 of this excellent BBC video report). The group’s support for Israel reflects a gradual reorientation of Britain’s far-right in favor of the policies of the Jewish state and against the rights of Muslim immigrants. While their motives for the strategic shift are largely cynical, they are also rooted in a genuine fascination with the image of Israel as a state fighting for ethnic purity against armies of Muslim marauders.

The BNP’s Griffin, who has openly denied the Holocaust and accused Jews of controlling the media, urged his allies to transmute their anti-Semitism into Islamophobia to broaden the party’s political appeal. He wrote in 2007, “It stands to reason that adopting an ‘Islamophobic’ position that appeals to large numbers of ordinary people – including un-nudged journalists – is going to produce on average much better media coverage than siding with Iran and banging on about ‘Jewish power’, which is guaranteed to raise hackles of virtually every single journalist in the western world.”

Ruth Smeed of the Board of Deputies of British Jews observed with astonishment, ”The BNP website is now one of the most Zionist on the web – it goes further than any of the mainstream parties in its support of Israel and at the same time demonises Islam and the Muslim world.”

When Israel attacked the Gaza Strip in 2008 and ‘09, leading BNP figures celebrated. ”This sort of ‘disinfecting’ process whereby Israel is required to sterilise areas of radical Islamist support … is what all nations have to do in order to eradicate Islamist cells who have managed to take over territory either within or on the edges of their borders,” BNP head of legal affairs Lee Barnes proclaimed on his blog on January 4. He continued, “Get used to the casualties – for without them any nation so infected with Islamism will surrender, rot away into liberal apathy and then dies as it is taken over.”

Griffin echoed Barnes’ comments in an essay called “Israel’s Gaza affair:” “The Israelis will NEVER get unbiased reporting on the Brussels Broadcasting Corporation, despite being the only civilised country in the region & fighting for their very existance [sic],” Griffin proclaimed. “It is NOT our place to get involved but you aren’t the only one to be 100% behind them, they are an example to us all because the only thing the Islamic Terrorists understand is FORCE.”

The reorientation of the BNP around a pro-Zionist, Islamophobic platform led directly to the rise of the EDL. Now Pam Geller has volunteered as perhaps the group’s most prominent online promoter. So who is the Nazi?

Geert Wilders

His star is growing in the circles of hate but rational people still regard him as a creep.

Dutch Populist Wilders ‘unwelcome’ in Eifel Town

The Dutch anti-Islam populist Geert Wilders has been told he is “not welcome” in the western German town of Monschau after he spent the weekend in the Eifel region.

The parliamentarian and leader of the far-right Party for Freedom, along with several armed bodyguards, stayed from Saturday afternoon until Sunday morning in the town, according to police in the city of Aachen.

Wilders, who promotes a strongly anti-immigration and anti-Muslim platform, has called for the Koran to be banned in the Netherlands, among other incendiary positions. His party recently performed strongly in council elections.

Monschau Mayor Margareta Ritter said she was concerned that Wilders’ presence had tainted her town with the suspicion that it was sympathetic to his views. As a result, Monschau had unfairly been connected with extremism in the European press.

“Of course I care very much if such persons feel comfortable here,” she said. “Anyone who pollutes the integration debate in the Netherlands with poisonous right-wing populism as Wilders has, is not welcome in Monschau. I wanted to distinguish Monschau from that.”

But she was not in favour of a legal bar against Wilders’ coming to the area and if he wanted to return, he could, she said. The populist politician was briefly barred from entering Britain in 2009 for his unsavoury views.

Wilders presence in Monschau only became public knowledge because he suffered a dizzy spell there.

Whether Wilders was merely holidaying in Monschau or had been meeting with like-minded people, Ritter was unable to say.

Police were in contact with Wilders’ bodyguards drove past his hotel several times to check there was no trouble, according to a police statement. The outspoken opponent of Islam has received death threats from Muslim militants and therefore has his own, round-the-clock bodyguards.

DPA/The Local (news@thelocal.de)

A hilarious article from UK Indymedia.

If desecrating Nottingham Castle was not enough, on Friday the 5th of March, whilst in London to pay homage to their far right extremist prophet Geert Wilders, the “patriotic crusaders of England’s cultural heritage” paid their ultimate respect to one of England’s most historic sacred Christian sites, deluging Westminster Abbey with gallons of filthy urine.

Engaged in a tsunami of continuous racist chanting, the EDL’s (in denial) neo-Nazi “defenders of England’s Christian heritage” made a beeline for one of London’s most famous place of worship, unzipping their floppy pink mitres in majestic unison, baptising walls, doorways and memorials with an almighty torrent of pungent hops-tinged English excreta.

Given a free reign to do what they pleased, while sober anti-fascist demonstrators were kettled, jostled, arrested, and released later without charge, the drunken racist thugs of the so-called English Defence League were allowed to do just what they pleased in Britain’s capital, free to roam the streets of London without censure, inflicting conflict and hatred upon anyone and anything as they pleased.

Scuffling in city pubs, drinking in the streets, racially abusing passers-by, intimidating shoppers, threatening anti-racist campaigners with violence, the very worst of England’s binge-drinking yob culture was on display in the nation’s capital last Saturday.

Rampaging through the streets, disturbing the peace in the Tate Gallery, was not enough to keep the violent fascist yobbos occupied. Once they had paid lipservice to wildeyed Wilders, they set off on their most hypocritical mission yet.

Their Hitler salutes and incessant racist chanting hardly demonstrating to the world the EDL are not bigots, by displaying the same contempt towards Christianity as they openly display towards Islam, Stopping off at a sufficient number of drinking holes along the way, paying homage to cheap fizzy Australian, Danish and Belgian lagers, the self-styled “defenders of England’s native culture”, slurped, stumbled and vomited until their bladders were ready for the big one, the defining moment for the english nationalist hooligans to leave their mark upon one of Britain’s most historic churches.

Making a pissing pilgrimage to Westminster Abbey, the usual suspects including the same lout dressed like St George captured urinating on Nottingham Castle (they never learn), ran in desperation towards the historic church, disproving the sceptics who thought they only defiled mosques with racist valdalism after dark, by doing their utmost to show the world what the EDL truly thinks of Christianity.

The Metropolitan Police, church officials and embarrassed tourists looked away while the filthy louts of the riot-igniting EDL (including some of their ringleaders) sprayed walls, doors, commemorative plaques, and anything they could land on including a medieval doorway. Westminster Abbey was used as a toilet by the thugs of the EDL.

Urinating in public always has been a criminal offence. In this CCTV era, so much as dropping a bus ticket onto the pavement can warrant a hefty fine and even a court appearance, but even though the recognisable culprits had been captured many times on camera, none of the despicable fascist scrotes who thought it funny to behave like tomcats on one of London’s most visited sacred places of Christian worship have so much as been interviewed by the boys in blue.

Try pissing not in broad daylight but late night, down some hidden rubbish-strewn alley of no importance, and expect to be arrested, handcuffed and rushed to the nearest nick to spend the night. The EDL regard themselves as untouchables since the bail terms for their leaders were overturned in court, but this fails to explain why the capital’s bastians of law and order see fit not to apply the letter of the law to these lawless racist football hooligans, when law-abiding social workers, students and humanitarian anti-racist campaigners are jostled, harassed, and even arrested without charge for peacefully opposing fascism, is beyond explanation.

Given a licence to chant offensive slogans, pick fights with opponents, and indecently urinate in broad daylight on Britain’s historical tourist sites willy-nilly, beyond their curtain of spin and internet trolling, the so-called “English Defence League” are nothing more than the shamelessly moronic dregs of society, a gang of uncontrollable racist louts who bring nothing but hatred, fear and shame to the country they claim to love.

Glenn Beck

I guess when you are a supporter of fascists you are to the right of some of the most hardline and dogmatic Conservatives. It looks like Glenn Beck is going to be getting some grief from the extreme Right-wingers of the Horowitz-Geller-Spencer axis if he doesn’t take back his statement that Geert Wilders is a fascist. Sit back and enjoy!

From the Atlantic Wire:

Geert Wilders, the Dutch politician and outspoken critic of Islam, sparked outrage across Europe last week when he showed his anti-Islamic film in the UK’s House of Lords. Though the backlash against Wilders from America media has also been harsh, some of it has come from the unlikeliest of sources: Fox News. The conservative network ran a special report from Bret Bauer on Wilders, and Glenn Beck indirectly lumped him in with French politician Jean Marie Le Pen as members of a rising fascist movement in Europe (starting at the 13:00 mark).

Beck’s comments were relatively benign–at least for him. But that didn’t appease hardline conservatives, who slammed Beck and Fox in general for denigrating Wilders. The backlash has taken on several forms, but the one consistent theme on the right is anger.

• What’s Up, Glenn? “What is he doing?” asks a befuddled Pamela Geller at Atlas Shrugs. “Was Beck saying that the UK was right to ban Wilders in the interest of ‘community harmony?’ And the fact that he was allowed to enter the UK last week was a dire sign?” After extolling Wilders’ virutes, Geller warns Beck to think twice in the future. “Is this going to be be Beck’s narrative? If so, he is wrong. And he ought to be silent until he learns everything.”

• Next Time, Know Your Stuff At Power Line, Paul concludes Beck was simply uninformed. “It was apparent to me that Beck was out of his depth with Wilders. [...] I’ve said before that the European ‘right’ is a complex phenomenon that does contain fascist elements. It takes a little bit of work to identify those elements.”

• Denigrating a ‘Hero’ “Shame on you, Glenn,” chastises The RightScoop’s Cubachi, who proceeds to heap praise on Wilders.

Geert Wilders. A hero, a man who is risking life and limb to rescue the Netherlands and Europe from radical Islamization and communism taking grip of his country and continent. Everyday he has to wear a safety vest and hide his family and give them 24-hour security because he is willing to say the unpopular thing to protect and defend his nation.

• No More Beck for Me Vowing never to trust Beck again, iOwnTheWorld’s BigFurHat embarks on a screed-worthy tirade to set the Fox News host straight. “Glenn – there is NO MODERATE ISLAM. This is what you get when you go out on a limb with a guy that is largely fueled by emotion rather than brains. I’m not saying Beck isn’t smart, but he is a bit Howard Bealish for me, and this is what you will have to endure with him.”

Geert Wilders

At the same time that he is facing charges for hate speech his party is making advancements in local polls which bode ill for future national elections. Islamophobia is on the march!

For more on Wilders, read Krapuul.nl which is the number one site tracking Geert Wilders.

Wearing a Yarmulke (Yamaka) is okay but not the Hijab

Geert Wilders previously called for a tax on the Hijab, now a recent political event reveals a new tactic in his  discriminatory political agenda. On a side note this is a good compliment to Danios’ article, as it ironically reveals that it is contemporary, if marginal Westerners who want to repress religious freedom and are advocating repressive conditions and restrictions on minorities akin to the ones in the fabled ‘Pact of Umar.’

Wilders goes for headscarf ban in the Hague

A ban on headscarves for city council workers and in all institutions and clubs which get local authority money will be the most important point in the PVV´s negotiations to join governing coalitions in Almere and the Hague, says party leader Geert Wilders.

Speaking to RTL news, Wilders said the ban would be central to talks to form new local authority executives in the only two cities where the party is contesting the March 3 local elections.

The ban will apply to ‘all council offices and all other institutions and clubs which get even one cent of council money,’ he said.

The PVV is tipped to emerge as the biggest party in Almere and second biggest in the Hague.

Speech

Wilders brought up the ban again in a speech to supporters in Almere, where he entered the room to the Rocky theme tune Eye of the Tiger.

The ban will not apply to other religious items such as Christian crosses and Jewish skull caps because these are symbols of our own Dutch culture, Wilders said in his speech, receiving a standing ovation from the crowd.

The speech began with a ‘lengthy tirade’ against the ‘arrogant Labour party’, according to the Volkskrant report of the meeting. ‘If you translate the PvdA’s Arabic language election brochures they say ‘bring your family here. You get benefits, we pay for everything’, the Volkskrant quoted the PVV leader as saying.

‘Almere must become the safest city in the Netherlands,’ he said. ‘There will be an end to subsidies for Turkish macramé and Arabic finger painting. Not just the Netherlands but all of Europe will look to Almere.’

Discrimination

Wilders is currently facing charges of discrimination and inciting hatred against non western immigrants and Muslims. He always maintains he is opposed to Islam, not Muslims themselves.

Earlier this week, Wilders told the Telegraaf the PVV´s commitment to maintaining the current retirement age of 65 would be crucial in negotiations to form a new national government, following the collapse of the CDA, Labour and ChristenUnie alliance last weekend.

Most parties have already ruled out forming a coalition with Wilders. Only the Christian Democrats and right wing Liberals VVD have not done so.

Opinion polls make it likely that four parties will be needed to form a new government after the June 9 vote.

The tragic earthquake in Haiti has brought an immense amount of suffering, with many people dead, injured, homeless and displaced.  This situation has brought out the best in many, various governments and organizations around the world have contributed emergency aid and funding but there has also been those who have attempted to take advantage of the situation by exploiting Haitians. This is what a group of American Christian missionaries are accused of doing.

The missionaries are accused of engaging in Child Trafficking, of taking missing children who are separated from relatives and smuggling them out of the country.

Baptists Probed in Haiti Case

A Haitian judge has questioned a group of US Baptist missionaries arrested while trying to leave earthquake-shattered Haiti with 33 children they claimed had been orphaned by the disaster.

The investigating magistrate question five of the ten missionaries for several hours and will question the remaining five on Wednesday, according to Marie-Laurence Lassegue, Haiti’s communications minister.

The missionaries were questioned behind closed doors and Lassegue said that they did not have a lawyer present at the meeting.

She also denied allegations, levelled by a lawyer for the group, that the Americans were being subject to “inhumane” conditions.

The judge will report to a district attorney who will decide if the 10 Americans are to be formally charged.

Undocumented children

The missionaries were arrested on Friday and are accused of trying to take 33 children – whose ages ranged from two months to 12 years – into the neighbouring Dominican Republic without the correct documents.The group, who are from a Southern Baptist church in the US state of Idaho, say they were only trying to save abandoned children.But legal experts say taking children across the border without documents or government permission can be considered child trafficking.

The children were later taken to the SOS Children’s Village orphanage, where those who were old enough and willing to talk reportedly said they had surviving parents.

Patricia Vargas, regional director of the orphanage, said: “Up until now we have not encountered any who say they are an orphan”.

Vargas said most of the children are between three and six years old, and unable to provide phone numbers or any other details about their origins.She said reports that the orphanage had turned some of the children over to their parents were untrue.

“The Americans apparently enlisted a clergyman who went knocking on doors asking people if they wanted to give away their children,” Jeanne Bernard Pierre, the director of Haiti’s social welfare agency, told the Associated Press news agency.

“One child said to me: ‘When they came knocking on our door asking for children, my mom decided to give me away because we are six children and by giving me away she would have only five kids to care for,’” he said.

‘Live parents’

Max Bellerive, the Haitian prime minister, has suggested that Haiti was open to having the Americans tried in the US since most government buildings, including Haiti’s courts, were crippled by a January 12 earthquake that destroyed much of the capital Port-au-Prince.

Haiti was home to an estimated 380,000 orphans before the earthquake [AFP]

“It is clear now that they were trying to cross the border without papers. It is clear now that some of the children have live parents. And it is clear now that they knew what they were doing was wrong,” Bellerive told the AP.

The prime minister said some parents may have knowingly given their kids to the Americans in hopes they would reach the US – not an uncommon wish for poor families in a country that already had an estimated 380,000 orphans before the earthquake.

Haiti’s overwhelmed government has halted all adoptions unless they were in motion before the disaster amid fears that parentless or lost children are more vulnerable than ever to being seized and sold.

Bellerive’s personal authorisation is now required for the departure of any child.

Investigators have been trying to determine how the American church group got the children, and whether any of the traffickers that have plagued the impoverished country were involved.

Of course Robert Spencer and his cronies at their hate site didn’t see fit to run this story because it doesn’t fit in nicely into their argument of Christianity=light and goodness and Islam=Evil and darkness.  If it were Muslims who were accused of this crime you can bet that Spencer would preside as judge, jury and executioner and say that the Muslims were just acting on Islam.

Grasping for straws and for some way to deflect attention away from these missionaries Robert Spencer attempted to cast Muslim relief workers as “stealth Jihadists.”

Islamic Relief USA and the Islamic Circle of North America, both groups tied to the Muslim Brotherhood, which is dedicated in its own words to “eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within,” are operating in Haiti — ostensibly working in relief efforts, but no doubt doing a good bit of dawah on the side. Creeping Sharia has the story (thanks to herr Oyal).

Posted by Robert on January 30, 2010 9:02 AM | 49 Comments

It is quite pathetic to see Spencer reduced to cheap shots at relief workers, but his and JihadWatch’s hypocrisy knows no bounds.

Take a look at the comments section as well which Spencer claims is moderated. It shows the deep Islamophobia that is instilled in the hearts of Spencer’s followers and echo’s sentiments that Spencer himself holds but won’t dare to verbalize. According to them this is all “taqiyyah,” “stealth Jihad,” “fake.”

Some of the comments by luminaries on JihadWatch:

Wellington | January 30, 2010 10:08 AM | Reply

For so many reasons and for so many years Muslims have made me so deeply skeptical of Islam that I can’t help but look upon this relief effort as being prompted first and foremost not by noble compassion but rather by the desire to insure conversion. If this sounds too cynical, I plead innocent here and direct guilt towards the Islamic world, whose motives no person of sense should ever trust.

Battle_of_Tours | January 30, 2010 10:37 AM | Reply

Taqiyya at best, looks like humanitarian aid, but disguised as making over the world for Allah’s supremacy and Sharia. Beware of Islamics bearing gifts. Cynical with cause.

mp11 | January 30, 2010 12:16 PM | Reply

Muslims dont help = Evil Muslims

Muslims help = Evil Muslims

gravenimage | January 30, 2010 1:03 PM | Reply

A day or two ago, I mentioned that if Muslims were finally going to help with the relief effort in Haiti, then good for them.

I’m not usually so clueless—not anymore, anyway—but I have to admit, this being an opportunity for Da’wa did not really occur to me at the time.

Here’s a generally good article on the subject from Debbie Schlussel:

http://www.debbieschlussel.com/15625/haiti-islamic-relief-the-scientologists/

There is, however, a fair bit of silly moral equivalence between Islam and Scientology presented here. I *am not* a fan of Scientology, but there’s no death for apostasy with them if you decide you no longer want to hang out with Tom Cruise. I wish I could say the same about Islam.

From Hermit, above:

In my city in England, squads of muslims with islamic posters are out in force – stading outside shopping centres with buckets collecting for Haiti.
………………

I wonder how much of that money is actually going to Haiti, and how much will just be considered “Zakat”, and go for whatever Muslim cause—including Jihad—that the “charities” see fit?

Spirit Of 1683 replied to comment from mp11 | January 30, 2010 1:27 PM | Reply

Off you go back to Iran parasite, and stop sponging off us, workshy Mohammedan troll.

mp11 | January 30, 2010 1:55 PM | Reply

“Off you go back to Iran parasite, and stop sponging off us, workshy Mohammedan troll.”

Its good to see you disagree with what I said, so you think the Muslims who are helping haitians are not evil and are doing it out of the goodness of their heart, right?

I dont expect you to be able to put together a proper coherent reply which doesnt involve ad hominems and strange assumptions about my birthplace…but what the hell?

joeblough | January 30, 2010 2:05 PM | Reply

It just goes to show that charity is not a primary virtue.

It may be a secondary or tertiary virtue, or perhaps a value, but not a primary virtue as such.

Thugs and thieves are often fond of charitable giving as a way of making a respectable face in public and/or providing themselves with some ego grats for their material magnanimity.

In this particular case, Haiti is an open wound for the maggots to dig into and feed on.

By the way, why aren’t those bastards being run off?

Oh, oh … I forgot. Our Dear Leader, Red Hussein, has made a comittment to combating negative stereotypes of mohammedanism.

What do you want to be that he knows about this and possibly even had a hand in it.

Wellington replied to comment from mp11 | January 30, 2010 3:37 PM | Reply

Well, what do you expect? Followers of any totalitarian ideology when they are seemingly showing compassion should never be taken by sensible people as engaging in only charitable behavior. Sensible people know that ideologues (and yes, Muslims are as much ideologues as Marxists and Neo-Nazis) most always are motivated by a hidden agenda, i.e., the promotion of their belief system. Hey, this ain’t rocket science, just simple math, like your equations in your 12:16 P.M. post.

Kuffar_England replied to comment from gravenimage | January 30, 2010 3:40 PM | Reply

They are collecting in my city in England too. Same buckets and posters.

I wonder if they have registered with the UK authorities as a “charity”? Fake “charities” occur all the time. Perish the thought that those whom the Qur’an describes as the “best of people” would even think of doing such a thing.

I too, wonder where the money is actually going. Buckets with cash in them would be just too easy to “divert” to another cause.

mp11 | January 30, 2010 4:42 PM | Reply

“Hey, this ain’t rocket science, just simple math, like your equations in your 12:16 P.M. post.”

Exactly, if Muslims hadnt sent money they would have been trashed on here as evil Muslims and now that they have sent money they are trashed on here as evil muslims.

Wellington replied to comment from mp11 | January 30, 2010 5:07 PM | Reply

You are determined to remain clueless, aren’t you? Endeavor next time taking my full comment into account before commenting on it. Go ahead, try and rip my ENTIRE 3:37 P.M. post apart. Address all of it, not just a portion of it.

What’s so humorous here is that the equations you put forward are valid but you think they confirm narrow-mindedness by those who despise Islam, when, in fact, it is you who is the intellecutally diminutive one possessed of an insouciance that is risible in the first degree. My strong guess is that you’ll never get it. You haven’t to date, now have you?

PMK replied to comment from unbeliever1 | January 30, 2010 5:18 PM | Reply

“A few on the fringes” are all it takes.

mp11 | January 30, 2010 5:20 PM | Reply

“Well, what do you expect? Followers of any totalitarian ideology when they are seemingly showing compassion should never be taken by sensible people as engaging in only charitable behavior.”

Muslims, as followers of a totalitarian ideology, cannot be expected to exhibit purely altruistic behaviors.
“Sensible people know that ideologues (and yes, Muslims are as much ideologues as Marxists and Neo-Nazis) most always are motivated by a hidden agenda, i.e., the promotion of their belief system.”

Muslims. as ideologues, are assumed to be motivated by proselytism, including in instance when they exhibit altruistic behavior.

baest | January 30, 2010 5:56 PM | Reply

What’s the deal with the Pepsi and Guinness banners?

Wellington replied to comment from mp11 | January 30, 2010 6:18 PM | Reply

Thank you for confirming my overall point which is that any Muslim generosity to non-Muslims is not motivated by a kind of Mother Teresa love but rather by an agenda. See why Islam is becoming more and more despised by more and more non-Muslims with each passing year?

Islam has had a run of it for a few decades now, whereby most ordinary Western folk were prepared to give it the benefit of the doubt, but those days are almost over (even a majority of the extremely tolerant Dutch are sick of Islam). 9/11, tedious Muslim arguments about the importance of “context,” Muslim word games with terms like “innocent,” actual reading of the Koran by non-believers (which has not only putrid sentiments in it but clearly erroneous ones such as Alexander the Great living to an old age (Sura 18) and the Jews believing that Ezra is the Messiah (Sura 9), Muslim terrorism worldwide on virtually a daily basis, and revelation of just how psychopathic and sexually perverted Mohammed actually was (confirmed by Muslim sources which stupidly brag about it) have all insured with each passing year that more millions of non-Muslims are aware of just how fucked up Islam really is.

And that’s why I think that Islam is eventually headed to oblivion, but not before it does a lot more damage, just as other totalitarian ideologies have before they have finally become the stuff for fringe human beings and for no one else. Islam’s final legacy is to be assigned to that collection pile which contains the greatest and stupidest of human errors. It’s so deserved.

Fancy Dan | January 30, 2010 6:45 PM | Reply

After the initial earthquake in Haiti i’m not sure which of the two following aftershocks were the more harrowing for the survivors.
The inevitable : Part 1
The luminaries of Film, Stage, Music rush forward to the first available TV network and tell us unaffected lay-abouts that we aren’t doing enough to help the poor souls of Hawaii (or where ever that AWFUL thing happened) so give money and lots of it and you might save many floundering careers into the bargin.
Have these people never heard of anonymous donations ? – Of course not !
The inevitable : Part 2
The luminaries of the Muslim world, albeit slow off the mark, get in on the act by swapping bottles of water in return for a quick lecture as to why infidels have been so misguided all these years.
Stepping on and over females to find a nice area to pray in, one does ask, who’s water were they giving out anyway ?

Some of them must have been watching the news, oh yea ! and the Jihadist’s.

Fancy Dan | January 30, 2010 7:08 PM | Reply

Sorry, i forgot, a special thanks to Islamic Relief USA for the quite deliberate extended footage of the Guinness Beer Tent amidst the carnage.

Christian Soldier replied to comment from unbeliever1 | January 30, 2010 8:26 PM | Reply

“Islam doesn’t have a ghost of a chance establishing itself
in the Caribbean.The Christian faith goes too deep.
Maybe a few on the fringes may be persuaded.”

I would not be so quick to think that the scourge of Islam could not gain a strong foot hold in Haiti.

The Nation of Haiti has been infected with other demonic teachings, Voodoo.

An estimated 80 percent of Haiti’s 8.8 million people practice Voodoo to some extent, including many who claim to be Catholic or another religion.

“Muslims noticeable in cities”

“But followers of Islam have recently stepped into the
public eye. Muslim men distinctive in their kufi
headwear and finely groomed beards, and women in
traditional scarves, are now seen on the streets of
several cities.”

“Nawoon Marcellus, who comes from the northern city of
San Raphael, recently became the first Muslim elected
to the Chamber of Deputies, Haiti’s lower house of
parliament.”

http://www.flickr.com/photos/nygus/3684374231/

http://www.webster.edu/~corbetre/haiti/voodoo/islam.htm

http://www.islamawareness.net/Fastest/haiti.html

Voodoo and Islam both originate from the same source, the Devil himself.

gravenimage replied to comment from baest | January 30, 2010 9:03 PM | Reply

baest wrote:

What’s the deal with the Pepsi and Guinness banners?
……………………..

A lot of companies helping with the relief effort have sent tents and trucks and other items emblazoned with their logos. Some people consider this a bit tacky, but it doesn’t really bother me that much. It’s not as though they are only helping victims who have been past customers or anything.

Often these are already existing items—like the tents—that the companies normally use for concerts and festivals.

champ replied to comment from Christian Soldier | January 30, 2010 9:16 PM | Reply

“Voodoo and Islam both originate from the same source, the Devil himself.”

Agreed, CS.

Christian Soldier replied to comment from champ | January 30, 2010 9:26 PM | Reply

Here is an interesting article concerning Haiti and voodoo.

http://www.godlikeproductions.com/forum1/message965211/pg1

Christian Soldier | January 30, 2010 9:41 PM | Reply

Islamic Rituals Voodoo
By Abul Kasem

http://www.godlikeproductions.com/forum1/message493957/pg1

Christian Soldier | January 30, 2010 9:49 PM | Reply

For some reason the previous post with this link has a problem.

This one should be ok

http://www.godlikeproductions.com/forum1/message493957/pg1

champ replied to comment from Christian Soldier | January 30, 2010 10:48 PM | Reply

“When Muhammad finished ablution, Gabriel sprinkled water on Muhammad’s private parts.”

Yeah, in your DREAMS I did that, Muhammad!!

Angrily,
Gabriel

Christian Soldier replied to comment from champ | January 30, 2010 11:22 PM | Reply

He should have sprinkled hydrochloric acid.

That would have ended Mohammed’s career as a child raping pedophile.

livingengine replied to comment from mp11 | January 31, 2010 12:20 AM | Reply

There is nothing untoward about criticizing Islamist groups using disaster relief to their own advantage.

Many have commented on this in the past.

Islamist groups have long used charity to boost their support amongst poor Muslims . . .“These groups have seized the opportunity to raise their profiles by painting their names on the side of refugee tents and flying flags from the roofs of trucks carrying blankets and other supplies and to “reactivate themselves” and improve their image among the masses.. The Islamists are, as the saying goes “doing well by doing good.” “

“[It is] part of their strategy to achieve political power.”

A further concern that arises from the government allowing militant groups to fill the administrative void in quake‐affected areas is the increased penetration of these groups into other government sectors. Education, for example, is a particular concern. . . .it is easier to set up a madrasa than it is to rebuild a school.
http://fletcher.tufts.edu/al_nakhlah/archives/fall2006/byramji.pdf

Other concerns include: recruiting orphans for the jihad, weapons smuggling, misallocation of funds, money laundering, and harassment of other relief workers.
This is a feature of Islamist operations that has been remarked on by the former President of Pakistan, among many others, but you, mp11, don’t know about it?

Spirit Of 1683 replied to comment from mp11 | January 31, 2010 1:29 AM | Reply

Twit. Muslims are there to spread Islam, not help. The only thing they’re supplying is Korans. Nothing else. They’re trying to spread the wicked teachings of Islam to Haiti and create there the sort of Saudi or Pakistani society you’d obviously like to see in the West. So off you go to Pakistan, Sharia-loving barbarian d**khead.

avraidire | January 31, 2010 4:34 AM | Reply

http://www.avraidire.eu/2010/01/fitna-version-francaise-geert-wilders-part-12/

Fitna, version française Geert Wilders part 1/2

sITE EVANGELIQUE FRANCOPHONE VIDEO

Stephen Gash SIOE England replied to comment from mp11 | January 31, 2010 8:24 AM | Reply

At least you undertsand.

Muslims going in to “hekp” while promoting Islam are like the Ku Klux Klan going in to “help” wearing hoods and brandishing burning crosses.

champ replied to comment from Christian Soldier | January 31, 2010 8:50 AM | Reply

Indeed! …lol

gravenimage replied to comment from avraidire | January 31, 2010 9:35 AM | Reply

Avraidire wrote:

Fitna, version française Geert Wilders part 1/2
……………….

It’s good to know that Fitna is now available in French.

Avraidire, Robert Spencer is currently having his “Blogging the Qu’ran” series translated into Spanish. Perhaps you—or someone you know—could have the series translated into French?

ElizaDoolittle | January 31, 2010 12:21 PM | Reply

Izloom’s propagation and proliferation strategy makes perfect sense, logistically. If there is one thing that these a-holes can think clearly about its about how to spread there message of submission to an ideology of barbarism.This might sound perverse but when these barbarians try to procreate with the Haitian natives they will be easy candidates for HIV themselves. This is the only redeeming quality to this invasion.
BTW, I personally do not subscribe to the theory that Voodoo is about the “Devil”; the religion is not about this, but the bottom line here is that the “Devil” is a Christian concept so that negates the understanding that followers of voodoo are conjuring the “Devil”. I would say that if there is anything inherently “evil” about Haiti it is the evil of believing that political demagogues will somehow save the masses from their wretched lives. I would say that Haiti’s lack of up-to-par civilized modes of existence has to do with its subscribing to a belief system that says it is OK to be continually at the mercy of leaders whose only purpose is to use them as scapegoats and pawns for their own agendas. Now, izloom will be the next group of con-artists and whore-masters.

Isabellathecrusader | January 31, 2010 12:26 PM | Reply

Christian Soldier, thanks for the above. I pasted it into the comments section of one of “Hijab” Heageny’s articles about Rifqa over at the Columbus Dispatch online. One guy already red it and thanked me for it. If we can expose the idiocy and super control of Islam in a way that makes people laugh, we may be onto something. This was superb. Again, thank you.

Christian Soldier replied to comment from Isabellathecrusader | January 31, 2010 1:38 PM | Reply

As you can see being a Muslim is not so easy. Many intricate rules to follow.

Except for bathing. Some simple dirt will do just fine.

“In Islam, it is not compulsory to bathe every day. It is quite all right not to bathe for the six days of a week. The only recommended bath is the bathing on Fridays, to attend the juma prayer, although a perfect ablution might do, in case there is shortage of water, or due to inconvenience. When no water is available tayammum will do. This procedure (tayammum) consists of rinsing oneself with dirt or dust. Imam Nasai (1.316) writes that a Muslim can bathe in dirt and dust simply by rolling his body as a camel or a beast does.”

LouManati | January 31, 2010 3:27 PM | Reply

For all the liberals out there that keeping saying “Islam is a religion of peace”, let us look at that peaceful book the Qur’an:

Sura 7:166 “When in their insolence they transgressed all prohibitions, we said the them “be ye apes, despised and rejected” the “religion of peace” speaking about Jewish people

Sura 2:65 “And well ye knew those amongst you who transgressed in the matter of the Sabbath: We said to them “Be ye apes, despised and rejected.” again, the “religion of peace” speaking about Jewish people

You Muslims are out of God’s will. May you come to know the Lord Jesus Christ as your personal Savior. Your “friendly” Allah, will not and never will save ANYONE..

Robert Spencer with loon Pamela Geller

Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer are joining forces (a regular occurrence) and holding an “event” at the  Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) slated for February 19 from 10 am until noon. CPAC is billed as the “preeminent yearly conservative gathering” and will have such worthies as Glenn Beck (who will be the keynote speaker), Andrew Breitbart, John Ashcroft, Rush Limbaugh, Rick Santorum and many others. The sponsors include such far right-wing organizations as the David Horowitz Freedom Center, the John Birch Society, Focus on the Family, the Heritage Foundation and others.

I imagine there will be a cadre of undercover liberals and documentarians, the Max Blumenthal’s of the world who will cover all the craziness that we are accustomed to from right-wingers. If he is there, I am sure one of his exposes will be covering the anti-Muslim loonacy sure to be on display at the Geller-Spencer event.

Pamela Geller brought to our attention the event over on her website Atlas Drugs, oh excuse me Atlas Shrugs in which she practically begs for donations because she complains that she is not funded by big right wing groups or persons (just ask your buddy Spencer he gets paid a pretty penny by the David Horowitz Freedom Foundation). We can’t confirm whether Geller gets funded but it is a little hard to believe she doesn’t have her hand deep into the pockets of the right-wing hate racket.

Here is the hilarious post from Pam replete with her usual over the top verbiage and endless hyperbole:

Last year in an unprecedented event at CPAC, Geert Wilders met Joe Sixpack, and it was good.

This year, Atlas does not disappoint. We are ratcheting it up a few notches. Robert Spencer and I are organizing a joint venture to educate, elucidate and scare the bejeezus outta ya. (emphasis added)

Pam sums up in one sentence what her and her friends’ agenda is with regards to “Mooslims” and “Islam,” “to scare the bejeezus outta ya!” Can it be any clearer they are using the buffoons on their site, manipulating them with fear mongering, but don’t expect the zombies who are deluded into following her to budge because it seems they love a good horror show.

THIS IS A NOT A CPAC EVENT – THIS IS A GELLER-SPENCER EVENT.

Jihad: The Political Third Rail
What they’re not telling us about the war on America

It’s Friday, February 19th from 10 am until Noon.

We are still firming our speakers up, but here is a list of the invited:

Wafa Sultan [confirmed]
Doctor, author, “A God Who Hates”

Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff [confirmed]
Criminal complaint filed for  “hate speech” under Austrian law
Human Rights Activist

Steve Coughlin [confirmed]
Leading Islamic Specialist at the Pentagon, who was fired by Islamic infiltrators

Simon Deng
Former Slave in Sudan, leading human rights activist against jihad

Lt. Colonel Allen West [confirmed]
Running for Congress, Future Leadership

Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer

Invited:

Rifqa Bary [invited]
teenage apostate

Kurt Westergaard [invited]
Danish cartoonist targeted for death by axe-wielding Muslim

The latest assassination attempt on Kurt Westergaard’s life by an axe-wielding Muslim (in his home with his five year old granddaughter present) has thrown an axe a wrench into this …………

Rifqa Bary is a free American. She should be free to speak anywhere she wants. Should she not?

Plan to be at CPAC this year, or at least in DC, and set aside Friday, February 19th from 10 am to noon. I need your help getting it off the ground. I will not be charging for attendance, but it costs.

No one underwrites me. No one. Not a penny.

All of these right wing organizations have donors, big donors, small donors …. and fund raising arms. They are, by their very nature, fund raising machines. Not Atlas.

Huge thanks to BigFurHat for the killer art ………. he’s da best!

If you can contribute, please do (and those who have — G-d bless you).

The woman is after money! Does she have any self-respect at all?

Look at the all stars on the list of confirmed speakers, they include Wafa Sultan (bettter known as Wafa Stalin) who we exposed as a hateful, lying poseur playing off the ignorance of her audience and also an advocate for Nuking Muslims.  There is the Austrian, Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff whose claim to fame is that she has been charged with hate speech for saying “Muslims rape children” and believes that Austria’s culture is in danger because of Islam. There is Steve Coughlin who we are supposed to believe was an Islam specialist and was “fired from the Pentagon” by so-called “Islamic infiltrators.” Maybe these infiltrators were also the Islamic congressional interns who were “spying” on America for the world-wide Khaliphate? There is Simon Deng who seems to have taken his horrible experience in the Sudan into an all out crusade against Muslims, and of course there is the Biblical Literalist Allen West, the near court-martialed former lieutenant running for Congress on the platform that Palestine should not exist and that all Palestinians should move to Jordan.

Seems like a swell bunch doesn’t it? Well it doesn’t end there, they also “invited” Fathima Rifqa Bary, the poor girl whose life they have constantly intefered in and labeled as the “apostate.” Throughout the whole saga involving Rifqa Bary it is instructional to note that it is only Pam’s group that have been eager to label her an “apostate,” none of those evil Mooslim organizations, ISNA, CAIR, MPAC, ICNA, MAS, Muslim Advocates, etc. have ever called her “apostate.”

So if you want to get together to see a group of flunkies, bigots, charlatan’s and clowns then don’t miss out on this show February 19th that will “scare the beejuzus outta ya!”

Robert Spencer next to his Perpetual Serf Pamela Geller

Terry Krepel had an excellent piece on Pamela Geller in the Huffington Post, though what is “pretty” about Pamela?

Check it out:

Pamela Geller’s Pretty Hate Machine

Newsmax has had a bad run of late with its columnists.

Longtime writer John L. Perry penned a column advocating a military coup against President Obama; Newsmax removed it after a public outcry, and Perry hasn’t written for Newsmax since. After giving Bernard Kerik a column and spending months trying to rehabilitate his reputation amid corruption allegations, quietly put him aside after he pleaded guilty to several of the charges.

Then Pat Boone, in a Nov. 2 column, described Obama and his administration as “political voracious varmints” who must be dealt with, “figuratively, but in a very real way,” by “tenting” the White House the way one does with a house infested by rodents; Newsmax had to pull that one too, though Boone has continued as a columnist. (WorldNetDaily, meanwhile, does not object to Boone’s eliminationist rhetoric, as the column still resides there.)

So who’s next? We nominate Pamela Geller as the next Newsmax columnist most likely to have a claim quietly retracted.

Pamela Geller

Newsmax officially added Geller as a columnist in August. Her bio claims that at her regular blog, Atlas Shrugs, she is “bringing you the news you will not hear from the mainstream media, covering little-reported events of great import.” But of course, there’s no attention given to the wacky extremist views she holds.Geller — a former associate publisher of the New York Observer formerly married to a New York car dealer that owned a dealership linked not only to an alleged fraud scam but the killing of two police officers (the dealership is listed as partly owned by Geller, who has denied any knowledge of or involvement in the alleged scam) — is rabidly anti-Obama, anti-Islam and pro-birther. She has also had dalliances with European fascists and promoted the far-right British National Party. (Geller doesn’t think these folks are “neofascist,” apparently feeling that their anti-Islamic activism excuses their political leanings.) Geller’s Newsmax columns reflect these views.

Indeed, Geller — who once notoriously published a video blog of herself in a bikini — is one pretty hate machine.

Her very first Newsmax column, on Aug. 4, went deep into birther territory, rehashing discredited and irrelevant conspiracies regarding Barack Obama’s birth certificate. Geller spent a needlessly large amount of space on the case of Jay McKinnon, who in July 2008 posted what he claimed to be Obama’s birth certificate on the Daily Kos website that, according to Geller, “even to the layman’s eye, it was obvious that the Kos COLB had been altered.” Geller touted how the Israel Insider website broke the news that McKinnon “implicated himself in the production of palpably fake Hawaii birth certificate images.”

Missing from Geller’s account is McKinnon’s side of the story. In an interview posted on Daily Kos, McKinnon said that he posted the fake certificate to serve as a magnet for conspiracy theorists (like Geller). McKinnon also discussed Israel Insider, a right-wing, anti-Obama blog with ties to WorldNetDaily’s similarly right-wing, anti-Obama reporter Aaron Klein:

Opendna: Reuven Koret, publisher of Isreal Insider, has written that you admitted to forgery.

Jay McKinnon: Reuven Koret wrote me a number of emails before he published his article. Using a kind of Good Cop/Bad Cop style he alternatively offered to keep my statements off the record, and threatened to report me to DHS and CSIS and reveal my identity before an audience larger than DailyKos. When I asked for his questions, he sent me five which required that I both admit to a crime and suggested I implicate other innocent people (including Markos Moulitsas and unidentified members of the Obama Campaign staff) in a conspiracy. I regarded his overtures as a form of journalistic blackmail, in which I either told him what he wanted to hear or he would libel me on his website.

I informed him that I believed his article was based on libel and provided him with this statement: “I believe there is overwhelming evidence that Senator Obama is a natural born US Citizen, and I have no evidence to contradict that belief.”

Evidently that wasn’t what he wanted to hear because a few days he published his article omitting that quote.

Opendna: What do you think of Reuven Koret?

Jay McKinnon: He appears to write under his own name and is skillful at his craft: smearing his ideological opponents. I would not call him a journalist, investigative or otherwise. An internet pundit, maybe. Probably just a blogger who thinks writing scurrilous things about Senator Obama is good for site traffic.

Geller then went on to claim that the birth certificate posted on Obama’s campaign website is a “horrible forgery,” according to the analysis of “Techdude.”Geller summarized “Techdude’s” credentials:

He is an active member of the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners, the American College of Forensic Examiners, the International Society of Forensic Computer Examiners, the International Information Systems Forensics Association — the list goes on.

He is also board certified as a forensic computer examiner, a certificated legal investigator, and a licensed private investigator. He has been performing computer based forensic investigations since 1993 (although back then it did not even have a formal name yet) and he has performed countless investigations since then.

Only, not so much. Not only has “Techdude’s” analysis of the birth certificate been discredited, his credentials have been called into question as well.

Geller also referenced other baseless Obama conspiracies, such as “the passport on which he traveled to Pakistan in 1981.” Surprisingly, though, she dismissed the Kenyan birth certificate that WorldNetDaily desperately wanted to believe was real as an “obvious forgery.”

Geller then complained about the “veritable birth certificate circus” for distracting right-wingers, blaming not ringleaders like herself for this situation but … Obama:

Let’s not cloud the issue. Obama’s COLB was altered. He should produce the vault copy. Then the opposition can get on with the business of stopping his destruction of the economy and his weakening of American hegemony as he pursues his disastrous foreign policy.

Geller doesn’t seem to comprehend the possibility that the “circus” could easily end when circus clowns like herself choose to stop telling lies.

When a report surfaced in October purporting to describe a college thesis Obama wrote, Geller was among the right-wingers to promote it at her blog — at least, until it was proven to be a fraud. Writing about it in her Oct. 27 Newsmax column, Geller not only embraces the fake-but-accurate defense — that Obama could have plausibly written it — but also invents a way to blame Obama for the whole thing:

If Barack Obama would release his Columbia thesis, this latest media pseudo-controversy would never have happened. But now the tittering hyenas on the left are howling at the moon over the satire of Obama’s thesis that was taken for the real thing by Rush Limbaugh, as well as by Denis Keohane at The American Thinker and Michael Ledeen at Pajamas Media.

The fake thesis has Obama criticizing the Constitution, saying that “the so-called Founders did not allow for economic freedom. While political freedom is supposedly a cornerstone of the document, the distribution of wealth is not even mentioned. While many believed that the new Constitution gave them liberty, it instead fitted them with the shackles of hypocrisy.”

That sounded to me like something Obama would have said, so I cited it and ran it with it at my blog AtlasShrugs.com. But when I couldn’t find the actual link to what purported to be the “first ten pages” of Obama’s thesis, I took it down.

But bear in mind one thing: as Michael Ledeen says, “it worked because it’s plausible.”

Funny how the same defense right-wingers hated when CBS employed it in the case of the Bush National Guard papers is embraced by them when they’re caught repeating bogus information.

Geller went on to falsely portray Obama’s statements in a 2001 radio interview in order to fit her preconceived script that Obama wants to redistribute the nation’s wealth:

He said that it was a tragedy that the Constitution wasn’t radically reinterpreted to force redistribution of the wealth: “I am not optimistic,” he said, “about bringing about redistributive change through the courts. The institution just isn’t structured that way.” He praised the civil rights movement and its “litigation strategy in the court” for succeeding in vesting “formal rights in previously dispossessed peoples.”

In fact, as ConWebWatch documented when other right-wingers did the same thing, Obama never claimed it was a “tragedy that the Constitution wasn’t radically reinterpreted to force redistribution of the wealth.” What Obama called a tragedy was the civil rights movement’s reliance on the court system to bring about change instead of grassroots work.

Geller went on to write:

This was the fault of the Supreme Court and the Constitution itself: “But the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth and sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society. And to that extent as radical as people tried to characterize the Warren court, it wasn’t that radical.”

And that was because of the constraints of the Constitution: “It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution, at least as it’s been interpreted, and the Warren court interpreted it in the same way that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties.

“It says what the states can’t do to you, it says what the federal government can’t do to you, but it doesn’t say what the federal government or the state government must do on your behalf. And that hasn’t shifted.”

That’s a false interpretation as well. Obama never expressed a desire for the court to “break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution” during that interview, as Geller claimed; he was merely pointing out that it didn’t.

Sometimes Geller just explodes with visceral hatred for Obama, as she did in a Nov. 17 column on the decision to try suspected terrorist Khalid Shaikh Mohammed in a civilian court instead of a military court:

President Obama is dropping another O-bomb on America with the decision to try the masterminds of the shocking attack of Sept. 11, 2001, in a New York courtroom.

That’s right: Obama is trying to reduce the Sept. 11 act of war to a law enforcement issue. So our wartime enemy is going to face a civilian trial in New York City. It’s another O-bomb on American leadership.

[...]

America going on a witch hunt and prosecuting those who kept this country safe from people like Khalid Shiekh Mohammed, as Obama has announced he intends to do, sets back our moral authority. America turning her back on the jihad against women, Christian, Jews, and non-believers has set back America’s moral authority. America electing a radical for a President has set back America’s moral authority.

America electing an America-hater for president vanquished our moral authority.

[...]

This is yet another vile chapter in the Obama presidency. As long as he is president, the man will never stop punishing America for being so foolish as to elect him.

Geller hates Obama as much as she hates Islam. Here’s one of her anti-Muslim rants, from a Nov. 12 column:

We are witnessing an Islamized America. This is well beyond political correctness. We are enforcing Shariah. We will not insult Islam. That is Shariah. We self censor. That is Shariah. We disrespect ourselves, our nation, so that we might respect Islam. This is dhimmitude.

[...]

Every “Soldier of Allah” who goes jihad is an enemy combatant. Every devout Muslim who believes in the word of the Quran has his duty to Islam, her call to jihad. Hence this terrible act of war, the 14,363 Islamic attacks across the world since 9/11, and all of the relentless plots and plans to take down America in the past month alone. Devout Muslims should be prohibited from military service. Would Patton have recruited Nazis into his army?

One of Geller’s biggest cause celebres in her Newsmax column is Fathima Rifqa Bary, an Ohio teen who fled to a Florida pastor claiming her parents want to kill her for converting from Islam to Christianity. But Geller took a one-sided view of the Bary case, ignoring exculpatory evidence.

In an Aug. 13 column, Geller hyperbolically asserted: “Rifqa’s testimony is a plea to the free world to stand for its values and its principles. How far we have fallen when a young woman is pleading to be free in the land of the free, home of the brave. Rifqa Bary’s life hangs in the balance. The West should do everything in its power to save her.”But the full facts of the case diverge greatly from what Geller wrote. As Christianity Today reported, Bary’s story is being promoted by the pastor who whom she fled, Blake Lorenz, whom the girl found through Facebook, and the parents are telling a much different story:

The attorney representing Bary’s mother told Orlando-based 10TV News that they were “allowing [Bary] to explore her Christianity,” and that Bary wasn’t fearful until she met Pastor Lorenz, who holds Bary tightly throughout the video.

Meanwhile, Sgt. Jerry Cupp with the Columbus missing persons bureau disputes Bary’s claims, telling The Columbus Dispatch that Mohamed Bary has known about his daughter’s conversion for months and appears to be caring. And today, the attorney for Bary’s parents issued a statement that they have never threatened Bary: “If this case is perceived as a clash of religions, it is because Mr. Lorenz recklessly and without authorization put someone else’s child in front of television cameras to publicly renounce her previous faith,” McCarthy said in the statement. “The parents who love Rifqa are in the best position now to protect her from the mess that Mr. Lorenz has made.”

Further, as religious blogger Richard Bartholomew points out, the pastor to whom Bary fled, Blake Lorenz, “believes that he receives special personal messages from God about the imminent end of the world,” which raises questions about whether he’s exploiting Bary to promote his own ministry.

Christianity Today concluded:

Of course, believers can rejoice that this teenager has come to Christ in a cultural context in which it would be difficult to betray her parents’ teaching. And if Bary’s claims are true, we can also hope that her legal case is handled fairly and wisely, and that she finds support from Christian mentors and friends. But none of this requires that Christians be quick to use Bary’s claims to prove that Muslims — in this case, her parents and mosque leaders — are intent on killing Bary because their beliefs make them inherently violent.

That last point is exactly what Geller appears to want to push by ignoring the full story. indeed, Geller used an Aug. 17 column to defend Lorenz via misdirection: She doesn’t deny the accusation, asserting instead that Islam, “the group that silently approves of the murder of a daughter who shames her family by not wearing the proper head dress … or by choosing another religion (like Rifqa Bary),” is the real cult and not “the group that offers sanctuary to a poor threatened girl.”

Geller didn’t note that the claim of receiving personal messages directly from God is arguably de facto evidence of a cult leader, nor did she mention that Ohio police have said that Bary’s parents have known about Bary’s conversion for months and “appear to be caring.”In an Aug. 24 column, Geller accused the “media shills and Islamic machinery in the United States” of distorting the Bary case. But of course, Geller was still hurling her own distortions.

Geller’s main target of ire is Orlando Sentinel columnist Mike Thomas, whose column pointing the anti-Muslim bias surrounding the Bary case Geller immediately distorted: “Thomas got nothing right. Not one detail. Further, at no point did he consider Rifqa’s testimony. At no point did he consider the consequences of Rifqa’s testimony. At no point did he consider the risk to Rifqa’s life.”

Actually, Thomas got numerous facts correct — facts Geller would rather not have get out, such as pointing out that Bary’s father is “a middle-class jeweler with no documented history of abuse and no record of radical actions or beliefs” and noting pictures of Bary in a cheerleader outfit: “Somehow I can’t imagine a Muslim extremist allowing his daughter to wear short skirts and shake pompoms in front of a crowd of infidels.”

Geller responded to that last point with the nonsequitur: “Thomas knows nothing of honor killings in the West.”

Geller went on to complain: “The media reported only the parents’ Islamist narrative — giving Rifqa’s story no air time or ink. They repeated the lies over and over again.” But Geller does not know that the parents are lying, or that Rifqa is telling the truth. (Nor do we, for that matter.) Yet Geller has already made up her mind to promote her anti-Islam agenda, which of courses he denies she’s doing, insisting instead that “there was an anti-Christian bias. The mainstream media vilified the good Christians who provided sanctuary to Rifqa, who sought only to escape her father’s threat to kill her.” Again, Geller failed to mention the cult-like tendencies of the “good Christians who provided sanctuary to Rifqa.”

Further contradicting herself, Geller concludes with an anti-Islamic rant:

Salman Rushdie, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Wafa Sultan, Geert Wilders: these truth tellers live under 24-hour guard because of Islamic death threats, which they received because they spoke the truth about Islam. Rifqa Bary has committed a far worse crime from the Islamic perspective: the crime of apostasy. Her testimony is far more dangerous to the stealth jihadists in America.

Rifqa Bary is the highest value target in America. She should be under 24-hour guard. And she should be given a fair shake in the media.

And she’s accusing other people of distorting the case?

Similarly, Geller’s Sept. 14 Newsmax column is one long screed against Newsweek for doing what Geller won’t — tell both sides of the Rifqa Bary story. Geller complained that the Newsweek stated that “Muslim scholars say that in Islam, there’s no such thing as an honor killing for apostasy,” asserting that “Newsweek was conflating two distinct Islamic practices: honor killing and the killing of apostates.” She didn’t mention that it appears that Bary herself is the one conflating the two, as news reports featuring references to “honor killings” indicate. As Richard Bartholomew noted in August:

The girl gives a rather strange interpretation of what an “honour killing” is for; rather than being the remedy for a perceived dishonour suffered by a family, she tells the journalist that to kill her would be an especially ”great honour” because she is the the first Christian in her family for “150 generations” and it would show her family’s love for Allah (Lorenz concurs with a “yes” at 5:03). This seems to me to be a garbled “Christianized” understanding of the phenomenon, making it into something like a human sacrifice.

Geller went on to complain that Newsweek described a “33-page memorandum that Rifqa’s attorney, John Stemberger, filed about the Noor Islamic Center’s connection with Islamic terrorists and radical elements” as being filled with “innuendo and provocative allegations.” In fact, Newsweek supports its claims:

Among them: that the center is connected to an FBI terror probe (which the FBI denies) and that its CEO has connections to the Muslim Brotherhood (which, along with every other allegation, the Noor Center denies). The mosque is actually regarded as mainstream and regularly hosts interfaith events.

Geller’s sole source for contradicting the Newsweek article is “Jamal Jivanjee, Rifqa’s friend and confidante.” But Geller offered no independent confirmation of these claims; Jivanjee is clearly too close to the situation to be an objective source of information. Yet Geller treated his claims as incontrovertible truth.

Why is Geller so afraid of the other side being told? That she is so intent on trying to discredit an article that commits the apostasy (as far as Geller is concerned) of telling both sides of the story belies a certain insecurity about the side of the story she’s on.

Geller again declares of Rifqa: “As a high-profile apostate, she is Islamists’ highest value target right now.” If she’s “high-profile,” it’s anti-Muslim activists like Geller that made her one. Which means she’s partially culpable for any harm that comes Rifqa’s way.

Geller’s Dec. 2 column purported to be outraged that Bary — who by this time had been returned to Ohio and placed in foster care — is “in imminent danger of being returned to her family” and is being “deprived of access to the phone and Internet as well as “pastoral guidance,” adding, “Convicts, murderers, rapists, and pedophiles all have access to ‘pastoral guidance.’” Given that the pastor to whom Bary fled believes that he receives special personal messages from God about the imminent end of the world, a lack of “pastoral guidance” is probably a good thing. Of course, Geller is silent about the pastor’s beliefs.

Geller also repeated unsupported claims of hostile Muslims, alluding to “powerful and influential Islamic supremacists” and “myriad busts for jihad activity in recent weeks.” She also again treated “close friend and fellow ex-Muslim” Jamal Jivanjee as a credible source, even though he’s clearly too close to the case to be objective. Indeed, Geller quoted Jivanjee aping her: “If you are incarcerated in an American prison today, you have the right to have a visit from a pastor. Rifqa Bary does not have this most basic right that most criminals have today.”

Geller summed up by claiming that Bary is “isolated, alone, and in danger of being returned to Islamic jihadists who believe apostates from Islam should be killed. What has happened to America?”

The facts, however, are different than what Geller suggests. As the Columbus Dispatch has reported, no credible threats to Bary have been found by authorities in either Florida or Ohio, and Ohio officials are attempting to work out a solution between Bary and her family. A caseworker wrote that there are “severe differences between the parents’ and Rifqa’s perceptions of what has occurred.”

Putting fearmongering before the truth, however, is what Geller does. And that — coupled with her hyperbolic attacks — makes Geller the odds-on favorite to be the next Newsmax columnist to write something her publisher will have to walk back or retract.

Geert Wilders

It seems like Geert Wilders racism and anti-Muslim discourse is going to catch up with him, but don’t hold your breath.

This article is from the Morroco Post and is littered with a lot of grammatical mistakes but it is informative:

By Rachid Chelouah\ Cambridge \ England
The most popular Dutch lawmaker Geert Wilders asked judges today 13 January 2010 during his first meeting at court for mitigation to reduce the penalty regarding his accusation of Islamophobia.

The far-right Dutch politician who is known for his hate for Muslims and Islam and who was once denied entry to the British territory   at London – Heathrow airport by the immigration officials because of his racist views towards the Islamic religion, asked judges to drop or reduce charges against him since his racist discourse is met with freedom of speech right.

The suspect is facing charges because of hate crime based on his intolerance and insulting Muslims as a group which makes of his trail very serious with few chances to be discharged or acquitted within the course of justice.

At Amsterdam District Court, Wilders tried to politicize his trial saying that the session was “the first day of a political trial” in an attempt to associate   his trail to political agenda of his party in a way to avoid or win the public support

The most popular politician in Netherland built his Freedom Party movement on anti-immigrant and anti-Islam principals while calling for banning the Quran in the Netherlands and deny entry to any immigrant to the country as well as taxing clothing commonly worn by Muslims, such as headscarves, because they “pollute” the Dutch landscape.

In retrospect to the year 2008, Geert Wilders linked Quran verses with terrorism and violence in his 17 minutes in length film “Fitna” . The MP Geert Wilders has been extended to include inciting hatred against Moroccans and non-Western immigrants

If found guilty Wilders could face a maximum sentence of two years in prison, though a fine of up to euro18, 500 ($26,800) can apply.

While the year was great and we had a lot of highs there were some pieces that didn’t get the attention that they truly deserved due to Loonwatch not being as well known at the time.

Here are a list of 10 pieces you may have missed but shouldn’t have, also take a look through our archives for any past articles:

Douglas Farah’s Delusional Delight

Douglas Farah

Doug, yet another so-called “investigative consultant” tries to link U.S. Muslim orgs to planet Zorbex, that global superpower operating in perfect coordination yet total secrecy to sneak in an evil empire.

M.Cherif Bassiouni Rips Fake Scholar Robert Spencer

Cherif Bassiouni

Robert Spencer, and his proxies such as Hugh Fitzgerald fail miserably trying to character assassinate M. Cherif Bassiouni, read them get ripped in the process.

Update: Robert Spencer Whines and Wimpers after being Exposed

Robert Spencer: Exposed

Update: Robert Spencer cries “bloody censorship” after he is exposed and the ALA canceled his near platform to spout anti-Muslimisms.

Rabbi Brad Hirschfield’s Double Speak

Rabbi Brad Hirschfield

Rabbi Hirschfield seems like a good guy but on his blog he bizarrely criticizes Muslim objections to an anti-Muslim hate film he himself trashes, as “crying wolf.”

ADL Contradicts its Goals by Supporting Fascist

Abe Foxman’s support of Avigdor Lieberman is quite troubling for a number of reasons, most glaringly for its contradiction to the goals preached by the ADL.

Tawfik Hamid: The Shemp of the Three Stooges

Tawfik Hamid

Previously we wrote about the Three Stooges of Islamophobia: Walid Shoebat, Zachariah Anani, and Kamal Saleem but we forgot about Shemp — Tawfik Hamid.

Steven Emerson: “Wowser”

Steven Emerson likes to pass himself off as a gumshoe Investigative Journalist but his antics reveal that he is a poor imitation of Inspector Gadget.

Update: Freedumb of Speech Summit-Defenders of Delusion

The Freedumb of Speech Summit descended into a predictable Hate Summit, but were you expecting otherwise?

Spate of Islamophobic Gang Attacks on Elderly Muslims of London

Three year old girl, traumatized from watching her grandfather's brutal murder

A spate of racially motivated gang attacks against Muslims culminate in the death of a sixty-seven year old man, who was clubbed to death in front of his now traumatized granddaughter.

Fascist Leaves Daniel Pipes “Elated”

Avigdor Lieberman

Lieberman’s extreme world view and rhetoric has left observers around the world, including many Israelis, shocked and frightened. Not so, Daniel Pipes. Lieberman has him “elated.”

————————————————————————————————–

And here is a free bonus since Rabbi Hirschfield, while having a loonie moment, does not qualify as a loon in our books:

Robert Spencer: Teaming up with Euro-Supremacists Again

Robert Spencer, erstwhile ally of neo-Fascists, friend to advocates of genocide, and all around anti-Muslim is once again basking in the light of his own, made up self-importance.

This time it centers around his recent trip to Germany where he gave a speech at a rally in Berlin.

It has been a crazy 2009, we began our little adventure here at Loonwatch about eight months ago to monitor and expose the comical and disgusting world of Islamophobia. In that time we have gathered a pretty formidable team: Emperor, Garibaldi, Mooneye, Danios, Zingel, Darter and the sporadic contributors American Sole and Barbel.

The year has been wacky and sad, we witnessed Islamophobic murders, violence, and incitement, the continuing repitition of the double standard of castigating all Islam for the crimes of a few Muslims in the media, we saw crazy conspiracy theories revolving around Barack Obama’s supposed “Mooslimness” increase, and much more and Loonwatch has been in the middle of it all, documenting and breaking it down.

We have taken on Robert Spencer and JihadWatch, for the past few years he had been either mostly ignored or left unscathed but through our exposes such as Zingel’s devastating revelation that Spencer’s site was connected to “F***Islam.com” and Danios’ thorough and explosive dissections of Spencer’s arguments he has been exposed for the hateful fraud that he is. It doesn’t take a genius to realize that Spencer is scared of Loonwatch, when there was an open challenge for him to rebut our refutations he slithered into silence.

We have documented the Blog Wars in the anti-Muslim blogosphere, the humiliation they had to deal with when we exposed how they had fallen for one conspiracy theory after another such as the insane Gaza mass wedding pedophilia conspiracy. From the Fathima Rifqa Bary case all the way to the Swiss minaret ban we have covered it all, and we can only promise that with the continued participation and support of our indefatigable readers we will keep bringing explosive exposes and incisive commentary on the loony world of Islamophobia!

Without further ado these are the top ten most popular pieces of 2009 from Loonwatch (we tallied this by posting those pieces that had the most traffic on the site):

1.)Pamela Geller: The Looniest Blogger Ever

Pam Geller is the looniest blogger ever. Quite a distinction, but she has earned it through her vigilant anti-Muslimism, constant Islamophobia and hatred of Obama.

2.)Fathima Rifqa Bary Needs to Read Her Bible; Final Word on Islam and Apostasy

Fathima Rifqa Bary’s pastor has convinced her that the Quran commands her to be killed for converting. In this expose we deal with the veracity of the claim.

3.)Anti-Muslim Blogosphere Runs Amuck: Forced to Eat Crow

The anti-Muslim, Islamophobic Blogosphere was riled up and accusing the world of turning a blind eye to Pedophilia but then they had to eat crow. See why.

4.)Geert Wilders Wants to Tax Women who Wear the Hijab

Geert Wilders, friend of Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller calls for a tax on Muslim women who wear the hijab. Where are the condemnations against this attack on the values of “Western Civilization?”

5.)Wafa Sultan is Better Known as Wafa Stalin

Wafa Sultan

Wafa Sultan advocates the nuking of Islamic countries whose religion she likens to Nazism. She also seconds Geert Wilders call to ban the Quran.

6.)The Church’s Doctrine of “Perpetual Servitude” was Worse than “Dhimmitude”

Robert Spencer next to his Perpetual Serf Pamela Geller

Robert Spencer can’t stop talking about “dhimmitude.” In this mini-book, we neutralize the argument by examining the Church’s doctrine of “Perpetual Servitude.”

7.)Temple University Rejects Geert Wilders

Temple University Rejects Geert Wilders

Temple University administrators allow Geert Wilders hate speech over the unanimous objection and rejection of the student body and faculty. (Updated)

8.)Muslim Americans Must Obey U.S. Laws; Nidal Hasan Disobeyed Islamic Doctrine

Major Nidal Malik Hasan

Islam enjoins believers to obey the laws of the land, which is why millions of Muslims seek to be upstanding and loyal Americans.

9.)Loonwatch Exclusive: Robert Spencer’s “f**kallah.com” & “f**kislam.com”

"Islam Scholar" Robert Spencer Exposed

A LoonWatch Exclusive takes a look at the latest scandal associated with the internet’s premiere anti-Muslim bigot.

10.)Debbie Schlussel and the Great Blog Wars

Debbie Schlussel

Debbie Schlussel has been described by the LATimes as a trigger happy anti-Muslim zealot, she is also a pioneer in the Great (Civil) Blog War.

From Left to Right: Andrew Bostom, Geert Wilders, Robert Spencer, Pamela Geller

One of our readers, isherif who if I recall has been commenting on our site for quite some time now really took the initiative and provided us with a cool short montage of some of our best hits. We really love it when readers interact with us and are pro-active in joining us in exposing Islamophobia.

Take a look and enjoy:

The Moral Contortionist

On November 25th, we wrote about a wacky article that the failed academic and full time Likud apologist, Daniel Pipes wrote for the Jerusalem Post, in which he argued that US Congressman Keith Ellison, intellectual Tariq Ramadan and President of Turkey Recep Tayyip Erdogan were a greater threat to Western Civilization than Al-Qaeda.

We wrote at the time,

According to the illogic of Pipes the greatest threat doesn’t come from Al-Qaeda, Ayatollah Khomeini or Nidal Hasan but rather from people like Dr. Tariq Ramadan and Congressman Keith Ellison. He accuses the two of being part of something he terms “Islamism 2.0.” This ridiculous term translates essentially into what Islamophobe Robert Spencer calls “Stealth Jihad,” or the subtle takeover of the West by peaceful, law-abiding Muslims who have a secret, sinister (stealth) goal to takeover the West and replace Democracy with Shariah law: in other words it’s a conspiracy theory.

Ayatollah Khomeini, Osama bin Laden, and Nidal Hasan represent Islamism 1.0, Recep Tayyip Erdogan (the prime minister of Turkey), Tariq Ramadan (a Swiss intellectual), and Keith Ellison (a US congressman) represent Islamism 2.0. The former kill more people but the latter pose a greater threat to Western civilization. (emphasis mine)

That Erdogan, Ramadan and Ellison can even be mentioned in the same sentence as equivalent to, or even more dangerous and threatening to the West than Bin Laden speaks volumes about Pipes’ preposterous agenda. Would Bin Laden have Turkey make peace with Armenia as Erdogan did? Would Bin Laden affirm Democracy as the way forward to better governance and equal rights as all three do? Would Bin Laden pledge to uphold the Constitution of the United States of America on Thomas Jefferson’s Qur’an as Keith Ellison did?

We never imagined Daniel Pipes would offer a response, as he usually isn’t too keen to get into a debate with anyone who challenges his weak and biased arguments. However, it seems this time Pipes couldn’t hold himself back. Prompted by a reader of his website, Aliya, who alerted Pipes to our rebuttal of his article, he responded by bringing the all too familiar response of those who have no arguments: comparing your subject to Hitler.

The questioner sounds like another loon that we know, Pamela Geller who surmised that Loonwatch was a George Soros funded website, but she takes it a step further and includes all the possible conspiracy theories she can think of, not only are we George Soros funded but we are an, “Islamist Jewish/Eurabian (apparently George Soros and Saudi funded) website.” I love these loons, if half of what they said were true (Alas, my meager pockets) we would be rolling in the dough!!  Soros and company we are still waiting on our checks!

Notice that Daniel Pipes really didn’t answer any of the arguments or questions in our article, my guess is he probably didn’t even read it. He looked at the way Aliya framed the question and answered it by equating Keith Ellison, Tariq Ramadan and Recep Erodogan, all fierce proponents of Democracy to the greatest mass-murderer of the 20th century. Quite despicable, and it seems to have become Daniel Pipes’ forte to side on the side of the despicable.

The real question however is, if Pipes is truly interested in “protecting Western Civilization,” why is he as silent as a mouse on the real threat: the new little Hitler’s springing up all over Europe? Why does Pipes ignore neo-fascist Geert Wilders who calls for the deportation of Mooslims, banning of the Quran, taxing the hijab, etc? Why does he not speak out against the fascist Northern League, why does he give his tacit approval of the minaret ban in Switzerland which he charachterizes as a vote against “Islamization?”

The new amendment also validates and potentially encourages resistance to Islamization throughout the continent.

The reality is ever clearer, Mr.Pipes doesn’t give two hoots about Democracy, for him Democracy is convenient when it fits his agenda but should be discarded the moment it is no longer of use.

French Immigration Minister, Eric Besson

What is going on in Europe? Some have postulated that Europe is going through an identity crisis that challenges the core universal values that it trumpets, while others like the more conservative populists warn of a transformation of Europe at the hands of barbaric Muslim hordes remaking Europe into a Eurabia.

The dialogue has gotten heated, and we have seen a rise in neo-fascist and Euro-supremacist groups who are leading Europe into a dangerous direction of greater Islamophobia. This dialogue has a way of polluting reality which then effects mainstream parties who see this rise in anti-Muslim sentiment and for political gain drop their universal values and resort to cheap populist rhetoric.

At the same time that Muslims across Europe are integrated into their countries and identify with their nations to a greater extent than their fellow citizens, it seems their fellow citizens view them increasingly with suspicion (with the exception of Britain). This has lead to initiatives that are truly shocking to anyone who believes in Democracy, such as the recent ban on minarets in Switzerland which has echoed across Europe, from Italy to Denmark with parties such as the Northern League and Geert Wilders saying they will follow suit.

Recently France has been the scene of some of the most strident Islamophobia, and moves that from the perspective of an outsider smack of an attack on Democracy. We have heard of the desecration’s of Mosques and Muslim graves, but this has all happened in light of statements like this from French junior minister Nadine Morano,

In one of the many local debates scheduled to be held as part of the nationwide discussion on what it means to be French, the junior minister for families, Nadine Morano, suggested Tuesday to a young Muslim that he should change his behaviour. “What I want of a young Muslim is that he loves France when he lives here, finds work and does not speak in slang. And that he doesn’t wear his cap back to front.”

This discussion follows an earlier discussion around the niqab, or full face veil that a small minority of Muslim women wear in France. If you recall, Nicholas Sarkozy inaugurated the first presidential address to France’s parliament in decades with a call to ban the niqab.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s party, the UMP, says it will push for a law banning the full-face Islamic veil, according to its parliamentary leader Jean-François Copé.

“The issue is not how many women wear the burqa,” Copé wrote in an article in the right-wing newspaper Le Figaro. “There are principles at stake: extremists are putting the republic to the test by promoting a practice that they know is contrary to the basic principles of our country.”

It seems the principles of the French Republic do not include women choosing to wear what they want. Banning the niqab is not enough, just yesterday the French Immigration minister Eric Besson said that he wants to make it law that women who wear the face veil be denied citizenship and residency cards.

France’s immigration minister said Wednesday that he wants the wearing of Muslim veils that cover the face and body to be grounds for denying citizenship and long-term residence.

Eric Besson said he planned to take “concrete measures” regarding such veils, which are worn by a small minority of women in France but have become the object of a parliamentary inquiry into whether a ban should be imposed. Besson spoke during a hearing before the panel of lawmakers as their nearly six-month inquiry draws to a close.

Besson said he believed a formal ban on veils that cover the face and body seemed to him “unavoidable,” with a ban in public services as a minimum step. Whether such veils are banned or not, he said he intends to personally move forward to ensure that women wearing such veils and seeking French nationality or residence cards are denied.

“I want the wearing of the full veil to be systematically considered as proof of insufficient integration into French society, creating an obstacle to gaining (French) nationality,” he said. He said he would advise prefects, the highest state representative in the various French regions, that the wearing of such veils is a motive for not delivering 10-year residence cards.

Besson said he was prepared to put the measures before parliament to make them law. In November, Besson ordered a nationwide debate on the French identity, to conclude by the end of January with possible measures.

This raises a whole number of questions: what about those French women who were born in France, whether descended from immigrants or indigenous who have taken up the veil, will they have their citizenship revoked? What if a woman immigrated to France but didn’t wear a veil but decided to wear one since, will she be denied citizenship?

These anti-Democratic measures have opened a pandora’s box of bigotry and racism that is leading Europe into an essentialized discourse that doesn’t bode very well for the future, as one French Law maker said, “This brings back the ethnic vision of the nation, the one that took place at (the pro-Nazi puppet government of) Vichy.”

Wafa Sultan

Wafa Sultan, or as she is better known, Wafa Stalin eventually spoke at Ahavath Torah on December 3rd. Ahavath Torah, is the synagogue which is led by the “betraying” Rabbi Jonathan Hausman, an admirer of neo-Fascist Geert Wilders and all around sleaze ball.

Before Sultan’s speech at the synagogue, LoonWatch exposed the fact that she is a liar who is duping her audiences into believing her concocted biography, we also exposed her craven and insane desire to “nuke” and “crush” Muslims. She said at the time,

“I believe King Abdullah can change Islam overnight, but you need to put pressure on him to do it, and the same kind of pressure you put on Japan, you might need it“ at that moment someone from the audience interjects and asks, “atom bombs?” Wafa Sultan replies, “Yes. At some point the West will need to do it.” This statement is quite revealing considering how in 2007, at a right-wing David Horowitz funded conference called “Restoration Weekend,” Wafa Sultan said, “I will change 1.3 billion Muslims…they have to realize they have only two choices: to change or to be crushed.”

Yet, despite exposing her genocidal fantasies and calling on the synagogue and Rabbi Hausman to repudiate her they went ahead with the event, Hausman introduced Wafa as a “brave” woman and other similar cliches that we are used to hearing from Islamophobes when they are congratulating each other. In effect, they belligerently ignored and refused to address the facts that LoonWatch had uncovered about Wafa Stalin.

What was interesting about Wafa Sultan’s speech was that there seemed to be a veiled hint to LoonWatch in her opening remarks.

Special thanks to you Rabbi Hausman for your brave decision to invite me to speak for your congregation. I am certain it must be a great challenge for you to stand firm and defy the forces who easily surrender to ignorance, to political correctness and to intimidation.

How brave is it to invite a bigot and liar to your congregation to spout lies and hate? How much of a challenge was it for Rabbi Hausman to have Sultan speak at Ahavath Torah? Was there any resistance to the idea from congregants or administration at the synagogue? In reality what Sultan seems to be referencing is LoonWatch, as we called on Ahavath Torah and the Rabbi to repudiate her grisly comments and charlatan story.

Now that we are exercising our freedom of expression and exposing Wafa Sultan for the hate filled bigot that she is, she wants to cry that we are “intimidating,” that we are “politically correct,” that we are “ignorant.” Wafa, what is ignorant about exposing the fact that you lied about being subject to Shariah in secular Syria? What is politically correct about exposing the fact that you want to “nuke” and “crush” Muslims? What is “ignorant” about asking the quite logical question of how an atheist can still consider herself not just a Muslim, but a Muslim reformer? What is “intimidating” about asking a house of worship and a spiritual leader to repudiate such an obvious hate filled liar?

In the end, we are yet to hear Wafa Sultan answer the questions and points we have brought up, instead she has chosen to ignore them and fall back on her nauseating “victim” status.

Wafa Sultan, if you are brave enough please answer these questions:

-Isn’t it a contradiction in terms for one to be an atheist and at the same time to be a Muslim, let alone a Muslim reformer?

-Aren’t you lying when you say that you were subject to brutal shariah treatment during your thirty years in Syria, when for much of that time Syria was ruled by the Ba’athist secular dictator Hafez al-Assad who happens to come from the same sect as you?

-How could you witness the murder of your professor in your classroom in 1979 when no such murder is ever recorded to have taken place on campus, and a number of students and friends of yours have confirmed that such a thing never occured?

-Do you repudiate and apologize for your past comments, which we have recorded, in which you call for the “nuking” of Muslims, applying the same pressure to Muslims as you did to Japan in World War II, and saying that there are only two options for Muslims: to change or to be crushed?

-Do you still believe Islam isn’t a religion?

-Do you still want to ban the Quran?

We await your reply.

Oren Dorell

Oren Dorell, a reporter with USA Today wrote an article recently on so called “Honor killings,” of which there have been six in the past two years. Unfortunately, his article was rendered inaccurate and ineffectual because of a severe lapse of judgment on his and USA Today’s part in citing Robert Spencer as an authority on Islam and Radical Muslims.

The portion that we are speaking about goes,

“There is broad support and acceptance of this idea in Islam, and we’re going to see it more and more in the United States,” says Robert Spencer, who has trained FBI and military authorities on Islam and founded Jihad Watch, which monitors radical Islam.

Of course, Robert Spencer, per his modus operandi is again lying. There is neither broad support or acceptance of honor killings as an idea in Islam. Two points which Spencer will be hard pressed to prove, especially since Islam expressly condemns the pre-Islamic tribal practice. Spencer also attempts to play prophet here, a role that he has failed at over and over.

This is an especially egregious report in light of the events that played out in the Fathima Rifqa Bary case, a case which Michael Kruse, a reporter for the St.Petersburg Times noted was in part “created” by Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller. Throughout the case, without any of the facts present Spencer was claiming that Rifqa would be killed in an honor killing and that her parents were extremists, he still believes this today regardless of the fact that the authorities investigated the matter and repudiated Spencer and his far right cronies when they sent Rifqa back to Ohio and found the charges against the family to be baseless.

We urge our readers to contact Oren Dorell and USA Today to rectify this epic failure in citing Spencer as an authority on Islam or radical Islam.

Contact Brent Jones, for corrections and clarifications: accuracy@usatoday.com

Contact Oren Dorell: odorell@gmail.com

Remember to be polite and topical.

The fact is Spencer is not taken seriously by academia especially in the field of Islam: He has been repudiated over and over. Take a glance at our archives:

Academics and members of the American Library Association condemn Spencer and his work: Robert Spencer Rejected by Academics, still Supports Geert Wilders

DePaul Law Professor M. Cherif Bassiouni condemns Spencer

His former friend and ally Charles Johnson has also condemned Robert Spencer as an “Anti-Islamic Bigot:”

Robert Spencer goes postal on Charles Johnson

Spencer’s association and fervent support for anti-Muslim European neo-Fascists and supremacists also disqualifies him from being mentioned as a true neutral observer and commenter on Islam or radical Islam:

Robert Spencer Teams up with Euro-Supremacists Again

Spencer has also joined a genocidal Facebook group which called for the extermination of Turks:

Robert Spencer: Wanna be Conquistador

Robert Spencer’s arguments have been shown to be filled with errors and excessive prejudice:

The Church’s Doctrine of Perpetual Servitude worse than Dhimmitude

Robert Spencer Misrepresents Facts — Again

Robert Spencer Worried about ticking ‘Muslim Demographic Time Bomb’

There is more information exposing the bigotry and anti-Muslim motive that mars the work of Robert Spencer in our archives, if USA Today truly cares about what they print and the information they wish to present to readers then they should take a serious look at who they choose to quote as experts.

Wafa Sultan

We updated our post on Wafa Sultan. It looks like she was loonier than we thought.

In retrospect, our piece on Wafa Sultan seems not to have been harsh enough on her hateful lying and bigotry. In light of recent comments she has made while on her book tour at synagogues and churches, the poseur can properly be renamed, Wafa Stalin Sultan because the atheism that she believes in is propelled by the same genocidal and insane impulses that led another loon, Joseph Stalin.

Atlas Shrugs (read: Pamela Geller on Drugs) made our jobs easy by posting a video clip of Wafa Stalin Sultan going off the deep end. In the video, Sultan is addressing a group at a synagogue in NYC and says,

“I believe King Abdullah can change Islam overnight, but you need to put pressure on him to do it, and the same kind of pressure you put on Japan, you might need it“ at that moment someone from the audience interjects and asks, “atom bombs?” Wafa Sultan replies, “Yes. At some point the West will need to do it.” This statement is quite revealing considering how in 2007, at a right-wing David Horowitz funded conference called “Restoration Weekend,” Wafa Sultan said, “I will change 1.3 billion Muslims…they have to realize they have only two choices: to change or to be crushed.”

At the end of her speech, she utters something quite strange for an atheist, “God bless you and God bless America.” More charlatanism?

During the question and answer session she divides moderate Muslims into three categories: 1.) a majority, 80% who are unaware of the real teachings of Islam, 2.) huge chunks of them are practicing Taqiyyah, 3.) a very small progressive group who have no effect. All talking points from the far right-wing.

The rest of the question and answer session is interesting as well, and pocked full of more and more lies from Wafa Stalin Sultan. Check it out for yourselves:

This disgusting woman continues with her fascist fear mongering, she says, “Islam is infiltrating and you are doing nothing about it.” Someone from the audience then asks Sultan, “How would we stop it from infiltrating?” Sultan replies, “Get involved in politics, you have to know the kind of leaders you are choosing.” The man then says, “If we got involved in politics, what would our platform be, what would we say?” Sultan replies quoting Geert Wilders, “Islam is not religion!” The man interrupts and asks, “what would our platform be, what would A, B and C be?” Sultan replies, “the same you dealt with Nazism. The same way, the same exact way. The same way!” To this she receives a big applause from the all too captive audience…”you reversed the Japanese culture, the same, you might need to do it, you might need to do a heavy pressure, I cannot predict the kind of pressure, you understand it, I don’t have to say it.” Quite chilling the way she nonchalantly advocates nuking Muslims.

Sultan also says, “You know Geert Wilders has said if he becomes Prime Minister of Holland he will ban the Quran, I admire him for that.” The audience glibly agrees with her with mutterings of “yes.” If you want to see how fascism takes hold then watch the video. My only question is how much are these synagogues and churches paying her for speaking appearances at their congregations?

LGF has a post on a UK Jewish council that is urging Jews not to be fooled by fascists and Islamophobes. Interestingly, Pamela Geller and Rabbi Jon Hausman don’t seem to have gotten the memo, as both are open and belligerent supporters of Euro-Supremacists such as Geert Wilders and Stop the Islamisation of Europe (SIOE).

British Jewish advocacy group CST appeals to Jews not to take part in an upcoming demonstration by far right Eurofascists: Don’t be fooled by Islamophobia.

A small Islamophobic group, called Stop Islamisation Of Europe (SIOE), has called for 1,000 Jews to attend its forthcoming demonstration at Harrow mosque; and for each Jew to bring an Israeli flag.

This is strikingly similar to appeals that have also been made in recent months by the English Defence League (EDL). It is also essentially the same as opportunistic attempts by British National Party leader Nick Griffin to ditch both his and his party’s antisemitic heritage, by stressing his supposed new-foundsupport for Israel and Jews.

SIOE’s appeal for Jewish participation sits alongside this grotesque Islamophobic image on its website:

If a Jew cannot understand why the image is racist, or hateful, or bigoted then they should try imagining it as a synagogue: with blood dripping from a Star of David; with blood dripping down the rabbi’s pulpit; and with blood dripping from the mouth of a skull that wears an Israeli army helmet. …

CST has raised awareness of the activities of extreme Islamist groups in the UK for many years. But to demonise an entire community, every Muslim and every mosque, in the way that SIOE does, shows exactly the kind of bigotry from which Jews have suffered so often in our history. For SIOE to appeal to Jews tosupport them shows a complete ignorance of the Jewish experience of being on the receiving end of exactly this type of politics. …

Hatred, division, cycles of inter-communal violence, intimidation and polarisation feed the extremists on every side. They encourage social division and leave all minorities vulnerable. Anti-Muslim bigotry is a vital recruiting sergeant for both the far right, and its Islamist extremist counterparts. It generates votes for the BNP and, at the furthest ends of this political spectrum, it even provides the fuel for terrorism. British Jews should have no part of it.

The SIOE is trying to use British Jews for two purposes: 1) to give them cover and deflect accusations of fascism, and 2) to enrage any Islamists at Harrow mosque and try to provoke them to violence.

Insane shrieking harpy Pamela Geller is solidly on the side of the fascists, as always, and is freaking out at her hate site: Atlas Urges Jews Worldwide to Support SIOE, Ignore Dhimmi ‘Jewish Councils’ – Atlas Shrugs.

Quote:

Onvce again leftist Jews lying and deceiving to advance the aims of the enemies of Jews andJewish life.

Robert Spencer

The blog wars have started again. Charles Johnson, seems to have gotten under the skin of good ole’ Robert Spencer once more. In a recent post on Little Green Footballs, Johnson lays out the top 10 reasons he has parted ways with the Right-wing, of which he was formerly a solid member. He writes in his ninth reason that he left the Right because of,

9. Anti-Islamic bigotry that goes far beyond simply criticizing radical Islam, into support for fascism, violence, and genocide (see: Pamela Geller, Robert Spencer, etc.)

Spencer, takes umbrage at being accurately described as a bigot and responds with what can only be described as a volley of insults calling Johnson a “CAIR tool,” “libelblogger” who has “betrayed all his principles, friends, and associates.” He also plays the victim card and states that Johnson is a thug who is inciting his followers to hate and frenzied hysteria,

The thuggish libelblogger incites his sycophants and whips them into a frenzy of hate.

It is pathetic and ironic to watch Spencer, who we have exposed as a persistent Islam hater, Muslim basher, disingenuous liar, supporter of Euro-Supremacism and neo-Fascism to project onto his ex-ally, his own failings. Spencer, along with the rest of the Right-wing is in the throes of a strange evolution that sees it devolving into a group of hate-filled conspiracy theorists who either have to reform and transform or will remain defeated, forced by their own hand to witness the slow migration of its more sane and rational members to other platforms.

Spencer ends his diatribe by waxing ineloquent and asks,

One can only wonder what sickness of soul would lead this man to devote so much time and effort to lying about other people and trying to destroy them.

“Sickness of soul” indeed. The irony is overwhelming. Spencer is one of the biggest liars in the blogosphere, he has a whole website devoted to bashing Islam and skewing reality while destroying anyone who disagrees with him. All Johnson did was write a single sentence about Spencer, yet it seems it is enough for Spencer to think Johnson is stoking a (excuse the term) crusade against him. It seems some one’s conscious is bothering them.

Meanwhile, in the same post one of Spencer’s supporters takes a shot at LoonWatch. After deleting one commenters link to a LoonWatch truth piece on Spencer, Darcy writes,

lol,You think we would actually check out the repellent, idiotic, “loonwatch?”

Only loons go there, like you. Take your trash elsewhere, loonatic (misspelling deliberate).

The truth hurts. The fact is Spencer and his drones can’t bear to feel the fire, and are despondent at ever adequately and substantively rebutting any of the facts provided here on LoonWatch, such as the latest piece by Danios which all but obliterates Spencer’s Dhimmi argument.

Rabbi Jon Hausman

We reported recently that Ahavath Torah invited Wafa Sultan, a known bigot and loon to speak at their Synagogue. At the time we weren’t sure what the motivation was, whether it was done out of malice or ignorance, we wrote,

It seems the Synagogue is either unaware of Sultan or is not interested in harmony or critical dialogue and factual knowledge about its Muslim neighbors but instead seeks to plant the seeds of animosity and hate.

We now can confirm that the true intent of bringing Sultan was not to educate congregants about Islam or the threat of radicalism but to fan anti-Muslim Islamophobia. The spiritual leader of Ahavath Torah is one Rabbi Jon Hausman, we hate to give him more publicity than he deserves but a little background on him will clear this matter up sufficiently.

Rabbi Hausman is a friend and admirer of Geert Wilders, the neo-fascist Dutch politician who has called for the deportation of Muslim citizens, banning the construction of Mosques, the banning of religious freedom for Muslims, the banning of the Quran, a tax on hijabs and other similar nonsense. Rabbi Hausman invited Wilders to speak to his congregation where he spouted verbatim the above positions. Wilders, bestowed on the Rabbi the “honorific” title of “the Warrior Rabbi” which coming as it does from a fascist should send shivers down the spine of any sensible person who cares about Democratic values. That Hausman can revel in such praise from a vile cretin like Wilders exposes his moral bankruptcy and reveals how unfit and inept he is to lead a congregation. I posit another title for Hausman, instead of “the Warrior Rabbi” he may better be known as “the Betraying Rabbi” for his betrayal of Judaic values and  “never again” for any people.

In our original article we asked concerned people of all faiths to contact Ahavath Torah and Rabbi Hausman and politely ask why they had invited Wafa Sultan and to reconsider their invitation. Rabbi Hausman responded to the polite emails by calling the people who sent them “nutjobs.”

On a right-wing website defending Rabbi Hausman’s decision, we learn that one of our readers, John sent him this email:

Forwarded Message: Regarding your invitation to Wafa Sultan on Dec 3rd

Regarding your invitation to Wafa Sultan on Dec 3rd

Thursday, November 26, 2009 3:53 AM

To:  Rabbi Hausman

I am responding to an online campaign at loonwatch.com, which is asking your synagogue to review your decision to invite Wafa Sultan to the Ahavath Torah Congregation Thursday, Dec. 3, at 7:30 p.m.

Please see these news article at Loon Watch, and I am responding to their request to write a polite letter to your synagogue.

Why is Ahavath Torah Synagogue Inviting Wafa Sultan?

http://www.loonwatch.com/2009/11/why-is-ahavath-torah-synagogue-inviting-wafa-sultan/

Wafa Sultan: A Poseur Playing off of Ignorance to Further Hate

http://www.loonwatch.com/2009/11/wafa-sultan-a-poseur-playing-off-of-ignorance-to-further-hate/

I would draw your attention the fact that Wafa Sultan is also on record as stating:-

“Christopher Columbus discovered America in 1492 America was founded in 1776 approximately 300 years later. You cannot blame America – as a constitution, a regime, and state for killing the Indians.”

My own feelings regarding this are as follows:-

Sultan is a known bigot.  Inviting such a person to a synogogue, does nothing for improving interfaith harmony. No less a distinguished figure than Judea Pearl, the father of slain journalist Daniel Pearl, walked out on of one her talks due to her bigotry. If a Jew whose son was killed by terrorists in Pakistan can see through a hate mongering opportunist, it does not behoove a synagogue to invite her. It will also do nothing for Muslim Jewish relations in Stoughton. I would say exactly the same thing to an Imam if his mosque invited Israel Shamir who claims to be an ex-Jew to speak on Jewish history.

I would appreciate it if you could read the reports above.

Kind Regards and Shalom.

John P Turner

How did the Rabbi respond?

Everyone,

Could it be that I’ve ruffled a few feathers?!? Could it be that these people want to stifle inquiry into the dark inner recesses of Islamic doctrine? Could it be that I don’t care what these nut jobs think and I won’t be intimidated? Most likely the second and third questions….

The Warrior Rabbi

Notice the very un-Jewish ego on the Rabbi. He signs his response with the “Warrior Rabbi.” Strange indeed for a spiritual leader. Instead of ad hominem attack why can’t the Rabbi respond to the substantive points in the email? Does he even have a response? No one is scared of you “Mr. Warrior Rabbi,” people are just wondering why you have invited a bigot to speak to your congregation? If it is because you hate Islam than at least have the guts to say so.

Daniel Pipes

Daniel Pipes, the academic who dropped academia long ago to pursue anti-Islam polemics and apologia for Israeli policy is at it again. In a Nov, 24, 2009 article in the Jerusalem Post, Pipes writes about his favorite topic, “the Muslim threat to Western Civilization.”

According to the illogic of Pipes the greatest threat doesn’t come from Al-Qaeda, Ayatollah Khomeini or Nidal Hasan but rather from people like Dr. Tariq Ramadan and Congressman Keith Ellison. He accuses the two of being part of something he terms “Islamism 2.0.” This ridiculous term translates essentially into what Islamophobe Robert Spencer calls “Stealth Jihad,” or the subtle takeover of the West by peaceful, law-abiding Muslims who have a secret, sinister (stealth) goal to takeover the West and replace Democracy with Shariah law: in other words it’s a conspiracy theory.

Ayatollah Khomeini, Osama bin Laden, and Nidal Hasan represent Islamism 1.0, Recep Tayyip Erdogan (the prime minister of Turkey), Tariq Ramadan (a Swiss intellectual), and Keith Ellison (a US congressman) represent Islamism 2.0. The former kill more people but the latter pose a greater threat to Western civilization. (emphasis mine)

That Erdogan, Ramadan and Ellison can even be mentioned in the same sentence as equivalent to, or even more dangerous and threatening to the West than Bin Laden speaks volumes about Pipes’ preposterous agenda. Would Bin Laden have Turkey make peace with Armenia as Erdogan did? Would Bin Laden affirm Democracy as the way forward to better governance and equal rights as all three do? Would Bin Laden pledge to uphold the Constitution of the United States of America on Thomas Jefferson’s Qur’an as Keith Ellison did?

All of the above are of course rhetorical questions because there is an obvious wide gulf that separates the likes of a Bin Laden and a Keith Ellison. Keith Ellison, is an American whose family history in the Americas goes back centuries, longer even than Pipes’ family history. He is a liberal Democrat who believes in Democracy, the rule of law, universal suffrage and equal rights for all. That is why his district in Minnesota overwhelmingly voted for him.

The most condescending aspect to the vile piece from Pipes and what he ignores or fails to mention is that Erdogan, Ramadan and Ellison are Westerners. In fact, they represent all that is good about the West, they are consistent on their values, are educated, active and participatory citizens: one doesn’t have to agree with their beliefs or ideas to see the common values in that. They call on their fellow citizens to be active and educated and they foster understanding between different communities while also being self-critical; that is more than we can say for Daniel Pipes.

Pipes goes on to state that “lawful Islamism” is growing in the West and may be worse than “violent Islamism” which is retreating,

Other once-violent Islamist organizations in Algeria, Egypt, and Syria have recognized the potential of lawful Islamism and largely renounced violence. One also sees a parallel shift in Western countries; Ramadan and Ellison represent a burgeoning trend.

In conclusion, only Islamists, not fascists or communists, have gone well beyond crude force to win public support and develop a 2.0 version. Because this aspect of Islamism undermines traditional values and destroys freedoms, it may threaten civilized life even more than does 1.0’s brutality.(emphasis added)

Instead of bizzarely bemoaning the fact that these once violent organizations have renounced violence, Pipes should see it as most sensible people do, a positive development which brings these groups into the system and opens them up to the scrutiny of checks and balances and eventually the electorate. Also notice the highly disingenuous way in which Pipes again lumps these once violent organizations onto the same wavelength as Ramadan and Ellison who, yes, are proud Muslims (not a crime by the way) but at the same time are staunch Democrats who are the fiercest and most affective opponents of the violent ideology that motivates groups such as Al-Qaeda.

Ellison and Ramadan stand as a strong counter example against Bin Laden and his cohorts for Muslims, especially young Muslims. They see two Muslims, strongly grounded in their faith, belonging to their society and giving back on various levels from the social to the political; instead of deriding them Pipes should be encouraging them. As more examples such as theirs increase in the West it will enable Muslims to better fight those minority elements within their faith that seek to cause chaos and violence and that is what really threatens Daniel Pipes who seems to be motivated by the paranoid fear that the “enfranchisement of American Muslims…will present true dangers to American Jews.”

So what does Daniel Pipes propose? How do we stop this “stealth Islamism 2.0?” Do we restrict the free speech of Tariq Ramadan and deny him entry into the US? ( Pipes does support that) Do we disallow Muslims such as Keith Ellison from holding public office? Do we not allow Muslims to enter into the military? Do we watch Muslim peoples’ every move? What practical solutions is Pipes proposing from this highly opinionated and doomsday scenario article?

We can only assume that he is in league with other believers in these conspiracy theories who do put forward pratical solutions to the “stealth Muslim problem.” Believers like Geert Wilders whose solutions include: no religious freedom for Muslims, banning the Quran, taxing Muslim women who wear the Hijab, deporting Muslim citizens etc.

One must ask Daniel Pipes, does he agree with such a program? Some of his colleagues and friends such as Robert Spencer have already given their backing to Wilders, where does Pipes stand? Does he stand for Democracy, equal rights, freedom of speech, and freedom of religion or is he a hypocrite cloaking himself as a champion of Western civilization when in reality with every word he undermines it?

"Atheist Muslim reformer" Wafa Sultan with anti-Muslim loon Pamela Geller

We must begin this profile with a question: Is there a more contemptible poseur than Wafa Sultan who calls herself an atheist but in the same breath also claims to be a Muslim reformer, which would kind of be like Christopher Hitchens calling himself a Christian reformer? It is difficult to answer that question with certainty considering the wide pool of bigots who combine charlatanism with raving and incorrigible insanity. But for sure one thing is certain, she is completely undeserving of the 15 minutes of fame she has succeeded in procuring.

In this sense, Wafa Sultan falls into the same category as Walid Shoebat, Brigitte Gabriel, Nonie Darwish, Kamal Saleem, Zachariah Anani and other self-proclaimed turn coats from their Arab and Muslim identities. As we mentioned before this group attempts to parlay their “otherness,” and so-called “insider knowledge of the Muslim world,” (the “I’ve been there, I know” line) into a cash cow. Meanwhile, we are supposed to be duped into freaking out and running back to them for more “expert” advice brought to us from our loyal friend who ventures into the other side on our behalf.

Sultan is no different, her tale of flight into Islamophobic stardom is a curious and thoroughly modern one. In the beginning of this tale Sultan was invited onto a show hosted by the well known anchorman of AlJazeera’s Opposing Viewpoints (Ittijaah al-Mu’aakas), Faisal Al-Qasim for the purpose of a debate with professor Ibrahim al-Khouly from Al-Azhar on the topic of the Clash of Civilizations and the Clash of Religions. Al-Qasim, brought her onto the show originally after noticing some of her articles on the Arabic website called AnNaqed (The Critic). The New York Times reported that the website was an Islamic reform site, but in actuality it turns out that it is a Christian website,

[T]he web site called Annaqed (www.annaqed.com) she supposedly wrote for before being noticed by Al-Jazeera Television is not an “Islamic reform Web Site” as was reported in the New York Times article, but rather an Arab nationalist blog run by a Syrian Christian who defines it as being “in line with Christian morality and principles.” The site is also replete with anti-Muslim writings.

On the show she supported the thesis of a clash and stated that the conflict between the West and Islam is,

a clash between a mentality that belongs to the Middle Ages and another that belongs to the 21st century… a clash between civilization and backwardness, between the civilized and the primitive, between barbarity and rationality.

MEMRI, (Middle East Media Research Institute) which peddles in biased, selective, de-contextualized, error-filled, and misleading translations of news, shows and opinion from Middle East television took the 45 minute show and per its modus operandi chopped up and edited the show into a 5 minute sound bite of Wafa Sultan’s attack on Muslims and Islam. In the process, and without any respect for translational integrity they also attempted to deceptively frame Professor Khouly as proclaiming Sultan a “heretic,” when, as this fully translated transcript shows he did no such thing. Instead Khouly responded to Sultan’s jibes with questions that though we might not agree to the way he frames them are far from irrational or undebatable,

…here we must ask a question, who facilitated the conflict and indeed initiated it; is it the Muslims? Muslims now are in a defensive position fighting off an aggressor… who said Muslims were backward? They may be backward in terms of technological advances, but who said that such are the criteria for humanity?

That is just the beginning of the story, the MEMRI produced video was downloaded to YouTube where it went viral receiving over a million hits and like wild fire the anti-Muslim blogosphere picked it up. Instantly, over night, Sultan was a star. In this consumer age, MEMRI’s rendition of the show gave the public what it wanted to see: a spectacle. It fit in well with the narrative of an oppressed Mooslim woman “finally” standing up for her rights and taking on the world of Islam.

Sultan capitalized on the spotlight she had and with all the ingenuity and creativeness of a con-artist spun a tale which essentially boils down to her “dark days growing up in the barbaric ‘Islamic nation’ of Syria.” A good example of her deception can be gleaned from a recent article she wrote for the neo-conservative website Hudson New York,

As an Arab woman who suffered for three decades living under Islamic Sharia, it is clear to me that Islam’s political ideology and Sharia must be fought relentlessly by Western civilization to prevent its application in a free society. (emphasis added)

This encapsulates the opportunism that motivates Sultan and it also reveals the contempt with which she holds her readers whose intelligence she seeks to insult with such a blatant lie. She attempts to paint her three decades in Syria as a nightmare in which she suffered the brutal force of a Taliban-esque regime that implemented Islamic law on her constantly. The absurdity is only matched by the bravado of her claim, as anyone who cared to check (Wikipidea for instance) could tell you that the regime that ruled Syria had nothing to do with Islam.

The regime in Syria, during much of the time period that Sultan talks about was ruled by the secular, anti-Shariah Ba’athist dictator Hafiz al-Assad who happens to come from the same privileged sect that Sultan was born into: the Alawies. Her allegation is even more obscene considering the fact that Hafiz al-Assad massacred 20,000 villagers in Hama, Syria who were members of the Muslim Brotherhood. One has to ask Sultan, if you were made to suffer for thirty years under Islamic Sharia’, how could you, a woman, have finished your medicine degree at the University of Aleppo? On top of that, would an Islamic Sharia state as horrid as you describe have funded your education for free?

Another good example of her tale of woe is the profile carried by self-described “bad girl of Islam” Asra Nomani in TIME magazine. Asra Nomani, who can’t pen anything without including herself writes,

I connected with her (Sultan’s) anger and pain. She questioned Islam in 1979, when, she says, she witnessed the murder of a professor by men with alleged ties to the ultraconservative Muslim Brotherhood political group.

As to the claim that her professor (thought to be Yusef Al-Yusef) was gunned down before her eyes in a faculty classroom at the University of Aleppo, Halabi said the incident never took place. “There was a professor who was killed around 1979, that is true, but it was off-campus and Sultan was not even around when it happened,” he added.

InFocus contacted the University of Aleppo and spoke to Dr. Riyad Asfari, Dean of the Faculty of Medicine, who confirmed Halabi’s account. “Yes, the assassination took place off-campus,” he said. Dr. Asfari was keen to add that no one had ever been killed in a classroom anytime or anywhere at the university.

Syrian expatriate Ghada Moezzin, who attended the University of Aleppo in 1979 as a sophomore, told InFocus that she never heard of the assassination. “We would’ve known about the killing if it had happened,” she said. “It would have been big news on campus and I do not recall ever hearing about it.” Moezzin, who lives in Glendora, Calif., added that government security was always present around the university given the political climate in Syria at the time.

Half-truths and lies corroborate and reveal the true motive behind Sultan’s hate and invective against Islam: money. The article reveals more,

Adnan Halabi*, a Syrian expatriate who met and got to know the Sultans when they first came to the United States, spoke at length about the Wafa Sultan that very few people know.

According to Halabi, Dr. Wafa Ahmad (her maiden name) arrived in California with her husband Moufid (now changed to David) in the late 80s on a tourist visa. Contrary to what she told the New York Times, they came as a couple, leaving their two children back in Syria.

Another source named Nabil Mustafa, also Syrian, told InFocus that he was introduced to Moufid Sultan through a personal friend who knew the family well, and both ended up having tea at the Sultans’ one-bedroom apartment one evening in 1989. It was then that Moufid told Mustafa the story of how he was reunited with his two children. According to Mustafa, Moufid Sultan told him that a short time after they arrived in the country, his wife, Dr. Wafa Sultan, mailed her passport back to her sister Ilham Ahmad in Syria (while the passport still carried a valid U.S. tourist visa). With Ilham bearing a resemblance to her sister Wafa, the plan was to go to the Mexican Embassy in Damascus and obtain a visa to Mexico, making sure that the airline carrier they would book a flight on would have a layover somewhere in the Continental United States.

With an existing U.S. visa on Wafa Sultan’s passport, Ilham Ahmad had no trouble obtaining an entry permit to Mexico. Shortly after, Ilham and Wafa’s two children landed in Houston, Texas. She and the children then allegedly made their way through customs and were picked up by Moufid and brought to California.

Taking advantage of an amnesty law for farmers, the Sultans applied for permanent residency through a Mexican lady who worked as a farm hand. She helped Moufid with the paperwork by claiming he had worked as a farmer for four years. The application went through and the Sultans obtained their green cards.

As incredible as the story sounds, Mustafa told InFocus that to the best of his recollection, this was the exact account he heard from Moufid Sultan. Halabi, who is not acquainted with Mustafa, corroborated the story, which he heard from Dr. Wafa Sultan herself but with fewer details. Dr. Wafa Sultan declined InFocus’ repeated requests to be interviewed or comment on the allegations. InFocus contacted the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to check on the veracity of the story but an official said that they would look into the allegations, which could take months to investigate.

Halabi alleges that Ilham Ahmad lived as illegal resident with her sister Wafa for years until she met an Arab Christian named Khalid Musa Shihadeh whom she ended up marrying (they were married in Nevada on 12/8/1991 and filed for divorce in 2002). It was during that time that Halabi got to know the Sultans well.

Halabi alleges that the Sultans lived in dire poverty. “Their rent was over $1,000 per month and Moufid was only making $800,” he said. Dr. Wafa Sultan was forced to rent out a room in her apartment and work at a pizza parlor in Norwalk, Calif. where a personal friend used to pick her up and drop her off daily. This same friend used to help the Sultans out with groceries and occasionally loaned them money just so they could make it through the month. “It was a serious struggle,” Halabi recalled. “The Sultans lived hand to mouth for years on end.” Further, Halabi said that at no point during the period he knew the family did Sultan ever discuss religion, politics or any topic relevant to her current activities. “She is a smart woman, articulate and forceful, but she never meddled in religion or politics to the extent she is doing now,” Halabi said.

Sultan is not condemned only by Muslims, non-Muslims have come out and strongly condemned her as well.

Sultan’s detractors include not only Muslims but members of the Jewish community as well. In an op-ed piece published in the Los Angeles Times (June 25, 2006) and titled “Islam’s Ann Coulter,” Rabbi Stephen Julius Stein at Wilshire Boulevard Temple, who attended a fundraiser for a local Jewish organization where Sultan was a speaker, wrote, “The more Sultan talked, the more evident it became that progress in the Muslim world was not her interest…. She never alluded to any healthy, peaceful Islamic alternative.”

The rabbi mentioned that Judea Pearl, father of murdered journalist Daniel Pearl, “was one of the few voices of restraint and nuance heard that afternoon. In response to Sultan’s assertion that the Koran contains only verses of evil and domination, Pearl said he understood the book also included ‘verses of peace’ that proponents of Islam uphold as the religion’s true intent. The Koran’s verses on war and brutality, Pearl contended, were ‘cultural baggage,’ as are similar verses in the Torah.”

He added, “Sultan’s over-the-top, indefensible remarks at the fundraiser, along with her failure to mention the important, continuing efforts of the Islamic Center (of Southern California), insulted all Muslims and Jews in L.A. and throughout the nation who are trying to bridge the cultural gap between the two groups. And that’s one reason why I eventually walked out of the event.”

The hope is that more and more people like Rabbi Stephen Stein will see Wafa Sultan for who she is: a hateful, opportunistic poseur. The atheist who calls Islam and Muslims “backward and primitive,” “incapable of reform,” the Qur’an as only filled with “evil,” yet can’t see the self-contradiction in her befuddling statements that growing up in secular Syria she “suffered from Islamic Shariah” and “I even don’t believe in Islam, but I am a Muslim.” Go figure.

UPDATE: In retrospect, our piece on Wafa Sultan seems not to have been harsh enough on her hate. In light of recent comments she has made while on her book tour at synagogues and churches, the poseur can properly be renamed, Wafa Stalin Sultan because the atheism that she believes in is propelled by the same genocidal and insane impulses that led another loon, Joseph Stalin.

Atlas Shrugs (read: Pamela Geller on Drugs) made our jobs easy by posting a video clip of Wafa Stalin Sultan going off the deep end. In the video, Sultan is addressing a group at a synagogue in NYC and says,

“I believe King Abdullah can change Islam overnight, but you need to put pressure on him to do it, and the same kind of pressure you put on Japan, you might need it” at that moment someone from the audience interjects and asks, “atom bombs?” Wafa Sultan replies, “Yes. At some point the West will need to do it.” At the end of her speech, she utters something quite strange for an atheist, “God bless you and God bless America.” More charlatanism?

During the question and answer session she divides moderate Muslims into three categories: 1.) a majority, 80% who are unaware of the real teachings of Islam, 2.) huge chunks of them are practicing Taqiyyah, 3.) a very small progressive group who have no effect. All talking points from the far right-wing wing.

The rest of the question and answer session is interesting as well, and pocked full of more and more lies from Wafa Stalin Sultan. Check it out for yourselves.

This disgusting little woman continues with her fascist fearmongering, she says, “Islam is infiltrating and you are doing nothing about it.” Someone from the audience then asks Sultan, “How would we stop it from infiltrating?” Sultan replies, “Get involved in politics, you have to know the kind of leaders you are choosing.” The man then says, “If we got involved in politics, what would our platform be, what would we say?” Sultan replies quoting Geert Wilders, “Islam is not religion!” The man interrupts and asks, “what would our platform be, what would A, B and C be?” Sultan replies, “the same you dealt with Nazism. The same way, the same exact way. The same way!” To this she receives a big applause from the all too captive audience…”you reversed the Japanese culture, the same, you might need to do it, you might need to do a heavy pressure, I cannot predict the kind of pressure, you understand it, I don’t have to say it.” Quite chilling the way she nonchalantly advocates nuking Muslims.

Sultan also says, “You know Geert Wilders has said if he becomes Prime Minister of Holland he will ban the Quran, I admire him for that.” The audiences glibly agrees with her with mutterings of “yes.” If you want to see how fascism takes hold then watch the video. My only question is how much are these synagogues and churches paying her for her speaking appearances?

Here's praying that Islam and Muslims face the blame for Fort Hood

 Since news of the heinous Fort Hood massacre at the hands of Major Malik Nidal Hassan first broke out, “Islam Scholar” Robert Spencer, of f**kislam fame, has been like a gluttonous kid in a candy shop, frantically blogging over three dozen times with one goal in mind: slap down the blame on Islam and Muslims at large.

That is precisely the line that every sane responder has warned against. Whether it was the American Muslim leadership, the US military leadership, the mainstream media, or the President of the United States. But to Spencer who is rubbing his hands praying that a massive backlash could befall the American Muslim community, the sanity that he is hearing and seeing from mainstream America is cause for anger, bitterness, and complaints.

For the “Islam Scholar,” everyone including the US Military leadership are “dhimmi” wimps afraid of the Mooslims. Fancy that, a sedentary blogger who barely gets off his backside where he sits day and night punching away at a keyboard sees fit to accuse those who venture on the war frontiers risking their lives to protect this country (including his) of being cowardly sell-out wimps.

As pretentious and downright sick as that is, Spencer who is drenched in his own bias and deafened by the screeching sound of his own propaganda will likely fail to take notice.

Spencer’s mad response of course is entirely predictable, after all he has shown tremendous consistency and undying loyalty to a line of arguments whose sole agenda is to drive a wedge between America’s faith communities and make a compelling case for the widespread hate of Islam and distrust of Muslims.

Accordingly, only moments after news of the shooting was made public, the opportunistic preacher wasted no time getting on his e-pulpit and positing that the shooter was carrying out a legitimate Islamic Jihad, a religious requirement of all Muslims (unbeknownst to you and them for that matter). Since then, he has immersed himself in whipping out a flurry of dishonest and sinister propaganda posts, cherry picking items to strengthen his case, and completely ignoring those that do not.

For example, Spencer seems to the be the only one who missed the tremendous outpouring of support from the American Muslim community and their organizations of whom CAIR, MPAC, ISNA, and virtually every registered Muslim organization – if not Mosque – in the United States were quick to issue condemnation and condolences as they expressed that such action has no support in their Islamic faith. Some even started support networks for the victims. Not a peep from Spencer. Instead, all the expedient Spencer could see was that one 18 year old kid and this one Imam in Yemen (condemned by Muslim orgs in the US and refuted by American imams) who supported the killing. Oh and wait, there is a radical web forum out there too. “Aha! There you have it, it’s a MOOOSLIM thing! It’s Izlaahm! Am I lying about anything I posted?”

Lying by highly selective reporting and glaring omission, yet another example of the objective scholarly ways of the “Islam Scholar” Robert Spencer.

Spencer’s three dozen posts on the Fort Hood massacre fall into one of three rants:

1) Incriminate the faith of 1.5 billion Muslims who had nothing to do with Hassan’s actions, and 7 million American Muslims who condemned his act (moved ironically by their faith to do so). Question the loyalty of Muslims in the military, ignoring that there are 3500 active Muslim service men and women in excellent standing.

2) Cherry pick any instance of support for the massacre regardless of how off the beaten path they are while turning a blind eye to the zillions of instances of more credible and representative Muslim voices condemning it.

3) Whine when others take a pass on your loon rants. Throw a temper tantrum at the mainstream media, the US military, the public and everyone else; respond by ridiculing them as dhimmis and wimps. (Take solace in the fact that at least Lou Dobbs and slimey Senator Joe Lieberman may come through for you).

Here is a fun little exercise for our wonderful readers, see if you can match each of Spencer’s posts below to its appropriate category above:

• In the wake of Fort Hood jihad, Houston authorities try to assure non-Muslims that steps are being taken to keep them safe — no, wait…

• AP: “Anti-Muslim Backlash Immediate” — but offers not even one example

• Muslim vets group: No reports of harassment of Muslim soldiers. None.

• “Everybody knows Islam is a Religion of Peace”

• Muslims in New York celebrate the deaths of Americans in the Fort Hood jihad

• DHS Secretary warns that Fort Hood jihad must not be repeated — no, wait…

• Muslim at Islamic Community of Greater Killeen, Texas: “I honestly have no pity” for victims of the Fort Hood jihad

• U.S.-born Islamic cleric: Nidal Hasan “Did the Right Thing”

• Fitzgerald: A Nest of Ninnies

• U.S. government vows revenge after jihadist commits mass murder at Fort Hood — no, wait…

• Why He Shouted “Allahu Akbar”

• It wasn’t jihad, it was heartburn

• U.S.-born Muslim cleric praises Fort Hood jihadist

• Lindsey Graham: “At the end of the day this is not about his religion — the fact that this man was a Muslim”

• U.S. Army General: Lack of diversity in Army is worse than mass murder

• Playing the victim card: Florida mosque requests extra police protection, even though it wasn’t threatened

• Fort Hood jihadist’s coworkers saw warning signs, but said nothing for fear of seeming bigoted

• Muslims at Fort Hood blame army command for jihad massacre

• It’s getting harder by the minute to say he just “snapped”: Fort Hood jihadist linked to 9/11 jihadists

• In the wake of Fort Hood jihad, Houston authorities try to assure non-Muslims that steps are being taken to keep them safe — no, wait…

• Fort Hood shooter regularly described war on terror as “war on Islam”

• Fort Hood shooter taught Koran when he was supposed to be giving a medical lecture

• Just before his jihad

• Al-Qaeda last week called for attacks on “any crusaders whenever you find one of them, like at the airports of the crusader Western countries that participate in the wars against Islam, or their living compounds, trains etc.”

• “A person behind counter stood up, and he said, ‘Allah Akbar!’ And just opened up on everybody”

• Fort Hood jihad shooter handed out Korans the morning of his attack

• Fort Hood jihad shooter was disciplined for Islamic proselytizing

• Spencer: Jihad at Fort Hood

• Fort Hood jihadist is alive

• Fort Hood shooter a devout, observant Muslim

• Fort Hood jihad shooter said “Muslims have to stand up against the aggressor”

• Jihad at Fort Hood? Shooter: Maj. Malik Nadal Hasan

• Islamic Awakening Forum on Fort Hood shooter: “What a brave mujahid”

• Fort Hood shooter was member of Homeland Security Panel advising Obama

"Islam Scholar" Robert Spencer Exposed

[UPDATED 11/4/09: "f**kislam.com" Magically Disappears from Robert Spencer’s JihadWatch.org]

Imagine if the scientific research belonging to a scholar of marine biology was accessible online via the URL “fuckmarinebiology.com” or if a scholar of Jewish Studies put out his material under the URL “fuckyahweh.com” or “fuckjudaism.com”.

What would that say about the scholarly ways of such a scholar? Would such a buffoon be taken seriously by anyone? Would his work carry an ounce of credibility?

Well imagine no more, Loonwatch has gone digging and sure enough, Robert Spencer, a  long discredited anti-Muslim hatemonger posing as an “Islam scholar” has shown his scholarly objective ways with the heinously named URL’s “fuckallah.com” and “fuckislam.com” redirecting to his cesspool of subjectivity, the David Horowitz funded hate blog, Jihadwatch.org.

In doing so, Robert Spencer may have been trying to actively market his hate material to like-minded audiences. It is a well known fact that keywords are a crucial factor in the popularity of a blog. This is damning evidence of the true gutter intent behind his little blog project which is to attract and further incite those with Islamophobic tendencies, his primary audience.

fuckallah.com & Jihadwatch.org

In that respect, Jihadwatch.org has grown into a special-interest niche, a hate cult that attracts a small but vociferous number of anti-Muslim Spencer groupies while having little credibility with the mainstream.

Now, it is often said that hatemongers are cowards, and we believe that Robert Spencer is no exception. So expect Spencer – now that he has been publicly exposed- to try to wiggle his way out of this one . Expect him to deny responsibility, claim ignorance, and deflect blame.

After all that was his strategy when it was revealed that he had become a fan of an anti-Muslim genocide-promoting hate group on Facebook. Despite being unable to deny the fact that he had willingly signed up to this group, he still ventured to argue that he had not meant to and that the meticulous researcher and astute observer in him had somehow failed to notice the plethora of in-your-face literature that permeated the group’s Facebook page from beginning to end. Unfortunately for the career liar, Mr. Spencer, he seemed to have forgotten that he had previously promoted the logo of the group’s supremacist philosophy on his website (as documented by LoonWatch with screen still shots from Jihadwatch.org) thus cementing his complicity and premeditated intent.

This time, expect Spencer to argue that he redirected those vile and vulgar slogan url’s by mistake. Or that someone else did him the favor without his consent or knowledge. Given Spencer’s track record of intense hatred for Islam and his knack for lying his way out of trouble, one would not be inclined to believe him.

But let us for the sake of the argument ask “what if”? Well then Spencer would have to explain why he has not yet disavowed and apologized for the association?  He would also have to explain why someone would choose Jihadwatch.org out of the internet’s 200 million websites. Why not the Islam page on PBS or the BBC or Beliefnet? Could it be that these sites are deemed objective and that someone filled with the intense hatred required to register “fuckallah.com” and “fuckislam.com” could not find a more fitting site that would resonate with his hatred than Jihadwatch.org. That in itself is a blatant referendum on the editorial content of Jihadwatch.org.

The fact that the petty Robert Spencer is anything but a serious objective scholar of Islam and is instead every bit of a paid anti-Muslim polemic and agitator who is a prized tool in David Horowitz’s shed is not breaking news for most people.

The serious question then is this: how could any self-respecting church, Synagogue, college, or institution even think of associating with such a discredited buffoon and mire their reputations with his? To think that the likes of the American Library Association almost got duped by this guy sends shudders down our spine. As the number of the blissfully ignorant victims of his two-faced marketing campaigns who are quickly catching on continue to dwindle, expect his antics to get more desperate and more pathetic.

Editor’s note: Our apology to our readers for having to reprint those vulgar URL’s

Pamela Geller

Pamela Geller, who is contending for the “most insane blogger in the world award” is cooking up another conspiracy theory (hat tip: Lex, Agent of Chaos). We have reported on her well worn conspiracy theories that include (but are not limited to): Mooslims are taking over and “Islamizing” Europe and America, Obama is a radical Mooslim Jihadist, everyone except her and her small group of friends in the anti-Muslim blogosphere is a dhimmi, Obama is an anti-Semite, Obama is an Indonesian Mooslim and the list goes on and on. Now it seems Pamela has turned her creative, if illiterate conspiratorial mind to Loonwatch.

Pamela posts a picture of a pamphlet Columbia University protesters were handing out that informed people about the fascist nature of Geert Wilders. The pamphlet included a link to Loonwatch.

We appreciate the protesters using and linking to our site, and want to congratulate them on their successful protest. That is what we are here for, to provide information and details on these anti-Muslim wackos.

After posting the picture, Pamela writes,

Muslim propaganda ……check out the source, loon watch, the new smear site. Someone big is financing Loon Watch ……….. it is very Soros. There is a a lot of time, money and resources behind it.

She cannot refute the facts, it is not “Muslim propaganda” to point out the fascist nature of Geert Wilders, that’s called being honest, a concept Pam has been unable to identify for years. Does she dispute that Geert has made public calls to ban the Quran, tax the hijab, and deport Muslim citizens? How does our exposing the simple facts constitute a smear?

Perhaps following the lead of her buddy Robert Spencer, she describes Loonwatch as a sinister left wing plot, headed and funded by “someone big” like none other then the evil emperor, George Soros (aka Darth Vader) himself! This is likely a case of projection as Pamela Geller and her cronies like Spencer are funded to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars by extreme right-wingers like David Horowitz and his ironically named Freedom Center.

The commenters on her site live up to expectations by vying to be dafter than one another. Here is a sampling,

Took a peak at Loonwatch.com. What a bunch of assholes these people are. When all else fails resort to ridicule. The site equates Robert Spencer, Pamela, Geert, and everyone else doing this important work, to the level of UFO conspiracy kooks. They themselves are kooks…

Posted by: Deus_Vult! | Thursday, October 22, 2009 at 02:44 AM

Why, whatever could have given us the impression that Spencer, Pamela and Geert were on the “level of UFO conspiracy kooks?” An apt description if I ever heard one Deus.

Temple Protests Geert Wilders

The Geert Wilders speech at Temple University went ahead after some initial signals that it would be canceled. The University cited “free speech” as the reason they allowed Wilders to speak. This decision was over the objection and rejection of the student body and faculty who didn’t want a hate-mongering, David Duke like character on their campus. This was never about free speech but rather was about the principals of not giving a platform to a fascist. The speech was promoted and funded by David Horowitz who also funds JihadWatch.

Wilders was probably expecting to be greeted with warmth and applauds but he was surprised when protesters, employing their right to peacefully assemble and protest expressed their disdain for his backward, racist and anti-Democratic drivel. To give you a rough idea of how it all went down, take a gander at Wilders favorite supporters in the anti-Muslim blogosphere: the shrieking wing-nut Pamela Geller and her best friend Robert Spencer were both crying at the fact that protesters had gathered to counter demonstrate against the fascist. Pam, in her infinite wisdom summed it all up as “pearls before swine.” Spencer reported it as an attack on “free speech.”

It goes without saying that when these two individuals agree with each other on something it’s usually false or a lie. Whenever anyone opposes their hate, they label it “censorship,” an attack on free speech, submission to creeping-stealth-sharia-jihad of the highest order and dhimmitude, but when anyone, (like these Temple University protesters) chooses to then express how they feel about the anti-Muslim hate they get all Soddy and unleash tirades of how the sky is falling and evil is taking over the world. To say the least it is a simple case of double standards: Pam and Bob if you cant take the medicine then don’t try to dish it out.

I digress though, the event turned out to be one Geert Wilders would regret. He was seen for who he truly is, a xenophobic, anti-Muslim Euro supremacist peddling his hatred, and the crowd of protesters let him know it. Included in the Dutch parliamentarian’s profundities were his call for a ban on Muslim Immigration to the West, their deportation and calling the Quran and Islam “evil.”

PHILADELPHIA —  Amid tight security and a large turnout of protesters, Dutch right-wing lawmaker Geert Wilders told an assembly of Temple University students that Europe and America must fight an ongoing “stealth jihad” that threatens democracy and free speech.

“Where Islam sets roots, freedom dies,” Geert Wilders told the students during his 30-minute address organized by a new student group called Temple University Purpose and funded by the California-based David Horowitz Freedom Center, a foundation that promotes conservative scholarship.

His remarks were met by a mixture of applause and boos, and occasionally gasps — particularly when he stated that “our Western culture is far better than the Islamic culture and we should defend it.”

He decried as a “disgrace” a resolution co-sponsored by the U.S. and Egypt, and backed by the U.N. Human Rights Council earlier this month, deploring attacks on religions while insisting that freedom of expression remains a basic right. Wilders also criticized President Barack Obama for his efforts to extend a hand to the Islamic world, saying that such appeasement marks “the beginning of the end.”

If the spread of Islam continues unabated in the Western world, “you might at the end of the day lose your Constitution,” he told the assembly. “Wake up, defend your freedom.”

He also touched on common themes in his speeches, including calling for an end to Muslim immigration and referring to the Muslim holy book, the Quran, as “an evil book” that promotes violence and intolerance.

A question-and-answer session was cut short after the tone of the event began to turn nasty, when some in the crowd of several hundred students began shouting jeers. Wilders’ security detail quickly ushered him from the room…

It would be nice if this article also reported on his call to ban the Quran, tax the hijab and his preference for a white dominated Netherlands. It may be that Wilders wanted to keep a lower profile and not repeat some of his more banal belief’s because he knew the reaction it would invoke in the media. One has to applaud the Temple University students for gathering together and freely expressing their revulsion and rejection at a fear mongering fascist such as Geert Wilders.

This video gives a good feel of the event and the protesters it inspired:

We get hate mail here quite often at loonwatch, this one comes from someone calling themselves “Ryan Reynolds.” His IP tracks him to Amsterdam. It isn’t a death threat but just someone who really hates us. He left this as a comment on the recent Geert Wilders piece.

Author : Ryan Reynolds
E-mail : ryan@reynolds.com
URL :
Comment:
F*** you and f*** your sick, twisted religion…

If you were wondering, yes, we did censure the curse words.

Temple University Rejects Geert Wilders

Contrary to what those at the ironically named David Horowitz Freedom Center have been claiming, Geert Wilders was not planning to travel to Philadelphia from the Netherlands solely for the purpose of informing Americans about terrorism.  The notion that a politician from the Netherlands needed to travel to a city less than two hours away from Ground Zero to inform us about the nature of terrorism or the challenges we face from it in the future would be laughable if it were not such a grim indicator of the state of the world today.

So, we must wonder, what then was the real motive for the Dutch politician’s planned visit?  Based on Wilders’ record, it is clear that the purpose behind the speech was to convince Americans that Islam as a religion is the root cause of terror and that the United States must seriously consider curtailing the civil liberties of its Muslim population if it wishes to survive as a free nation.  We need only to look at some of the many previous comments Wilders has made to come to this conclusion.

“It is not a coincidence that every terroristic act, almost every terroristic act, aimed and based on this fascist book, the Koran, and this wrong ideology, Islam, unfortunately has been done by people from Islamic [background]“

“I don’t believe in a moderate Islam.  I don’t believe in what some people call a European Islam. I don’t think there will be [a moderate Islam] and if there will be, in time, it will be in two or three thousand years.”

“Madam Chairman, this country has an excise tax on petrol and diesel, it has parking permits and a dog tax, it has an airline ticket tax and has a packaging tax, so why not tax the headscarf? A Head Rag Tax.”

We were fortunate this time around that students and the administration at Temple University were informed of Wilders’ nefarious agenda by the commendable efforts of the Muslim Students Association on campus and his slanderous speech (which is not protected by the First Amendment) was canceled before it could take place.  Rumor has it though that Columbia University has decided to hold the speech instead.  One can only hope that they too come to the realization that slander is not a right acknowledged by the First Amendment nor is it a form of speech worthy of being granted a position at the podium of an institution of higher learning.

To understand why Wilders’ words should be considered as slanderous, we have to take a few steps back and look at the big picture.  Slander involves the speaking of false words that damage the recipient’s reputation (luckily for Wilders, one can not be sued for slandering a religion or ideology).  Wilders’ claim is that there are elements intrinsic to Islam itself that promote acts of terror against civilians.  To support his position he has crafted a youtube-sized video that cleverly juxtaposes carefully selected passages from the Quran and speeches by terrorist leaders with acts of terror.  Ignoring the fact that anyone with more than a cursory knowledge of the Quran could show that the passages Wilders [and his intellectual brethren in Al Qaeda] chose are taken out of context, Wilders has forgotten the very basic of all rules of statistics.  Correlation does not imply causation. The significant number of Muslims involved in terrorist actions does not mean that Islam is the cause, nor do most Americans follow that crass logic.

How can Islam as a religion be culpable for causing terror if terror itself has had such a long history of being practiced by people of varying faiths and no faith?  When Native Americans attacked and killed all of the inhabitants of Jamestown, what was it but terrorism?  When President McKinley was assassinated by an anarchist named Leon Czolgosz, what was it but terrorism?  When the Zionist group, Irgun, bombed unarmed Palestinian and British civilians, what was it but terrorism?  Any argument that attempts to assert that Native American beliefs, or anarchist beliefs, or the Zionist movement, intrinsically promote terror against civilians is absurd and patently false.  Similarly, any argument that claims that Islamic scripture promotes terror simply because Islam is the religion practiced by most terrorist today is just as absurd and just as patently false.

There are more than one and a half billion Muslims in the world today.  If Wilders’ assertions about Islam were correct, one in four people would be attempting to kill the other 3 people.  Were this to happen, global civilization would quickly disintegrate as we faced a level of warfare that would make World War II look like nothing more than a rough game of beach volleyball.  Since this is clearly not the case, we are left with the possibility that the vast majority of Muslims who have condemned terrorism have misunderstood their religion and that Geert Wilders, great scholar of Islam that he is, has uncovered Islam’s true message.  Once again, this would be a laughable notion if it were not such a grim indicator of the current realities of political thought.

The unfortunate truth is that terrorism is simply a tool used by peoples who have exhausted all others means of resistance. Fanaticism and terrorism by a people who have had their lives and liberties attacked from every possible direction is a deplorable yet predictable phenomena that is independent from any particular set of religious or ideological beliefs.  In the last century alone, those living in the the “Muslim World” have had to face challenges stemming from the decline of formal religious institutions, the abrupt end of colonialism, the imposition of forced dictatorships, the creation and failure of arbitrary nation-states, and the existence of occupying foreign armies on their land.  The combined effect of these forces has unfortunately resulted in a rise in the number of people who see acts of terror as the only means by which they can establish a system of social justice that they believe will give them the freedoms they desire.  Islamic scripture is used as a way to rationalize the approach these individuals have chosen to achieve their goal, similar to the way Christian scripture was used to rationalize the political and financial ambitions of the papacy during the Crusades.

Until Geert Wilders is able to demonstrate that Islam, and not the numerous other factors that have historically played a role in cultivating terror, is the actual cause for terrorism today–a task as unachievable as it is absurd– his claims amount to slander and defamation and should be treated as such.  Temple University was right to rescind their offer to have Wilders speak and Columbia should follow suit.  Slander has no place in a free and just society; especially slander that utilizes hate speech to promote discrimination.

Editor’s Update: Temple University has decided, under pressure it seems to allow the Temple University Purpose to go ahead with the Geert Wilders speech. After initially signalling that it would not be permitted they are going ahead with it in the name of “free speech,” an argument we addressed above. However, aside from leading administrators it seems the whole University, consisting of the student body and the faculty have indeed “rejected” Wilders.

Temple U. Uneasy as anti-Islam Figure is Set to Speak

The Student Senate has joined ranks with several organizations decrying a student group’s invitation to Dutch politician Geert Wilders, known for anti-Islamic and anti-immigration beliefs, to speak on campus.

In an overwhelming vote yesterday, the governing body passed a resolution denouncing Wilders for “intolerable, disgraceful and prejudiced slandering of the Islamic faith.”

Student Senate President Jeff Dempsey said he couldn’t support the decision to invite Wilders and hoped that the university would pull the plug on the program at the last minute.

“I’ve never been ashamed to be a Temple student,” Dempsey said, adding that university-sponsored dollars were not used to fund the event. “Our proud embrace of diversity and inclusion is tarnished by this man’s provocation of hate.”

Wilders was invited to speak by a new group on campus called Temple University Purpose.

Before the meeting, about a dozen students held signs with phrases including “Temple U. Does Not Condone Hate” and “Hate Speech [does not equal] Free Speech.”

Among the demonstrators was Megan Chialastri, vice president of All Sides, an organization that seeks to promote peace between Israel and Palestine.

“We feel student groups should not bring people on campus that jeopardize the safety, or just the way people feel on this campus,” she said.

In a letter issued last week, Monira Gamal-Eldin, president of the Muslim Students Association, criticized the university for being the first in the United States to allow Wilders to address students.

“The Muslim population at Temple feels attacked, threatened and ultimately unsafe that Mr. Wilders has been invited to voice his hate-driven opinions,” she wrote.

“The decision to allow Mr. Wilders to share his viewpoints is a danger not only for the public safety of Muslims and the honor of the core principle of Islam, but also for academic integrity and objectivity on campus.”

Nonetheless, the event will go on as planned, said university spokesman Ray Betzner. “We respect the right of our student organizations to invite people who express a wide variety of views and ideas,” he wrote in an e-mail yesterday.

David Horowitz, of the David Horowitz Freedom Center, which funded the event, issued a letter asking university officials to disregard the concerns of the Muslim students.

“The Temple community should reject the call by the MSA to censor free speech on the Temple campus, and should recognize it for what it is – an assault on the right of all Americans to have a democracy that is inclusive, tolerant and respectful of the rights of others,” he wrote.

The event is not intended to offend any group, but to provide a forum for students to discuss sensitive subjects, said Brittany Walsh, president of Purpose, a social and political group that organized the event. She added that her group does not share Wilders’ views.

“I respect their opposition to it,” she said of the Muslim students. “The purpose of TU Purpose is to hash out unconventional views . . . to promote freedom of speech and give students an education opportunity of a lifetime to raise concerns and issues with a prominent international figure.”

But Barry Scatton, whose College Republicans organization had co-sponsored the event but now condemns it, said that discussion shouldn’t come at the expense of others.

“It’s caused so much personal trauma to a lot of students,” he said. “That is not the goal for me or my organization.”

As a precaution, Temple officials will dispatch university police for crowd control, a security official said. The event is scheduled to begin at 7 p.m. in Room 17 of Anderson Hall, on Berks Street between 11th and 12th.

Wilders, a leader of the Party for Freedom, in the Netherlands, has made headlines for a string of controversial actions.

In 2008, Wilders escaped prosecution in England for allegedly inciting hatred of Muslims after releasing his short film “Fitna,” in which Quran verses are shown alongside images from terrorist attacks.

Before that, Wilders had called for bans on the Quran – likening it to Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf – and the burka, the Muslim women’s garment that covers most of the body.

"Under his wing": Geert Wilders & Robert Spencer

Robert Spencer, erstwhile ally of neo-Fascists, friend to advocates of genocide, and all around anti-Muslim is once again basking in the light of his own, made up self-importance.

This time it centers around his recent trip to Germany where he gave a speech at a rally in Berlin. Spencer writes,

Today I spoke in Berlin at a rally against antisemitism and Islamization, sponsored by Bürgerbewegung Pax Europa (BPE), the most important German human rights organization, seeking to preserve European values, freedom and democracy (emphasis added).

When ever Robert Spencer makes a claim such as some “organization is the ‘most important’ human rights group” in a particular country it throws up all kinds of red flags for us because such a statement coming from him is usually filled with a load of BS.

Spencer, of course, relies on his American audience’s ignorance about the reality of this “human rights” organization. He gives us a link to a German website that most of his readers will be unable to understand, thereby hoping they will stick to the script he formulates about it being the most important German human rights group.

The truth is that, per his track record, this is just another episode in a long list of episodes where Spencer has teamed up with anti-Muslim, Islam-obsessed haters. Bürgerbewegung Pax Europa (BPE) is far from being the premier, let alone “most important human rights organization” in Germany, in fact the claim might go down as one of the greatest oxymoron’s in Islamophobia history (on the other hand a group such as Gesellschaft für Bedrohte Völker is one of the most important and “real” human rights groups in Germany).

Bürgerbewegung Pax Europa

Looking at the BPE site reveals that it is just another organization using the title and badge of human rights to add an air of legitimacy to the real intent behind their work: demonization and marginalization of Europe’s Muslims.

Thanks to one of our German readers, Morakot, we were able to see for ourselves the true nature of this group that Spencer attempts to trump up. It is a group whose aims are undifferentiated from those of neo-Fascists like Geert Wilders and the BNP.

BPE (fake human rights organization)

In “Der Verein” (The Association) section of their website they claim that they are not “anti-Muslim” but the facts speak otherwise. Similar in substance to neo-Fascists and Euro supremacist groups, they take up the mantle of proclaiming themselves to be the vanguard and champions of “European Culture.” They define this as being “exclusively committed to the preservation of the Christian-Jewish tradition of their European culture” and opposed to the so called “creeping Islamization” of Europe, which is nothing less than the perpetuation of the debunked Eurabia and Muslim Demographics conspiracy theories.

Their solutions to the so called problem of “creeping Islamization” are elucidated in a document they released titled De-Islamization program which states amongst its main points,

- Organizations of islam critics as well as of people who left islam shall be funded by the state and have an adaquate say in the media.

Lets think about this for a second. They want the state to reward critics of Islam (who defines “critics of Islam?” Would anti-Muslim Geert Wilders of “tax-the-hijab-fame” be considered an acceptable “critic?”) and people who leave Islam with funding, essentially lobbying the government to take an official position in opposition to Islam. Does this not cross the boundary of separation of Church and State, and the fundamental tenants of secularism? It seems the “Christian-Jewish values” that this organization wants to protect bears more of a resemblance to a theocratic “Holy Roman Empire” rather than a pluralistic Democracy.

-All islamic organizations following a political instead of a religious agenda and/or on behalf of a foreign governement shall be disbanded.

Who will decide if an “Islamic organization is following a political agenda?” This is really a concealed attempt to disband all Muslim organizations. Everything the BPE represents indicates that they agree with a Geert Wilder-esque concept that  ’Islam is not a 1500 year old religion at all but rather a political movement,’ so no matter what you do as an organization you will be labeled a political organization.

It also highlights the double standards they advocate: on the one hand you have the Christian Democrats (CDU) led by Chancellor Angela Merkel, which is “Christian-based, applying the principles of Christian Democracy and emphasizes the “Christian understanding of humans and their responsibility toward God.” CDU is a political party which heads the German government, imagine the firestorm that would be created if Muslims even attempted to create a party which “emphasizes the ‘Muslim understanding of humans and their responsibility toward God.”

-Persons supporting djihad or installment of sharia in Germany shall undergo a de-islamization training or must suffer severe sanctions.

Who would define what “supporting djihad” or installing “sharia” consists of and what would be the scope of these definitions?As we well know Robert Spencer and the advocates of the conspiracy theories of Eurabia believe that many law abiding Muslims, by the very fact of their increasing presence and visibility in the West, are pushing a “stealth djihad.” For example there are people in Europe who think  wearing a headscarf, or installation of footbaths is an act of “djihad,” would such acts entail implementation of the “severe sanctions” being proposed, and of what would these “severe sanctions” consist?

- Quran-schools are to be forbidden.

They should just go a step further with their fascistic ideas and follow their brethren in Europe who have called for the Quran to be banned. If in some fairyland-Democracy-minus-religious-freedom envisioned by these jokers this is okay, then why are: Bible schools, Torah schools,  Bhagavad Gita schools not similarly forbidden?

- Islamic head cloths are to be banned in kindergardens, schools, campusses, workplaces, public buildings and events.

This was another predictable point, the obsession with hijab for Islamophobes is