Al-Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri reiterated his call for jihad against the Syrian dictatorship in a message posted on the Internet yesterday. The conflict in Syria pits the Assad regime, Iran and Hezbollah against the Muslim Brotherhood, Al-Qaeda and the Arab states. Non-Islamist Syrians desiring genuine democracy, including the Christian minority, are caught in-between.

Zawahiri tells Muslims to support the uprising “with all that he can, with his life, money, opinion, as well as information.” The message comes after 25 were killed and 175 were wounded in two suicide bombings in Aleppo of security service buildings. The attacks are believed to have been directly ordered by Ayman al-Zawahiri and carried out by Al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Iraq.

He is especially concerned about how foreign powers will influence the Syrian opposition as it looks for outside help.

“Our people in Syria, don’t rely on the West or the United States or Arab governments and Turkey,” Zawahiri says.

His video was released on the same day that the Arab League asked the United Nations to send a peacekeeping force into Syria and agreed to “materially” support the opposition, likely paving the way for military assistance to the Free Syria Army that is fighting the regime’s forces.

The Muslim Brotherhood, unlike Al-Qaeda, is happy to accept foreign military intervention if it will lead to victory. Sheikh Yousef al-Qaradawi, the top Brotherhood cleric, declared that it is permissible for Muslims to welcome U.N.-backed intervention in Syria if the Arab states are unable to stop the violence.

Al-Qaeda has had an on-again, off-again relationship with the Assad regime. Syria has imprisoned members of Al-Qaeda, as the terrorist group is ideologically committed to replacing the regime with Islamist rule. Assad has also helped Al-Qaeda when their interests have aligned, particularly in Iraq and Lebanon. Relations between Iraq and Syria hit the breaking point in 2009 when the Iraqis released evidence that the Assad regime was backing Al-Qaeda and other terrorists carrying out attacks in Iraq. The relationship has healed since then as Iranian influence over Iraq has grown.

The Iraqi Deputy Interior Minister says that terrorists are crossing the border into Syria and shipping arms to the opposition fighting Assad. The price of a Kalashnikov assault rifle has increased from $100-200 to $1000-$1500 because of the rise in demand, he claims. However, the Iraqi government is backing Assad and could just be trying to substantiate the dictatorship’s claims that it is only fighting “armed gangs” and terrorists.

Since coming to power in 2000, Bashar Assad’s strategy has been to portray his regime as the only thing stopping an Islamist takeover. Secular democratic voices are silenced while the jihadist rhetoric of Islamists is often allowed. The regime recently released a top Al-Qaeda prisoner, Abu Musab al-Suri, who used to lead the terrorist group’s operations in Europe. He oversaw the 2005 bombings in London and was involved in the 2004 bombings in Madrid.

The dismissed court case involving a Jewish student attacked by a Muslim student last year at the University of California at Berkeley is still alive. Jessica Felber, 21, was injured by Husam Zakharia, leader of the Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), during a rally while holding a sign that said, “Israel Wants Peace.” Zakharia rammed her from behind with a shopping cart. The case was dismissed at the end of December when U.S. District Court Judge Richard Seeborg ruled, astonishingly, that the assault was “an act of protected free speech.”

In her suit, Felber alleges that UC Berkeley did not effectively deal with the harassment and intimidation of Jewish students by the SJP and Muslim Students Association [MSA], leading to “a dangerous and threatening environment.” The groups staged mock “checkpoints” on campus, where they waved imitation weapons around and demanded of passing students, “Are you Jewish?” Jewish students were allowed to pass (although some were verbally harassed) while Muslim or Arab students were “detained.” The checkpoints were meant to mimic the Israeli Defense Force’s security measures against Palestinian terror attacks.

The suit lists other instances of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish hostility at Berkeley and other California campuses. It notes that Zakharia and two other SJP activists were cited in 2008 for battery after disrupting a college rally by a campus Jewish group and assaulting a Jewish student. SJP members also heckled Mideast expert Daniel Pipes and author Nonie Darwish when the two came to speak at UC Berkeley in 2004 and 2007 respectively. The hecklers allegedly shouted “Death to Zionism,” “Zionism is racism,” and the infamous Nazi salutation “Sieg Heil” during Pipes’ presentation.

UC Berkeley administrators had been warned that growing Muslim extremism on campus was putting Jewish students at risk, and that the excessive and violent on-campus actions of the SJP and the MSA clearly constituted “hostile environment” harassment. The suit charges that the administrators were well aware of this and could have prevented the assault but did nothing, and that their duty to do so arises from the fact that the SJP and MSA are on University of California property and are subject to the Regents’ control and discipline.

Indeed, the suit alleges, UC Berkeley’s policies “fostered and encouraged” pro-terrorist incitement, “turned a blind eye to the perpetrators of illegal activities,” and “failed to effectively discipline the MSA and SJP for their pro-terrorist programs, goals and conduct; despite having ample notice that such violence was foreseeable.” By failing to provide security to Jewish and pro-Israel students, UC Berkeley “condoned and allowed the MSA, the SJP and MSU [Muslim Student Union] to threaten, harass and intimidate Jewish students and to endanger their health and safety.”

In an interview with FrontPage managing editor Jamie Glazov, Felber’s attorney Neal Sher, former head of American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and of the Justice Department’s Nazi prosecution unit, noted that

the University seems to be a slave to political correctness. And, I suspect that there is an element of intimidation stemming from the actions of the anti-Israel crowd, who have been loud and persistent in pushing their agenda. And, some university officials might have mistakenly bought into the deceitful propaganda being spread by those who seek to de-legitimize the Jewish state and her supporters.

Three distinguished guests recently joined The Glazov Gang, Frontpage’s television program, to shed light on The High Price of Telling the Truth about Islam — the title of Eric Allen Bell’s recent Frontpage article. Our guests were Eric Allen Bell, a writer and filmmaker who was recently fired from the “Daily Kos” for telling the truth about Islam, Nonie Darwish, author of the new book, The Devil We Don’t Know: The Dark Side of Revolutions in the Middle East, and Mark Tapson, Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. Below is Part I of a three part series. We will run Part II in tomorrow’s issue.

To get the whole story on why the Left suppresses the truth about Islam, read Jamie Glazov’s book, United in Hate: The Left’s Romance with Tyranny and Terror.

The Arab Spring brought Egyptians new freedoms: kidnapping and robbing American tourists, the arrest of 43 NGO workers, including 19 Americans, senseless killings, endless riots and chaos, burning of churches and the killing and kidnapping of Christians.

Arrests of Westerners and accusing some of espionage and stirring up the riots and attacking and accusing Christians of working with the enemies of Islam, is nothing new and is almost always politically motivated. Focusing on the outside non-Muslim world rather than focusing on urgent internal matters and taking responsibility for previous failures has always been the norm in almost all Muslim countries, especially Egypt. With a straight face, an Egyptian MP recently commented on the Egyptian soccer riots that resulted in the killing of over 75 people and injuring hundreds, by saying “This anarchy is caused by America, Israel and the former regime.”

Blaming Israel and America has reached pathological levels and Western media keeps ignoring it thinking it will go away. Blaming the outside world has always managed to work in confusing the public, deflecting their anger against the system and placing the blame on the outside evil infidel world and the treasonous non-Muslim minorities. Arab obsession with the blame game is deeply rooted in a religion that is obsessed with jihad and conquering the outside world. 62% of the Koran focuses on the infidels and not on conquering the hearts of Muslims to peace and loving one’s neighbor.

Even though Mohammed Tantawi, leader of the Egyptian transitional government, was thought of as a friend of America, his friendship must quickly evaporate in a culture where showing any friendship or loyalty to the West can be a life or death situation. The West must always be put in its infidel dhimmi place, Western interests must be challenged and a good dose of humiliation of Western leaders every now and then will certainly increase the popularity of any Islamic regime. I always believed that tyranny in Muslim countries often originates from the bottom up.

Pushing the buttons of the Westerners and rubbing their noses in the ground, insulting and slandering them and spreading outright lies, throwing shoes at them, arresting Westerners, and accusing every tourist of being a CIA agent has become the normal political tactic for internal political gains. Ahmadinejad’s popularity in Egypt skyrocketed after he insulted America and its leader in NY and in the UN. While the West is trying to rescue third world nations, the Islamic third world wants to use every opportunity to denigrate and destroy them. The bitterness, anger, envy and resentment is filling the heart of the Muslim world and it stands in the way of any hope for reform within Islam.

[Editor's note: The article below is written by Eric Allen Bell, a filmmaker who was recently banned from blogging at  the “Daily Kos” because he wrote three articles that ran afoul of the mindset there, specifically naming “Loonwatch.com” as a “terrorist spin control network.” This article first appeared in our Feb 7 issue and we have decided to rerun it due to the massive interest and reaction it received. Don't miss Eric Bell on Frontpage's television program, The Glazov Gang.]

A strange thing happened to me the other day when I was driving past the Federal Building in Los Angeles.  There were a crowd of people assembled there with signs which said that Israel is an aggressive force in the Middle East and that Iran is being picked on.  As I stopped at a red light I heard a man with a mega phone lead the protesters in a chant charging Obama with genocide.  I saw many young people and several Muslim women with their heads covered.  It was an anti-war demonstration that probably a year ago I would have supported.  But although I am not in favor of military action, I know that Iran is not another Iraq, and that in fact there is more going on here than the overly-simplified picture that the protestors were painting, as cars drove by honking in support.  As the light turned green another sign caught my eye – a picture of the Twin Towers burning which read “911 Was an Inside Job”.  As I looked at a sea of Palestinian flags and college kids banging on drums I felt a certain frustration – frustration based on a series of events that have changed my world view.

In the Summer of 2010, having recently escaped Hollywood, CA to take a much needed break from my profession as a film maker, I was driving in my car listening to a story on NPR.  It seems the people in my new home of Murfreesboro, TN were up in arms over the proposed construction of a 53,000 square foot mega mosque, to be built in their small town in the middle of the American Bible Belt.

I listened carefully, to the sound bytes, of those who had shown up to a town hall meeting to voice their opposition and, as someone who was rather new to the South, I was surprised by what I was hearing.   “America is a Christian nation and there is only one God and his name is not Allah and his son is Jesus Christ” and “America is a Christian Nation” and “These Muslims do not share my values and I don’t want them in my backyard”.  Growing up in Southern California, I had never heard anything like this before in my life.  And I started to follow the story with great interest.

On the outer edge of town, off a small country road, there was a large parcel of land, right next door to a Baptist church, with a big sign that read, “Future Home of the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro”.  Over the past 6 months that sign had been defaced twice.  Once it was broken in half and another time the words “Not Welcome” were spray painted over it.

Rutherford County, which includes Murfreesboro, only has a little over 100,000 residents and yet the area boasts nearly 200 Christian churches.  Having not been much of a fan of Islam or Christianity or religion in general (and that’s putting it mildly) I saw this as something of a David vs. Goliath story – with fanatical Evangelicals bullying a peaceful Muslim population, which had been in the community for over 30 years without there ever being any trouble.  And, after learning that in July there was to be a big parade down Main Street to the town square, protesting the construction of this new mosque, I decided someone really needed to make a documentary about this.  And even though I had gone to Murfreesboro to escape the film world for a while, it seemed pretty clear that if I did not document this in a movie, no one else would.  I wanted to show the world what I was seeing.  So I put together a small film crew and began production on a documentary I would title, “Not Welcome”.

I had never seen more American flags assembled together in one place than I had on that hot July morning as the anti-mosque crowd gathered at the base camp to prepare for the parade.  Many of the marchers showed up wearing red, white and blue.  I had 4 cameras covering the event with one crew embedded with the Liberal activists who were going to counter-demonstrate and the rest of the cameras with me, embedded with those who were to march against the mosque.  I conducted several interviews in the school parking lot where locals and those who had driven for hours gathered, prepared to march against what they perceived to be not only a threat to their way of life, but also something of an insult given the events of September 11, 2001.  Two Congressional candidates, both promising to “stop the Islamic training camp” showed up and used this opportunity to campaign, one of whom even gave a speech through a mega phone reminding folks to vote for him if they wanted to stop Sharia Law from coming to Murfreesboro.  The pastor of Baptist church gathered everyone together in prayer, and the parade took off down Main Street with signs that read “Google the Koran” and “Stop Homegrown Terrorism” and someone in the crowd handed out hundreds of small Israeli flags as several hundred Southerners marched against the mosque.

About six months later I had accumulated over 300 hours of footage, interviewing the parade organizer, both Congressional candidates, the Mayor, the Imam at the mosque and several of its board members, numerous concerned residents on both sides of the issue, Muslim residents, city council members, a Christian Zionist lobbyist who was organizing the opposition to the mosque – and I had even filmed weeks of court proceedings, as a local group had filed suit against the County to stop them from issuing any construction permits to the Islamic Center.  The court proceedings were truly a circus with a country lawyer in loud suit with a bow tie argued that Islam is not a religion and that he was prepared to take this matter to the Supreme Court if necessary.  That legal action had failed and failed miserably.  And although many of the townspeople did in fact have a number of very valid concerns, I felt that those whom they had chosen to represent them were not their best foot forward.  In many ways, for the people of Murfreesboro, TN this turned out to be an international embarrassment – given the level of interest from the press.

Also, someone tried to set fire to some construction equipment at the site of the new mosque and the student activist group, calling themselves “Middle Tennesseans for Religious Freedom” put together a candle light vigil where hundreds of townspeople showed up in support of tolerance.  A few young men showed up in a pickup truck and honked their horn repeatedly throughout the vigil.  Their clothes seemed to indicate they had spent the work day hanging drywall.  And when they put up a huge sign in the back of their truck which read “No Mosque” while misspelling the word mosque, I did not hesitate to film them but to also sort of taunt them, in order to provoke a good response on camera.  And I got it.  One of them said we should suspend the Constitution and went on to say that “All them Mooslums should be shipped home” even the ones who were born here.

Adding more fuel to that fire was an incident that took place when I attempted to interview Kevin Fisher at a Tea Party event on the town square.  It was my opinion that in order to avoid accusations of being bigoted, the money interests (a Christian Zionist organization called Proclaiming Justice to the Nations) chose the only person of color, already involved in this issue, to lead the parade and to be a plaintiff in the lawsuit.  Kevin Fisher was an African American college dropout, who worked as a prison guard and became a passionate opponent of the new mosque, after his wife divorced him and became, you guessed it, a Muslim convert.  When I approached him on the square with a crew that included 4 cameras, saying only “Hi, Kevin” he dialed his cell phone and called 9-1-1 saying that he was being “racially harassed”.  This not only made the headlines of the local paper but the incident, including audio from the 9-1-1 call was played over and over that night on the local evening news.  This became something of a running joke, when I was recognized at the grocery store in Murfreesboro for instance, people would often point at me and say, “Hey, stop racially harassing me” and then we would all have a big laugh.  And Islamic blogs such as Loonwatch.com were only too happy to run an article about how an opponent of the mosque was “playing the race card” against a filmmaker who was just trying to ask questions.

CNN breezed through town and produced a quick hit piece painting all of the mosque opponents as uneducated rednecks and the Islamic community as everyday people who were being wrongly persecuted.  Soledad O’Brien’s producer offered to buy some of my footage from me with the explicit promise that their piece was going to be called “Islam: In America” and would not focus more than a few minutes on Murfreesboro.  After an inside tip that this producer was lying to me, I confronted him and got some rather vague answers.  So I declined to license him any of my material.  And sure enough, the CNN documentary did in fact focus exclusively on Mufreesboro and was called “Unwelcome: The Muslims Next Door”.  Somehow Hollywood, with its usual backstabbing tricks, had managed to find me hiding out in Tennessee.

I had accumulated a lot of good quality footage.  That, combined with the increasing number of physical threats to me personally while filming in large crowds, and death threats that had arrived via email (causing me to look over my shoulder everywhere I went and making it necessary to spend a small fortune on private security) told me it was time.  The writing was on the wall.  It was time for me to leave Murfreesboro, hire a professional Editor and get to work on assembling my footage to create a feature length documentary for theatrical distribution.

Before I go any further, I should mention that, while all of this was happening, I had become involved in the story itself.  I took sides.  I sided with the Islamic community in their legal right to build a house of worship and when I was interviewed by the local papers (it’s not every day that a small town like this has someone shooting a documentary there) when I was asked where I stood on the issue I never hesitated to give my point of view.  And after a time my point of view was sought out by larger newspapers and several local and syndicated radio programs – mostly Conservative and mostly taking issue with my stance.  And I was also invited to write several pieces for Michael Moore’s blog as well.

Although I had left town to edit, there continued to be letters to the editor on a few of the local papers saying that I should leave TN and go back to where I came from.  I could not believe the cartoonish way in which those who opposed the mosque were making their case.  I felt like I was on the right side of this thing – absolutely certain.  But in fact, I was wrong.

Everything I have told you up until now – this version of my story – is exactly how I was seeing things up until something changed.  I went home to Los Angeles, showed my 25 minute short version of the documentary to some distributors and backers, and did the usual dog and pony show that had worked so well to raise funds, for other motion picture projects I had been involved with in the past.  And sure enough someone said they would back the completion of the movie.  It was decided that the focus would be on “the enemy at home” that being what we were calling “Apocalyptic Christianity” (as there was concern about using the word “Zionism” in “Christian Zionism”).  The Murfreesboro issue was to be used as something of a jumping off point to take a look at the expanding influence of the End Times Evangelical lobby in the United States and how they use their influence to manufacture consent for the bombing of oil rich Islamic countries and to influence policy on social issues.  The theme would focus on the problems we have in America, with our own religious lunatic fringe, rather than on a peaceful group of non-Christians who just wanted to build a place of worship.

After writing a few articles for Michael Moore, I also wrote for a liberal blog called Common Dreams and I wrote over a hundred articles for the Daily Kos, a liberal blog so popular that they receive over one million visitors a day.  I felt I was protecting the underdog, going after the bullies.  I really believed that I was on the right side of this thing.

But something kept nagging at me on a gut level.  Something about all of this didn’t quite feel right.  The Arab Spring, which I supported, started to degenerate into the Islamist Winter, and I grew more and more concerned.  I flew back to Nashville to shoot a conference on whether or not Islam was conducive with Democratic Values and on the way to my hotel room I learned that my cab driver was from Egypt.  I asked him how he felt about the fall of Mubarak, a dictator worth over $70 billion dollars while so much of his country was living in poverty and he told me he was concerned.  Concerned?  Wasn’t this good news?  The cab driver was a Coptic Christian and he told me that he feared for his family back home.  “If the Muslims take control, and they will, it will be very dangerous for my parents and my sisters.  I’m scared for them right now”.  After that conversation, I started to pay more attention to the news coming from the Islamic world in the Middle East.

Over the coming months I watched as the Muslim Brotherhood gained political power in Egypt.  I saw that cab driver’s worst fears come true as Coptic Christians were attacked by Islamic mobs.  I saw Tunisia institute Sharia, the brutal Islamic Law.  After Libya fell, the Transitional Council also instituted Islamic Law.  The nuclear armed Islamic government of Pakistan arrested and punished those who cooperated with the United States in killing Osama Bin Laden.  A woman under the Islamic government of Afghanistan faced execution for the crime of being raped.  Similar news stories emerged from Iran.  A man who typed “there is no god” as his Facebook status in Indonesia, the largest Islamic country in the world, was arrested for blasphemy.

Several Muslim men in England were arrested for handing out leaflets to Londoners demanding that homosexuals be executed by hanging for violating Islamic Law with their lifestyle.

And it struck me.  Even though these angry townspeople in Mufreesboro, TN had not articulated their concerns very well, they were only half wrong.  I remember meeting Frank Gaffney and interviewing him in front of the courthouse and asking him if he really thought that the peaceful Muslims here actually presented a real threat to America and he said no.  That caught me off guard so I asked if he really thought it was a credible threat that a community that makes up about one percent of the United States population was just going to suddenly rise up one day and try to take over the country and force Sharia Law onto all of us.  Again he said no.  Then he told me I was asking the wrong questions.  He suggested that I was only looking for answers that would support the conclusions I had already arrived at.  He said he had, after much research, arrived at a different set of conclusions and he challenged me to look a little deeper.  He gave me a report to look at and many, many months later I did look at his report.

It was at this time that I went to my backers and told them that we were not making an honest documentary.  I felt that everything I had put into the 25 minute short version (the one I used to raise the completion funds) was true, but only half true.  It was critical that we also show the very real threats that exist within Islam.  We needed to show that what is happening to these small communities of peaceful Muslims in America are the exception to the rule.  I wanted to show what happens to countries when they gain a Muslim majority, how women are treated, that homosexuals were executed, that free speech did not exist, that the forced Islamic Law was not consistent with Democratic Values – anything and everything I could think of that ought to strike a chord with the Liberal mindset.  And the response I received was, “Eric you are starting to sound like an Islamophobe.  We don’t want to make a movie that promotes fear.  Let’s just stick with the existing plan, okay?”

I fought and I fought.  I showed them a book called “The Truth About Mohammed” but was struck down since the author was a man named Robert Spencer and my backers pointed out that the Southern Poverty Law Center named his “Jihad Watch” site as part of a hate group.  I asked them to watch a documentary called “Islam: What the West Needs to Know” and pointed out that I had researched independently and verified the truth of what was being presented there, but they would not even watch this documentary as they were sure in advance that it was “hate speech” and “propaganda designed to spread fear”.  It probably goes without saying that by now I was very frustrated.  I showed my new backers several verses from the Koran that call for the killing of infidels and was told that these verses were probably being taken out of context.  I showed them a video clip from MEMRI TV of a young Egyptian child reciting a Hadith that calls for the killing of Jews and was told that “you can’t trust MEMRI because they have an agenda”.

I mentioned the popular Islamophobia watchdog site “Loonwatch” and how I had noticed a pattern of deflection all criticisms of radical and violent Islam by calling anyone who publicly raises these concerns a “Loon” and how I felt this was an intentional effort to provide a smoke screen for the terrorists.  I also noted that everything Loonwatch said was in lockstep with the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) and now CAIR was named an unindicted co-conspirator in the prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation – the largest Islamic charity at one time, which was found to be funneling monies to Islamic terrorist organizations.  I also noted that CAIR had ties to both Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood and that Al Qeada had come out of the Muslim Brotherhood.  I expressed my concerns that the Egyptian Imam of the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro might have ties to the MB, something I had failed to properly investigate.  But since CAIR had the support of Glenn Greenwald and Amy Goodman’s show, Democracy Now, I was told that I had my facts all wrong.  It was also pointed out to me that if CAIR was allegedly some kind of terrorist front then why do they still have a special tax status and why are they still around?  When I said I do not know but it was possible that the government might prefer to watch them out in the open rather than risk them going underground I was told that my judgment was sounding less and less clear and that maybe I needed to take a step back from the project for a while.

This article was first published by the Stonegate Institute.

The beginning of the New Year saw only an increase in the oppression of Christians under Islam, from Nigeria, where an all-out jihad has been declared in an effort to eradicate the Muslim north of all Christians, to Europe, where Muslim converts to Christianity are still hounded and attacked as apostates.  According to the Chairman of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, “The flight of Christians out of the region is unprecedented and it’s increasing year by year”; in our life time alone, he predicts “Christians might disappear altogether from Iraq, Afghanistan, and Egypt.”

An international report found that Muslim nations make up nine out of the top ten countries where Christians face the “most severe” persecution.  In response to these findings, a Vatican spokesman said that “Among the most serious concerns, the increase in Islamic extremism merits special attention.  Persons and organizations dedicated to extremist Islamic ideology perpetrate terrible acts of violence in many places throughout the world: the Boko Haram sect in Nigeria is but one example. Then there is the climate of insecurity that unfortunately in some countries accompanies the so-called “Arab spring”—a climate that drives many Christians to flee and even to emigrate.”

Categorized by theme, January’s batch of Muslim persecution of Christians around the world includes (but is not limited to) the following accounts, listed in alphabetical order by country, not severity of anecdote.

APOSTASY

Iran: A Christian convert who was arrested in her home has been sentenced to two years in prison. Previously she endured five months of uncertainty detained in the notorious Evin prison, where the government hoped she would come to her senses and renounce Christianity. She was convicted of “broad anti-Islamic propaganda, deceiving citizens by formation of what is called a house church, insulting sacred figures and action against national security.” Likewise, Iranian Pastor Yousef Nadarkhani continues to suffer in prison.  Most recently, he rejected an offer to be released if he publicly acknowledged Islam’s prophet Muhammad as “a messenger sent by God,” which would amount to rejecting Christianity, as Muhammad/Koran reject it.

Kenya: Muslim apostates seeking refuge in Kenya are being tracked and attacked by Muslims from their countries of origin: An Ethiopian who, upon converting to Christianity, was shot by his father, kidnapped and almost killed, is now receiving threatening text messages. Likewise, a Ugandan convert to Christianity is in hiding, his movements severely restricted since “the Muslims are looking to kill me. I need protection and help.”

Kuwait: A royal prince who openly declared that he has converted to Christianity, confirmed the reality that he now might be targeted for killing as an apostate.

Norway: While out for a walk, two Iranian converts to Christianity were stabbed with knives by masked men shouting “infidels!” One of the men stabbed had converted in Iran, was threatened there, and immigrated to Norway, thinking he could escape persecution there.

Somalia: A female convert to Christianity was paraded before a cheering crowd and publicly flogged as punishment for embracing a “foreign religion.” Imprisoned since November, “the public whipping was meant to mark her release.” She received 40 lashes as hundreds of Muslim spectators jeered. An eyewitness said: “I saw her faint. I thought she had died, but soon she regained consciousness and her family took her away.” Likewise, “Somali Islamists arrested a Muslim father after two of his children converted to Christianity” and fled.  He is accused of “failing to raise his sons as good Muslims,” because “good Muslims cannot convert to Christianity.”

Zanzibar: After being robbed, a Muslim convert to Christianity called police to his house; they discovered a Bible during their inspection. The course of inquiry immediately changed from searching for the thieves to asking why he “was practicing a forbidden faith.” He was imprisoned for eight months without trial, and, since being released, has been rejected by his family and is now homeless and diseased.

CHURCH ATTACKS

Azerbaijan: A pastor has been threatened with criminal proceedings following a raid on his church during Sunday service. Earlier, he was told that “a criminal case had been launched over religious literature arousing incitement over other faiths,” and was pressured by authorities to leave the area, which he did, traveling great distances each week to lead church services.

Egypt: Before a bishop was going to inaugurate the incomplete Abu Makka church and celebrate the Epiphany mass, a large number of Salafis and Muslim Brotherhood members entered the building, asserting that the church had no license and so no one should pray in it. One Muslim remarked that the building would be suitable for a mosque and a hospital.

Indonesia: A sticker on the back of the car of a member of the beleaguered Yasmin church saying “We need a friendly Islam, not an angry Islam,” distributed by the family of the late Muslim president, prompted another Islamic attack on the church: scores of Muslims “terrorized the congregation and attacked several church members.” Since 2008, the congregation has been forced to hold Sunday services on the sidewalk outside the church and then later in the home of parishioners. Not satisfied, hundreds of Muslims later searched and found the private home where members were congregating and holding service and prevented them from worshiping there as well: “It crosses the line now. The protesters now come to the residential area, which is not a public place.” A new report notes that anti-Christian attacks have nearly doubled in the last year.

Nigeria: Soon after jihadis issued an ultimatum giving Christians three days to evacuate the region or die, armed Muslims stormed a church and “opened fire on worshippers as their eyes were closed in prayer,” killing six, including the pastor’s wife. Then, as friends and relatives gathered to mourn the deaths of those slain, “Allahu Akbar” screaming Muslims appeared and opened fire again, killing another 20 Christians. Several other churches were bombed, and seven more killed.

[Editor's note: Don't miss Eric Bell on Frontpage's television program, The Glazov Gang, which we will air in our Monday, Feb. 13 edition.]

Join the Jamie Glazov Show that aired on Tuesday, February 7, 2012 at 8-9 pm Pacific (11-12 pm EST) on Blog Talk Radio. This week’s guests were:

Eric Allen Bell, a regular blogger for the “Daily Kos” — where he was recently banned for the crime of writing three articles that ran afoul of the mindset there, specifically naming “Loonwatch.com” as a “terrorist spin control network.” He is currently producing a documentary entitled “Not Welcome” that is about the backlash against construction of a 53,000 square foot mega mosque in America’s Bible Belt.

and

Robert Spencer, the director of Jihad Watch, a program of the David Horowitz Freedom Center, and the author of ten books, including two New York Times bestsellers, The Truth About Muhammad and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) (both Regnery).

To read Robert Spencer’s report on the developments surrounding Eric Bell’s firing at the Daily Kos, click here.

To listen to the program, click here.

Or go to: http://www.blogtalkradio.com/radio-jihad/2012/02/08/the-jamie-glazov-show

See you next Tuesday night!

Which is more damaging to the reputation of Islam's prophet: the above illustration, or terrorism, murder, hate, misogyny, and intolerance in his name?

Editor’s note: Raymond Ibrahim provided the translation and introduction to the article below, originally published by the Stonegate Institute. 

The following op-ed, written by Ahmed El Aswany, appeared in the popular news website El Bashayer, December 22, 2011, following several lawsuits against Egypt’s Christians, most notably billionaire Naguib Sawiris, who allegedly “defamed Islam” by posting on his twitter account an illustration of Mickey Mouse with a beard and Minnie Mouse veiled, accompanied by the comment “Mickey and Minnie after” [the Islamist takeover]. Hard-hitting and self-critical, the op-ed deals with an important question: exactly who is it that defames Islam and its prophet Muhammad?  Many in the Muslim world insist it is the West, specifically non-Muslims—whether through cartoons, books, or simply free speech.  However, as El Aswany boldly argues, no one defames Islam as much as “we Muslims, for imposing a terroristic, hypocritical, and life-hating model of Islam that feeds on killing others in the name of jihad and fighting freedom of expression…”  

I do not believe that cartoons, books, or movies can defame any religion or affect the faith of its adherents and true believers.

Those who defame the Prophet are they who slaughter and bomb innocent people all over the world—in New York, Madrid, London, Bali, Riyadh, Cairo, Kabul and Baghdad—while citing the name of Allah and his Prophet and under the banner of Islamic jihad. Ongoing demonstrations follow in support of their acts, while Internet sites sing praises of the “knight” Osama bin Laden, the “hero of the two raids on New York and Washington [i.e., the strikes of 9/11].”

Those who defame the Prophet include men like [Yusif] Qaradawi [the Muslim Brotherhood’s spiritual leader], who incite killing Jewish babies in their mothers’ wombs (his lecture at the Egyptian Journalists Syndicate in 1996), and who incite and support suicide bombings and declared jihad in Iraq, in the name of religion and the Prophet, leading to the killing of innocent people.

Those who defame the Prophet are they who demand the world to enact resolutions against the “defamation of religion,” while they practice this defamation in every prayer in their mosques, schools, and satellite stations—especially against Christians and Jews, whom they curse in every prayer. (After the Islamic Human Rights Commission of the United Nations motioned this resolution against “Defamation of Religion,” according to the Saudi internet site ArabiaNet, the Saudi Shura [Consultative] Council opposed the resolution—because defaming other religions is a rite and part of the rituals of Islam.)

Speaking at an anti-Sharia conference in Nashville, TN, ACT! for America founder Brigitte Gabriel reveals shocking information on the level of Islamic indoctrination in public schools. Even more daunting, Gabriel explains, millions of dollars from Islamic radicals, particularly from oil-rich Saudi Arabia, pour into our universities to further promote the Islamist agenda. See Gabriel’s entire account below.

Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: Click here.

[Editor's note: The article below is written by Eric Allen Bell, a filmmaker who was recently banned from blogging at  the “Daily Kos” because he wrote three articles that ran afoul of the mindset there, specifically naming “Loonwatch.com” as a “terrorist spin control network.” Frontpage invited him to tell his story, which he does below.]

A strange thing happened to me the other day when I was driving past the Federal Building in Los Angeles.  There were a crowd of people assembled there with signs which said that Israel is an aggressive force in the Middle East and that Iran is being picked on.  As I stopped at a red light I heard a man with a mega phone lead the protesters in a chant charging Obama with genocide.  I saw many young people and several Muslim women with their heads covered.  It was an anti-war demonstration that probably a year ago I would have supported.  But although I am not in favor of military action, I know that Iran is not another Iraq, and that in fact there is more going on here than the overly-simplified picture that the protestors were painting, as cars drove by honking in support.  As the light turned green another sign caught my eye – a picture of the Twin Towers burning which read “911 Was an Inside Job”.  As I looked at a sea of Palestinian flags and college kids banging on drums I felt a certain frustration – frustration based on a series of events that have changed my world view.

In the Summer of 2010, having recently escaped Hollywood, CA to take a much needed break from my profession as a film maker, I was driving in my car listening to a story on NPR.  It seems the people in my new home of Murfreesboro, TN were up in arms over the proposed construction of a 53,000 square foot mega mosque, to be built in their small town in the middle of the American Bible Belt.

I listened carefully, to the sound bytes, of those who had shown up to a town hall meeting to voice their opposition and, as someone who was rather new to the South, I was surprised by what I was hearing.   “America is a Christian nation and there is only one God and his name is not Allah and his son is Jesus Christ” and “America is a Christian Nation” and “These Muslims do not share my values and I don’t want them in my backyard”.  Growing up in Southern California, I had never heard anything like this before in my life.  And I started to follow the story with great interest.

On the outer edge of town, off a small country road, there was a large parcel of land, right next door to a Baptist church, with a big sign that read, “Future Home of the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro”.  Over the past 6 months that sign had been defaced twice.  Once it was broken in half and another time the words “Not Welcome” were spray painted over it.

Rutherford County, which includes Murfreesboro, only has a little over 100,000 residents and yet the area boasts nearly 200 Christian churches.  Having not been much of a fan of Islam or Christianity or religion in general (and that’s putting it mildly) I saw this as something of a David vs. Goliath story – with fanatical Evangelicals bullying a peaceful Muslim population, which had been in the community for over 30 years without there ever being any trouble.  And, after learning that in July there was to be a big parade down Main Street to the town square, protesting the construction of this new mosque, I decided someone really needed to make a documentary about this.  And even though I had gone to Murfreesboro to escape the film world for a while, it seemed pretty clear that if I did not document this in a movie, no one else would.  I wanted to show the world what I was seeing.  So I put together a small film crew and began production on a documentary I would title, “Not Welcome”.

I had never seen more American flags assembled together in one place than I had on that hot July morning as the anti-mosque crowd gathered at the base camp to prepare for the parade.  Many of the marchers showed up wearing red, white and blue.  I had 4 cameras covering the event with one crew embedded with the Liberal activists who were going to counter-demonstrate and the rest of the cameras with me, embedded with those who were to march against the mosque.  I conducted several interviews in the school parking lot where locals and those who had driven for hours gathered, prepared to march against what they perceived to be not only a threat to their way of life, but also something of an insult given the events of September 11, 2001.  Two Congressional candidates, both promising to “stop the Islamic training camp” showed up and used this opportunity to campaign, one of whom even gave a speech through a mega phone reminding folks to vote for him if they wanted to stop Sharia Law from coming to Murfreesboro.  The pastor of Baptist church gathered everyone together in prayer, and the parade took off down Main Street with signs that read “Google the Koran” and “Stop Homegrown Terrorism” and someone in the crowd handed out hundreds of small Israeli flags as several hundred Southerners marched against the mosque.

About six months later I had accumulated over 300 hours of footage, interviewing the parade organizer, both Congressional candidates, the Mayor, the Imam at the mosque and several of its board members, numerous concerned residents on both sides of the issue, Muslim residents, city council members, a Christian Zionist lobbyist who was organizing the opposition to the mosque – and I had even filmed weeks of court proceedings, as a local group had filed suit against the County to stop them from issuing any construction permits to the Islamic Center.  The court proceedings were truly a circus with a country lawyer in loud suit with a bow tie argued that Islam is not a religion and that he was prepared to take this matter to the Supreme Court if necessary.  That legal action had failed and failed miserably.  And although many of the townspeople did in fact have a number of very valid concerns, I felt that those whom they had chosen to represent them were not their best foot forward.  In many ways, for the people of Murfreesboro, TN this turned out to be an international embarrassment – given the level of interest from the press.

Also, someone tried to set fire to some construction equipment at the site of the new mosque and the student activist group, calling themselves “Middle Tennesseans for Religious Freedom” put together a candle light vigil where hundreds of townspeople showed up in support of tolerance.  A few young men showed up in a pickup truck and honked their horn repeatedly throughout the vigil.  Their clothes seemed to indicate they had spent the work day hanging drywall.  And when they put up a huge sign in the back of their truck which read “No Mosque” while misspelling the word mosque, I did not hesitate to film them but to also sort of taunt them, in order to provoke a good response on camera.  And I got it.  One of them said we should suspend the Constitution and went on to say that “All them Mooslums should be shipped home” even the ones who were born here.

Adding more fuel to that fire was an incident that took place when I attempted to interview Kevin Fisher at a Tea Party event on the town square.  It was my opinion that in order to avoid accusations of being bigoted, the money interests (a Christian Zionist organization called Proclaiming Justice to the Nations) chose the only person of color, already involved in this issue, to lead the parade and to be a plaintiff in the lawsuit.  Kevin Fisher was an African American college dropout, who worked as a prison guard and became a passionate opponent of the new mosque, after his wife divorced him and became, you guessed it, a Muslim convert.  When I approached him on the square with a crew that included 4 cameras, saying only “Hi, Kevin” he dialed his cell phone and called 9-1-1 saying that he was being “racially harassed”.  This not only made the headlines of the local paper but the incident, including audio from the 9-1-1 call was played over and over that night on the local evening news.  This became something of a running joke, when I was recognized at the grocery store in Murfreesboro for instance, people would often point at me and say, “Hey, stop racially harassing me” and then we would all have a big laugh.  And Islamic blogs such as Loonwatch.com were only too happy to run an article about how an opponent of the mosque was “playing the race card” against a filmmaker who was just trying to ask questions.

CNN breezed through town and produced a quick hit piece painting all of the mosque opponents as uneducated rednecks and the Islamic community as everyday people who were being wrongly persecuted.  Soledad O’Brien’s producer offered to buy some of my footage from me with the explicit promise that their piece was going to be called “Islam: In America” and would not focus more than a few minutes on Murfreesboro.  After an inside tip that this producer was lying to me, I confronted him and got some rather vague answers.  So I declined to license him any of my material.  And sure enough, the CNN documentary did in fact focus exclusively on Mufreesboro and was called “Unwelcome: The Muslims Next Door”.  Somehow Hollywood, with its usual backstabbing tricks, had managed to find me hiding out in Tennessee.

I had accumulated a lot of good quality footage.  That, combined with the increasing number of physical threats to me personally while filming in large crowds, and death threats that had arrived via email (causing me to look over my shoulder everywhere I went and making it necessary to spend a small fortune on private security) told me it was time.  The writing was on the wall.  It was time for me to leave Murfreesboro, hire a professional Editor and get to work on assembling my footage to create a feature length documentary for theatrical distribution.

Before I go any further, I should mention that, while all of this was happening, I had become involved in the story itself.  I took sides.  I sided with the Islamic community in their legal right to build a house of worship and when I was interviewed by the local papers (it’s not every day that a small town like this has someone shooting a documentary there) when I was asked where I stood on the issue I never hesitated to give my point of view.  And after a time my point of view was sought out by larger newspapers and several local and syndicated radio programs – mostly Conservative and mostly taking issue with my stance.  And I was also invited to write several pieces for Michael Moore’s blog as well.

Although I had left town to edit, there continued to be letters to the editor on a few of the local papers saying that I should leave TN and go back to where I came from.  I could not believe the cartoonish way in which those who opposed the mosque were making their case.  I felt like I was on the right side of this thing – absolutely certain.  But in fact, I was wrong.

Everything I have told you up until now – this version of my story – is exactly how I was seeing things up until something changed.  I went home to Los Angeles, showed my 25 minute short version of the documentary to some distributors and backers, and did the usual dog and pony show that had worked so well to raise funds, for other motion picture projects I had been involved with in the past.  And sure enough someone said they would back the completion of the movie.  It was decided that the focus would be on “the enemy at home” that being what we were calling “Apocalyptic Christianity” (as there was concern about using the word “Zionism” in “Christian Zionism”).  The Murfreesboro issue was to be used as something of a jumping off point to take a look at the expanding influence of the End Times Evangelical lobby in the United States and how they use their influence to manufacture consent for the bombing of oil rich Islamic countries and to influence policy on social issues.  The theme would focus on the problems we have in America, with our own religious lunatic fringe, rather than on a peaceful group of non-Christians who just wanted to build a place of worship.

After writing a few articles for Michael Moore, I also wrote for a liberal blog called Common Dreams and I wrote over a hundred articles for the Daily Kos, a liberal blog so popular that they receive over one million visitors a day.  I felt I was protecting the underdog, going after the bullies.  I really believed that I was on the right side of this thing.

But something kept nagging at me on a gut level.  Something about all of this didn’t quite feel right.  The Arab Spring, which I supported, started to degenerate into the Islamist Winter, and I grew more and more concerned.  I flew back to Nashville to shoot a conference on whether or not Islam was conducive with Democratic Values and on the way to my hotel room I learned that my cab driver was from Egypt.  I asked him how he felt about the fall of Mubarak, a dictator worth over $70 billion dollars while so much of his country was living in poverty and he told me he was concerned.  Concerned?  Wasn’t this good news?  The cab driver was a Coptic Christian and he told me that he feared for his family back home.  “If the Muslims take control, and they will, it will be very dangerous for my parents and my sisters.  I’m scared for them right now”.  After that conversation, I started to pay more attention to the news coming from the Islamic world in the Middle East.

Over the coming months I watched as the Muslim Brotherhood gained political power in Egypt.  I saw that cab driver’s worst fears come true as Coptic Christians were attacked by Islamic mobs.  I saw Tunisia institute Sharia, the brutal Islamic Law.  After Libya fell, the Transitional Council also instituted Islamic Law.  The nuclear armed Islamic government of Pakistan arrested and punished those who cooperated with the United States in killing Osama Bin Laden.  A woman under the Islamic government of Afghanistan faced execution for the crime of being raped.  Similar news stories emerged from Iran.  A man who typed “there is no god” as his Facebook status in Indonesia, the largest Islamic country in the world, was arrested for blasphemy.

Several Muslim men in England were arrested for handing out leaflets to Londoners demanding that homosexuals be executed by hanging for violating Islamic Law with their lifestyle.

And it struck me.  Even though these angry townspeople in Mufreesboro, TN had not articulated their concerns very well, they were only half wrong.  I remember meeting Frank Gaffney and interviewing him in front of the courthouse and asking him if he really thought that the peaceful Muslims here actually presented a real threat to America and he said no.  That caught me off guard so I asked if he really thought it was a credible threat that a community that makes up about one percent of the United States population was just going to suddenly rise up one day and try to take over the country and force Sharia Law onto all of us.  Again he said no.  Then he told me I was asking the wrong questions.  He suggested that I was only looking for answers that would support the conclusions I had already arrived at.  He said he had, after much research, arrived at a different set of conclusions and he challenged me to look a little deeper.  He gave me a report to look at and many, many months later I did look at his report.

It was at this time that I went to my backers and told them that we were not making an honest documentary.  I felt that everything I had put into the 25 minute short version (the one I used to raise the completion funds) was true, but only half true.  It was critical that we also show the very real threats that exist within Islam.  We needed to show that what is happening to these small communities of peaceful Muslims in America are the exception to the rule.  I wanted to show what happens to countries when they gain a Muslim majority, how women are treated, that homosexuals were executed, that free speech did not exist, that the forced Islamic Law was not consistent with Democratic Values – anything and everything I could think of that ought to strike a chord with the Liberal mindset.  And the response I received was, “Eric you are starting to sound like an Islamophobe.  We don’t want to make a movie that promotes fear.  Let’s just stick with the existing plan, okay?”

I fought and I fought.  I showed them a book called “The Truth About Mohammed” but was struck down since the author was a man named Robert Spencer and my backers pointed out that the Southern Poverty Law Center named his “Jihad Watch” site as part of a hate group.  I asked them to watch a documentary called “Islam: What the West Needs to Know” and pointed out that I had researched independently and verified the truth of what was being presented there, but they would not even watch this documentary as they were sure in advance that it was “hate speech” and “propaganda designed to spread fear”.  It probably goes without saying that by now I was very frustrated.  I showed my new backers several verses from the Koran that call for the killing of infidels and was told that these verses were probably being taken out of context.  I showed them a video clip from MEMRI TV of a young Egyptian child reciting a Hadith that calls for the killing of Jews and was told that “you can’t trust MEMRI because they have an agenda”.

I mentioned the popular Islamophobia watchdog site “Loonwatch” and how I had noticed a pattern of deflection all criticisms of radical and violent Islam by calling anyone who publicly raises these concerns a “Loon” and how I felt this was an intentional effort to provide a smoke screen for the terrorists.  I also noted that everything Loonwatch said was in lockstep with the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) and now CAIR was named an unindicted co-conspirator in the prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation – the largest Islamic charity at one time, which was found to be funneling monies to Islamic terrorist organizations.  I also noted that CAIR had ties to both Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood and that Al Qeada had come out of the Muslim Brotherhood.  I expressed my concerns that the Egyptian Imam of the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro might have ties to the MB, something I had failed to properly investigate.  But since CAIR had the support of Glenn Greenwald and Amy Goodman’s show, Democracy Now, I was told that I had my facts all wrong.  It was also pointed out to me that if CAIR was allegedly some kind of terrorist front then why do they still have a special tax status and why are they still around?  When I said I do not know but it was possible that the government might prefer to watch them out in the open rather than risk them going underground I was told that my judgment was sounding less and less clear and that maybe I needed to take a step back from the project for a while.

This is how it happens, folks.  Little by little.  Law by law.  The proponents of sharia get themselves elected to positions of power – and then, before too long, they start trying to subject the rest of us to it, bit by bit:

Hasan Küçük, Hague councilor for the Islam Democrats, says dogs should be banned as pets in the city, reports De Telegraaf. The Muslim party says that the animals belong in nature, not inside the house. Küçük says that keeping dogs is animal abuse and should therefore be criminalized.

Needless to say, Hasan Küçük’s concerns have nothing whatsoever to do with animal abuse – and everything to do with the fact that Islam considers dogs to be impure.  Like women, Jews, and gays, dogs are on the front line of the confrontation in the West between sharia-observant Muslims and the rest of us.  When you see Muslims making trouble over dogs, you can bet that it’s just the beginning of all kinds of trouble over all kinds of things that run afoul of Islamic religious law.

To be sure, Küçük’s suggestion – which came in response to a proposal by animal-rights advocates that The Hague be made more dog-friendly – was immediately shot down by other members of the city council.  Küçük was undoubtedly not surprised.  He knows these things don’t change in a day – they change over time, by a gradual process of wearing down.  People like Küçük are exceedingly patient.  And they trust in their own patience and intransigence – and in our weakness, our distraction, our readiness to give in, eventually, under steady pressure, on what may seem to us like small matters that are not worth fighting over.

Küçük’s proposal is nothing new.  For years now, the Western media have featured, with some frequency, news stories about blind people with guide dogs being refused taxi rides by devout Muslims cabdrivers, being thrown off buses because of complaints by Muslim passengers, or being refused access to stores by devout Muslim shopkeepers.  Daniel Pipes has been assiduous in cataloging such cases, some of them dating back to the 1990s, in places ranging from Milwaukee to Melbourne.

The Muslims in these cases invariably argue that their religion commands them not to be around dogs.  But it’s not just about dogs but about pretty much every little detail of daily life.  The same people who object fiercely to the presence of dogs in their shops or cabs also maintain that their religion commands them not to do, or touch, or say, or see, or be in the vicinity of a great variety of things that are commonplace in the Western world.  And once they’ve gotten their way with regard to dogs, they’ll move on to another thing – and then another, and another – at which they take offense, and once again spell out exactly how they expect non-Muslims to change their behavior in order to keep the peace.

In this edition of The Glazov Gang, three distinguished guests shed light on our culture’s reluctance to name our enemy by its name. Our guests are: Sonja Schmidt, a conservative political analyst, Evan Sayet, America’s #1 conservative comedian and Kevin Hand, CEO and President of Hand & Associates. To see Part I of this three part series, which focused on the communist roots of Occupy Wall Street, click here. Part II is below. Part III, which focuses on Romney Rising, will run in tomorrow’s edition.

Groundhog Day is the long eternal tragedy of Islam, which always sees its shadow and always ends up with six weeks, six months or six hundred years of more winter. That hopeful time when the bitter cold of winter begins its slow transition into the warmth and renewal of spring never comes for Islam.

In a reversal of the cycle of season, the Arab Spring led to the Islamic Winter, but that is the endless pattern of Islamic attempts at reform and rejuvenation, which rather than finding renewal in their attempts at transformation only go on perpetuating the same cycle of violence, tyranny and oppression.

There is a peculiar tragedy to a religion which cannot escape its own destructive nature, each time it reaches for some form of redemption, its hands come up dripping with blood and it all ends in more bodies and petty tyrannies.

The film Groundhog Day showed us a man who was doomed to repeat the same day over and over again until he learned to use his time to become a better person. Islam has been stuck in its own form of that cycle, repeating the same century over and over again, moving from religious ecstasy to holy war, seeking redemption through religious tyranny, and finding that there was no escaping the internal decay and instability in the veins of its religion.

Islam’s only redemption lies in establishing a theocracy. Its commitment to power and the indulgence of the earthly and heavenly paradise of loot, slaves and violence led to its own degeneration over and over again. Having no other spiritual form than the exercise of power, it has corrupted itself each time, and then attempted to exorcise the corruption through more of violence.

The Islamic leaders of one generation endorse the tyrants whom the Islamic leaders of another generation strive to overthrow. Hardly had Mohammed kicked the bucket than his nearest and dearest were fighting a civil war over supreme rulership. The origins of the Shiite-Sunni split lay not in theology, but in a vulgar power play between Mohammed’s relatives. That greedy infighting has hardened into theological variations, but underneath they remain fixed in the same patterns of warring over power and wealth.

Over a thousand years later the Muslim world is still dedicating all its energies to civil wars and external conflicts whose only true goal is to put money and power into the hands of its leaders. The confrontations between the prominent Shiite families running Iran and the Arab Sunni families running the Arabian gulf states are not theological, though they take place under the guise of theology. They are ethnic and economic conflicts dressed up as religious conflicts.

The ugliest elements of Islam, its bigotry toward Jews and Christians, its endless raids, its need to remove the faintest doubt about the parentage of the children of its women, are pure tribal pettiness distilled into religion by warlords and clan leaders whose understanding of theology did not extend beyond sanctifying the exercise of their personal power.

Islam was a predecessor of power movements like Communism and Nazism, its leader worship grimly real, as any cartoonist who has tried to draw a picture of Mohammed knows, or anyone who has seen Shiites cut their children bloody while crying out in mourning for Caliph Ali. Its theology is still incapable of embracing anything higher than its own will to power. Its objects of worship are its warleaders, its soldiers and its atrocities.

Editor’s note: Sign the Freedom Center’s petition, Purple Hearts for Fort Hood Heroes.

The Purple Heart, a United States military honor awarded for military merit, is specifically to be given, according to U.S. Army regulations, for “wounds received as a result of hostile action,” including fatal wounds. It can be awarded in peacetime “to military personnel wounded by terrorists or while members of a peacekeeping force.” Yet the twelve U.S. military personnel (plus one civilian) murdered by Islamic jihadist Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan at Fort Hood in Texas on November 5, 2009 have not been awarded the Purple Heart, and neither has Army Private William Long, who was murdered by Islamic jihadist Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad in Little Rock, Arkansas on June 1, 2009.

The reason for this is obvious: the Obama administration has not recognized either the Fort Hood or the Little Rock jihad attack as an act of terrorism. Thus the military personnel killed at Fort Hood and Private Long were not “wounded by terrorists”; hence no Purple Heart. Thus they become casualties not only of the global and domestic jihad, but of the politically correct refusal of official Washington to call that jihad what it is, and to recognize its full dimensions.

Of the facts of each case there is no question. Obama has ignored the Little Rock shooting, and, in one of the most egregious whitewashings of jihad in a field thick with competition, termed the Fort Hood shooting “workplace violence.” Any objective examination of either, however, leaves no doubt that Nidal Malik Hasan and Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad were Islamic terrorists performing a terrorist action in the name of Islam, and thus their victims were precisely “military personnel wounded by terrorists.”

In April 2011, Muhammad, an American convert to Islam, explained that he had killed Long in a “jihad operation.” He was not a soldier fighting against Americans on a battlefield, or even apparently an al-Qaeda operative acting on behalf of a recognized terror organization. He was a Muslim who was acting in accord with the teachings of his religion as he understood them – that is, as giving him a responsibility before Allah to wage war against and subjugate unbelievers. He was acting in imitation of his prophet, who said: “I have been made victorious through terror.” And in his terror operation, he killed Private Long.

If you were to suggest in a public forum that just possibly Israel’s failure to reach a peace agreement with a terrorist organization run by kleptomaniacs and homicidal maniacs, which still continues to applaud the murder of Israeli children, might possibly be due to the terrorists and not because of Israel, then according to the consensus of the left, you are an Israel Firster.

The paradigm of the Israel Firster only works if you assume that the America First position is to support Islamic terrorists. Even if we were to dismiss the threat of Islamic terrorism to the United States then a position sympathetic to the territorial claims of Islamic terrorists in Israel would still not be the America First position. It would be the Muslims First position.

The left, which deploys names like Israel Firsters, is certainly not calling for neutrality in the conflict, rather it would like us to side with the Muslim Brotherhood and the assorted Islamic terrorists scattered throughout the region. Arguably the United States has been doing this for some time already.

Obama stuck his finger in Prime Minister Netanyahu’s chest, but bowed to the Saudi King. When he visited Turkey, he made no mention of the Turkish settlements in occupied Cyprus, but when Biden visited Israel, he threw a fit over a partial approval for a few houses in Jerusalem. The United States doesn’t fund many terrorist groups, but the bulk of the funding that it allots to terrorists goes to terrorists operating in Israel and killing Israelis.

Last week the State Department put out a list of designated terrorist organization. That list includes the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade. The Brigade has not only committed numerous atrocities against Israelis, it at one point threatened to launch terrorist attacks against America. The Brigade is the military arm of the Fatah group which controls the Palestinian Authority. The Authority is the beneficiary of an average of 600 million dollars a year in direct assistance, and indirectly through the UNRWA which has already received an initial 55 million dollars from the United States in 2012.

Terrorists who murder Israelis don’t just indirectly benefit from American aid; that money is going to pay the salaries of convicted terrorists in Israeli prisons. Some of those terrorists received training and weapons from the United States. I would like to be able to say that this sort of thing is one of the innovations of the Hussein administration, but it’s an an artifact of two previous administrations.

This is usually how countries treat other countries that they are at war with. In this case it is an artifact, not of an Israel Firster policy, but of a Muslim Firster policy. There is no interpretation of Israel Firster that accommodates the United States arming and funding terrorists. But there is an extensive global policy of rewarding and appeasing Muslims.

Opponents of Israel often complain that they are being “silenced” in some intangible ways, but the United States government has certainly never criminalized criticism of Israel. However, it continues to conduct discussions with the OIC, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, on ways to suppress and censor criticism of Islam. Nor has the Secretary of State suggested that critics of Israel should be subject to “peer pressure and shaming,” which she has for critics of Islam.

American soldiers have been dying incessantly to protect Muslims for decades now. They died in Somalia to protect aid to Somali Muslims. They died in the Gulf War to liberate Kuwait and protect the Muslim holy sites of Mecca and Medina from Saddam Hussein. They died over Yugoslavia to build a state for the Muslim terrorists of the KLA. Thousands of American soldiers have died to protect Muslims from other Muslims in Afghanistan and Iraq.

In the last year alone, the United States has helped overthrow secular governments to make way for Muslim ones. When the Libyan ruler refused to resign, Obama sent in NATO jets to bomb his forces into submission so that the Al Qaeda- and Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated Libyan Islamic Fighting Group could take power.

While the United States abandoned Iranian students protesting against an Islamist regime, it overthrew governments in Egypt and Tunisia to make way for Islamist takeovers. The Saudis got to use tanks in Bahrain, but Gaddafi was hunted down and killed for a genocide that never happened.

What do you call all that but a Muslim Firster foreign policy?

In “The Audacity of Hope,” a book title taken from a sermon of his vilely anti-Semitic former black Muslim mentor, Obama wrote, “I will stand with the Muslims.” And he has done it.

Obama has stood with the Muslims in Cote d’Ivorie, where armed force was used to illegally seat a Muslim ruler against the ruling of the country’s supreme court. He has stood with the Muslims in Kenya, where his cousin and his Muslim backers forcibly wrote Sharia Law into the Constitution. He has stood with the genocidal Muslims in Indonesia, not the Christian Papuans whose land is occupied and whose representatives are persecuted.

On January 21, Raymond Ibrahim, a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, spoke at an event titled ”The Persecuted Church: Christian Believers in Peril in the Middle East,” hosted by the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (read this report for more details on the conference).  Raymond’s talk, which provided “context and continuity,” can now be seen on video, which follows:

Part I

Part II

Part III

When the 2006 Palestinian Arab elections resulted in a decisive victory for Hamas, the advocates of democracy as the solution for all regional ills blamed Israel’s undermining of the Palestinian Authority. In the aftermath of the Arab Spring when the Al-Nahda Islamists swept to power in Tunisia and the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafists captured a majority in Egypt, some of the same people blamed the United States for enabling dictators.

The excuses were an attempt to place the blame somewhere other than the electorate which had cast their ballots for theocracies, or rather more extreme versions of the existing theocratic elements in the legal and political system. The most convenient target for blame was the scapegoat of Western foreign policy.

If only the United States and Israel had not undermined the “liberal” alternative to the hard core Islamists then the results would have been different, went the refrain. But the United States had done everything possible to back the “liberal” opposition in Egypt, despite it being fueled by a raging hatred of the United States. During the shakedown in Egypt, Western nations had all but ordered the Egyptian military to cede power to El Baradei.

The Palestinian Authority was fed by Israeli and American money and protected by their armed forces. It was the United States that encouraged the PA’s showdown with Hamas after its election losses and it was Israel that bailed out the PA’s cowardly militias when Hamas began throwing them off buildings. American weapons, training and money, not to mention funding of social services and all the other vaunted elements of soft power did not salvage the Palestinian Authority which has learned its lesson and has repeatedly ducked out of holding elections since.

The advocates of democracy have been unable to admit that Hamas, Al-Nahda, the Brotherhood and the Salafis are the people’s choice because they represent their values and ideals. The Salafist victory in Egypt cannot be put down to an effective organization, to a moderate veneer or even the ability to engage voters on economic issues. Nevertheless they surprised everyone with a popularity that was not based on any external factor or political cunning, but on their core message of hate for non-Muslims, repression for women and Islamist tyranny for Egypt.

The trouble with democracy is that it is representative. It is representative in Egypt, in Tunisia, in the West Bank, in Iraq and beyond. The rise of Islamist groups is a symptom of the mindset throughout the Muslim world. But democracy has not worked all that well throughout the rest of the world either.

After all the efforts made to keep the Sandanistas out of power, El Salvador’s supreme leftist pedophile Daniel Ortega is back in the Presidential Palace in Nicaragua. In Venezuela, Hugo Chavez is polling well ahead of his left-wing opposition rival. In Brazil, former leftist terrorist Dilma Rousseff boasts even higher approval ratings.

Twenty years after the fall of the Soviet Union, the second largest party in the Russian Duma is the Communist Party. Its actual vote totals are probably higher due to the fraudulent nature of the elections under the control of Putin’s United Russia Party. This roster is rounded out by the Liberal Democratic Party, which is run by a career lunatic who has proposed conquering Alaska, dumping nuclear waste on nearby nations and rounding up the Jews into camps.

The Obama administration supports “democracy” and “self determination” in the Middle East—two euphemisms that, in the real world, refer to “mob-rule” and “Islamic radicalization,” respectively.  Yet, as Jimmy Carter recently put it: “I don’t have any problem with that [an “Islamist victory” in Egypt], and the U.S. government doesn’t have any problem with that either. We want the will of the Egyptian people to be expressed.”

Sounds fair enough.  The problem, however, is that Muslim clerics openly and unequivocally characterize democracy and elections as tools to be discarded once they empower Sharia law.  Thus Dr. Talat Zahran holds that it is “obligatory to cheat at elections—a beautiful thing”; and Sheikh Abdel Shahat insists that democracy is not merely forbidden in Islam, but kufr—a great and terrible sin—this even as he competed in Egypt’s elections.

The Obama administration can overlook such election-exploitation because the majority of Muslims are either indifferent or willing to go along with the gag—with only a minority (secularists, Copts, etc.) in Egypt actually objecting to how elections are being used to empower Sharia-enforcing Muslims.

But what if Muslims do not win elections? What if there are equal amounts of non-Muslims voting—and an “infidel” wins? What then?  Then we get situations like Nigeria.

While many are aware that Boko Haram and other Islamic elements are waging jihad against the government of Nigeria, specificallytargeting Christians, often overlooked is that the jihad was provoked into full-blown activity because a Christian won fair elections (Nigeria is about evenly split between Christians and Muslims).

According to Peter Run, writing back in April 2011

The current wave of riots was triggered by the Independent National Election Commission’s (INEC) announcement on Monday [April 18, 2011] that the incumbent President, Dr. Goodluck Jonathan, won in the initial round of ballot counts. That there were riots in the largely Muslim inhabited northern states where the defeat of the Muslim candidate Muhammadu Buhari was intolerable, [but] was unsurprising.  Northerners [Muslims] felt they were entitled to the presidency for the declared winner, President Jonathan, [who] assumed leadership after the Muslim president, Umaru Yar’Adua died in office last year and radical groups in the north [Boko Haram] had seen his ascent [Christian president] as a temporary matter to be corrected at this year’s election. Now they are angry despite experts and observers concurring that this is the fairest and most independent election in recent Nigerian history.

Note some key words: Muslims felt “entitled” to the presidency and seek to “correct” the fact that a Christian won elections—which they assumed “a temporary matter.”

Founded in 1985, Reporters Sans Frontières (RSF), also known as Reporters Without Borders, professes to be motivated by a profound devotion to freedom of expression.  The organization has apparently done good work on behalf of journalists in countries like Cuba and China, where press freedom simply doesn’t exist.  But RSF also issues an annual Press Freedom Index – the latest was released just the other day – in which it purports to rank countries according to the degree of freedom their journalists enjoy.  Let’s just say that the list doesn’t represent RSF at its finest.

As someone who frequently slams the New York Times, I’m glad to be able to say that Times reporter Andrew Rosenthal, writing about RSF’s new list last week, summoned precisely the right word to describe it: “ridiculous.” As Rosenthal put it: “Like US News & World Report with colleges, they freshen the list each year based on new developments, and – again like US News – they sometimes end up with a pecking-order that doesn’t quite mesh with reality.”

For example, on the new list, the United States comes in at #47, falling from #20 last year, purportedly because police officers have beaten and arrested journalists reporting on the Occupy Wall Street movement.  One suspects that at least some of those whom RSF counts as mistreated journalists are bloggers who were taking active, and violent, part in them.  Be that as it may, it turns out that Hungary was given a better ranking this year than the U.S., even though its news media are under government control.  Rosenthal issues a challenge to RSF: “Can you find me a journalist who thinks he’d have a freer hand in Hungary than in the United States? I don’t think so.”

But it’s not just Hungary’s position relative to the U.S. that is ludicrous.  To judge by RSF’s rankings, you’d think some of the most troubling recent assaults by Western governments on the freedom of expression never took place at all.

Take one of two countries tied for tenth place – Canada, where a few years back both Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant were hauled before Human Rights Commissions for writing critically about Islam.  Although the Ontario Human Rights Commission declared that the offending article by Steyn – which had appeared in the new magazine Macleans – was beyond its jurisdiction, it condemned the article anyway, rendering, in effect, a guilty verdict without a trial on a matter that it acknowledged was none of its business.

Steyn’s article appeared in 2006, and his cases before the Ontario and Canadian Human Rights Commissions were wound up in 2008; so were two cases against Levant before the Alberta Human Rights Commission.  But there’s no indication that anything has changed in Canada to render critics of Islam less vulnerable to government harassment in 2011 than Steyn and Levant were in 2008.  In any event, it’s worth noting that Canada’s Press Freedom ranking in 2008 was #13, while the U.S. was tied with several other countries for 36^th place.

Tied with Canada at #10 this year is Denmark, where author and journalist Lars Hedegaard has been put on trial for criticizing Islam in a conversation held in his own home.  Hedegaard – who is the founder and director of Denmark’s Free Press Society as well as of the International Free Press Society – was found not guilty of racism in 2011, but the case was retried, and later in the year he was found guilty and fined 5,000 kroner ($884).  It was an outrageous travesty of Western justice and a chilling betrayal of the freedom of expression for which Hedegaard’s own organization stands – and which the RSF, too, purportedly exists to defend.  But does RSF even know about the case?  From 2010 to 2011, Denmark actually went up a slot on its Press Freedom list, from #11 to #10.

At #5 on RSF’s new list is Austria.  Elizabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff, anyone?  In February 2011, an Austrian court convicted her of “denigration of religious beliefs of a legally recognized religion” – guess which one? – and fined her up to €480; in December, Austria’s Supreme Court affirmed the verdict.  Despite this scandalous precedent, Austria’s new RSF ranking, too, represents a step up from 2010, when it was at #7.

Now celebrating its tenth anniversary, Silicon Valley Reads is a program that encourages everyone in northern California’s Santa Clara County “to read the same book, at the same time, and talk about it.” If you think this sounds like a program ripe for abuse by progressives in our educational system promoting groupthink about a social agenda, go to the head of the class.

The program is presented by the Santa Clara County Office of Education, Santa Clara County Library and the San Jose Public Library Foundation, with funding from foundations, nonprofits, corporations, and private donors. Each year it offers several dozen free public events at libraries, schools, and other community locations. Speakers and panels, a film festival, book discussion groups, essay contests, teen book groups and children’s story times are all part of a concerted effort to focus the community on a given theme. According to their website,

between 4,000-5,000 individuals attend these events and thousands more read the featured books on their own, for high school and college assignments, and with their book clubs…

And of course, no progressive indoctrination is complete unless it targets children:

Silicon Valley Reads has also recommended companion books for children with themes similar to the featured book for adults. This allows families to read together and to discuss contemporary issues and themes.

The themes of past book selections have included illegal immigration, WWII Japanese internment, racism, and censorship. Now we come to the theme for 2012, kicking off on January 25: “Muslim and American – Two Perspectives.” If you suspect that the program will consist of the usual disinformation about Islam and whitewashing of its darker aspects, then you get a gold star.

One of the program’s two book selections is The Muslim Next Door, sporting the cutesy subtitle The Qur’an, the Media, and That Veil Thing and a disarming cover photo of author Sumbul Ali-Karamali smiling warmly. As she writes on the program’s website,

I hope this is only one step in many that will serve to erase misconceptions and build intercultural understanding.

In the ten-year span since 9/11, more non-Muslims than ever before have undertaken to learn about the Religion of Peace and are alarmed and disgusted by the totalitarianism, misogyny, violence, supremacism, and Jew-hatred that are evident in the foundational texts of Islam, in the pronouncements of its most respected imams, and in the behavior of its fundamentalist adherents around the world. And yet Muslims still insist that we’re laboring under ignorance and misconceptions; that our irrational fear, racism and cultural myopia are the problem; that if we just unquestioningly accept the vapidity of interfaith dialogue and the soothing reassurances of such non-threatening, Westernized apologists as the ones featured in Silicon Valley Reads, we’ll finally understand that worldwide jihad and all-encompassing sharia are nothing to fear.

The other book selection is The Butterfly Mosque: A Young American Woman’s Journey to Love and Islam by G. Willow Wilson, a Muslim convert who struggled to come to grips with “that veil thing” and ended by proclaiming that a woman in the Middle East “is far less free than a woman in the West, but far more appreciated.” The book comes with a front cover blurb by the rock star of academic apologists for Islamic supremacism, Reza Aslan. Ms. Wilson writes on the Silicon Valley Reads site that

the topic of Islam is loaded with emotional and political baggage, and only through open and honest communication can Muslims and non-Muslims come to a better understanding of one another.

I couldn’t agree more. Indeed Islam is loaded with emotional and political baggage, and I hope that, in the spirit of that “open and honest communication,” she will openly and honestly acknowledge the reasons why.

The 2012 Silicon Valley Reads program also features a panel discussion called “Paranoid Politics – Islamophobia, McCarthyism and the Yellow Peril,” described thusly:

Muslims are not the first group in America to be targeted by paranoid people who are afraid and looking for someone to blame. This will cover three periods in U.S. history when groups who are “different” – Muslims since 9/11, Jews during the McCarthy Communist witch hunts, and Asians during World War II – were persecuted in politics and the media.

Of course, American Muslims are not being targeted, and non-Muslims outraged about sharia and jihad are not “paranoid people looking for someone to blame.” Any reasonable person who follows the news is justifiably concerned about Islam not because Muslims are “different” but because Muslim fundamentalists have openly declared war on Western civilization and are waging global jihad, including on our own soil. Real-world Islamic terrorism and creeping sharia are the issues, not the phantom red herring “Islamophobia.”