Share
-
Heaven On Earth
Monthly Archives: February 2006
On not Getting the Point: A Cartoon Response to Danoongate
The Muslim blogger Ihsan has approvingly posted a piece from a Muslim cartoonist based in Berkeley, Khalil Bendib, that comments on the Danish Cartoon Scandal (Danoongate). It is a perfect example of moral equivalence.
Much like our British commentator, whose response to this issue is to argue we shouldn’t ban holocaust denial in order to maintain standards of free speech, Bendib and Altaf at Ihsan make an equivalence argument to point out the hypocrisy of the West. As a result, holocaust denial is equated with cartoons critiquing Islam.
The notion that there is an equivalence here, that saying something offensive to Jews and something offensive to Muslims are the same thing seems to lie at the heart of the comment.
Let’s just consider what these commentators want us to entertain as an argument: images that deny the Holocaust, a systematic attempt to exterminate an entire people that managed to murder about 6 million of them, all civilians, is the equivalent of 12 cartoons, many not even critical, that depict the prophet Muhammad. Granted some Muslims feel strongly that Muhammad should not be depicted, but that is a religious commitment that we infidels neither share nor, in a world of freedom, should be asked to share. If Muslims feel that way about Muhammad, or Christians feel that Jesus is the only begotten son of God, that is their beliefs. To say that non-believers cannot deal with these world-historical figures as historical figures, cripples the very mainsprings of modern honest discourse… which may be precisely what’s at work here.
To describe these cartoons as Islamophobic is equally interesting. One of them clearly is afraid of Muslims.
But the hysterical and hypocritical Muslim reaction suggests that “Islamophobia” may be a sane response, not a pathological fear (like Muslim Judeophobia).
Now let’s briefly address the issue of hypocrisy. First there’s the case of the deeply offensive cartoons that permeate Muslim media. One searches in vain for a condemnation of these among either the Ihsan blog or Bendib’s cartoons. Actually Altaf has a post on how the anti-Muslim cartoons are like the Nazi one’s of Der Stuermer, as Europe resurrects its fascist past! Apparently, the injury he feels at the “Islamophobic” cartoons has so blinded him, that when he looks for parallels to Der Stuermer in today’s world, it’s the cartoons insulting Islam, not Islamic cartoons insulting everyone else that catch his eye.
The hypocrisy of supposedly progressive Muslim bloggers and cartoonists (from Berkeley no less!) who invoke moral equivalence to condemn something that their fellow Muslims do on a terrifying scale, needs to be considered when we then deal with the two issues they wish to equate: cartoons criticizing the Muslims and Holocaust denial. European countries have outlawed Holocaust denial because they want to hold on to the sobering sanity that hit them all when, in 1945, they took cognizance of the results of Nazi madness. Whether this legal prohibition is a good idea from the perspective of civil society or not, is up for debate. But when Muslim MSM accept Holocaust denial and all the conspiracy thinking that goes with that as dogma, when their Imams preach genocide from the pulpit, in other words when they are eagerly plunging into the same madness their insistence that we live up to extraordinarily high standards of tolerance while they engage in the most debased expressions of hatred and intolerance strike me as a classic definition of demopathy.
Now remind me: is Hitler popular here because he killed 6 million Jews, or because he did nothing of the sort?
Isn’t Hamas what Democracy is all about?
Josh Katzen asks for responses to the following challenging analogy from a correspondent:
Isn’t being in favor of the Palestinians but wanting to destroy Hamas like being in favor of the American people but wanting to destroy the Democrats or the Republicans?
I add my thoughts; welcome others.
The notion that being a democracy means whoever the people vote for is legitimate represents a basic misunderstanding about the nature of democracy.
One of the fundamental aspects of an enduring democracy is the wisdom and restraint exercised by the voters. Few peoples attempt civil societies, most of the rare few who do, fail rather quickly. Many ancient greek political thinkers, looking at the chaotic times brought on by democratic experimentation in the 5th century BCE city states, disliked democracy — Athens was the exception — because, as Plato put it, democracy is a recipe for demagogy, anarchy, and civil war. The classic aristocratic argument against democracy is that people cannot be sufficiently self-controlled to sustain it by wise choices for leaders, to overcome their own desire for domination.
The Palestinians have shown tremendous lack of judgment, including possibly miscalculations based on the belief that Hamas could not win. They elected a party that was so careless with explosives that they blew up a bunch of their own kids in a parade, whose social services include brainwashing 5 year olds to want to be suicide terrorists, whose promise is more war until Israel is destroyed and Sharia installed — i.e., we get to dominate. The Palestinians will be lucky to get another shot at electing leaders before their “democratically elected” leadership puts an end to votes and takes them into hell.
To think that democracy is just about elections, and not education, and a culture of fairness, an ability not to do onto the other what you hate, is to make a fundamental category error and takes for granted what is actually one of the most difficult moral achievements in human history. Democracy is not a computer program that you can take off the shelf and upload onto any system.
(This is, imnsho, the kind of simplistic logic that got us Bush’s Chomskyite foreign policy of domino democracy in the ME. Undermined by the suicidally resentful Europeans, it’s a recipe for disaster no matter how brave the Iraqi public.)
When you think the way this analogy does, you tend to become a classic dupe for demopaths, a perfect target for cooperation with those who want to use democracy to destroy democracy. Among other symptoms, you (as dupe)
These attitudes are the underpinnings of PCP and give us an analogy so morally confused by equivalence that it cannot tell the difference between an American political party and Hamas.
The better analogy here comes from an understanding of Hamas’ belligerent dimensions. They compare best with a demopathic party like the Nazis. Can one be “for the German people” and for destroying the Nazi party before it leads to an orgy of killing that will leave tens of millions of people dead including millions of Germans? Retrospectively for sure. Can we learn from history? One hopes so.
rl
Culture Matters: Goodbye Economics
A great article by David Brooks about the importance of Culture and the decline of a materialistic view of human behavior and of the world. This article should be read by academics of all fields.
Once, not that long ago, economics was the queen of the social sciences. Human beings were assumed to be profit-maximizing creatures, trending toward reasonableness. As societies grew richer and more modern, it was assumed, they would become more secular. As people became better educated, primitive passions like tribalism and nationalism would fade away and global institutions would rise to take their place. As communications technology improved, there would be greater cooperation and understanding. As voters became more educated, they would become more independent-minded and rational.
Not so says Brooks:
None of these suppositions turned out to be true. As the world has become richer and better educated, religion hasn’t withered; it has become stronger and more fundamentalist. Nationalism and tribalism haven’t faded away. Instead, transnational institutions like the U.N. and the European Union are weak and in crisis.
We know better now:
All of this has thrown a certain sort of materialistic vision into crisis. We now know that global economic and technological forces do not gradually erode local cultures and values. Instead, cultures and values shape economic development … The events of the past years have thrown us back to the murky realms of theology, sociology, anthropology and history. Even economists know this, and are migrating to more behaviorialist and cultural approaches … The fundamental change is that human beings now look less like self-interested individuals and more like socially embedded products of family and group. Alan Greenspan said that he once assumed that capitalism was “human nature.” But after watching the collapse of the Russian economy, he had come to consider it “was not human nature at all, but culture.
What has Osama done for us?
In the Los Angeles Times Mansoor Ijaz, an American Muslim, writes that Muslims act against their own self-interest:
The first truth is that most Muslim ideologues are hypocrites. What has Osama bin Laden done for the victims of the 2004 tsunami or the shattered families who lost everything in the Pakistani earthquake last year? He did not build one school, offer one loaf of bread or pay for one vaccination. And yet he, not the devout Muslim doctors from California and Iowa who repair broken limbs and lives in the snowy peaks of Kashmir, speaks the loudest for what Muslims allegedly stand for. He has succeeded in presenting himself as the defender of Islam’s poor, and the Western media has taken his jihadist message all the way to the bank.
He also has something to say about Muslim and Arab elites:
The hypocrisy only starts there. Muslims and Arabs have done pitifully little to help improve the capacity of the Palestinian people to be good neighbors to their Israeli brethren. Take the money spent by any Middle Eastern royal family at a London hotel or Geneva resort during one month and you could build enough schools and medical clinics to take care of 1,000 Palestinian children for a year. Yet rather than educate and feed Palestinian and Muslim children so they may learn to settle differences through dialogue and debate, instead of by throwing rocks and wearing bombs, the Muslim “haves” put on a few telethons to raise paltry sums for the “have nots” to alleviate the guilt over their palatial gilded cages.
There’s no such thing as a “Muslim moderate,” he writes:
The second truth — one that the West needs to come to grips with — is that there is no such human persona as a “moderate Muslim.” You either believe in the oneness of God or you don’t. You either believe in the teachings of his prophet or you don’t. You either learn those teachings and apply them to the circumstances of life in the country you have chosen to live in, or you shouldn’t live there. Haters of Islam use the simplicity and elegance of its black-and-white rigor for devious political advantage by classifying the Koran’s religious edicts as the cult-like behavior of fanatics. The West would win a lot of hearts and minds if it only showed Islam as it really is — telling the story, for example, that the prophet Muhammad was one of the great commodity traders of all time because he based his dealings on uniquely Muslim values, or that the reason he had multiple wives was not for the sake of sex but to give proper homes to the children of women made widows during a time of war. The cartoon imbroglio offered Western media an opportunity to portray the prophet in his many dignified dimensions, not just the distorted ones; sadly, there were few takers.
Towards “Animal Farm” …
The Archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu, the Church of England’s second in command, says that the US administration’s refusal to close Guantanamo Bay camp reflected “a society that is heading towards George Orwell’s Animal Farm”.
“The US should try all 500 detainees at Guantanamo, who still include eight British residents, or free them without further delay. To hold someone for up to four years without charge clearly indicates a society that is heading towards George Orwell’s Animal Farm.”
More here
“America Lost Its Moral Ground”
From The New York Times Editorial:
Who needs sophomoric cartoons to inflame the Muslim world when you’ve got the Bush administration’s prison system? One reason the White House is so helpless against the violence spawned by those Danish cartoons is that it has squandered so much of its moral standing at Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. This week, the world got two chilling reminders of why both prisons must be closed … All are a reminder that the Bush administration has yet to account for what happened at Abu Ghraib. No political appointee has been punished for the policies that led to the atrocities. Indeed, most have been rewarded. The prison was a symbol of the worst of the Hussein regime. Now it’s a symbol of the worst of the American occupation.
Bad News Sells? (The Media In Iraq)
In an interview actor Gary Sinise, who has been to Iraq several times, talks about the media’s unwillingness to report good news:
My point to this journalist [was] that I was disturbed at the media’s willingness … to go after the military regarding the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. It seemed like they could not put enough of those pictures on television enough times. We saw dozens and dozens and dozens of pictures daily, for two, three weeks, [showing] the lack of integrity of our military. He [the journalist] said to me: “You know what, I don’t care. I think we should put those pictures on every day and all the time, and I have no problem with that.” I said: “I can’t disagree with you that it was a horrible misstep by a bunch of dufusses in our military, about 15 of them. But on the other hand I would say, where is the other side of the story? Why, if you’re going to be so aggressive with depicting American troops in a negative manner, why not be just as aggressive to show the heroism of our service members?” I brought up dozens of examples. There’s a woman, a major, who is like a superwoman over there, helping kids and delivering kerosene lamps and pulling Iraqis out from under trucks and saving people and doing all these things. You never hear about that kind of stuff. Yet it seems like they can’t wait to put bad news on. I said, “You tell me. Why do we see one side of the story and not the other if there are two sides?” He paused, and then he said, “Well, bad news sells” – and that’s all he could say.
Al Jazeera: Fair and Balanced
Marc Lynch, professor of political science at Williams college argues in “Voices of the New Arab Public: Iraq, Al-Jazeera, and Middle East Politics Today” that Al Jazeera is surprisingly fair and balanced. From Newsweek:
Asserting that “it is manifestly untrue that the Arab media are dominated by a single perspective,” Lynch points out that often the most hostile critics of Al-Jazeera neither speak Arabic nor bother to watch the programs they castigate. In contrast, Lynch has amassed a wide range of network data, allowing him to analyze “what Arabs themselves have actually said.” They include the full transcripts of 967 episodes of five of the most important Al-Jazeera talk shows, a separate database of those episodes that dealt specifically with Iraq and another containing thousands of opinion essays published in Arabic newspapers. His conclusion: Arabs are “relentlessly bombarded” by their media not with crude propaganda but with diverse “political arguments.”
Respect, please
From Edgar M. Bronfman op-ed in The Haaretz:
Mutual respect and understanding between members of different religions is the key to ending hatred and to creating a better world. We consider desecration of any holy book an insult to ourselves. Desecration of the Koran, the Torah or the Christian Bible, or any religious site should be offensive to all of us. Mutual respect means just that: You respect me and what I stand for, and I respect you and what you stand for. To consciously provoke and offend the fairly small Muslim minority in Denmark was wrong … Christians, Jews and Muslims are all children of Abraham, and we should learn what we have in common. After that, our differences might look less significant. We need to restrain ourselves in what we say about other religions, in how we judge other faiths. We don’t need new laws. We cannot restrict freedom of speech. We need to restrict ourselves. Otherwise, in the end, we will be restricted.
The challenge to Islam
From Suzanne Fields op-ed in The Washington Times:
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Dutch writer and politician who wrote the film script for the movie that inspired an Islamist terrorist to murder filmmaker Theodore van Gogh, told the Danish newspaper that first reprinted the cartoons of Muhammed: “It’s important to remember that Islam hasn’t undergone all the reforms and adjustment which Christianity and Judaism have undergone over the past thousand years.” This controversy brings attention to the Muslim taboos that are incompatible with democratic values. Subjugating women and imprisoning writers is anathema to Western religions. If religious institutions are to be capable of maintaining themselves in a democratic age, observed de Tocqueville, “their power also depends a great deal on the nature of the beliefs they profess, the external forms they adopt, and the duties they impose.” This is history’s challenge to Islam.
Cartoons (Italian style)
Italy’s Reforms Minister Roberto Calderoli has had T-shirts made emblazoned with cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad. From The Washington Post:
Calderoli, a member of the anti-immigrant Northern League party, told Ansa news agency on Tuesday that the West had to stand up against Islamist extremists and offered to hand out the T-shirts to anyone who wanted them … “I have had T-shirts made with the cartoons that have upset Islam and I will start wearing them today,” Ansa quoted Calderoli as saying. He said the T-shirts were not meant to be a provocation but added that he saw no point trying to appease extremists.
“We Drink Blood”
From Haaretz:
A Hamas Web site recently published the videotape wills of two suicide bombers, with two main messages: One is directed to the Jews whose blood Hamas pledges to drink until they flee from the land of the Muslims, and the other is devoted to a mother who helps her son plan a suicide attack, according to Palestinian Media Watch, which presents the video shown on the Hamas site after its victory in the Palestinian parliamentary elections.
The video shows Idham Ahmed Majila and Maumin Rajab Rajab, who blew themselves up at the Karni crossing at the end of 2004. “My message to the hated Jews: There is no God but Allah,” Majala says. “We will hunt you everywhere, when you wake and when you sleep. We are a blood-drinking people and we know that there is no better blood than Jewish blood.
“We will not leave you alone until we quench ourselves with your blood and we will quench the thirst of our children with your blood. We will not rest until you leave the lands of the Muslims.”
Oh the Shame! Male Humiliation
While reading for my course on Honor-Shame culture a friend pointed out the following brilliant passage from Tom Wolfe’s latest novel, I am Charlotte Simmons. It bears reading, not only for the squeamish feeling it will create in men, but for the meditation it will provide those who want to understand the agony of those who find themselves in a world that has passed them by.
Where is the poet who has sung of that most lacerating of all human emotions, the cut that never heals – male humiliation? Oh, the bards, the balladeers have stirred us with epics of the humiliated male’s obsession with revenge… but that is letting the poor devil off easy. After all, the very urge, Vengeance is mine, gives him back a portion of his manhood, retaliation being manly stuff. But the feeling itself, male humiliation, is unspeakable. No man can bring himself to describe it. The same man who will confess with relish and in lavish ghostwritten detail to every sort of debauchery and atrocity will not utter one peep about the humiliations that, in Orwell’s phase, “make up seventy-five percent of life.” For confessing to humiliation means confessing that he has cringed, caved in, surrendered his honor without a fight to another man who has intimidated him – that he has been unsexed and has plunged into a misery worse than the prospect of imminent death. Eternally, the sheer fear of physical confrontation – even now – in the twenty-first century! – when life’s major victories are won not by knights in armor on the field of battle but by sedentary men in central-heating-weight worsted suits inside glass-walled electronic chambers. Nor will a man ever free himself from that sickening moment of capitulation. A word, an image, a smell, a face will bring it flashing back, and he will experience the very feeling, every neural sensation of that moment, and he will drown all over again in the shame of lying still for his own unsexing.
Tom Wolfe, I am Charlotte Simmons (Picador, New York, 2004), pp. 293-294.
Holocaust-denial law: Violation of free speech (for British professor)
Ronald Dworkin, professor of law at University College London, writes that Muslims might have a point about the Holocaust:
Muslims who are outraged by the Danish cartoons point out that in several European countries it is a crime publicly to deny, as the president of Iran has denied, that the Holocaust ever took place. They say that western concern for free speech is therefore only self-serving hypocrisy, and they have a point. But of course the remedy is not to make the compromise of democratic legitimacy even greater than it already is but to work toward a new understanding of the European convention on human rights that would strike down the Holocaust-denial law and similar laws across Europe for what they are: violations of the freedom of speech that that convention demands.
Still Hate After All These Years …
Victor Davis Hanson has a question for Europeans:
Do the Europeans sense that the more open, free-wheeling and non-judgmental the culture, the more it is hated by the jihadists? If Europe as a whole is more pro-Palestinian than the United States, disapproved of Iraq, and yet is still hated as much, is magnanimity at last exposed as appeasement—earning only contempt from an emboldened enemy?
On not printing the cartoons
The Boston Globe’s ombudsman just explained again why it’s not publishing the Muhammad cartoons.
Questionable cartoons
By Richard Chacón, Globe Ombudsman | February 12, 2006
It’s understandable for readers to feel the Globe’s decision not to run the offensive caricatures left them inadequately informed or that the newspaper was somehow caving in to the reprehensible actions and threats by Muslim extremists.
That is a fairly important point. Unless you know how anodine most of the cartoons are, and how right on the few that are critical are, you can’t understand the dynamics involved, including the three months and three fakes it took to cook up the indignation. The idea that the public can understand this controversy without seeing the cartoons, a position widely repeated by our MSM, is a clear index of just how miserable their standards are when it comes to serving their public.
It’s also fair to say that most Americans lack enough knowledge of Islam to understand why such cartoons would be considered so painful, so that printing the images could help readers better understand a complicated story.
I like that. As if the Globe does understand. As if they are not accepting as Islamic that which is Islamist. Look here for some of the many examples of Muslim depictions of Muhammad. Isn’t it a bit late in this controversy to think it’s still about pictures of Muhammad and not about the hyper-allergic reaction of Islamists to criticism, and an aggressive strain of Islam seeking to impose its standards on the infidels?
Dan Wasserman, the Globe’s cartoonist who has had his own clashes with editors and readers during more than 20 years of drawing for the newspaper, said editorial cartoons at most dailies are edited for taste.
”There is a standard at most major papers that cartoons don’t ridicule religions as religions,” Wasserman wrote last week. ”Cartoons often satirize religious institutions and leaders for their actions in the world . . . but not basic tenets of faith. The Danish cartoons set out as their mission the mocking of the Muslim prohibition on the depiction of Mohammed.”
I don’t know what Islamic organization Wasserman got his language from. The purpose of the Danish newspaper was not to mock — that’s part of the hyper-allergic Muslim reaction to criticism — but to insist that non-Muslims had rights too, and that the Danes would not be intimidated by threats of violence into acting like dhimmi. To reduce this to intentional mockery, rather than to recognize the dangers of Muslims imposing their laws on us, is to adopt the Islamist position. As Robert Frost put it (according to William Kristol), the problem with liberals is they can’t even take their own side in a dispute.
Several readers, in demanding that the Mohammed cartoons be printed, argued that publications in the Arab world frequently print images that are virulently anti-Jewish or anti-Christian. Others recalled the times when the Globe published ”Piss Christ,” a photograph by Andres Serrano that showed a crucifix covered in urine that offended many Christians. That photo appeared three times in the Globe — in 1989, 1991, and 1992 — all during a previous ownership and leadership.
Printing the Mohammed cartoons wouldn’t balance any of these arguments, it would only add to the list of controversial journalistic decisions. More wrongs won’t make the problem right.
The squirrely logic of change of ownership aside, the point made by those pointing out how vicious cartoons are in the Arab world is not to say, if they can do it, we can do it. Rather the point is, “where do they get off getting indignant and rioting in the street, when they regularly indulge in the kind of cartooning that makes a mockery of mockery?” Why is the Globe — and the rest of the American papers — all of a sudden discovering the exquisite sensitivities of the Muslims when they haven’t even had the decency to tell their own readers about the exquisite sadism of the Muslims vis-a-vis Christians, Jews, Americans, Westerners, infidels, etc.?
Freedom of speech means that news organizations have the liberty to decide whether or not something meets strict standards of accuracy, fairness, and taste for the sake of the community. The Globe exercised an uncomfortable but necessary restraint not to print the images. Being open and transparent about how those decisions are made by editors — especially over controversial stories and images — helps readers better understand the dilemma that journalists often face between being free and fair.
The ombudsman represents the readers. His opinions and conclusions are his own. Phone 617-929-3020 or, to leave a message, 929-3022. His e-mail address is ombud@globe.com.
Well I certainly don’t feel represented here, and as for the “open and transparent” nature of the decision making, wouldn’t it be just the slightest bit honest to admit that the reason why the Globe has suddenly become considerate of religious feelings has to do with the fact that it’s a billion Muslims who may be upset, and they are intimidated… that this may be part of a larger pattern of avoiding confrontations with people who retaliate nastily when they’re crossed… as in their position on not calling organizations like Hamas terrorist.
I for one feel strongly that in this case our pusillanimous press has let down our European allies. Granted the Europeans have behaved badly (and continue to do so). But when they finally discover some backbone, it’s our job to come to their aid, like the Calgary Sun (hat tip LGF), not act like them.
Israel like South Africa? (Update)
Last week The Guardian ran 2 articles by the paper’s Jerusalem correspondent (Chris McGreal) examining parallels between Israel and apartheid South Africa.
The report was the cover story of G2 on Monday, with the whole of the front page devoted to juxtaposed pictures of a Palestinian in East Jerusalem and a black South African, each holding his identity documents. On the opening spread, at the beginning of the 12 inside pages devoted to this first article, the heading read, in part, “… even within Israel itself, accusations persist that the web of controls affecting every aspect of Palestinian life bears a disturbing resemblance to apartheid”.
The Guardian’s Ombudsman praises the newspaper for “opening the subject” to debate.”
This – the persistence of comparisons by people with experience of both societies – was, it seemed to me, well established in McGreal’s account …
He did not, in his two articles, draw conclusions. Neither have the leader columns of the Guardian offered any comment. McGreal’s intention, and this was clearly endorsed by the Guardian in publishing the articles, was to open the subject to debate.
The Project: dominating the West
Interesting details from a new book published in France.
A new book published by Le Seuil in Paris in October may further Western understanding of this reality. Written by the Swiss investigative reporter Sylvain Besson and not yet available in English, it publicizes the discovery and contents of a Muslim Brotherhood strategy document entitled “The Project,” hitherto little known outside the highest counterterrorism circles. Besson’s book, La conquête de l’Occident: Le projet secret des Islamistes (The Conquest of the West: The Islamists’ Secret Project), recounts how, in November 2001, Swiss authorities acting on a special request from the White House entered the villa of a man named Yusuf Nada in Campione, a small Italian enclave on the eastern shore of Lake Lugano in Switzerland. Nada was the treasurer of the Al Taqwa bank, which allegedly funneled money to al Qaeda. In the course of their search of Nada’s house, investigators stumbled onto “The Project,” an unsigned, 14-page document dated December 1, 1982.
But, what is “The Project”?
One of the few Western officials to have studied the document before the publication of Besson’s book is Juan Zarate, named White House counterterrorism czar in May 2005 and before that assistant secretary of the treasury for terrorist financing. Zarate calls “The Project” the Muslim Brotherhood’s master plan for “spreading their political ideology,” which in practice involves systematic support for radical Islam. Zarate told Besson, “The Muslim Brotherhood is a group that worries us not because it deals with philosophical or ideological ideas but because it defends the use of violence against civilians.”
“The Project” is a roadmap for achieving the installation of Islamic regimes in the West via propaganda, preaching, and, if necessary, war. It’s the same idea expressed by Sheikh Qaradawi in 1995 when he said, “We will conquer Europe, we will conquer America, not by the sword but by our Dawa [proselytizing].”
Thus, “The Project” calls for “putting in place a watchdog system for monitoring the [Western] media to warn all Muslims of the dangers and international plots fomented against them.” Another long-term effort is to “put in place [among Muslims in the West] a parallel society where the group is above the individual, godly authority above human liberty, and the holy scripture above the laws.”
Conspiracy theory? A look into the future?
You decide …
Report: U.S. plans military attack against Iran
The Sunday Telegraph (UK)
Strategists at the Pentagon are drawing up plans for devastating bombing raids backed by submarine-launched ballistic missile attacks against Iran’s nuclear sites as a “last resort” to block Teheran’s efforts to develop an atomic bomb … “This is more than just the standard military contingency assessment,” said a senior Pentagon adviser. “This has taken on much greater urgency in recent months.”