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December 6, 2007
Saying that 'Radical Islam wants us dead' is a truism and denying it is societal suicide.
While the jihadists act on their Islam, flaunt their Islam, and aggressively push their Islam among peaceful Muslims, non-Muslims must evidently see no Islam, hear no Islam, speak no Islam, and pretend that what is happening has completely different causes and motivations from what the jihadists themselves explain them to be.- Robert Spencer.
In today's vernacular, radical Muslims are often referred to as jihadists and without exception, all jihadists are Muslims. Clearly, jihadists justify their actions by referring to Islamic teachings, they gain recruits by portraying themselves as the pure and true Muslims, and they murder non-Muslims and even Muslims that refuse to believe in radical Islam. Ergo not only is saying that 'Radical Islam wants us dead' a truism, denying that radical Islam wants us dead and that they have every intention of killing us, is societal suicide.
(Fact: More Muslims have been killed by Muslims, more Muslims continue to be victimized by Muslims, and more Muslims are in danger of dying at the hands of Muslims than non-Muslims.)
As Tony Blankley said in a piece at RCC back in May 2006, denial is an often useful innate human trait, and few of us would be able to function in the present if we did not put out of mind many unpleasant realities -- such as our inevitable death. However, as Blankley goes on to say, when a person, or a society, denies emerging or imminent dangers, the peace of mind it gains will be extremely short term, while the harm may be sustained or fatal:
Most of the world today not only is in denial concerning the truly appalling likely consequences of the rise of radical Islam, it often refuses to even accept unambiguous evidence of its existence.To understand just how far American society has drifted toward what Blankley describes as "sustained or fatal harm" from denying the "truly appalling likely consequences of the rise of radical Islam and the degree of denial that exists today in our media and on our university campuses, we need only look at the University of Florida saying that a law student group's poster warning that "Radical Islam Wants You Dead" - is offensive to Muslims
:
Florida's attorney general, Bill McCollum, has sent a sharply worded letter to the University of Florida, saying that a vice president of the institution may have limited students' free speech rights by criticizing posters put up last month to publicize a showing of the controversial documentary, Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West. Campus Republican groups sponsored the event, and their posters said: "Radical Islam Wants You Dead." The university's vice president for student affairs, Patricia Telles-Irvin, responded by sending a message to all students in which she called on those who put up the posters to apologize and said that the language on the ad "reinforced a negative stereotype ... and contributed to a generalization that only furthers the misunderstanding of the religion of Islam." In the attorney general's letter to the university (not yet released to the public, but posted on the Phi Beta Cons blog and confirmed by the university), McCollum said that Telles-Irvin "has chilled free speech" at the university and that she didn't have the right to say, as official university policy, that the posters were wrong. "This may be the view of Dr. Telles-Irvin, but a great many Americans would disagree and argue that it is essential to the discussion and understanding of this war that the terrorists be properly and correctly labeled as radical Islamists who by their very actions clearly want us dead. Students and student organizations who hold this latter view should not be stifled in their free expression of it," McCollum said. He urged the university to consider "appropriate remedial action" for what happened.Robert Spencer nails the University of Florida's response to the student's posters for exactly what it is, sheer madness:
How exactly? The jihadists are Muslims. The jihadists justify their actions by referring to Islamic teachings. The jihadists gain recruits by portraying themselves as the pure and true Muslims. The posters referred to "Radical Islam," not to Islam in general. Many have criticized that term itself for giving the impression that the jihadists are "twisting" or "hijacking" Islam's original peaceful teachings -- but now apparently even that term is off limits. While the jihadists act on their Islam, flaunt their Islam, and aggressively push their Islam among peaceful Muslims, non-Muslims must evidently see no Islam, hear no Islam, speak no Islam, and pretend that what is happening has completely different causes and motivations from what the jihadists themselves explain them to be.
At least Florida's attorney general is speaking out against this madness.
Looking at the University of Florida's dhimmitude juxtapositionally with a news report from Israel about a Muslim Israeli Knesset Member who sold secrets to Hizbullah helps to clarify the extent of the problem - pretending that there are not radical Muslims and denying that they exist and represent an immediate and imminent danger to non-Muslim nations, is nothing less than insanity and societal suicide.
As Robert Spencer writes today in his post titled, Israeli Arab Knesset member sold secrets to Hizballah," he has maintained from the beginning of his site and before that that there is no reliable way to distinguish a "moderate" Muslim who rejects the jihad ideology and Islamic supremacism from a "radical" Muslim who holds such ideas, even if he isn't acting upon them at the moment. He goes on to say that the cluelessness and multiculturalism of Western officialdom, which make officials shy away from even asking pointed questions, only compound this problem.
Spencer's post is addressing a story in Israel National News titled,"MK Bishara Sold Strategies, Israeli Secrets During War," about an Arab money changer in eastern Jerusalem admitting to paying former Israeli Knesset Member Azmi Bishara $390,000 for information on behalf of Hizbullah during the Second Lebanon War. The INN article shies away from identifying the Muslim country, as shown in this excerpt:
The money was transferred from an undisclosed Muslim country, via Jordan. Despite his perpetual denial of receiving funds other than his Israeli government salary, Bishara fled from Israel following the war in order not to be tried for treason.In the case of Bishara, clearly, a Muslim member of the Israeli government was trusted with secrets, and he chose to support radical Islam instead of the government of which he was a part of. As Tony Blankley says in the same RCC article referred to above, the public has the right and vital need to have the events of our time fully and fairly described and reported. Having a witch's brew of psychological denial and political correctness is suppressing the institutional voices of government, police, schools, universities and the media when it comes to radical Islam. And in the Bishara case, ocurring in the midst of a war for Israel's survival, misplaced trust in a Muslim and assuming that he would place the survival of his country over the ummah, and a radicalized population of it at that, could have been fatal to Israel.
Investigators state that Bishara's contacts say Bishara recommended Hizbullah attack Haifa, and use long-range rocket attacks as a tactic against Israel. Bishara is also thought to have recommended other strategic locations for terrorists targets inside Israel.
As the danger grows but is not publicly described, the public will first be ignorant and fail to demand sufficient remedial action. As Blankley points out, Institutional voices are not being responsible by suppressing honest description of radical Islamic events. Denying the existence of evil (or refusing to be judgmental about it) has never proved a reliable method for defeating it. Hell is presumably filled with souls who didn't understand that point.
Cross posted from Hyscience
Posted by Richard at December 6, 2007 11:08 AM
