Thursday, January 22, 2015

Did you read these essays?


Here are excerpts from three essays that appeared last week. You might not have seen them. 

From Legal Insurrection:

“#CharlieHebdo after-assessment: A bleak analysis of a bleak reality”

  by William A. Jacobson

January 14, 2015  

The Obama administration has engaged in absurd linguistic gymnastics to pretend that the terrorists who shot up Charlie Hebdo and the HyperCasher supermarket merely were individuals who happened to adopt radical Islamic extremism almost by chance.  Could have been any extremism, we’re told.

Generic “extremism” is the problem, as if it lived out of body.

By playing these word games, the administration does no favor to those in the Muslim world who recognize the reality and want it to stop.  To the contrary, the administration’s word games constitute an abandonment.

[One Arab voice against Islamic extremism is] Hisham Melhem, the Washington bureau chief of Al-Arabiya.  In late September 2014, [William Jacobson] wrote about an article by Melhem, “The Barbarians Within Our Gates”. Melhem made points as a Muslim examining the Muslim world that would get him labeled “Islamophobic” and “racist” by groups like CAIR and the Southern Poverty Law Center: 
Arab civilization, such as we knew it, is all but gone. The Arab world today is more violent, unstable, fragmented and driven by extremism…than at any time since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire a century ago. Every hope of modern Arab history has been betrayed….And let’s face the grim truth: There is no evidence whatever that Islam in its various political forms is compatible with modern democracy. …

 

From The American Thinker:

“The Proliferation of Online Anti-Semitism” 

By: C. Hart

January 15, 2015 

…With an uptick in anti-Semitism, not just in Europe, but also in the United States and throughout the world, concerned leaders are analyzing how to stop these vicious acts against the Jewish People.

One place that anti-Semites have been misinforming the public, encouraging negative attitudes towards Jews, is on the Internet. But in the name of First Amendment rights, Internet companies have refused to take material off of their sites that encourage racism, incitement, and lies. Much of this classic anti-Semitism is full of fabrications and blood libels. Moreover, cyber demonization of Jews could be poisoning the minds of fanatics and fueling the fire for more attacks.

According to Israeli Ambassador Gideon Behar, “Every new development in the cyber world is being used to integrate this kind of hate”. 

Behar is the Director of the Department on Combating Anti-Semitism for the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He is raising public awareness of cyber discrimination and prejudice against Jews, while also pressing Internet companies to get the hate material off the Web.

In his office, Behar and others conduct searches on You Tube, Facebook, Google, Yahoo Answers, Instagram, and Wikipedia to prove how prevalent the bias is. The propaganda is massive. Articles, caricatures, videos, and photos are aimed at defaming the Jewish race and spreading falsehoods.

According to Behar, the Internet is an important platform, especially for vulnerable school children who are being given tasks by their teachers to find out information. A child may pose a question on Yahoo Answers, and an anti-Semite may answer their question. The answer is not challenged and the information remains on the Internet. Behar says that anti-Semites use this for their own purposes in every language.

For example, an app was created about two years ago for The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. You could download it onto mobile phones in Arabic before the app was finally removed from the Internet.

Another example is that a Twitter account was created for Adolf Hitler. There were 770,000 followers before Twitter stopped it. 

“The Internet influences life on the ground,” Behar states. “It creates more motivation to attack Jews. It gives legitimization to that. Then, you have more motivation to attack them verbally or physically.”…

 

From Jewish Journal: 

“Tough love for Islam”

by David Suissa

January 13, 2015

We’re conditioned to respect all religions. But what happens when we’re confronted with a religion that looks more like a political ideology? When I criticize Islam, I don’t criticize its spiritual beauty; I criticize the fact that in too many places around the world, the religion has morphed into a violent and totalitarian movement.

It’s not a coincidence that, since 9/11, more than 24,000 terrorist acts have been committed under the name of Islam. After the latest murderous attacks in Paris, even a staunch liberal like Bill Maher had the politically incorrect nerve to say what so many of us are afraid to say: “When there’s this many bad apples, there’s something wrong with this orchard.”

What’s wrong with this orchard? Well, for starters, it harbors an extremist and literalist interpretation of Islam that has morally contaminated large segments of the Muslim world.

While practices and beliefs in Islam are hardly monolithic, it’s disheartening to see such widespread support among Muslims for strict religious law (Sharia) as the official law of their countries. According to polling from the Pew Research Center, this support is most prevalent in places like Afghanistan (99%), Iraq (91%), the Palestinian territories (89%), Pakistan (84%), Morocco (83%), Egypt (74%) and Indonesia (72%).

When you consider that a strict interpretation of Sharia law can often mean cutting off the hands of thieves, lynching gays, stoning adulterous women and the death penalty for apostates, it’s not a pretty picture.

And yet, in much of the West, we act as if Islamic terrorism is simply the result of some “bad apples,” and, well, every religion has its fanatics. This cozy and convenient narrative has run its course. Islamic terrorism is not an isolated phenomenon — it’s a violent outgrowth of a global, triumphalist and totalitarian ideology that is on the march and hiding behind the nobility of religion.

When French President Francois Hollande says, “These terrorists and fanatics have nothing to do with the Islamic religion,” he’s being politically correct, but not accurate. Islamic terrorism has very much to do with the extremist interpretation of classic Islamic texts. Until we acknowledge that inconvenient truth, we have no chance of combating this disease. …

These are excerpts. But there are also food for thought. Go ahead--Google the essays. Read them in their entirety.

 

 

No comments:

Post a Comment