This article is old, I know, but it calls out the threat to Western values that cannot co-exist with this coming Islamic caliphate. TM

Confusion over Islam and how to relate to it imperils free speech, without which no secular republic can survive

By JEFFREY TAYLER, MAY 10, 2015

Whatever her views on other matters are, Pamela Geller is right about one thing: last week’s Islamist assault on the “Draw Muhammad” cartoon contest she hosted in Texas proves the jihad against freedom of expression has opened a front in the United States. “There is,” she said, “a war on free speech and this violent attack is a harbinger of things to come.” Apparently undaunted, Geller promises to continue with such “freedom of speech” events. ISIS is now threatening to assassinate her. She and her cohorts came close to becoming victims, yet some in the media on the right and the center-right have essentially blamed her for the gunmen’s attack, just as far too many, last January, surreptitiously pardoned the Kouachi brothers and, with consummate perfidy to human decency, inculpated the satirical cartoonists they slaughtered, saying “Charlie Hebdo asked for it.”

No.

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One must, however, recoil in stupefaction and disgust at the consortium of prominent writers who just signaled de facto capitulation to the Enforcers of Shariah. I’m referring, of course, to the recent decision of 204 authors to sign a letter dissociating themselves from PEN’s granting the Toni and James C. Goodale Freedom of Expression Courage Award to the brave, talented surviving artists of Charlie Hebdo. (Disclosure: I have friends among Charlie Hebdo’s staff.) The authors objecting did so out of concern, according to their statement, for “the section of the French population” – its Muslims – “that is already marginalized, embattled, and victimized, a population that is shaped by the legacy of France’s various colonial enterprises.” A “large percentage” of these Muslims are “devout,” contend the writers, and should thus be spared the “humiliation and suffering” Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons allegedly caused them.

Europe’s colonial past and the United States’ current (endless) military campaigns in the Islamic world, as well as prejudice against nonwhites in Europe, have predisposed many to see, with some justification, Muslims as victims. But apart from the blundering wrongheadedness of the PEN writers’ dissent (Charlie Hebdo’s undeniable courage won them the award, not their artwork) and putting aside the question of whether France’s Muslims are necessarily “devout” (French law prohibits religion-based polling, so who could know?), or uniformly “humiliated” by Charlie Hebdo, or necessarily “embattled,” one thing transpires with arresting clarity from the authors’ declaration: Among the left, the confusion surrounding Islam and how we should relate to it imperils the free speech rights without which no secular republic can survive. We have to clear this up, and fast.

There is no legitimate controversy over why the Kouachi brothers targeted Charlie Hebdo. They murdered not to redress the social grievances or right the historical wrongs the PEN authors named. They explicitly told us why they murdered — for Islam, to avenge the Prophet Muhammad. Progressives who think otherwise need to face that reality. Put another way, the Kouachi brothers may have suffered racial discrimination and even “marginalization,” yet had they not been Muslims, they would not have attacked Charlie Hebdo. They would have had no motive.

What is it about Islam that simultaneously both motivates jihadis to kill and so many progressives to exculpate the religion, even when the killers leave no doubt about why they act? The second part of the question is easier to dispense with than the first. Progressives by nature seek common ground and believe people to be mostly rational actors – hence the desire to blame crime on social ills. Unfamiliarity with Islam’s tenets also plays a role, plus, I believe, the frightening future we would seem to be facing as more and more Muslims immigrate to the West, and the world becomes increasingly integrated. Best just to talk of poverty and the like, or a few “bad apples.” But to respond to the question’s first part, we need to put aside our p.c. reading glasses and examine Islam’s basic elements from a rationalist’s perspective. Islam as a faith would not concern progressives, except that some of its adherents choose to act as parts of its dogma ordain, which, to put it mildly, violates the social contract underpinning the lives of the rest of us.

Islam is a hallowed monotheistic ideology, as are Judaism and Christianity, the other two Abrahamic “anti-human religions” (to quote Gore Vidal), that preceded it. From a rationalist’s perspective, any ideology that mandates belief without evidence is a priori dangerous and liable to abuse. This especially applies to monotheism. Objectively, polytheism was better. Look back in time. The many gods of Greek and Roman antiquity, by their very multiplicity, presupposed a spirit of pluralism in their societies and even a certain ludic variety. I worship Zeus, you Aphrodite; he follows Ceres, she Diana. The classical gods quarreled and copulated, stirred the heavens to storm and sent down rain on the crops, tossed earthward thunderbolts, and now and then accepted propitiations from us humans, but otherwise, didn’t do much to bother us.

Enter the God of the Israelites. Jealous and vengeful, capricious and megalomaniacal, He issued His Decalogue. What is Commandment Number One? “You shall have no other gods before Me” — an absolutist order implicitly justifying violence against those who haven’t gotten the memo. Even after “gentle Jesus meek and mild” entered the picture, Tyrannus Deus continued His brutal reign, with legions of His Medieval votaries waging crusades against rival monotheists in the Holy Land, hurling themselves into battle as they cried Deus vult! (God wills it!). And, of course, with Jesus came (the highly non-gentle, non-meek, non-mild) idea of eternal torment in hell as divine retribution for sin – surely no inducement to peace and tranquility, either.
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The meme “Islam – the religion of peace” might evoke snickering now, but it was wildly inaccurate long before 9/11 and the plague of Islamist terrorism. For starters, the Prophet Muhammad was a triumphant warlord leading military campaigns that spread Islam throughout Arabia and initiated the creation of one of the largest empires the world has known. His was a messianic undertaking. He preceded his invasions by demands that populations either convert or face the sword. Verses sanctifying violence against “infidels” abound in the Quran. Even the favorite verse of Islam’s apologists, Surat al-Baqarah 2:256 (“There is no compulsion in religion”), prefaces a warning that Hellfire awaits those worshipping anything besides God. The real meaning of the word “Islam” is, in fact, surrender — to God and the inerrant, unchallengeable path He lays out for us. Surrendering denotes war, groveling, and humiliation – not exactly the kind of behavior liberals tend to value.

Many know that “jihad” means both spiritual and non-spiritual striving in the name of Islam, with the latter connoting holy war. As we speak, the violent are bearing it away, rendering the peaceful definition irrelevant. The Charlie Hebdo massacre and the shooting at Geller’s “Draw Muhammad” contest attest to how extremists are determining our discourse about Islam, and compelling us to deal with the religion at its worst. Even though the majority of Muslims in the West are hardly on the warpath, the overarching aim of jihad, of the messianic mission launched by the Prophet Muhammad, remains Islam’s conquest of the planet — the most illiberal goal imaginable, threatening to every aspect of Western civilization.

The canonical glorification of death for the sake Islam, or martyrdom, similarly belies those who would argue that the religion’s nature is pacific. If you, as a progressive, do not believe in the veracity of the Quran, then you have to accept Arthur C. Clarke’s diagnosis of those who “would rather fight to the death than abandon their illusions” as complying with the criteria of “the operational definition of insanity.” Insanity hardly engenders peace.

All those who, à la Reza Aslan, maintain that Muslims today do not necessarily read the Quran literally have lost the argument before it begins. What counts is that there are those (ISIS, say, and al-Qaida) who do, and they are taking action based on their beliefs. To the contention, “ISIS and al-Qaida don’t represent Islam!” the proper response is, “that’s what you say. They disagree.” No single recognized Muslim clerical body exists to refute them.

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In doing as he urges, we will give the terrorists too many targets to attack and convince them that we will not surrender, not cede an inch. That means the media needs to begin showing Charlie Hedbo’s Muhammad cartoons. We must stop traducing reason by branding people “Islamophobes,” and start celebrating our secularism, remembering that only it offers true freedom for the religious and non-religious alike. And we should reaffirm our humanistic values, in our conviction that we have, as Carlyle wrote, “One life – a little gleam of time between two eternities,” and need to make the most of it for ourselves and others while we can. There is nothing else.

This is not a battle we have chosen; the battle has chosen us.

It’s time to fight back, and hard.

http://www.salon.com/2015/05/10/the_left...ives_must_face/