by Helle Dale
From The Foundry

At yesterday’s debut showing of Silent Conquest: The End of Freedom of Expression in the West at The Heritage Foundation, one of the most shocking moments was a comment by Lars Hedegaard, a Danish historian and chairman of the Danish Free Press Society.

Lars Hedegaard

Hedegaard was asked: Could the screening of this movie and the free intellectual discussion of the advance of Islamic Sharia law in the West have taken place at a European—say British—think tank? “No, I don’t think so” was his chilling answer.

The subjects of Islam and Sharia have simply become taboo in many European countries. Free speech advocates, among them moderate Muslim voices, are deeply concerned.

As shown in Silent Conquest, throughout Europe, in Canada, and even in the United States, judicial systems in countries with large Muslim minorities are under pressure to adopt Sharia free speech restrictions. As a result, in many places, including Denmark, it is now a crime to say anything negative about Islam or the prophet Mohammed, regardless of whether such statements are factual or not. The concept that even offensive speech is protected—so fundamental to the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment—is collapsing.

Even if those accused of insulting Islam are acquitted, as Hedegaard himself was after a grueling legal battle, outraged Muslims may take matters in their own hands. Hedegaard narrowly escaped assassination in February when a Muslim immigrant posing as a mailman attempted to shoot him. Another Dane, cartoonist Kurt Westergaard of Mohammed cartoon fame, survived two assaults by knife-wielding immigrants and is now under permanent police protection. (The fact that Denmark has stringent anti-gun laws protected neither from attack, one might add.)

The extent of the problem is startling. In 2010, Dutch filmmaker Geert Wilders was acquitted after being charged with the crime of “insulting Muslims” and “inciting hatred of Muslims.” That same year, Hedegaard was charged with hate speech and finally acquitted two years later by the Danish Supreme Court. In France, actress Brigitte Bardot was sentenced to a two-month suspended sentence and a fine of $15,000 for complaining about Muslims in her neighborhood. In Canada, author Mark Steyn was acquitted in 2008 after a prolonged legal battle over his article “Why the Future Belongs to Islam.”

Even though some are acquitted, all of this has a chilling effect. Europeans “are acting as though Sharia law has already been adopted in Europe,” Nasar Khader, a moderate Muslim member of the Danish parliament, stated in the movie.

Disturbingly, so does the U.S. government. While the 9/11 Commission report from 2007 contained hundreds of references to words such as Islam, Muslim, and Jihad, not a single instance of these words is found in the national security strategy documents of the Obama Administration, a deliberate government decision. Furthermore, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton threw U.S. support behind U.N. anti-blasphemy Resolution 16/18 in December 2011, which would effectively repress free speech if enacted in member countries.

At least in the United States, the First Amendment still stands as a bulwark, and lawmakers have taken up the cause of free speech and the free exercise of religion. On March 7, Senator Jim Inhofe (R–OK) introduced S. Res. 69, “Calling for the protection of religious rights and freedoms in the Arab world.” It specifically “urges in the strongest possible terms that the United States Government lead the international effort to repeal existing blasphemy laws.”

Though it is not likely the Obama Administration will heed this plea, it is imperative for the future of this country, this civilization, that the defenders of freedom remain vigilant.

Congress
113th Congress sworn in -

Religion and Culture

Al Gore

Al Gore takes oil money and helps Islamists – Al Gore is helping the advance of radical Islam in the USA by selling his failing TV network for a huge profit to a radical Islamist network that prided itself in showing IED’s killing Americans in Iraq. The Al Jazeera network is funded by the government of Qatar. Qatar is controlled by a “royal” family and has no freedom of speech, press or religion. Read more
International
F-16′s to Egypt and F-35′s to Turkey – I have previously reported that the United States will begin delivery to Egypt this month of advance F-16 fighters and the newest version of the Abrams tank. Our government also approved the sale of ultra-advanced F-35 to Turkey which has declared itself an enemy of Israel. Turkey will purchase a total of 116 of the aircraft to Israel’s 55 with delivery through 2017.
Morsi called for war on Israel – So much for the “moderate” Muslim Brotherhood president of Egypt. Recently found iTV interviews of Morsi show him saying in 2010 – “Either [you accept] the Zionists and everything they want, or else it is war,” Morsi said, “This is what these occupiers of the land of Palestine know – these blood-suckers, who attack the Palestinians, these warmongers, the descendants of apes and pigs.” Read more
Syria: Christian beheaded - A Christian man was beheaded and fed to hungry dogs by the Obama supported “rebels” in Syria who are in reality little more than Islamist bandits who pillage the countryside. Read more
Syria: Fatwa says rape OK – Three hundred thousand Christians forced from their homes so far by the jihadists in Syria. Hundreds of Christians killed and now Obama’s Saudi buddies have issued a fatwa approving of rape to boost moral of fighters. Read more
Italy: Muslims attack Jewish tourist – A young American Jew visiting relatives in Venice was brutally attacked by 15 Muslims. The attacks on Jews in Italy have increased sharply the last few years. Read more
More from the Religious Freedom Coalition
New Chairman’s Report – Now available, the December 24th, 2012 edition of the RFC Chairman’s Chairman’s Report In the current issue: William J. Murray writes on the Newtown school massacre / Mike Huckabee Show features Chairman Murray on America’s violent society / Do we have more violence crime in America because the church does not preach eternal punishment in Hell any longer? / The Fiscal Cliff is a lot worse that anyone thinks / Taxes to rise regardless of congressional votes
Constitution or Sharia DVD - This is the complete set of DVD’s from the November 11, 2011 Constitution or Sharia conference in Nashville, Tennessee. The Constitution or Sharia: Preserving Freedom Conference was the first true national conference on Sharia and the Islamization of America sponsored by major freedom oriented organizations! It was not just another educational conference. How to deal with and stop implementation of Sharia law in the United States was outlined by speakers and in panels. Order today
Books by William J. Murray

Now available at our online store. Books by William J. Murray

FrontPageMazazine by Daniel Greenfield Nov 16th, 2011

Rebuilding the Library of Alexandria some 1300 hundred years after its final destruction at the hands of its Islamic conquerors in a country where blasphemy against Islam is still a crime was always a fool’s errand. But it was a fool’s errand lavishly embraced by every collection of useful idiots from UNESCO to the National Library of France, which kicked in half a million books.

Most of the money was spent constructing a massive edifice housing only a fraction of the books that could be found in the Harvard University Library, the Library of Congress or the British Library– in a country with a lower literacy rate than much of the African continent. The Library was a Mubarak project and as the wonderful Arab Spring turns into the Islamic Winter, the mobs of Tahrir are coming for the library.

The Library of Alexandria 2.0 is hardly a beacon of culture and enlightenment, but its arts programs, feeble as they are, have already become a target for Egypt’s rising Islamists. There’s no room for ballet in a country where women are expected to cover themselves head to toe in black and walk behind a man. To learn its future, we need only go back to the words of Caliph Omar who declared that if the contents of the library accord with the Koran then they are redundant, if they contradict the Koran, then they are heretical and must be burned.

Ibn Khaldun​, the Berber historiographer, whose statue stands in a Tunis now fallen to Islamic mobs, asked, “Where is the literature of the Persians? Their literature was destroyed by order of Omar when the Arabs conquered the country. And so the literature of the Chaldees, the Babylonians, and a literature still more ancient that of the Copts.”

This cultural genocide isn’t discussed much by modern Western scholars who spend a great deal of time on what the Conquistadors did in South America, but are reluctant to address what the Arabs did in North Africa and the Middle East. Every traveling fair showcasing Islamic science, a misnomer in a religion that denies science, is an obscene spectacle of revisionist history by the conquerors who destroyed much of the knowledge and culture of the peoples they ground under their boot, and now want to take credit for what little they appropriated and put to use.

The true picture of Islamic science is of fragments of knowledge that survived despite Islamic barbarism. Caliph Omar’s encounter with the rich science of Persia is a frightening repetition of the same formula, according to Ibn Khaldun.

“We know that the Muslims, when they conquered Persia, found in that country an innumerable quantity of books and scientific treatises, and that their General, Saad Ibn Abi Oueccas, asked Khalif Omar by letter if he would allow him to distribute those books among the true believers with the rest of the booty. Omar answered him in these terms: — “Throw them into the water. If they contain anything which can guide men to the truth, we have received from Allah what will guide us much better. If they contain errors, we shall well be rid of them, Praise Allah.” In consequence of this order, the books were thrown into the water and the fire, and the literature and science of the Persians disappeared.” Read more