Some media have called into question the judgment of the
Charlie Hebdo editors in publishing their offensive cartoons in the first place. Others have worried more about the further rise of anti-immigrant sentiment in Europe than the dangers posed by the rising tide of home-grown jihadism.
The tragic carnage in Paris this past week was likewise followed by the shameful refusal of President Obama and other Western leaders to link the massacres to their ideological sources, rooted in the Koran and the hadith (the deeds and sayings of Prophet Muhammad), which embody Islamic supremacism and jihad. And while providing rhetorical support to the value of freedom of expression in his statement following the Paris massacre, President Obama did not walk back his own previous declarations challenging free expression deemed offensive to Muslims. His administration has also backed the efforts of stealth jihadists to abuse international and domestic incitement and anti-discrimination law to accomplish the same ultimate goal as the violent jihadists - stifling free speech deemed insulting of Islam and its prophet.
The jihadists who launched their military-style attack against
Charlie Hebdo massacred 12 people, including some of France’s most prominent cartoon satirists, staff members and two policemen, one of whom was a Muslim himself. They used assault rifles to methodically execute their victims, reportedly shouting "We have avenged the Prophet Muhammad" and "God is Great" in Arabic ("Allahu Akbar").
The two brothers who led the attack were killed by French police on January 9th. A third suspect surrendered to police early on January 8th. At about the same time as the police operation against the two brothers was taking place, the police killed one of their alleged associates, Amedy Coulibaly, who had invaded a kosher supermarket in Paris and held a number of hostages. While most of the hostages were freed alive, tragically four Jewish hostages were killed. Hayat Boumeddiene, reportedly Coulibaly’s wife and also an associate of the two brothers, is still at large as of the writing of this article. It’s possible that she was not in the kosher supermarket at all last Friday and may be in Syria, according to police sources.
Jihadists’ unifying battle cry the world over - the submission of “infidels” to the supremacy of Islam
The two jihadist brothers, Cherif and Said Kouachi, born in France to parents of Algerian origin, were reportedly both already known to French and American intelligence services. In fact, the younger brother, Cherif, was previously tried in a French court on terrorism charges in 2008, but released from prison for time served. He had connections to the al Qaeda affiliate in Iraq. The older brother is reported to have received training in Yemen in 2011 from the al Qaeda affiliate in that country. A member of al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, the al Qaeda Yemen-based affiliate, is reported by the Associated Press to have claimed that his group directed the attack in Paris “as revenge for the honor” of Islam's Prophet Muhammad. The jihadist branch's senior cleric Sheikh Harith al-Nadhari heaped praise for what he called the "blessed raid on Paris" and for the "hero mujahedeen" whom the cleric said "taught them a lesson and the limits of freedom of speech."
The brothers fit the profile of alienated Muslim youth born and raised in a Western country who became increasingly susceptible to the teachings of local and foreign jihadists. They internalized the message of groups such as al Qaeda and ISIS, which champion violent reprisals against any “non-believers” in their home countries who dare to say or do anything the jihadists deem offensive to Islam.
Just last December, for example, in a video posted by a pro-ISIS jihadi forum
Alplatformmedia.com, as quoted by The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), a masked and armed ISIS fighter called on Muslims in France to "Blow up France. Reduce it to bits. Blow up the heads of these unbelievers. Kill them. Kill them, wherever they are. Kill them. Don't let them live in peace.”
While France is in the cross-hairs of the jihadists at the present time, none of us are safe. As reported by
Reuters, the head of Britain's MI5 Security Service warned last Thursday that "A group of core al Qaeda terrorists in Syria is planning mass casualty attacks against the West.” He added that the jihadists were aiming to "cause large-scale loss of life, often by attacking transport systems or iconic targets."
The
Charlie Hebdo massacre reflects the jihadists’ unifying battle cry the world over - the submission of “infidels” to the supremacy of Islam – and their intent to impose their blasphemy and defamation of Islam laws on free Western societies by force and intimidation.
The editor and executive producer of the English version of
Al Jazeera, which Hillary Clinton once praised as offering "real news," rationalized that the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists gratuitously offended many Muslims with their “racist caricatures.” The editor and executive producer, Salah-Aldeen Khadr, instructed
Al Jazeera staff to question whether the
Charlie Hebdo massacre was “really an attack on ‘free speech,’” according to an internal e-mail leaked by
National Review. “Defending freedom of expression in the face of oppression is one thing; insisting on the right to be obnoxious and offensive just because you can is infantile,” Khadr added. “It’s unclear what the objectives of the caricatures were other than to offend Muslims.”
Notwithstanding Hillary Clinton’s enthusiastic support for the publication owned by the terrorist sponsor state Qatar, one can expect
Al Jazeera to gloss over the grave danger to fundamental liberties and universal human rights when those offended by controversial speech are effectively given veto power over free expression because of understandable fears of reprisals. Unfortunately, such veto power is already having its effect closer to home. The jihadists and their enablers are sadly succeeding in their strategy to suppress free expression in the West.
The mainstream Western media has generally refrained from printing or broadcasting the
Charlie Hebdo cartoons deemed so offensive by the jihadists. In defending its decision not to publish the satirical images of the Prophet Muhammad, for example, a spokesperson for the Associated Press explained to the Daily Beast: “None of the images distributed by AP showed cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. It’s been our policy for years that we refrain from moving deliberately provocative images.”
The
New York Times chose on January 8th to publish images of two Charlie Hebdo covers that had nothing to do with Islam. The covers the
Times chose to re-print mocked immigration critics and French President Hollande. Its lead editorial on the same day, declaring that the “attack was an assault on freedom everywhere,” rings hollow in light of the
Times’ selection of which
Charlie Hebdo magazine covers to re-print. New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet made a conscious decision not to publish cartoons considered insulting of Islam because, in the words of
Times public editor Margaret Sullivan, “he had to consider foremost the sensibilities of
Times readers, especially its Muslim readers.” Yet the
Times had no compunctions about offending the sensibilities of its Jewish readers when it decided several years ago to publish an image of a cartoon by a Holocaust-denying Iranian cartoonist that the Times itself characterized as part of “anti-Jewish caricatures.”
On January 9th the
Times published an article in its news pages purporting to argue that the Koran is no different than other religions’ texts that contain passages condoning violence. The article quoted Prophet Muhammad’s “injunctions to mercy and forgiveness” and “his forbidding of ‘coercion in matters of religion.” The article conveniently left out passages written later in Muhammad’s life, which abrogated the more tolerant earlier written passages and commanded believers to fight all non-Muslims until they convert to Islam or submit to its rule.
Some Western publications have actually tried to turn the jihadist massacre in Paris into some sort of lesson for Westerners to improve their own behavior!
Some Western publications have actually tried to turn the jihadist massacre in Paris into some sort of lesson for Westerners to improve their own behavior! Avoid language too offensive to Muslims and don’t use the jihadist killings as an excuse for racism against Muslims, they warn.
For example, the Financial Times lectured that “some common sense would be useful at publications such as
Charlie Hebdo, and Denmark’s
Jyllands-Posten, which purport to strike a blow for freedom when they provoke Muslims…..”
Is it common sense or freedom-killing self-censorship to appease the guardians of Sharia law? Some in the mainstream Western media do not seem to know the difference.
Variety, the leading magazine for the idiot-savants in show business, admonished: “
Charlie Hebdo carnage will likely fuel the racism and anti-Islam sentiment which has been on the rise in France.”
Is it really racism in the cobwebs of Leftists’ brains to raise concerns about lack of adequate protections and controls to prevent the further rise of jihadism in our midst? Do we really have to sacrifice or compromise the life-affirming universal human rights values of freedom of expression, freedom of religion, and respect for the individual in the service of a warped notion of “tolerance” and “anti-racism?” Apparently so if we want to avoid being branded Islamophobic by the politically correct elite.
President Obama, while acknowledging in a statement he made following the Paris massacre that an “evil” attack had been committed by “terrorists” in Paris, still refused to connect the attack with its source. Missing from his statement condemning the attack was even a single reference to “Muslim,” “Islam,” “jihad,” “jihadist” or “Islamist.” Instead of seeing this attack in the context of large and growing global networks of jihadists fueled by the same evil Islamic supremacist, jihadist ideology, Obama continued his tendency to minimize the terrorist acts as representing the isolated “violence of a few.”
Obama’s lip service in his statement to the importance of defending freedom of expression was in stark contrast to the antipathy to freedom of expression he has shown in the past where the sensibilities of easily offended Muslims were concerned.
Last Wednesday after the attack, Obama said: "This was an attack on journalists, it's an attack on our free press." He added that “these terrorists fear freedom of speech and freedom of the press."
However, he sang a very different tune back in September 2012, at a time when he and other members of his administration, including former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, blamed an anti-Muslim video for the Benghazi terrorist attack that claimed the lives of the U.S. ambassador to Libya and three other Americans. Obama used the world stage of the UN General Assembly that year to declare: “The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.”
The Obama administration running interference for offended Muslims
The Obama administration pursued the hapless video producer, Mark Basseley Youssef, using probation violations as a convenient pretext to arrest and prosecute him. The real goal was to punish Youssef for blasphemy against Islam – a crime under Sharia law. Obama thus fulfilled his pledge made during his Cairo mea culpa speech to the Muslim world in June 2009 "to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear."
The Obama administration is unlikely to learn the lessons of the Paris massacre. Instead the administration will continue to sugar-coat jihadist ideology, minimize the widespread acts of terrorism as isolated violence of “the few,” run interference for offended Muslims, release suspected terrorists from Guantanamo so that they can resume their jihad war against us, and unilaterally ease restrictions on asylum seekers who had provided what the administration called only “limited material support” to terror groups.
Not defining the jihadist enemy in terms that are clearly based on their own self-professed Koran-based ideology is political correctness gone mad. Such denial of the truth does a disservice to the innocent victims of the Paris massacre and all other victims of global jihad.
