By Daniel Greenfield ——Bio and Archives--November 12, 2011
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the most pernicious thing about the Islamophobia myth is that once it is used to legitimize Muslim grievances, it is then used to legitimize the violent Muslim response to those grievances. Once you accept that Islamophobia is a serious problem, you have taken the first step to justifying violence as a response to that problem.
That is how it began in Israel, once the narrative of Muslim suffering under the “occupation” was accepted; Muslim terrorism became legitimized as a resistance to the occupation. Once you accept that Muslims in France have been marginalized by an Islamophobic society, then criticizing their religion marginalizes them further and justifies their violent response. ... That’s the Orwellian Doublespeak of Islamophobia: we are to be afraid of being afraid and if we are afraid enough, then perhaps we won’t need to be afraid anymore. The left’s twisted politics endorse militant terror and then warn us not to be terrorized by them. Only the guilty condemn the violence, the innocent cheer it on or pretend that it isn’t there. From the French Revolution to the USSR’s Great Terror to the Black Panthers to Islam, nothing has changed.
In this week’s issue of The Australian, Sheikh Hamza Abu Fas, Libya’s new Minister for Religious Affairs, gave Westerners a taste of the “free and democratic” that NATO had been fighting for. The law that allowed a first wife to veto marriage to a second wife will be overturned. “The woman is not equal to the man in the body,” explained Sheikh Hamza. Thieves will have their hands chopped off: “If this happens it will only happen once because other people will not want it to happen again and will not commit theft,” said the good Sheikh. Islamic banking will be the only kind of banking in Libya. “In the future, we hope all banks will be Islamic,” Sheikh Hamza said. “The Islamic bank is best for all people. All Europeans and Australian people will realize the best solution for banks is Islamic banks.” ... How extreme a figure is Sheikh Hamza? In Feb 2010, he participated in a symposium on “Revisionist Studies of the Concepts of Jihad, Verification, and Judgment of People” held under the auspices of Sheikh Salman bin Fahd al-Awda, secretary of the International Union for Muslim Scholars, Qaradawi’s organization, and a member of the European Council for Fatwa, another Qaradawi group. Sheikh Hamza has participated in sessions of the European Council for Fatwa and in Muslim World League events. The Muslim World League is another Muslim Brotherhood group for the promotion of Sharia and is funded by Saudi Arabia.So the good news is that Libya is now free. Free to kill Africans, oppress women and eagerly await the latest interpretation of Islamic law. See this and more in my FPM Article, "Meet Libya’s New Islamist Boss."
Dariano v. Morgan Hill Unified School District (N.D. Cal.), decided the day before yesterday, upholds a California high school’s decision to forbid students from wearing American flag T-shirts on Cinco de Mayo. (See here and here for more on this case.)The decision might well be correct under Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School Dist. (1969), which allows a “heckler’s veto” in K-12 school: Schools may indeed restrict student speech when it’s likely to cause substantial disruption, even when the disruption stems from other students’ hostility to the speech.You want bad? We're at the point where American flags are too controversial to allow in schools not just because of some leftist administrators, but because of the students... in a decision upheld by a court.
Here, for the reasons discussed above, Defendants have provided a non-discriminatory basis for asking Plaintiffs to remove their American flag attire. Defendants have put forth significant evidence demonstrating that Plaintiffs were asked to change clothes in order to protect their own safety. Plaintiffs have not offered any evidence demonstrating that students wearing the colors of the Mexican flag were targeted for violence.If Mexican students terrorize American students, then a Mexican-American vice-principal can order American students to get rid of the flag, without there being any discrimination involved. Except on the part of the Mexican students. Beautiful, isn't it? And the school system is paid for through compulsory taxes levied on homeowners who have to fund the schools and all the minority homeowners too, and the cost of bailing out the banks which were brought down by those mortgages and a local government deep in debt to pay for the schools, the health care and anti-gang programs.What could be more American than that? This in a nutshell is the problem with Perry. National debt, growth of government, those won't matter if much of the country is just an extension of the disaster area south of the border. If this goes on for another 30-40 years there isn't going to be an America, there are going to be American enclaves in Greater Mexico. And that American flag will be in the trash.
As the protesters of Occupy Wall Street voice their frustrations just a few blocks south of our offices, we’re facing our own very real challenges. It’s simple: because of the economy, donations to our Nation Associates program are down $200,000 for 2011. This is no time to pull punches, scale back or otherwise take our eye off the ball. Not with a presidential election heating up and so much at stake. We must make up this shortfall before we sit down to plan our Election 2012 coverage for the coming year. Help us by bidding in our online auction. So instead of buying your loved ones holiday gifts that enrich the corporate establishment, why not share your passion for progressive journalism by bidding on a one-of-a-kind gift from The Nation.But isn't the Nation a corporation? Aren't its editors and advertisers enriched by its operations? It's begging for donations, so it's not a very good corporation, but it's certainly isn't a non-profit. It's The Nation LP. I can see a Sears ad on the front page. Sears is a corporation that pays money to place ads on the site of a magazine with paid subscriptions. What is Teresa Stack's salary? I don't know, but I suspect it's a number close enough to that donation shortfall. It was certainly possible for The Nation to run without losing money, but by maintaining the image of a money losing operation that's subsidized by donations, it never really had to develop a workable business model. It can just ask for money. Advertising makes up 20 percent of its revenue. How much of the rest is made up by radicals with their hand out? If you have nearly a fifth of a million of subscribers at 40 to 50 bucks for an annual subscription and you can't figure out how to make money from that or find advertisers, then it's a real problem. But instead The Nation wraps itself in its own radicalism and goes panhandling, while pretending that it's more moral because they're not greedy capitalists, they're greedy radicals. But if you are moved to help out a red mag, you can pick up Memories of Lenin at their auction for a steal.
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Daniel Greenfield is a New York City writer and columnist. He is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and his articles appears at its Front Page Magazine site.