Islam
April 4, 2013 — Steven Hayward
I’m having to pinch myself today to make sure I’m not living in my own special Groundhog Day hell where every day is April 1. How else to take the story that Lego is discontinuing a Jabba the Hutt palace set because the Turkish Cultural Association of Austria (!!) complained that the Lego set is raaaccciist. The Turkish Cultural Association of Austria?? Okay, I know the Turks rolled briefly through
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March 29, 2013 — Paul Mirengoff
Elliott Abrams wonders where the hard core jihadists currently fighting in Syria — an estimated 5,000 of them — will go when/if the fighting ends there. Israeli officials naturally are asking the same question. According to Abrams, the Israelis identify the following possibilities: They may go west to Lebanon, to fight the Shiite group Hezbollah. They may go south to try to cross into the Golan, and fight the Israeli
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March 18, 2013 — John Hinderaker
Yesterday, Mariam Farhat died in Gaza City after a long illness. Mark Steyn noted her passing with a quote from his book America Alone. Steyn was writing about Hamas’s victory in the 2006 election: Among the incoming legislators was Mariam Farahat, a mother of three, elected in Gaza. She used to be a mother of six but three of her sons self-detonated on suicide missions against Israel. She’s a household
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March 12, 2013 — John Hinderaker
The American Freedom Defense Initiative is a Pamela Geller-led organization that seeks to inform Americans about the dangers of Islamic extremism. Among other things, AFDI has placed advertising on buses in several metropolitan areas that contain educational messages. Many Muslims regard these posters as dirty pool, because they are so unfair as to quote the actual words of respected Islamic clerics. The latest round is taking place in San Francisco,
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March 9, 2013 — John Hinderaker
In Lahore, a frenzied mob of Muslims went on a rampage in a Christian neighborhood, burning 150 homes. It was the usual story: someone started a rumor that a Christian had “blasphemed the Prophet,” and members of the Religion of Peace® swung into action: Hundreds of people in eastern Pakistan rampaged through a Christian neighborhood Saturday, torching dozens of homes after hearing reports that a Christian man had committed blasphemy
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March 6, 2013 — John Hinderaker
The Arab Spring is looking more like Springtime For Hitler all the time. The latest outrage comes from Libya, where 100 Christians from Egypt were arrested, allegedly for proselytizing. Representatives of the local Christian church say the men were working in Libya, but not proselytizing. Be that as it may, telling others about their religion is something they had a right to do. The creepy video below shows the men,
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March 1, 2013 — Scott Johnson
In his most recent verbal assault against Israel, Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan has characterized Zionism as a crime against humanity along with anti-Semitism, fascism, and, of course, Islamophobia. Isn’t leaving homophobia off such a list itself a crime against humanity? Prime Minister Netanyahu has issued this concise response: “This is a dark and mendacious statement the likes of which we thought had passed from the world.” Netanyahu is constrained by
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February 27, 2013 — Scott Johnson
The Claremont Institute continues its American Mind series with host Charles Kesler, editor of the Claremont Review of Books, and guest Mark Helprin. Helprin is the acclaimed novelist and observer of the contemporary scene. He has been a ferocious critic of our response to 9/11 in Afghanistan and Iraq. The institute posts the interview in segments on a weekly basis here. We are pleased to post the interview in its
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February 26, 2013 — John Hinderaker
At Commentary, Evelyn Gordon writes that Christianity has replaced Judaism as the world’s most persecuted religion: In recent months, a new consensus has emerged: For the first time in millennia, Judaism has lost its title as the world’s most persecuted religion; today, that dubious honor goes to Christianity. “Christians are targeted more than any other body of believers,” wrote Rupert Shortt in a 54-page report for the London-based Civitas institute
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February 18, 2013 — John Hinderaker
In Benghazi, four alleged Christian missionaries–from the U.S., Egypt, South Korea and South Africa–have been arrested for distributing extracts from the Bible, and may face the death penalty: Four foreigners have been arrested in Libya on suspicion of being missionaries and distributing Christian literature, a charge that could carry the death penalty. The four – a Swedish-American, Egyptian, South African and South Korean – were arrested in Benghazi by Preventive
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February 17, 2013 — John Hinderaker
Here in the United States, reporters seem to be almost an extinct species. That is true in the United Kingdom as well, except that some relatively disreputable organs, like the Sun, actually investigate things from time to time. It was the Sun that infiltrated radical mosques and filmed cleric Anjem Choudary telling his followers how to make war on the West. The Sun’s account is all pretty disgusting, but what
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February 13, 2013 — Steven Hayward
We haven’t taken sufficient notice here of the decision of Pope Benedict XVI to abdicate. Pope Benedict has always labored in the shadow, so to speak, of his charismatic and highly consequential predecessor, Pope John Paul II, who we can rightly claim had a key role in bringing about the demise of the Soviet empire. I write about this a lot in my second Age of Reagan, and I won’t
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February 10, 2013 — John Hinderaker
Raymond Ibrahim continues his indispensable, if depressing, catalog of Muslim oppression of Christians during the month of December 2012: As usual, the month of Christmas saw an uptick in Christian persecution under Islam, in a variety of forms, from insults to murders. Mass murder figures prominently in these accounts, but the Christmas season reminds us that Islamic supremacism is mainstream, and is by no means limited to Pakistan, Iran, etc.:
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January 20, 2013 — John Hinderaker
I don’t believe we have written anything about the terrorist attack on the Algerian gas plant at Ain Amenas. News accounts have generally been sketchy, but with the siege now over, more details have emerged. The Associated Press reports: Algerian bomb squads scouring a gas plant where Islamist militants took dozens of foreign workers hostage found 25 more bodies on Sunday as they searched for explosive traps left behind by
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January 15, 2013 — Steven Hayward
So, the person the Obama Administration has placed all our chips on in Egypt, the supposedly moderate Mohamad Morsi (pay no attention to the Muslim Brotherhood behind the curtain), turns out not to like Israel or Jews. As the New York Times reports this morning: Nearly three years ago, a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood delivered a speech urging Egyptians to “nurse our children and our grandchildren on hatred” for
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January 8, 2013 — Scott Johnson
In an adjacent post Paul cites DCI nominee John Brennan’s 2010 speech at NYU. The video of Brennan speaking to a Muslim audience as part of “A Dialogue on Our Nation’s Security” held at NYU is still available on the White House Web site. The speech was part of a public forum co-hosted by the White House Office of Public Engagement and the Islamic Center at New York University. As
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December 19, 2012 — Scott Johnson
Salman Rushdie has just published a memoir — Joseph Anton — of his life under the fatwa promulgated against him by Ayatollah Khomeni on account of Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses. I have taken my bearings on this saga from Daniel Pipes’s prescient treatment of it in The Rushdie Affair, originally published in 1990. In his rewarding New Republic review/essay, Paul Berman cites Kenin Malik’s From Fatwa to Jihad, which
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