Jewish World Review Ira Rifkin September 11, 2006
He polished the prose of Muslim leaders so their views would be marketable. He invited them home to break bread. He even attacked his co-religionists in print for not being more realistic. No more.
In January 1985, the Los Angeles newspaper I worked for assigned me to the religion beat. My first story was a feature on what was then a new phenomenon in Southern California, a fully licensed Muslim parochial school.
Middle East Quarterly Denis MacEoin Fall 2006
Islamist Ideology
While often ignored in the Western media, human rights abuses in the Islamic world are a daily occurrence. Both Muslim states and ad hoc religious courts order mutilation and execution, not only of criminals but also of individuals—mainly women—who have not committed anything which would be considered a crime in other societies. In some cases, Shari‘a (Islamic law) tribunals issue death sentences for those acquitted in regular courts.[1] In other cases, religious leaders invoke religion to sanction non-Islamic practices such as honor killings and female genital mutilation.
National Review Online Melanie Phillips August 18, 2006
When America was attacked on 9/11 by Islamic jihadis, it was said that this was a doomsday wake-up call for the West. Within a short while, however, much of Britain decided that 9/11 was actually America’s fault and that Israel was at the core of the problem.
When Britain was attacked last year on 7/7 by Islamic jihadis, it was said that this was a doomsday wake-up call for the U.K. Within a short time, however, much of the country decided that it was Britain’s own fault on account of “Islamophobia” and the war in Iraq.
Now 25 British Muslims have been arrested for an alleged plot to blast up to ten trans-Atlantic airliners out of the sky. This vast alleged conspiracy, thought to encompass many dozens more plotters from Germany to Pakistan, bears all the monstrous hallmarks of a classic al Qaeda operation. In addition, security sources say that dozens more al Qaeda-linked terrorist cells are at large in the U.K.
From the evidence of one opinion poll this week, the British public has at least woken up to the fact that we are in the throes of a world war. Not so, however, the British establishment and chattering classes. Denial is no longer a river in Egypt but a British pathology.
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Frontpagemag.com Victor Davis Hanson July 5, 2006
With the collapse of the Soviet Union, Marxism was discredited as an unworkable–and often murderous–alternative to consumer capitalism. Eastern Europe was freed and began to prosper in a manner unimaginable just a decade earlier. China and India jettisoned statism, and found prosperity by emulating Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan. South America was democratizing and began to liberalize its economies (with mixed success).
Chicago Tribune Tom Hundley June 19, 2006
PARIS – Al Fath Mosque is in a scruffy immigrant neighborhood not far from the neon-lit kitsch of Pigalle. On Friday afternoons the mosque is jammed, and the overflow of worshippers – all men – spills into the streets.
Washington Post Sudarsan Raghavan June 5, 2006
Every morning, Jackie Avelar wakes up to a predicament. On one side of her bed is a clock that sounds the Islamic call to prayer five times a day. On the other side is a statue of Mary. As a Muslim, she wants to remove it. As a Latina, she can’t.
Her father, who is a Catholic from El Salvador, wants the statue to stay.
“I have to respect him,” Avelar said.
So she has found a comfortable balance: She covers the statue with a photo of her family.
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Toronto Sun Salim Mansur
June 3, 2006
We are all familiar with the opening lines of Hamlet, the Shakespearean tragedy, telling us of something rotten in the state of Denmark.
Since September 2001, we have become familiar with something rotten in Europe, and this rottenness threatens to wreak havoc on the civilization that Europe nurtured and whose values in terms of science and democracy were once sought by the rest of the world.
In Shakespeare’s most famous drama the Danish prince tragically perishes at the end in his effort to purge the kingdom of the evil of regicide with which the court compromised when the queen, Hamlet’s mother, wed the murderer of the slain king.
In Hamlet’s story, Shakespeare unravelled a microcosm of consequences that follow when an individual or people, knowingly or unknowingly, compromise with evil.
Wall Street Opinion Journal Matthew Kaminski April 11, 2006
Practicing a tolerant strain of Islam, the Ottomans clashed with fundamentalists.
The Ottoman Empire passed into history in 1922, a mere lifetime ago. Yet in a certain way it feels as distant as ancient Athens or Rome, known to us mostly through architectural relics, a few striking events and a mythical aura. Kemal Atatürk’s secular Turkish republic, the empire’s successor state, consciously rejected much of the Ottoman heritage and most of its traditions, while the empire’s colonial outposts have reverted to the imperatives of their local identities.
Anyone watching it? Michelle Markin has a good rundown.
Here too is a reminder of what 9/11 was like.
Human Events Patrick J. Buchanan Nov 7, 2005
The Romans conquered the barbarians—and the barbarians conquered Rome.
So it goes with empires. And comes now the penultimate chapter in the history of the empires of the West.
This is the larger meaning of the ritual murder of Theo Van Gogh in Holland, the subway bombings in London, the train bombings in Madrid, the Paris riots spreading across France. The perpetrators of these crimes in the capitals of Europe are the children of immigrants who were once the colonial subjects of the European empires.
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