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Daniel Pipes has an astonishing list of things that Muslims in the West are demanding, including:
- Setting up a government advisory board uniquely for Muslims in America.
- Permitting Muslim-only living quarters or events in America and Great Britain.
- Setting aside bathing at a municipal swimming pool for women-only , as in France.
- Banning Hindus and Jews from a jury hearing a case about an Islamist in Great Britain.
- Changing noise laws to broadcast the adhan , or call to prayer, in Hamtramck, Mich.
- Allowing a prisoner the unheard-of right to avoid strip-searches in New York State.
- Exploiting taxpayer-funded schools and airwaves to convert non-Muslims in America.
- Allowing students in taxpayer-funded schools to use empty classrooms for prayers in New Jersey.
- Deeming the “religious vilification” of Islam to be illegal in Australia.
- Punishing anti-Islamic views with court-mandated indoctrination by an Islamist in Canada.
- Prohibiting families from sending pork or pork by-products to American soldiers serving in Iraq.
- Requiring that female American soldiers in Saudi Arabia wear American government-issued abayas , or head-to-foot robes.
- Applying the Rushdie rules—or letting Muslims shut down criticism of Islam and Muslims.
Pipes notes:
Throughout the West, Muslims are making new and assertive demands, and in some cases challenging the very premises of European and North American life. How to respond?
Here is a general rule: Offer full rights—but turn down demands for special privileges.
This is how Jihad works, folks. Many Muslim immigrants refuse to assimilate into the broader society, and instead demand that their religion receive special privileges over and above all others.
As Pipes says:
Western governments and other institutions urgently need to signal Muslims that they must accept being just one religious group of many, and that aspirations to dominate will fail. Toward this end, governments need to enact principled and consistent policies indicating precisely which Muslim privileges are acceptable, and why.
All we have to do is be aware of it and talk about it, and we will be able to stop it.
Islam needs to move towards a more moderate interpretation that will be successful for Muslims in today’s world, and which will permit them to assimilate into today’s world.
Commenter Stephen and I are discussing the gay marriage issue in the comments section to this post, and I think we’re both making some good points. Check it out.
Skip Press sends this report:
TOP FILM STORY
Landmark duo backs d-cinema
LAS VEGAS—The Dallas Mavericks might be the name of Mark Cuban’s
NBA team, but the Internet billionaire’s maverick sensibilities extend far
beyond the basketball court. In the slowly evolving world of digital
cinema, Cuban and business partner Todd Wagner, owners of the largest
indie theater chain Landmark Theatres, are challenging the status quo.
The two executives will announce today at ShoWest 2005 that their 2929
Entertainment has purchased six SXRD Sony 4K projectors to begin
equipping their theater chain for digital cinema.
Skip comments:
What does this mean? Typically, innovators move outside Hollywood and affect Hollywood, and they’re increasingly digital. Pixar, anyone?
The playing field keeps getting leveled for all innovative creators, and I’m happy it’s a Dallas boy like myself doing it. I’ll have to shoot off an email and thank him.
If you can make a movie with $10,000 worth of equipment, including the computer and monitor, and you only need $50,000 to shoot it, and when it’s edited it’s already in a format you can transmit via broadband to those cinemas in Dallas, well, how cool is that? To use a Dallas term, cooler than a blue norther, baby.
Rats: Condi States Flatly: ‘I Won’t Run.’
Clearing up speculation that she was leaving the door open to a 2008 presidential run, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said flatly Sunday morning, “I won’t do it.”
I really wanted to vote for her. I think she could’ve won, too.
The majority of Americans oppose gay marriage.
The legislature of California enacted a law that says marriage is between a man and a woman.
But certain judges increasingly like to arrogate to themselves the ability to make the laws, rather than merely help ensure that existing laws are justly carried out. They don’t care what they people want or what laws the legislature has passed. Today a lower California court has ruled that gay marriage is just fine.
SAN FRANCISCO Gays and lesbians are entitled to marry under the California Constitution, a judge here ruled today in a decision that opponents to same-sex marriage vowed to appeal.
...The decision strikes down a provision of the state’s family law that limits marriage to “a man and a woman.”
If the majority of Americans don’t want it, too bad. If the legislature doesn’t want it, too bad. The liberal judge of this San Francisco court wants to force it on us.
His argument:
“No rational basis exists for limiting marriage in this state to opposite-sex partners,” wrote San Francisco Superior Court Judge Richard Kramer.
Is that the standard now? Judges don’t have to seek a basis for their actions in the Constitution? They can ignore public opinion, and the laws officially passed, and just go by their own personal feelings of what’s “rational?” This is a land that has thrived under the rule of law. Those laws are passed by legislatures, and the job of the courts is to see that they are justly enforced—not to make them.
Judge Kramer was elected. He is trying to write a law that will appeal to those who elected him, so as to get re-elected. But this law he is seeking to write would affect all Americans, not just those in San Francisco.
The election of judges works very well when judges do what they’re supposed to do, making sure that existing laws are justly enforced. It helps ensure that the local people involved in a dispute feel that justice is being carried out. But when a judge like Kramer arrogates to himself the power to strike down a state law, on the basis of what is most in the interest of those who elected him, it is a grave miscarriage of justice.
Judges are not supposed to make law. If we let them have the power to do so, a local judge in San Francisco can make decisions that affect, not just those who elected him, and whose favor he is trying to curry, but all Californians and all Americans.
Such judges are abusing their power, their authority, and the public trust. They need to get out of the law-making business. Or we need to look into ways to get some new judges.
More comments on this important issue, as well as links to responses from around the blogosphere, are here, via Wizbang.
