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Recently I posted regarding Daniel Pipes’ comments on how Muslims in Western nations are demanding special privileges.
Can you imagine going up to your boss and saying, “My religion requires me to stop working and pray 5 times every day, including once for 20-to-30 minutes at sunset?” You and I would get laughed at if we tried that.
But Muslims just demanded that of Dell Computer. And—threatened by CAIR with a lawsuit—Dell caved.
You read that right. If you’re a Muslim at Dell, you get to take 5 breaks from work a day, while your fellow workers have to scramble and cover for you—including a 20-to-30 minute break at sunset. This is on an assembly line.
Not Jews. Not Christians. Not anybody else. Just Muslims. If it screws up the workplace, so what.
Muslims have demanded and gotten special treatment, different from those of other religions.
It’s like they demanded that we show prejudice to all non-Muslim religions—and Dell agreed to do it.
From CAIR’s own web site:
(WASHINGTON, D.C., 3/17/05) – A prominent national Islamic civil rights and advocacy group today announced that Muslim contract employees at a Dell Inc. plant in Nashville, Tenn., have reached a settlement on issues related to a recent dispute over prayer in the workplace.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) said the 31 Muslim employees, who left work last month in a disagreement over Islamic prayers, will be reinstated, receive back pay and be granted continued religious accommodation. Managers will also receive additional training on existing religious accommodation policies and practices. Other terms of the settlement will not be made public.
Announcement of the settlement came following a meeting today between representatives of CAIR, Dell, the Muslim workers, the Nashville Metro Human Relations Commission, and Spherion Corp., the company that provided the workers to Dell. (In a meeting on Saturday, most of the Muslim workers retained CAIR as their legal counsel.)
From a prior article in the Washington Post:
Islam’s five daily prayers only take a few minutes, and most can take place within a span of a few hours. The daily devotion at sunset, however, must be completed within a 20- to 30-minute window. This is the prayer that sparked the conflict at the Dell plant.
Folks, this is the jihad. This is Muslims demanding special privileges for themselves, privileges only Muslims get, because they are taught that their religion is superior to all others, and that they should be privileged above those of other religions.
Look at how it changes the way of life at Dell. Your boss needs you to stay on the line? You will in order to get the job done and make the company a success, but a Muslim co-worker can tell him to stuff it because Muslims get special treatment.
Privileging those of one religion above others is un-American. We need to shut this down.
It’s the jihad, and Dell just caved.
Dell needs our support so that they can stand up to this extortion. All American companies will need our support to stand up to it in the future, because Dell is just the beginning.
Interested parties can contact Dell to show our support in their efforts to stand up against the un-American demands of special treatment for Muslims. Here’s the contact info:
Dell Investor Relations
One Dell Way
Round Rock, TX 78682
Phone: 512.728.7800
Dell’s Media Relations: (512) 728-4100.
He begins by detailing the falsehood of the analogy:
In fact, what do Linda Ronstadt, Harold Pinter, Scott Ritter, Ted Rall, and George Soros all have in common? The same thing that unites Fidel Castro, the European street, the Iranians, and North Koreans: an evocation of some aspects of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany to deprecate President Bush in connection with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
At first glance, all this wild rhetoric is preposterous. Hitler hijacked an elected government and turned it into a fascist tyranny. He destroyed European democracy. His minions persecuted Christians, gassed over six million Jews, and created an entire fascistic creed predicated on anti-Semitism and the myth of a superior Aryan race.
Whatever one thinks of Bush’s Iraqi campaign, the president obtained congressional approval to invade and pledged $87 billion to rebuild the country. He freely weathered mass street demonstrations and a hostile global media, successfully defended his Afghan and Iraq reconstructions through a grueling campaign and three presidential debates, and won a national plebiscite on his tenure.
...A Linda Ronstadt, Garrison Keillor, or Harold Pinter knows nothing much of the encompassing evil of Hitler’s regime, its execution of the mentally ill and disabled, the systematic cleansing of the non-Aryans from Europe, or mass executions and starvation of Soviet prisoners. Like Prince Harry parading around in his ridiculous Nazi costume, quarter-educated celebrities who have some talent for song or verse know only that name-dropping “Hitler” or his associates gets them some shock value that their pedestrian rants otherwise would not warrant.
It strikes me that we are less surprised by the very irresponsible behavior of actors who compare Bush to Hitler, because we’re so used to seeing that sort of thing played for laughs on sitcoms. Irresponsibility is funny and is rightfully used in sitcoms, where it belongs. It is endearing when seen in a sitcom character on TV. I wonder if it could be true that some of our popular actors are just emulating the irresponsibility that makes sitcom characters so beloved, when making the wild, outrageous comparison between Bush and Hitler.
Of course, the same irresponsibility which is so lovable when seen in characters on a TV sitcom, is quite dangerous when used in the real world.
Because in the real world (continuing to quote VDH):
Ignorance and arrogance are a lethal combination.
...Is there a danger to all this? Plenty. The slander not only brings a president down to the level of an evil murderer, but — as worried Jewish leaders have pointed out — elevates the architect of genocide to the level of an American president.
VDH cites multiple incidents in which public figures explicitly raised the notion of shooting the President. The actions of these public figures in calling and wishing publicly for the horrendous evil of murder and assassination, can not be considered unrelated to the actions of actual would-be assassins:
...All this venom is not so funny when we now witness a Saudi American young man, Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, currently under indictment for allegedly planning just such a murder. After all, when it becomes a cheap and easy thing to compare a president to a century’s great criminal, then it becomes even cheaper and easier to dream — or plan — to kill him.
VDH observes that such behavior is “not so funny,” which recognizes the defense offered by those making such statements, that they are being wild, outrageous, entertaining, humorous… just like lovably irresponsible sitcom stars. So my conjecture in this post may be correct. VDH is right: it’s not so funny when a popular public figure irresponsibly urges others to carry out political assassination.
At some point a Gore, Byrd, or Soros has a moral responsibility not to employ Nazi analogy, if for no other reason than to prevent unleashing even greater extremism by the unhinged. No doubt Abu Ali’s lawyer one day soon will say that his disturbed client’s “musings” were no different from what he read from Knopf or in the Guardian — or that he simply fell under the influence of Moveon.org and thought it was his duty to remove the Bush/Nazi threat that even U.S. senators and presidential candidates had identified and warned about.
It’s key to put down the Bush-Hitler analogy, not by legislation, but by the pressure of public opinion. The ability to do so is part of the great power of free speech.
Ancient Ruins Uncovered by Tsunami. Last month I noted that ancient ruins had been unearthed by the tsunami. Pictures of some of the ruins appeared today:
Michael Ledeen reports:
ISFAHAN — Iranian authorities beat up and tear gassed exuberant young revellers as they breathed new life into a pre-Islamic fire festival with a night of dancing, flirting and fireworks.
...there is a big Zoroastrian revival under way in Iran, another sign of the hollowness of the Islamic republic, and the hostility of the Iranian people to their leaders. And to say that the authorities “beat up and gassed” some “revelers” is quite an understatement, since, on the evening of March 15h, there were very large-scale demonstrations all over Iran, combining the Norooz celebrations with calls for the downfall of the regime itself. Effigies of top mullahs were burned in the streets.
...according to Iranians with whom I have spoken, there were monster demonstrations in eleven provinces and 37 cities, and many thousands — one source said more than 30,000 — people were arrested, some only briefly, others shipped off to the infamous prisons and torture chambers of the regime.
And Regime Change Iran reports:
Of course [Reuters] played down the size of the demonstrations (eye witness reports put the number in the millions, based on conservative estimates that 1/3 of most neighborshoods participated) and the anti regime slogans and acts committed by the Iranian people.
Ledeen has much more, including info on how Reuters misreported the event. (Is “misreported” a word? If not, perhaps it should be.)
Hezbollah refuses to renounce terrorist actions:
BEIRUT, Lebanon—Hezbollah’s leader on Wednesday rejected a suggestion by President Bush that his militants disarm and enter the political mainstream, saying the group will never leave Lebanon defenseless.
Sheik Hassan Nasrallah criticized Bush for not responding to Lebanese demands that Israeli warplanes stop flying over Lebanon, and for not calling on Israel to release its Lebanese detainees.
...“We are ready to remain until the end of time a terrorist organization in Bush’s view, but we are not ready to give up protection of our country, our people, their blood and their honor,” Nasrallah said.
So they’re confirming an intention to continue to kill civilians. Hopefully this will make it even easier for us to go after them.
At NRO, Michael Ledeen comments on the U.S. strategy of offering a respectable way out to Hezbollah:
It seems that our current tactic is to set a series of traps for the Europeans and the terror masters. The Europeans are told that we will support their nuclear negotiations with the Iranian regime for the time being, but they must join with us in strong action if the talks fail. The Syrians are invited to leave Lebanon, and Hezbollah is invited to abandon terrorism, and are warned of harsh consequences if they do not. The president quite clearly doesn’t expect the negotiations to succeed, doesn’t expect Syria to accept a free Lebanon, and doesn’t for a minute think that Hezbollah can renounce its terrorist essence. In each case, we have convinced ourselves that, by taking a sweet and reasonable position today, we will be in a stronger position for tough action tomorrow. It will make it easier for at least some of the Europeans to join with us, whereas they would oppose tough action right away.
All that may well be true, but even so, it is the wrong thing to do. First of all, it enables the terrorists and their masters to buy time, and this is a moment of enormous risk for them. Every day they remain in power encourages them, and discourages the forces of freedom in their countries. When the people of Shiraz ask President Bush “why don’t you act?” they are reflecting this reality. Carpe Diem, Mister President.
But above all, the clever stratagem adopted by the administration ignores Machiavelli’s greatest lesson: Leadership is all about winning and losing, not about elegance and deep thinking. If we win the Europeans and lose the Middle East, we will have lost. But if we win the Middle East, the Europeans will hail us, as we see from their grudging tributes to Bush’s successful liberation of Afghanistan and Iraq. “If you are victorious,” Machiavelli says in his uncompromising way, “people will always judge the means you used to have been appropriate.”
Syria and Iran are tottering, and if they fall, the terror network will break into relatively impotent shards that we will be able to destroy. Forget about diplomacy, this is war. Every day we hear about plans to attack the United States directly, and every day more Americans die in Iraq. Is it not too clever by half to resort to cunning diplomacy at such a time? Is it not immoral to leave American fighting men and women in harm’s way an hour longer than is absolutely necessary?
The fires of freedom are burning all over Iran, Syria, and Lebanon. Don’t stand back and admire the flames. Push the dictators in, and then cheer as free societies emerge.
Faster, confound it.
We may not be getting there fast enough—but we do appear to be getting there; freedom is spreading in the Mid-East at a rate that was unimaginable only a few months ago.
