October 07, 2005

Muslims in the U.K.: Being Offended as a Political Strategy

In the Western tradition we are raised to be considerate of others. Muslims in England are raised to be offended by everything that is non-Muslim. This makes Islam in England a perfect cancer directed against the British culture. They're offended by everything non-Muslim, and Westerners in England follow the Western tradition of caring about how others feel, and abandon Western ways to those claiming to be offended by them.  Mark Steyn describes the situation:

...the United Kingdom's descent into dhimmitude is beyond parody. Dudley Metropolitan Borough Council (Tory-controlled) has now announced that, following a complaint by a Muslim employee, all work pictures and knick-knacks of novelty pigs and "pig-related items" will be banned. Among the verboten items is one employee's box of tissues, because it features a representation of Winnie the Pooh and Piglet. And, as we know, Muslims regard pigs as "unclean", even an anthropomorphised cartoon pig wearing a scarf and a bright, colourful singlet.

This is how jihad works. Muslims immigrate in large numbers to a country, and then demand that all others submit to Islam.

So far the British are dumb enough to be letting it work.

Cllr Mahbubur Rahman is in favour of the blanket pig crackdown. "It is a good thing, it is a tolerance and acceptance of their beliefs and understanding," he said.

Notice how Rahman demands that non-Muslims tolerate and accept Islamic demands for them to submit to Islam -- but does not want Muslims to have any "tolerance and acceptance" of Western culture.

Steyn provides additional examples of the inroads made by jihad in England:

When the Queen knights a Muslim "community leader" whose line on the Rushdie fatwa was that "death is perhaps too easy", and when the Prime Minister has a Muslim "adviser" who is a Holocaust-denier and thinks the Iraq war was cooked up by a conspiracy of Freemasons and Jews, and when the Prime Minister's wife leads the legal battle for a Talibanesque dress code in British schools, you don't need a pig to know which side's bringing home the bacon.

A couple of years ago, when an anxious-to-please head teacher in Batley was banning offensive "pig-centred books", Inayat Bunglawala of the Muslim Council of Britain commented that "there is absolutely no scriptural authority for this view. It is a misunderstanding of the Koranic instruction that Muslims may not eat pork." Mr Bunglawala is a typical "moderate" Muslim - he thinks the British media are "Zionist-controlled", etc - but on the pig thing he's surely right. It seems unlikely that even the exhaustive strictures of the Koran would have a line on Piglet.

So these little news items that pop up every week now are significant mostly as a gauge of the progressive liberal's urge to self-abase and Western Muslims' ever greater boldness in flexing their political muscle.

After all, how daffy does a Muslim's willingness to take offence have to be to get rejected out of court? Only the other day, Burger King withdrew its ice-cream cones from its British restaurants because Mr Rashad Akhtar of High Wycombe, after a trip to the Park Royal branch, complained that the creamy swirl on the lid resembled the word "Allah" in Arabic script.

That's jihad. It's working in England.

We must prevent that from happening here.

We must control immigration to this country from Islamic nations. 

Israel Finally Stops Running

Reported by the Egyptian press:

[There are] "the new rules of the game" [practiced by Israel] for the military conflict with the Palestinians. Very simply, this translates as zero tolerance for any attempt by the Palestinian resistance to use Gaza as a base to mount attacks on Israel. It was shown by operation "First Rain", launched after mortars were fired following an explosion at a Hamas rally in Gaza on 22 September that left 23 dead. As veteran military correspondent, Alex Fishman, noted in Israel's Yediot Aharonot newspaper on 30 September, it was "less a rain, more a tornado".

Over the following seven days, Israel renewed its policy of assassinating militants, bombing civilian infrastructure and arresting Palestinians in mass sweeps, all methods tried and tested throughout the Intifada. For the first time since the 1967 War, it used artillery to clear entire regions in Gaza and flew F-16s to trigger sonic booms at a rate of one every two hours.

The aim of the onslaught was two-fold. In Gaza it was intended to sow fear among the civilian population, creating a popular groundswell for the PA to "act" against Hamas and Islamic Jihad. In the West Bank the purpose was to wreck Hamas as an electoral force. Of the 415 Palestinians Israel arrested last week, 250 were Hamas members, most of them civilian cadre, including 14 local government candidates and 15 campaign managers. The sweep also netted political leaders Hassan Youssef, Mohamed Ghazzal and Ahmed Haj Ali, all three driving forces behind the turn to elections in the movement.

The rain brought its harvest. By 24 September, Hamas leader in Gaza, Mahmoud Al-Zahar, announced an end to all military operations from the Strip. And on 27 September instructions were issued to Gaza's Palestinian police to "arrest any person" not in uniform. Both decisions were taken unilaterally, without consultation and in response to the Israeli attacks. And both lay the seeds for confrontation.

Hamas leaders then battled Palestinian police: 

It erupted on 2 October, when Palestinian police allegedly tried to arrest Mohamed Al-Rantissi, son of the assassinated Hamas leader Abdul-Aziz Al-Rantissi. Hamas reacted with absolute force, firing on police stations in Sheikh Radwan and the Beach refugee camp and leaving three Palestinians dead, including a police officer and 32-year-old woman, Hiyam Nasser.

The police evidently fled: 

The police reacted by storming Gaza's Legislative Council building, demanding protection and, above all, leadership. The police are insisting that they cannot be viewed as simply one militia among others. Hamas is adamant that there can be no move to disarm its fighters, especially when they are once more under attack from Israel.

Is there any way out from this impasse, short of civil war? Yes, says Palestinian analyst, Hani Al-Masri. "The resistance must be allowed to preserve its arms. But this does not mean it can act like a collection of private fiefdoms which decides when and how to act. Resistance is a national activity that should be decided by all Palestinians through their legitimate national institutions."

They're still calling their war against Israel "resistance." The PR value of that word may be in doubt. All the world really cares about, is whether Israel will defend its own women and children. When the world saw Israel doing the minimum possible to defend itself, the world condemned Israel. In my view, the more that country behaves like it's in a war, and does everything necessary to protect its women and children, the more it will gain global support.