Muhammad Mended His Own Clothes!    
By Robert Spencer
FrontPageMagazine.com | November 15, 2006

The Wall Street Journal, which should know better but obviously doesn't, has published a list of five recommended books about Islam (thanks to all who sent this in). Among them:

"Muhammad" by Karen Armstrong (HarperCollins, 1992).
To understand Islam, one needs to understand the central role played by the Prophet Muhammad in the religion's creation and propagation. Orphaned at a young age, he was a successful trader when the divine revelations began. In Karen Armstrong's sympathetic and sometimes academic profile, she argues that, unlike Jesus, who could be a pacifist because he lived during Pax Romana, Muhammad faced warring tribes across Arabia. She paints a portrait of a very human prophet who is expedient and clever, who loves women and--despite having multiple wives--even mends his own clothes. But at his death, divisions over succession lead to the murder of three of the first four caliphs, or leaders, who followed--setting in motion the Sunni/Shia struggles that continue today.

So Muhammad was forced away from pacifism by his circumstances? Then why did he enjoin his followers to offer unbelievers conversion, subjugation, or death? Why did he tell the pagan Quraysh: "Will you listen to me, O Quraysh? By him who holds my life in His hand, I bring you slaughter" (Ibn Ishaq 131)?

Why not instead preach peaceful coexistence as equals? And he "mends his own clothes"! Heavens to betsy! He must be a feminist!

Never mind that rather than regarding women as human beings equal to men, the Qur'an likens a woman to a field (tilth), to be used by a man as he wills: "Your women are a tilth for you (to cultivate) so go to your tilth as ye will" (2:223).

The Qur'an also declares that a woman's testimony is worth half that of a man: "Get two witnesses, out of your own men, and if there are not two men, then a man and two women, such as ye choose, for witnesses, so that if one of them errs, the other can remind her" (2:282).

It allows men to marry up to four wives, and have sex with slave girls also: "If ye fear that ye shall not be able to deal justly with the orphans, marry women of your choice, two or three or four; but if ye fear that ye shall not be able to deal justly (with them), then only one, or (a captive) that your right hands possess, that will be more suitable, to prevent you from doing injustice" (4:3).

It rules that a son's inheritance should be twice the size of that of a daughter: "Allah (thus) directs you as regards your children's (inheritance): to the male, a portion equal to that of two females" (4:11).

Worst of all, the Qur’an tells husbands to beat their disobedient wives: "Men are in charge of women, because Allah hath made the one of them to excel the other, and because they spend of their property (for the support of women). So good women are the obedient, guarding in secret that which Allah hath guarded. As for those from whom ye fear rebellion, admonish them and banish them to beds apart, and scourge them" (4:34).

It allows for marriage to pre-pubescent girls, stipulating that Islamic divorce procedures “shall apply to those who have not yet menstruated” (65:4).

I am not surprised to see this arrant apologetic nonsense coming from Karen Armstrong. But to see it in the Wall Street Journal is disheartening.


Cartoon Rage vs. Freedom of Speech
By Robert Spencer
FrontPageMagazine.com | February 2, 2006

Muslim rage over cartoons of the Islamic Prophet Muhammad published in early October in a Danish newspaper continues to grow worldwide.[teach.lanecc.edu/borrowdalej/cartoons]

These cartoons are much less offensive than what is routinely printed in every American newspaper about presidents, presidential candidates, and other pols. Yet strange as it may seem to Western non-Muslims, the rage over them seems to grow with each passing day — until the global scale of the response to it has now involved ambassadors from many countries, the United Nations, international boycotts, and the threatening of utterly innocent businesspeople and embassy personnel. A few recent examples:
 
• Gaza: On Monday, gunmen seized an EU office, demanding apologies from Denmark and Norway (where another publication later reprinted the cartoons). On Tuesday, demonstrators chanted “War on Denmark, death to Denmark” as they burned Danish flags. Said Islamic Jihad leader Nafez Azzam: “We feel great rage at the continued attacks on Islam and the Prophet of Islam and we demand that the Danish government make a clear and public apology for the wrongful crime.”
 
• Arab interior ministers, meeting in Tunis, declared: “We ask the Danish authorities to take the necessary measures to punish those responsible for this harm and to take action to avoid a repeat.”
 
• Libya and Saudi Arabia recalled their ambassadors from Copenhagen, while in Saudi Arabia, an angry mob beat two employees of the Danish corporation Arla Foods, which has been subjected to a crippling boycott throughout the Islamic world – a boycott that has been endorsed by, among others, the Sudanese Defense Minister.
 
• Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshiyar Zebari complained to the Danish ambassador to Baghdad, while Danish troops were put on alert there after a fatwa concerning the cartoons was issued.
 
These incidents follow diplomatic protests from the Organization of the Islamic Conference, protests in Kashmir, death threats emanating from Pakistan, protests to the United Nations from the Muslim World League and other organizations, and more.
 
Even Bill Clinton has gotten into the act, decrying “these totally outrageous cartoons against Islam” and huffing self-righteously: “So now what are we going to do? ... Replace the anti-Semitic prejudice with anti-Islamic prejudice?” Of course not, but his question is beside the point. The cartoons are not a manifestation of anti-Islamic prejudice: criticism of Muhammad or even of Islam is not equivalent to anti-Semitism. Islam is not a race; the problems with it are not the product of fear mongering and fiction, but of ideology and facts -- facts that have been stressed repeatedly by Muslims around the world, when they commit violence in the name of Islam and justify that violence by its teachings. Noting, as some of the cartoons do, that there is a connection between the teachings of Muhammad and Islamic violence, is simply to manifest an awareness of what has been repeatedly asserted by Osama bin Laden, Ayman Al-Zawahiri, Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, Omar Bakri, Abu Hamza, Abu Bakar Bashir, and so many others. Do all these men and so many, many others misunderstand and misrepresent the teachings of Muhammad and Islam? This question, as crucial as it is, is irrelevant to an ethical evaluation of the cartoons. The fact is, these and other jihad terrorists claim Muhammad’s example and words as their inspiration. Some of the cartoons call attention to that fact.
 
Ultimately, then, the cartoon controversy is a question of freedom of speech. As I wrote in mid-December: “As it grows into an international cause célèbre, the cartoon controversy indicates the gulf between the Islamic world and the post-Christian West in matters of freedom of speech and expression. And it may yet turn out that as the West continues to pay homage to its idols of tolerance, multiculturalism, and pluralism, it will give up those hard-won freedoms voluntarily.” Freedom of speech encompasses precisely the freedom to annoy, to ridicule, to offend. If it doesn’t, it is hollow. The instant that any person or ideology is considered off-limits for critical examination and even ridicule, freedom of speech has been replaced by an ideological straitjacket. Westerners seem to grasp this easily when it comes to affronts to Christianity, even when they are as sharp-edged and offensive as Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ or Chris Ofili’s dung- and pornography-encrusted Holy Virgin Mary. But the same clarity of thought doesn’t seem to carry over to an Islamic context.
 
Yet that is where it is needed most today. The cartoon controversy, insignificant and even silly as it may be in its origins, is an increasingly serious challenge to Western notions of pluralism and freedom of speech. The Danes have already begun to apologize, to the tentative satisfaction of Danish Muslim groups. But so far both the newspaper Jyllands-Posten and the Prime Minister have limited themselves to saying essentially that they are sorry if Muslims took offense, and that none was intended. If they go farther and “punish those responsible,” as the Arab Interior Ministers demanded, or treat the cartoons as a human rights violation, as a Belgian imam demanded, they will be acknowledging that lampooning Muhammad and criticizing Islam is somehow wrong in itself. Such a notion is just as dangerous for a free society as the idea that the Beloved Leader or dialectical materialism is above criticism. It is death for a free society.
 
Not only that. Muslim cartoon rage, having spread now all across the Muslim world, from Egypt and Sudan to Pakistan and beyond, also threatens to become the tinderbox that sets off a much larger conflagration between the West and the Islamic world than the present conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Muslim world was enraged over the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, and over reports last May that a Qur’an had been flushed down at toilet at Guantanamo Bay. But although there have been no killings in connection with the cartoons yet, as opposed to the Qur’an desecration scandal, the international scope of the cartoon rage makes those other sources of anger trivial compared to it.
 
About the Qur’an desecration riots in Afghanistan in which people were reportedly killed — people who had nothing whatsoever to do with the alleged desecration — I wrote: “The question here is one of proportionate response. If a Qur’an had indeed been flushed, Muslims would have justifiably been offended. They may justifiably have considered the perpetrators boors, or barbarians, or hell-bound unbelievers. They may justifiably have issued denunciations accordingly. But that is all. To kill people thousands of miles away who had nothing to do with the act, and to fulminate with threats and murder against the entire Western world, all because of this alleged act, is not just disproportionate. It is not just excessive. It is mad. And every decent person in the world ought to have the courage to stand up and say that it is mad.”
 
No one has been killed for these cartoons. But otherwise the same words apply today to the cartoon controversy. It is mad. It should be denounced as mad. The fact that Bill Clinton is the only American politician who has taken notice of this ongoing controversy, and that on the wrong side, is a travesty.
 
The free world should be standing resolutely with Denmark, ready to defend freedom of speech. Insofar as it is not defended, it will surely be lost. On Wednesday publications all over Europe — in France, Spain, Germany, Italy, and Holland — published the cartoons to demonstrate their support for this principle. But in a grim reminder of the dhimmitude and multiculturalist fog that still grips us, the editor of France Soir was fired for doing so. The defense of free speech and free thought will not be easy, and is not the matter of just a day.


Pope Rage in Istanbul    
By Robert Spencer
FrontPageMagazine.com | November 28, 2006

Pope Benedict XVI is set to arrive in Turkey on Tuesday, and tensions are running high. Mehmet Ali Agca, the Turk who shot Pope John Paul II in 1981, wrote to Benedict: “Your life is in danger. You absolutely must not come to Turkey.” And several weeks ago, a Turk named Ibrahim Ak stood outside Italy’s consulate in Istanbul and fired a gun while proclaiming his desire to strangle the pope. As he was arrested, Ak shouted: “I am happy to be a Muslim!” He said that he hoped the Pope would decide not to come to Turkey, and that his actions would inspire other Turks to violence: “God willing, this will be a spark, a starter for Muslims ... God willing, he will not come. If he comes, he will see what will happen to him.”
Turkish officials are trying to make sure nothing does. According to the Associated Press, they have “mobilized an army of snipers, bomb disposal experts and riot police, as well as navy commandos to patrol the Bosporus Straits flowing through Istanbul.” However, Meliha Benli Altunisik, a professor at the Middle East Technical University in Ankara, questioned whether such precautions were necessary at all: “Will there be protests? Yes, of course. But I cannot take seriously the notion that he is in physical danger. He will rather be ignored.”
 
Certainly Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan originally planned to ignore him. Erdogan will be attending a NATO summit in Latvia on the first two days of the Pope’s visit and at first announced that he would not meet with him during the last two days, either. “You can't expect me to arrange my timetable according to the pope,” Erdogan huffed, and of course he’s right: how could anyone expect him to rearrange his busy schedule to meet with someone so unimportant as the Pope? (However, on Monday he did finally change his plans and agreed to meet with Benedict.)
 
The real reason why Erdogan did not want to meet the Pope, of course, is the same reason why security is so tight: Turks are enraged over the Pope’s speech at the University of Regensburg on September 12, 2006, in which he quoted the fourteenth century Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Paleologos: “Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.” There were riots all over the Islamic world over these remarks in September, and several Christians were murdered in Iraq and Somalia. In Turkey, tempers haven’t cooled. Turkish politician Salih Kapusuz said: “The owner of those unfortunate and arrogant comments, Benedict XVI, has gone down in history, but in the same category as Hitler and Mussolini....It looks like an effort to revive the mentality of the Crusades.” The Crusades were on Al-Qaeda leader Ayman Al-Zawahri’s mind also: he likened Benedict to Pope Urban II, who called the First Crusade in 1095.
 
Unfortunately, the danger of and anger over the Pope’s visit to Turkey has overshadowed both the real focus of the visit, and what should be its major preoccupation. The main purpose of the Pope’s trip is to meet with the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, spiritual leader of the Orthodox Church. One may hope also that the Pope will take an opportunity to shed some light upon the woeful condition of religious minorities, principally Christians, in what is nominally a secular state that allows for religious freedom. Two converts from Islam to Christianity, Hakan Tastan and Turan Topal, are currently on trial on charges of “insulting ‘Turkishness’” and inciting hatred of Islam. What seems to be behind the charges is that Tastan and Topal were proselytizing – which, while not officially illegal, is frowned upon and has sometimes resulted in beatings of Christians trying to hand out religious literature. On November 4, a Protestant church in western Turkey was firebombed, after months of harassment that was ignored by Turkish authorities. The murderer of a Catholic priest, Fr. Andrea Santoro, last February in the Turkish city of Trabzon was recently sentenced to only eighteen years in prison. (The killer shouted “Allahu akbar!” as he fired shots at the priest.)
 
All this bespeaks a Turkish officialdom that is hostile – at best – to non-Muslim forms of religious expression, Turkey’s guarantees of religious freedom be damned. The institutionalized subjugation and second-class status of religious minorities under the Ottoman Empire was bad enough, but Turkish secularism has been, if anything, even worse. Constantinople was 50% Christian as recently as 1914 (its name was changed to Istanbul in 1930); today, it is less than one percent Christian. The Catholic Church has no legal recognition; Catholic churches, like other churches, remain inconspicuous so as not to draw the angry attention of mujahedin. Even the recognized Churches are not allowed to operated seminaries or build new houses of worship – in accord with ancient Islamic Sharia restrictions on non-Muslims in an Islamic state, which restrictions paradoxically enough still have at least some force in secular Turkey.
 
The righteous fury with which the Pope will likely be greeted in Turkey will shift attention from the shame Turkish authorities should feel over the mistreatment of Christians in their land that nominally allows for religious freedom. The mainstream media will focus on protests against the Pope, and pay scant attention to anything he may say, if he says anything at all, about the oppression of Christians in Turkey. And that, in the final analysis, may lead the Turkish government – for all its security precautions -- to hope that the protestors will turn out in force.

Robert Spencer is a scholar of Islamic history, theology, and law and the director of Jihad Watch. He is the author of six books, seven monographs, and hundreds of articles about jihad and Islamic terrorism, including Islam Unveiled: Disturbing Questions About the World’s Fastest Growing Faith and the New York Times Bestseller The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades). His latest book is the New York Times Bestseller The Truth About Muhammad.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/authors.asp?ID=1240

Other recommended books include Bernard Lewis' books The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror and What Went Wrong?: The Clash Between Modernity and Islam in the Middle East, David Horowitz's Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left, Dore Gold's Hatred's Kingdom: : How Saudi Arabia Supports the New Global Terrorism, Tony Blankley's The West's Last Chance: Will We Win the Clash of Civilizations? and Bruce Bawer's While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within.