By Robert Spencer FrontPageMagazine.com | June 30, 2005
“May Allah rip out his spine from his back and split his brains in two, and then put them both back, and then do it over and over again….Amen.”
“I believe he’s already on the hit list, nothing new.”
“we make dua [i.e., we pray] Allah allows your blood to spill over our hands.”
These are threats I have received recently. Last week, when I spoke at the New York Tolerance Center about “The True Nature of the Jihad Threat,” I discovered that news of these threats have somehow found their way to the New York Police Department, which -- unbeknownst to me until I arrived at the venue -- dispatched its “Hercules Team” to ward off any who might have wanted to make those threats reality. The Team, a group of courteous and accomplished plainclothesmen, turned away one young man with a backpack at the door, after he refused to let them search his bag.
Against that somewhat ominous backdrop, I spoke about the violent intolerance of the Islamic jihad: its imperative to impose Sharia, with its institutionalized discrimination against non-Muslims and women, and its mandate to commit violent acts that is rooted in the Qur’an and Sunnah, supported by mainstream understandings of those texts, and elaborated by Islamic law. I tried to impress upon the crowd the threat that the jihad poses to central notions of human rights enshrined in the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights and derived from the Judeo-Christian tradition.
Bravo for life’s little ironies: after this talk about the need to defend the West from this furious and fanatical form of intolerance, I was confronted by a young man and a young woman who were quite offended by my -- you guessed it -- intolerance. The Muslims who made it necessary for us to have our conversation under armed guard because of death threats did not offend them. My talk did. We had a brief discussion -- until the young man refused to shake my hand and I realized that no real exchange of ideas was going to be possible -- in which I found that their views reflected not just their personal opinions, but a large number of common prejudices and false assumptions about the nature of the present conflict, the meaning of tolerance itself, and more.
The young man, for example, insisted to me that my focus was wrong. He told me that even though he was a Jew, he believed that Israel was a worse violator of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights than the jihadists, and reiterated several times that America is the world’s greatest terrorist, not any jihadist. These are, of course, fashionable notions on the Left and some sectors of the Right, but that doesn’t make them true.
Israel a worse threat than the global jihad? What violence is Israel fomenting in Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, Kashmir, Afghanistan, Iraq, Chechnya, Uzbekistan, Nigeria, Bosnia, and elsewhere around the globe? Where are Israelis spreading an ideology that demands that its adherents subvert the states in which they live and replace their societies with a radically different social model that denies equality of rights to women and certain religious groups? Where are Israelis teaching their children that the noblest thing they can do with their lives would be to strap bombs on themselves and blow themselves up in a large crowd of unsuspecting civilians?
Very well thought out and written article. Go ye and read of it.
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