German outreach to Muslims backfires

The medicine Islam needs may kill it: Flinstones Vitamins & Arsenic.

A sustaining din of indignation has a steady source in the blogging collective surrounding Michelle & Jesse Malkin.

It appears to be getting more shrill as the group grows. This week saw a raising of stakes of sorts: paranoia of media manipulation in the coverage of the continuing slaughter in Lebanon, Joe Lieberman’s primary loss to a political fish, and the arrests of alleged violent jihadists in Britain.
(more…)

Anyone concerned with human rights should be appalled by the (laughably weak) charges against Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci. Unlike Michelle, I do not agree with Fallaci’s assessment of Islam, but I am willing to concede that her writings (from what I have seen) do not constitute “hate speech”, which is the basis of speech-restricting laws, such as those against Holocaust denial.

That said, is Michelle’s reporting of the facts accurate? Of course not. Her agenda requires that she distort the narrative to the extent that she can claim that ‘European dhimmitude’ will land on U.S. shores in no time. In her Women Warriors episode of VENT from May 9, our esteemed host claimed that Fallaci “faces up to two years in jail, in Italy”. It appears that she found this fact in a WSJ editorial that was written well before the law was changed in January 2006. From the New Yorker Fallaci profile that Malkin herself linked to:

A Mussolini-era criminal code holds that “whoever offends the state’s religion, by defaming those who profess it, will be punished with up to two years of imprisonment.” Though the code was written to protect the Catholic Church, it has been successively amended in the past ten years, so that it encompasses any “religion acknowledged by the state.” The complaint against Fallaci marks the first time that the code has been invoked on behalf of any religion but Catholicism. (In January, Fallaci’s supporters in the Italian Senate pushed through an amendment to the code, reducing the maximum penalty to five thousand euros.)

As a respected member/journalist of the New Media, I’m sure Michelle will be eager to clear this up for her readers, and call for the repeal of this oppressive statute.

If you’ve never seen the meat of Michelle’s “Swift Boat” appearance on the August 19, 2004 episode of Hardball with Chris Matthews, please take a look.

Long-time reader Rev. Mykeru (that’s “Mike-a-roo”), sent the following in an email as part of a discussion we were having concerning our favorite blogger. I’ve done a bit of editing and added links, none of which are absolutely necessary for context or continuity.

One of the things you have to get used to when dealing with Malkin is something that is common with all purveyors of nonsense, and that is the breathless padding around a non-claim.

(more…)

All this time I thought Arizona was The Grand Canyon state - and now we learn that it is “another known hotspot for al-Qaeda trainees.”

They really should do something about that.

If you’ll excuse me, I’m gonna get a little religious on you for a minute. Sirkowski, if you’re reading this, avert your eyes.

Matthew 25:37-45
“Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’

“The King will reply, ‘I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.’ Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.’”

“‘For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.’”

“They also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?’ He will reply, ‘I tell you the truth, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’”

Now, this story is presented a little more fire-and-brimstone-y than my Quaker self usually appreciates, but sometimes my fellow Christians need a little spiritual warfare before the Love Thy Neighbor message really sinks in.

Malkin’s still not getting it.

Paul Belien at The Brussels Journal reports on the march of dhimmitude in Belgium.

Belien says:

The Belgian Bishops have opened their churches to illegal immigrants in order to pressurize the Belgian authorities to allow the immigrants to stay in the country…

The Muslim squatters hold Islamic prayer services in the church. The altar has been moved and the statue of Our Lady covered by a cloth to hide her from the eyes of the Muslim believers…

The squatters are living in the churches. “Church occupations” by illegal immigrants have been going on for a number of years in Belgium. They are not really “occupations” because the Bishops condone the actions and actively support them. Chris Gillibrand visited a number of Brussels churches to take these pictures.

Oh, the nerve of these bishops.

Luke 10:33-35
But a Samaritan, as he traveled, came where the man was; and when he saw him, he took pity on him. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he put the man on his own donkey, took him to an inn and took care of him. The next day he took out two silver coins[e] and gave them to the innkeeper. ‘Look after him,’ he said, ‘and when I return, I will reimburse you for any extra expense you may have.’

“But Auguste,” you say, as you so often do, “these squatters are not mugging victims! They are illegal immigrants! In the country illegally! They have broken the law! And, did we not mention, they are Muslims!”

And, as so often when you argue with me, you are wrong.

Refugees whose permission to stay in Belgium has expired have occupied at least five Catholic churches hoping to pressure the government to regularize their status.

About 100 Afghans occupied the Church of Ste. Croix in Ixelles March 31, saying they feared for their lives if they were forced to return to Afghanistan. They occupied the church without the parish priest’s permission but seemed well organized and receiving help from Belgium supporters.

As night approached, the priest asked them to move to another parish building where they continued their protests in a single room, sleeping on mattresses on the floor. They have toilets and sinks, but no showers or tubs for bathing.

A supporter of the Afghans, Edith Mercier told NCR that it is as if the parish priest moved the refugees to a “stable.” She said she is not a parishioner of the Church of Ste. Croix. As 65 of the refugees began a hunger strike April 6, local media quoted a government spokesman saying immigration officials would review the Afghans’ requests on a case-by-case basis.

The church in this story is not specified but I have the feeling it’s the specific story Belien is referring to:

It is unclear how many asylum seekers will be allowed to stay in Belgium and how many will be forcefully repatriated, as Iran has refused to accept the return of Iranian refugees.

Asylum seekers who want to press their claim to a legal status in Belgium have occupied 11 churches across the country.

In a church community centre in Brussels, dozens of Iranian asylum seekers gathered to protest at the government’s plans to tighten asylum procedures.

They claim that the Belgian government has increased its demands to repatriate immigrants and asylum seekers back to their mother countries.

However Iran has refused to accept the return of Iranian refugees and therefore they are caught in a form of political no-man’s land.

Illegal immigrants? I suppose, in the same way that Cuban refugees are illegal immigrants.

Matthew 2:13-15

When they had gone, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream. “Get up,” he said, “take the child and his mother and escape to Egypt. Stay there until I tell you, for Herod is going to search for the child to kill him.” So he got up, took the child and his mother during the night and left for Egypt, where he stayed [until Herod’s death]…

As for the use of a Catholic Church for Muslim worship, the overall Christian umbrella is absolutely packed to the gills with churches which allow their facilities to be used for interfaith programs. I know of buildings locally which are primarily Christian churches but also rent or donate their space to groups representing other religions. I don’t know what the specific overall Catholic stance on this is, but it seems to me that the protection of the weakest among us - refugees certainly qualify - ought to override the concern that the wrong kind of prayer or the wrong iconography is taking place within the wrong four walls.

In today’s Vent, Malkin is upset about the marketing of “United Flight 93″, which is getting rave reviews from wingers - but Malkin has some reservations.

Head over to the official discussion site for United 93, which is sponsored by Universal Studios. You will be disturbed. In a section called (whining) “Why Do They Hate America?” There’s not a single mention of Osama bin Laden. Instead, you get a Catholic-bashing history lesson about the Crusades, an obligatory sentence blaming the founding of Israel for jihad, and an effort to cast Muslims as perpetual victims of Western oppressors. No mention of the fact that Islamic imperialism began some 450 years before the start of the Crusades.

Anyway, why is the Flight 93 movie site invoking this biased history lesson? (”Dhimmitude” graphic appears onscreen) Do the movie promoters mean to endorse al Qaeda’s terrorist leaders? Because the rationalizations look and sound sickeningly familiar…

Universal Studios has some explaining to do.

How about LA and I give it a shot?

This sounded suspiciously like Malkin’s M.O. of using messages which appear on a discussion board to represent Official Liberal Positions, so I headed over to united93movie.com (Ed.: Corrected. Sorry about that, boys’ soccer team from Oklahoma), which is listed on IMDB as the official site for the movie. Nothing - not even on the message boards - which would qualify as what Malkin is worried about. (There is a section for alternative theories of 9/11, which is unhinged enough for five episodes of Vent, but nothing like what Malkin was referring to.)

LA, meanwhile, followed the link on HotAir (a daring move, I know) to find u93.org, also apparently sponsored by Universal Studios and which contained the link to “Why Do They Hate America” as described by Malkin. He also passed along this:

u93.org is a Christian site. I don’t think it’s official:

United 93 raises some of the most compelling questions of our day including:

* Why do some Muslim groups hate the West?
* What can we do about it?
* How do we effectively discuss these things in our communities?
* What do Muslims really believe?
* What does Jesus say?

These kinds of questions are not easily answered. Since 9/11 affected all of us, United 93 gives another opportunity to work out the love of God and love of neighbor within our communities. This website gives you several resources, tools, and active steps to take when looking at these issues.

It certainly seemed offical, what with the prominent Universal Studios copyright and all. WHOIS shed some more light. The IP is owned by Motive Entertainment, with a registrant named Paul Lauer. From Motive’s website:

Lauer is…one of the most well connected entrepreneurs in the Faith and Family Market, having most recently designed and executed the highly-successful marketing campaign for Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” for Icon Productions.

Lauer has gone on to manage grass roots outreach campaigns for the Tom Hanks/Robert Zemeckis film, “The Polar Express,” as well as the record breaking Walden Media/Disney epic series, “The Chronicles of Narnia.” In addition, Lauer has assisted with the marketing and distribution of numerous independent film projects.

In 2002, having experienced first-hand the challenges of bringing independent faith-based and family-friendly films to market, Lauer conceived Motive Entertainment as the missing link to solve this “distribution dilemma”.

So u93.org - the film site which offends Malkin so deeply, which is practicing dhimmitude and selling out the West - is…a site specifically set up to market to Christians. The rest of the site contains sermon outlines, materials for group discussions, and articles with titles like “Faith Matters, but…What do you do when G_d disappears?”

Fear not, though. Malkin’s hordes have already begun to descend on the discussion boards. Things won’t stay on the level of Christian Love for very long.

Malkin’s column:

…Dr. Xavier Amador told the jury Monday that Little Orphan Moussaoui “suffered from schizophrenia of the paranoid variety.”

Let me throw away the medical dictionary and give my diagnosis of the defense team’s diagnosis: Bull.

Wingnuts love to practice lay medicine, don’t they? First Terri Schiavo, now Zacarias Moussaoui. I’m surprised Malkin didn’t say something like “Schizophrenia? Now they’re claiming multiple personalities made him do it!”

The fact is, mental status doesn’t excuse terrorism. Only Moussaoui’s defense lawyers claim it does - and that’s what they’re required by oath to do, and thank god they do it, because otherwise our legal system would devolve into a Malkin utopia kangaroo court. But mental status and everything that goes into it - nature, nurture, aspartame - might help explain terrorism.

“But Auguste,” you might be saying, “doesn’t explaining terrorism equal excusing terrorism?” If you are saying this, you are stupid.

I’m sorry, that was a little too strong. You are ignorant, intellectually lazy, and quite possibly suicidal. You probably also want to nuke Iran.

Malkin is your prophet:

On Monday, while Moussaoui’s defense team played their violins in court, apologists across Europe and the Muslim world played the same song for the suicide bomber who murdered 9 innocent civilians and wounded scores more at a Tel Aviv restaurant. The bomber packed his explosives with nails and shrapnel soaked in rat poison to increase the suffering of the victims.

Police had to pick bits of flesh off the blood-drenched streets and parked car windshields.

But it’s not the fault of terrorist Sami Salim Mohammed Hammed and his sponsors at Islamic Jihad. Blame “Israeli aggression” and “anti-Arab racism!”

The dry-eyed know there is one Root Cause for this carnage. It’s not America, Israel, racism, or psychological imbalances. It’s evil. Just evil.

Mary Wollstonecraft wrote, “No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks.”

And no, wingers, liberals aren’t asking you to avoid harshing the mistaken man’s buzz. The pursuit of happiness is subjugated to life and liberty - no one disputes that except the strawliberals you keep creating. To a liberal, when someone’s happiness lies behind other peoples’ life and liberty, it becomes the evil Wollstonecraft references.

In fact, it’s Malkin and her cronies who have no absolute definition of evil - who “know it when they see it.” Oh, most of them claim it’s biblically based, but it’s been well documented that to the wingers, evil is that which is done by other people. (In Malkin’s case, it seems to be that which is done by liberals.) It’s based on that - the fact that the Other is responsible - that Malkin states “It’s not America, Israel, racism, or psychological imbalances. It’s evil. Just evil.”

I recently saw a winger argue that because Timothy McVeigh was not aiming to kill innocents, that he thought he would only be killing FBI agents, that his act was not terrorism. Bad, but not terrorism. Is this a mainstream view among the right? I doubt it. But there are echoes of that sort of American exceptionalism all over Malkin’s work. She has her own version of la raza - “By Americans, no excuse is irrelevant; by non - Americans, no excuse is relevant.”

So yes, 9/11 was evil. Obviously, because it involved death and destruction, and those practiced against civilians. But evil is not spontaneously generated. And that, my friends, is a value-neutral statement.

The 9/11 hijackers were pursuing their happiness, and so they did evil. So the question is, what made them think that the destruction that took place on 9/11 was their happiness? Malkin is right, the madrassas and imams were involved. But those seeds needed soil. And as for the kind of thing which prepared that soil - put Moussaoui and the 19 hijackers in the frame of mind to embrace jihad - we don’t need racism, or anti-Islamism, or any other long-disproven ism. We just need to look at history.

As for our current strategy and its potential for decreasing the number of “Just evil” people in the world, let’s look to an author whom the wingnuts claim as their own:

“Conquest is an evil productive of almost every other evil both to those who commit and to those who suffer it.” — C.S. Lewis

So as you may have heard, Dateline NBC plans to send some obvious Muslims into a NASCAR event to observe what they imagine will be racist results.

Michelle and her readers are reacting as though “there are racists at NASCAR events” isn’t akin to “there are pot smokers at Guster shows.”

Mailbox is filling up with reaction to my blog post this morning about NBC’s Dateline show and its apparent Nascar fans-must-be-racist sting.

A sample:

Reader Joanthan M. calls for “An Army of NASCAR Davids” (meme nod to Glenn Reynolds):

“Just had a thought I wanted to share - what a great opportunity NBC’s news creation can provide to the blogosphere!. If word gets out to NASCAR fans (perhaps in part via your blog) that 1) NBC is trying to paint them as ignorant bigots, 2) they should be extra-super-duper nice to Muslims at the Apr. 8 race, and 3) they should bring their handheld video cameras to tape NBC taping them so that when NBC can’t find any bigotry to air, they can expose Dateline as the one possessed with bigotry, of the anti-red stater race fan variety, that is.”

More pernicious than this particular “defense” - by the way, not all race fans are racists, disclaim disclaim - is the “at least we’re not as racist as them” crowd.

Via Instapundit (read the entire post with updates):

‘[R]eader Eric Hall offers a new assignment: “Dateline NBC ought to take some Christian-looking people to Riyadh and see how things work out. Don’t forget the bikini-clad sister.”‘

Reader Ed:

“Why don’t you set up some white guy with hidden cameras, put a George Bush T-Shirt on him and have him walk down a street in Pakistan. Or, better yet, have him walk down a street in Detroit. I’ll just bet you could get a lot of bigoted reactions.”

It’s good to see the right embracing moral relativism again. I wonder if we can prevail upon Malkin and friends to create some sort of racism chart, so that we know what rules America is now playing by. Obviously “as racist as Muslims” will be at the top, in the red, and unacceptable. But obviously there’s a whole spectrum of bigotry that’s now totally acceptable to the wingers - otherwise why are they so upset about this “manufactured news”? Are the producers planning on injecting the poor innocent rednecks race fans with some sort of racism catalyst?

I didn’t realize that the concept of “entrapment” applied to racism. “But you don’t understand! I’m not normally racist, but for God’s sake, they sent a BROWN GUY into the middle of a NASCAR RACE! What was I supposed to do?”

Malkin, salivating over the possibility of the death penalty (emphasis mine):

Fox News producer Mike Levine was in the courtroom and reports that Moussaoui had another Islamo-hissy fit, screaming, “God curse you all! You will never get my blood” and “Allah Akbar!”

Blech.

Malkin wants to “ask uncomfortable questions” (from Investor’s Business Daily. Not sure why they’re dabbling in religion - and I do mean dabbling):

What better time for CAIR and other Muslim leaders to step up, cut through the politically correct fog and provide factual answers to the questions that give so many non-Muslims pause?

Generally speaking, those questions focus on whether the Quran does indeed promote violence against non-Muslims, and how many of the terrorists’ ideas — about the violent jihad, the self-immolation, the kidnappings, even the beheadings — come right out of the text?

I am a reader of the Bible. I want to state that up front, so that when I say that the number of terrible, violent ideas that have come out of the text of the bible must rival if not outnumber those that have come out of the Qu’ran, I won’t be accused of some sort of war against Christianity.

All religious texts must be read with context, and as I understand it, the Qu’ran is no different. After the fold, responses to a few of IBD’s questions.

(more…)

I’m not altogether sure what to make of this poster. About the last thing I would make of it, however, is Malkin’s interpretation:

With all due respect, those giving the U.N. the benefit of the doubt and advocating this benign interpretation are looking at the graphic bass-ackwards. The puzzle pieces represent unity and tolerance; the red LEGO represents a blaring, non-conformist, and unacceptable “shape of racism.”

In honor of this out-of-left-field torturing of logic:

We really didn’t do much to improve life in Afghanistan, did we?

I bet you I can write a post that will make Auguste’s head explode.

I win.

With exactly zero new facts and a little conjecture on the part of a single bomb-squad member, Malkin declares Joel Hinrichs a wild-eyed American jihadist, again. And when I say zero new facts, I mean just that. There’s not even enough in the post to counterargue, it’s so spectacularly structurally unsound.

Update: Cam in comments:

Curiously, in her exhaustive research, Malkin seems to have missed some of Sgt. Mauldin’s other remarks. The OU Daily covered the same presentation, and it addressed the “Islamic connection” directly: “The suspicions of an Islamic connection were shown to be false, Mauldin said.”…

An honest oversight, I’m sure.

What else could it be?

Shorter Michelle Malkin:

This is what criminals look like in case you’ve forgotten.