Senator Obama has released his line-up of convention speakers. His choice of speakers is neither wise nor moral nor are there that many new faces among them. Yes, I know: Senator Obama has to invite the previous living Democratic Presidents, it would be a break with tradition for him not to do so. But isn’t “change” Senator Obama’s mantra? And if not now, when?
For example, Obama has invited Jimmy Carter, the former one-time President of the United States to speak on the opening night of the Democratic National Convention.
Jimmy Carter? Yes, the President who, in 1979-1980, did not find a way to rescue the 52 Americans held hostage for 444 days by Khomeini’s goons; the current President Amadinejad was probably one of the young goons.
Jimmy Carter? Yes, the President who, post 9/11, still continued to blame America for the Arab hatred of America and who viewed America’s call for democracy in the Middle East as a justifiably “discredited” one. In a 2006 interview in the German Spiegel, Carter justified the hatred of America as caused by America’s invasion of Iraq and support for Israel.
Spiegel: You also mentioned the hatred for the United States throughout the Arab world which has ensued as a result of the invasion of Iraq. Given this circumstance, does it come as any surprise that Washington’s call for democracy in the Middle East has been discredited?
Carter: No, as a matter of fact, the concerns I exposed have gotten even worse now with the United States supporting and encouraging Israel in its unjustified attack on Lebanon.
Spiegel: But wasn’t Israel the first to get attacked?
Carter: I don’t think that Israel has any legal or moral justification for their massive bombing of the entire nation of Lebanon. What happened is that Israel is holding almost 10,000 prisoners, so when the militants in Lebanon or in Gaza take one or two soldiers, Israel looks upon this as a justification for an attack on the civilian population of Lebanon and Gaza. I do not think that’s justified, no.”
Oh, where do I begin?
From 1967 on, Palestinian terrorists hijacked planes, bombed synagogues, took hostages, and killed Jewish and Israeli civilians; they did so long before a so-called “settler” movement began living in disputed territories.
Long before America invaded Iraq and Afghanistan, and long before 9/11, the following Arab Muslim/Islamist/terrorist attacks against America (and against western civilians) took place:
On April 18, 1983, a suicide car bomber blew up the U.S. embassy in Beirut, killing sixty-three, including seventeen Americans.
On October 23, 1983, terrorist operatives blew up the U.S. Marine barracks and French military headquarters in Beirut, killing 241 marines and 58 French paratroopers. Jeffrey Goldberg, staff reporter for the New Yorker, attributes this attack to Hezbollah (a.k.a. the Islamic Jihad Organization, a.k.a. the Organization of the Oppressed on Earth). Prior to 9/11, it was the most deadly terrorist attack on Americans.
On June 14, 1985, Hezbollah seized a TWA jet and commandeered its flight to Beirut, demanding the release of seven hundred Arabs held in Israeli jails. One U.S. Navy diver was killed and thirty-nine Americans were held hostage until July 1. Goldberg reported that the United States held one of Arafat’s former bodyguards, Imad Mugniyah, responsible for most of Hezbollah’s anti-American attacks, including this one.
On April 5, 1986, a bomb, putatively Libyan, exploded in a Berlin nightclub killing 2 U.S. servicemen and wounding 230 other people. “Libya is blamed, “according to the Associated Press (AP).
On December 21, 1988, Libyan terrorists blew up Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 270 people, including some on the ground.
On February 26, 1993 a car bomb planted by radical Islamists exploded in the parking garage beneath the World Trade Center towers, killing six and wounding more than a thousand. The four convicted perpetrators were all linked to the blind Egyptian radical Sheik Omar Abdul Rahman, himself indicted as the leader of a larger alleged conspiracy to destroy the United Nations headquarters and the Lincoln and Holland tunnels.
On June 25, 1996, a truck packed with explosives exploded outside the Khobar Towers in Dharam, Saudi Arabia, killing nineteen U.S. servicemen and wounding hundreds. According to Goldberg, the U.S. also suspects former Arafat bodyguard Mugniyah of involvement in this case. However, according to the Washington Post, American investigations in 1998 pointed exclusively to Iranian agents.
On November 17, 1997, Jemaah Islamiyah operatives shot and killed more than sixty tourists visiting the temple of Queen Hatshepsut at Luxor, Egypt. There were Japanese, Swiss, German, and British among the dead.
ON August 7, 1998, Al Qaeda detonated two car bombs and destroyed the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam simultaneously, killing 224 and wounding thousands. The AP reported that bin Laden was suspected.
On October 12, 2000, Al Qaeda attackers bombed the U.S.S. Cole as it refueled in the Yemeni port of Aden, killing seventeen sailors. Again “bin Laden [was] suspected.”
On September 11, 2001 Arab Muslims, mainly from Saudi Arabia, and acting for Al-Qaeda, flew two planes into the World Trade Center and a third plane into the Pentagon. Passengers forced a fourth plane to crash in a Pennsylvania field.
These attacks all took place before America invaded Iraq.
The list of atrocities committed against peaceful Israeli civilians is a far longer list which I shall reserve for another article.
Let’s set all this aside. Let’s assume that none of the above ever happened. But Senator Obama, who attended Pastor Jeremiah Wright’s church for twenty years, the very church that Oprah attended but left after three years, has chosen a classical Jew-hater as an opening night speaker. (Will he throw him under the bus too? Or say that he did not know…?) Yes, I am still talking about Jimmy Carter.
Carter is not merely an anti-Zionist kind of anti-Semite. His is a good ol’ boy style of Jew-hatred. It is rooted in his version of Christianity. It is racism, raw and unadulterated.
In the late 1990s and into the twenty-first century, President Jimmy, the author of Palestine, Peace Not Apartheid taught a series of Bible classes titled Sunday Mornings in Plains. A tape of his classes was issued in CD form by Simon and Schuster. A student at Columbia, Michael Miller, listened to these CDs and partially transcribed them with commentary galore. I read some of the transcripts with my heart in my throat. I could not bear to read them all.
I have written about this Here. Trust me: Carter hates Jews big time and his Jew-hatred is based on a perverse reading of the Bible. This breaks my heart since I am a strong supporter of Jewish-Christian alliances. However, I doubt that Carter speaks for anyone else other than himself and the Saudi Lobby which has rewarded him so handsomely.
Carter repeatedly whips up hatred towards modern-day Israeli Jews by telling lies, half-truths, and ancient, out-of-context truths. For example, he insists that (all) Jews view (all) Christians as “dogs” and despise and persecute (all) Christians because they are “unclean, uncircumcised.”
Anyone familiar with Middle Eastern realities will understand that it is Muslims who view Christians as unclean infidels and it is Muslims who persecute, forcibly convert, exile, lynch, and be-head Christians. Palestinian Islamists have desecrated churches and murdered Christians. The very Israeli Jewish government whom Carter is railing against in his Bible classes has protected the holy sites of all religions. And, it is ethnic Arab Muslims who have been murdering black African Christians and Muslims in Darfur.
President Jimmy also presents the allegedly great power of Jews who lived under Roman occupation in Jesus’ time as the emblem for the contemporary cabal of power wielded by contemporary Jewish and Israeli Zionists. In his teachings, the stench of Messiah-murder clings to every possible Jewish deed.
And this man was once the President of the United States?
Maybe the crime of the Jew is that of having been there first, of being both the Mother and Father of religious monotheism. Maybe our descendents, whether they are rebellious followers or detractors, need to get out from under our looming parental shadow. But a true Christian is not supposed to hate. In fact, he is supposed to forgive even those who torment him. To demonize and scapegoat an essentially innocent people is so un-Christian that we might not only ask whether Jimmy Carter is a Jew-hater but whether he is really a good Christian.
“Shaikha,” a 16-year-old Saudi girl, drank bleach in an attempt to kill herself because her father was forcing her to marry a 75-year-old man. And why? So that Shaikha’s father could himself marry the elderly man’s 13-year-old daughter! Shaikha begged and pleaded not to be forced into this marriage–even her mother supported her plea; all to no avail.
While such normalized atrocities continue in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the Muslim world, Random House cancels the publication of a novel, The Jewel of Medina, based on the life of Aisha, the prophet Mohammed’s beloved wife whom he married when she was either six or seven years-old. The marriage was presumably consummated when Aisha was nine-years-old.
Can there possibly be a connection between what Mohammed did and what other Muslim men do? Is the mere suggestion heretical? Is telling the truth about Mohammed heretical?
According to the article in Al-Arabiya, Shaikha might have some redress since, according to Shariah law, both parties have to consent to the marriage or the marriage may be considered “null and void.”
And, a Pakistani mother and son unit in England imported a “slave bride” from Pakistan whom the son, “egged on by his mother,” violently beat and tormented daily. (Oedipus and Jocasta can’t hold a candle to this merged pair).Their fiendish plan was to turn the first wife into the family’s “slave” and to procure a second wife with whom to have children. The man, Haroon Ahktar, violently beat 20 year-old Sania Bibi twice a day, sometimes more. She was forced to work 17 hours a day. Her mother-in-law, Zafia Bibi, kept threatening to have her “shot in the head.” A sister-in-law threatened to have her put in an asylum and “given electric shocks.” Haroon Ahktar threw her down the stairs, smashed her into windows, dragged her by the hair, cursed her constantly. According to Tamara Cohen in the Daily Mail:
“(Ahktar) said ‘You are not good enough for me’ and he would get married a second time and he would have children through his second marriage and I would have to take care of these children.’
The jury of seven men and five women heard that when the teenager arrived in the UK her clothes and shoes and jewelry were immediately taken from her by her mother-in-law. She was forced to wear pajamas for her housework, and banned from answering the door, or using the telephone.”
When Sania Bibi escaped and went to relatives for refuge, they turned their back on her. They told her that family “honor” demanded that she stay with her husband’s family.
Miraculously, Ahktar was convicted of five counts of bodily harm. No matter what the sentence turns out to be, the fact that a trial took place and that a conviction was obtained constitutes a powerful triumph of western law over such normalized barbarism.
I hope that the British police understand that Sania Bibi is a marked woman who may need permanent round the clock protection. More: I hope that publishers in the West understand that documenting such truths is crucial.
NEWSFLASH! My esteemed colleague, Dr. Andrew Bostom, points out that the Jones’ novel may actually glorify Mohammed’s pedophilia. However, I do not think that is the reason for the Random House cancellation. Publishers do not routinely cancel novels because they glorify cruelty towards women and children or because they are poorly written; on the contrary, such novels often sell very well. If you go to the Bostom website you may read the Prologue to this novel.
Last week in Iraq, a female homicide bomber, masquerading as a Shiite religious pilgrim, murdered 20-30 pilgrims, half of them women, and injured at least 100 others. Once again, the homicide bomber stopped at a resting tent for pilgrims.
Please note: The target was not American or European “occupiers,” but Shiite Muslims. And, just as Muslims have historically attacked Jews on their most religious holy days (Yom Kippur, Passover), this possibly Sunni attack targeted Shiite religious pilgrims when they were at their weariest and most vulnerable: while they were resting along the pilgrimage route. Ironically, the Shiite’s pioneered the modern suicide/homicide bombing in the early 1980s in Lebanon with their truck bombings. The tactic has now returned to haunt them.
This homicide bomber camouflaged herself three times. As a woman, she played against type and did not nurture others; she killed them. Second, she disguised herself as a religious woman, thereby winning the instant “trust” of the other religious pilgrims. A “tent” often psychologically denotes a female-centered shelter. Veiled and burqa-wearing women are often known as “tents on the move.” Third, in a sense, this homicide bomber might unconsciously have been a rebel who wanted to literally blow her own tent/prison/home right up along with other extended “family” members.
Camouflage as a tactic characterizes Arab Muslim warfare. Both Palestinian (Fatah, Al Aqsa, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, etc.) and Iranian (Hezbollah) terrorists have occupied hospitals, ambulances, churches and civilian homes–all locations which allow them to claim victim status in the eyes of the foreign media as they continue to wage their unholy holy war against Israel and Lebanon.
This same way of thinking applies in the use of women as homicide bombers in the war between Sunni and Shiia Arab Muslims and between non-Arab Iranian Shiia and Arabs, both Shiia and Sunni.
Last week, my esteemed colleague, Dr. Nancy H. Kobrin and I published a letter in the New York Times in response to an op-ed piece about female homicide bombers by Lindsey O’Rourke. O’Rourke claimed that homicide bombings by women are indistinguishable from those by men; and that “foreign occupation” mainly provokes nationalist stirrings which have no other expression but that of homicide bombings. We begged to differ. O’Rourke’s article was titled: Behind the Woman Behind the Bomb. Here is our pre-edited letter.
The Veiled Male Professor Behind the Female Graduate Student
We read University of Chicago graduate student Lindsey O’Rourke’s op-ed piece with interest given that we have co-authored articles about suicide/homicide bombers. Her thesis mimics the work of the University of Chicago’s Professor Robert Pape, (who was John Mearsheimer’s teaching assistant), which blames suicide terrorism on foreign “occupations,” views nationalism as “liberatory,” and insists that there is “little connection between suicide terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism.”
We disagree. Nationalist liberation movements often have little to do with foreign “occupations” and are endemic to the region. Shiia versus Sunni, Kurds versus Turkey and Iraq, Tamil Tigers versus the Sinhalese-controlled government of Sri Lanka, are all groups that are natives of the same region.
In addition, Muslims have historically persecuted, converted, and exiled people who were not only native to the region but whose national and religious existences long preceded the birth of Islam and the rise of Islamic imperialism. Yes, we are talking about Arab Jews and Christians as well as about other “infidel” groups such as Hindus, and Bahai. The biggest, hidden story about Middle Eastern refugees is that of Arab Jews. Now that the Arab Middle East is almost completely “judenrein,” (free of Jews), the newest hidden story is about the Muslim persecution of Christians. Such fights unto-the-death have little to do with “foreign occupations.”
In the last month, Christian Ethiopians were stoned by Muslim Ethiopians; a Saudi daughter had her tongue cut out before she was burned alive by her father because she had converted to Christianity; in Pakistan; Muslim men kidnapped two Christian girls as young as ten, forcibly converted and married them.
Al Qaeda has taken this kind of fight global and on 9/11 used multiple homicide bombers to attack Americans whom they see as “infidel Christians.”
Second, the “liberation” that suicide bombers seek has as much to do with liberation from dysfunctional family dynamics as it does with liberation from “foreign occupations.” Thus, the normalized sexual, physical, and psychological abuse of both women and children in Arab Muslim, Arab Christian, and non-Arab Muslim families remains barbaric, secretive, and pandemic and may indeed lead to normalized cultural paranoia, hyper-vigilance, scapegoating, and to honor-related violence, including honor murders.
This complicated family dynamic may lead to different motivations among male and female homicide bombers.
Like so many others who write about this subject, O’Rourke also accidentally obfuscates the matter. There is a profound resistance to describing Muslim terrorists as “Muslims.” (We are not talking about Muslims who are not terrorists). Muslim terrorists are described as “South Asians,” “militants,” “freedom fighters,” etc. In a similar vein, O’Rourke does not use the phrase that we have chosen to use: “Homicide bomber.” She writes of “suicide killers,” “suicide attackers,” and “suicide bombers.”
After writing about this subject for many years, we have decided that it is important to describe a murderer as a murderer. Thus, the problem is that of “homicide bombers.” The fact that they are also willing to die in order to kill means that this is the ultimate expression of death worship.
Unfortunately, more female security checkers in Iraq had specifically been requested. That request was denied. We suggest that this policy must immediately be changed. But, in addition, we propose an international ban on burqas for security reasons and as a human rights policy. In doing so, we join Daniel Pipes who called for such a ban in 2007.
I wrote this article together with Nancy H. Kobrin.
I published this piece just before I began blogging for Pajamas Media. It appeared in Family Security Matters on September 24, 2007. The themes continue to interest me. Unfortunately, the piece remains quite up-to-date.
Terrorists do not terrify me–but the passivity of their potential victims does as does their glazed-over glamorization of fascist and totalitarian leaders. That Columbia has again invited Mr. Amadinejad to lecture does not surprise me; that so many “good” people have not grasped the inevitability of such an invitation deeply saddens me.
Academic freedom, free speech, and the First Amendment have all been used to justify and explain why hate speech against Israel, Jews, and America must be protected on American campuses. Other views are not welcome and lead to non-invitations, dis-invitations, or at best, to exceedingly hostile workplace environments on campus in which the minority-view speaker is jeered, booed, blamed for the heavy security their views seem to require, and often hustled out early for their own safety.
This happened to me at Barnard in 2003 and I have written about it here. and here. It happened to me again at Columbia when I spoke at a very large conference in 2004. Palestinian activists rose up to interrupt and denounce me as I spoke and Jewish left activists picketed the conference outside. If my memory serves me correctly, they were allowed to hand out their leaflets right on Broadway and 116th Street.
Perhaps my saddest moment at Columbia concerns a graduate student conference at School for International and Public Affairs (where Amadinejad is speaking today) which took place in 2004. Only fifteen people came to hear four to five heavy-duty speakers who had been invited to discuss the demonized stench that the word “Jew” and “Israel” now evokes on Ivy League American campuses. The boycott of our speeches by Columbia graduate students was absolutely stunning.
Well–there was one more sad event for me connected with Barnard. My own group, of which I am a founding member: The Veteran Feminists of America, hosted a plenary panel about the future of women, world-wide, at Barnard last year. They refused to allow me to speak about Islamic gender Apartheid. When I asked to do so, I was told that several women of color had already been invited and that no doubt, they would cover all the relevant issues that effected Third World women. Of course, they did not do so. One woman of color, a woman I rather like, instead railed against the host feminist organization because most of its members were “white.” Otherwise, the august panelists did not stray from their politically correct concerns about racism which trumped all and any concerns they might have had about gender.
No amount of dispassionate (and passionate) arguments have been able to sway the politically correct western faculties and administrators who believe that hate speech deserves all the trappings and protection of both free speech and distinguished university platforms and presses. The most heinous recent titles have all been published by once prestigious presses.
The University of California Press publishes Norman Finkelstein’s Big Lies; Oxford University Press publishes Tariq Ramadan’s glorified, subtle disinformation campaign, also known as his “taqquia”; Farrar, Strauss, Giroux has just published the Walt-Mearsheimer diatribe. In fact, in a curious coincidence, FSG has taken a full page ad in the New York Times (and based on all the reportage about what Moveon.Org paid for their traitorous full page ad in the NY Times to defame the honorable General Petraeus), we all now know that FSG might have paid anywhere from $67,000.00-$167,000.00 for this ad. But maybe they paid a lot less.
One very small, bright sign: Yesterday’s New York Times Book Review actually published a sober and negative review of the Walt-Mearsheimer tract by a long-time Times insider, Leslie H. Gelb, who reviewed the book on the issues. He found it seriously flawed. He noted that the Arab oil lobby is even more powerful than the Israel lobby–in my view, on campuses, and in the media even more so; that American military aid to Egypt, a country which is not an American ally in the same way that Israel is, is almost as great as its aid to Israel; and that American foreign policy supports Saudi Arabia far more than it supports Israel.
Perhaps this review explains the full-page ad. Nevertheless, the Walt-Mearsheimer book has already landed on the New York Times Bestseller lists. I wonder whether the Saudi lobby, which might have accounted for all the sales of Jimmy “Apartheid” Carter’s most recent book might not be funding this as well.
This is a season of Big Lies, doctored photography and fake documentary footage, of brainwashed professors and arrogant, thin-skinned western leftists and Islamists both of whom either slander or sue you when you expose their lies.
Let me paraphrase the late, great Winston Churchill who once said: “A lie can travel all around the world before the truth has a chance to get up and put its pants on.”
A Note: I retain the copyright to this article and you may also find it archived at my website www.phyllis-chesler.com
Last night, I made my way to the beach to watch the sun set and the moon rise. Every night, God paints a masterpiece in the skies. No two paintings are ever exactly alike. At first, one large cloud was English-Channel grey and black but it soon revealed a heart of smudged copper. That same cloud became suffused, irradiated, by soft, glowing pink.
And all was silent except for the cries of wheeling, gliding birds.
In the so-called “real” world: an imperial Russia set Georgia on fire; Kashmir remained on fire; the Taliban bombed a bus of civilians in Pakistan, killing at least 13 people; three female aid workers and their driver were killed in Afghanistan.
Humanity seems to be subtracting from, not adding to, beauty and harmony.
At the Olympic Games, world records were repeatedly broken. Male beach volleyball players were properly attired; their female counterparts wore eye-catching bikinis and I was mortified on their behalf.
I am not really on vacation. I wrote and published a Letter to the Editor in the pages of the New York Times which took issue with Bridget O’Rourke’s long piece about female suicide bombers. FOX-TV aired their important documentary on honor murders in America yet again. I am interviewed on camera. Therefore, the Chicago Tribune called to interview me on the subject. Since the mainstream media has so far refused to deal with the subject, I am pleased to be of service. And, I’ve just received the edited version of my academic article on the subject for Daniel Pipes’ excellent journal.
What’s it gonna be? Sky-gazing–or wrestling with fairly hellish footnotes?
Friends: I am near the sea now which I visit daily at dusk. It is my first vacation in more than a year. I plan to be posting some previously published material which still remains timely–perhaps timeless. But, breaking news may also interrupt my reverie at the beach from time to time.
I published this piece thirteen months before I began blogging for Pajamas Media. Again, it remain heartlessly up to date. Some developments have taken place: the heroic and almost unstoppable Rachel Ehrenfeld has persuaded the New York State legislature to pass legislation which protects writers who live and publish in New York State from being sued by Islamist “libel tourists” when they write the truth about Islam, jihad, or the funding of terrorism.
Front Page Magazine | August 14, 2007
When will the West awaken? Of course, I am not talking about your ordinary citizen or soldier but about our Talking Heads and other gate-keeping chatterers who simply refuse to “get it.”
Cambridge University Press not only recalls but has promised to pulp the book that authoritatively documents one Saudi billionaire’s funding of terror; many anti-jihadic writers and all our leading mainstream media have privately apologized to this same billionaire. Only Rachel Ehrenfeld has refused to “apologize” for telling the truth and has counter-sued him in an American court of law based on her First Amendment right to tell the truth. (She was initially sued in London where she lost by default; she chose not to appear in court). (Since I wrote this, Ehrenfeld lost in the New York State Court of Appeals on a technicality but she almost immediately and successfully turned to the New York State Legislature for a new law, now known as “Rachel’s Law.”).
At a recent conference in Los Angeles, sponsored by the American Freedom Alliance, Daniel Pipes announced his intention to start a legal defense bail fund for those who are sued by Islamists and their Western apologists for telling the truth. Not a moment too soon–although, regrettably, perhaps too late for Ehrenfeld. (It is not too late for Ehrenfeld since she is now trying to obtain federal legislation for all American writers in every American state). And, The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) has begun a process of legal intimidation against my esteemed colleague, Robert Spencer. Accordingly, David Horowitz has launched a legal defense fund for Spencer. I have pledged money to this and advise us all to do the same.
Before this war is over, we will each need legal defense funds. And that’s if we’re lucky. Those in the Islamic East need bodyguards and air-lifts to safety in the West. But there is a pattern emerging in the West which we ignore at our own peril.
For example, a leading American publisher of law enforcement and counter-terrorism titles cancelled Dr. Nancy Kobrin’s book about Islamic suicide terrorism. I wrote the Introduction for it and together Dr. Kobrin and I “went public.” A number of other publishers emerged–but they quickly disappeared too. (The book now has a potential publisher. Stay tuned for more news).
I have been trying to find a publisher for a book titled The Islamification of America and guess what? No takers so far. I am ready to self-publish the work.
This is a very special kind of Gulag. The internet provides us with the most sophisticated and universal of platforms for such 21st-century “samizdats.”
We who write in the America are so far lucky. We are legally intimidated. We are silenced on campuses due to the “politically correct” ideologies that rule there. True, the American Jewish Committee recently paid for a full page New York Times ad signed by American college presidents who oppose the eternally-intended British boycott of Israeli academics and who bravely suggest that they be boycotted too. Well and good.
But guess who did not sign? Harvard, Yale, Vassar, California State University at Berkeley, Los Angeles, UCLA, San Francisco State, and of course, Norman Finkelstein’s old perch, De Paul in Chicago. (Maybe I’m wrong, maybe they did sign in a Harry Potter kind of way in invisible ink).
But this is nothing compared to what Muslim intellectuals (and women, rape victims, homosexuals, etc.) must endure in the Islamic world today. If they are lucky, they live in exile or in hiding and write under pseudonyms. A handful write openly and travel with bodyguards.
I am just told that Taslima Nasrin was, yet again, attacked by one hundred angry Muslim fanatics as she held a press conference in Hyderabad, India, to launch her new book. Nasrin, a physician and a feminist author who was born in Bangladesh, was once nearly lynched by a mighty mob there. She fled her country and lived in exile in Sweden and in hiding. Now, she lives in India where dozens of Muslim protesters, led by three lawmakers physically attacked her and her co-panelists. They demanded that India extradite her to Bangladesh (I guess for the kind of justice Bangladesh has meted out to that other hero, parliamentarian Chadhury, who was imprisoned and tortured because he wanted to visit Israel. He is currently on trial).
Her works have been banned in Bangladesh. She is being accused of being “anti-Islam.”
Islamists are moving against us in the West very carefully and in legal ways. In the overly revered “Third World” they speak in violence, their speech IS violence.
I hope that Taslima Nasrin remains safe and in India. And that the sleeping giant awakens before we have all been sued and censored into silence.
A Note: I retain the copyright to this article and you may also find it archived at my website www.phyllis-chesler.com
Oh, this matter is indeed a bloody morass. Here is a piece that someone has just sent me about the “ethnic cleansing” of Serbian Christians by Muslims in Sarajevo.
Sarajevo, 6 August (AKI) – The Bosnian capital of Sarajevo, once a symbol of ethnic diversity, has become an entirely Muslim city, a Croat deputy in the Bosnian Parliament, Branko Zrno, said on Wednesday.
“Sarajevo definitely isn’t a multi-ethnic city, but the city of one group, the Bosniacs (Muslims), ” Zrno told local media.
He pointed out that Serbs and Croats in Sarajevo have no institutional protection, and continue to leave the capital.
Zrno echoed allegations from Bosnian Serb leaders, including Serb entity Prime Minister Milorad Dodik, that non-Muslims in Sarajevo suffered discrimination and were denied their rights.
This just in from my colleague Dr. Andrew Bostom.
My blog from this past February on “moderate” Bosnian President Izetbegovic
It is worth recalling that our “moderate” Bosnian Muslim ally in the 1990s, was President Alija Izetbegovic. Mr. Izetbegovic was a youthful recruiter for Himmler’s Nazi Bosnian Muslim Handschar Division, pious Muslim polygamist with four wives (as David Binder’s N.Y Times obituary [10/20/03] noted, “He is survived by his first wife, Halida, who lives in Turkey; a son, Bakir; two daughters, Leila Aksami and Sabina; his second wife, Melika; and his third wife, Amira, whom he married in 1993 under Shari’a,the Islamic code of law. In February 1995, the newspaper Slobodna Bosna published congratulations to him on his fourth marriage, without naming the woman.”), and author of the 1970 Islamic Declaration—in which he openly avowed support for a revived Caliphate—under Shari’a—of necessity including, of course, a vigorous re-Islamization of the Balkans.
Our Kosovo Folly: More Fulfillment of Izetbegovic’s “Moderate” Vision?
February 22nd, 2008 by Andrew Bostom
Izetbegovic (d. 2003): Are We Helping to Realize His Caliphate Dreams ?
The intrepid Julia Gorin details why US support for an independent Kosovo is dangerous folly. Kosovo is a narco-jihadist vipers nest bent on ethnically cleansing its residual native pre-Islamic Serb inhabitants, in fulfillment of regional, and perhaps larger Islamic goals.
My forthcoming “The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism” includes a poignant description of the chronic plight of Serbs under Muslim rule—a plight shared with Balkan Jewry, as per the system of dhimmitude—by the early 20th century sociologist and geographer Jovan Cvijic. In La Peninsule Balkanique, Paris, 1918, his detailed psychosocial analysis of the Serbian and other Christian dhimmis under Muslim, including, notably Albanian rule, Cvijic described how the fear of recurrent violence accentuated their submission, engendering prototypical dhimmi adaptive behaviors:
[they became]…accustomed to belonging to an inferior, servile class, whose duty it is to make themselves acceptable to the master, to humble themselves before him and to please him. These people become close-mouthed, secretive, cunning; they lose all confidence in others; they grow used to hypocrisy and meanness because these are necessary in order for them to live and to avoid violent punishments.The direct influence of oppression and violence is manifested in almost all the Christians as feelings of fear and apprehension. Whenever Moslem brigands or evil-doers made their appearance somewhere, entire districts used to live in terror, often for months on end. There are regions where the Christian population has lived under a reign of fear from birth until death. In certain parts of Macedonia, they don’t tell you how they fought against the Turks or against the Albanians, but rather about the way that they managed to flee from them, or the ruse that they used to escape them. In Macedonia I heard people say: “Even in our dreams we flee from the Turks and the Albanians.” It is true that for about twenty years a certain number of them have regained their composure, but the deep-seated feeling has not changed among the masses of people. Even after the liberation in 1912 one could tell that a large number of Christians had not yet become aware of their new status: fear could still be read on their faces.
It is worth recalling that our “moderate” Bosnian Muslim ally in the 1990s, was President Alija Izetbegovic. Mr. Izetbegovic was a youthful recruiter for Himmler’s Nazi Bosnian Muslim Handschar Division,
Folks: To continue: Press on Dr. Bostom’s link above.
As for me: I’m on vacation and “going fishing” for while now.
EARLIER THE SAME DAY:
Folks: I am getting many articles on the Balkan Mess. I am still no expert but what must be admitted is this: The West, including America, has been “had” in terms of signing on to only one acceptable narrative: The Christian Serbs are the evil aggressors and the Muslim separatists and imperialists are the innocent victims. (Where have we heard this before?)
The truth: That all sides committed war crimes but not genocide is apparently too complicated to bear. Anyway, I am reposting an entire article that has just appeared. Once again, dear reader, tell me what you know and what you think about this.
READERS PLEASE NOTE: I will post no comments that insult other commentators or that insult me. Good will must be assumed or I must assume an absence of civility on the insulter’s part. Also please note: This is not a legal tribunal. And calls for “evidence” must bear this in mind.
What are the lessons we must learn from the article? Please read the Comments posted at the Trifkovic article below.
The spirit of the media frenzy surrounding the arrest of the former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic on July 21 is based entirely on the doctrine of non-equivalence inaugurated in 1992: Serbs willed the war, Muslims wanted peace; Serb crimes are bad and justly exaggerated, Muslim crimes are understandable.
This doctrine was spectacularly reiterated a month before Karadzic’s capture, when the Muslim wartime commander of Srebrenica, Nasir Oric, was found not guilty by The Hague Tribunal of any responsibility for the killing of thousands of Serb civilians by the forces under his command in the three years before the fall of the enclave in July 1995. It is also apparent today, in the endless media repetition of Karadzic’s alleged bellicose intransigence before and during the Bosnian war.
UNRESOLVED ISSUE OF WAR GUILT
The imbalance is more than merely unfair. The talking heads gloating over Karadzic’s capture no longer need to suppress the thought that different U.S. policies could have prevented the horror of “Bosnia,” because no such thought—however pertinent in this case—ever occurs to them. Yet the fact remains that in the spring of 1992 the late Warren Zimmermann, the last U.S. ambassador to Yugoslavia before its breakup and civil war, materially contributed—probably more than any other single man—to the outbreak of the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The facts of the case have been established beyond reasonable doubt and are no longer dosputed by experts.
Nine months earlier, in June 1991, Slovenia and Croatia declared independence, a move that triggered off a short war in Slovenia and a sustained conflict in Croatia where the Serbs refused to accept Tudjman’s fait accompli. These events had profound consequences on Bosnia and Herzegovina, that “Yugoslavia in miniature.” The Serbs (34%) adamantly opposed the idea of Bosnian independence. The Croats (17%) predictably rejected any suggestion that Bosnia and Herzegovina remains within a Serb-dominated rump Yugoslavia.
Alija Izetbegovic, the leader of the Muslim community (43%), had decided as early as September 1990 that Bosnia should also declare independence if Slovenia and Croatia secede. On 27 February 1991 he went a step further: “I would sacrifice peace for a sovereign Bosnia-Herzegovina, but for that peace in Bosnia-Herzegovina I would not sacrifice sovereignty.” The process culminated with the referendum on independence (29 February 1992). The Serbs duly boycotted it. In the end just over 62 percent of voters opted for independence, overwhelmingly Muslims and Croats; but even this figure was short of the two-thirds majority required by the constitution. This did not stop the rump government of Izetbegovic from declaring independence on 3 March.
Simultaneously one last attempt was under way to save peace. The Portuguese foreign minister Jose Cutileiro organized a conference in Lisbon attended by the three communities’ leaders, Izetbegovic, Radovan Karadzic, and the Croat leader Mate Boban. The EU mediators persuaded the three sides that Bosnia-Herzegovina should be independent but internally organized on the basis of ethnic regions or “cantons.”
The breakthrough was due to the Bosnian Serbs’ acceptance of an independent Bosnia, provided that the Muslims give up their ambition of a centralized, unitary one. Izetbegovic appeared to accept that this was the best deal he could make—but soon he was to change his mind. When he returned from Lisbon, Zimmermann flew post haste from Belgrade to Sarajevo to tell him that the U.S. did not stand behind the Cutileiro plan. He said it was a means to “a Serbian power grab” that could be prevented by internationalizing the problem. When Izetbegovic said that he did not like the Lisbon agreement, Zimmerrmann encouraged him to renege. State Department subsequently admitted that the US policy “was to encourage Izetbegovic to break with the partition plan.” The New York Times (August 29, 1993) brought a revealing quote from the key player himself:
The embassy [in Belgrade] was for recognition of Bosnia and Herzegovina from sometime in February on,” Mr. Zimmermann said of his policy recommendation from Belgrade. “Meaning me.” … Immediately after Mr. Izetbegovic returned from Lisbon, Mr. Zimmermann called on him in Sarajevo… “He said he didn’t like it; I told him, if he didn’t like it, why sign it?”
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Please press on the link above to continue reading this long and thoughtful article.
Who can understand Balkan history–that cursed region whose fiery nationalisms led to World War One? Not I. East Europeans remember how especially brutal Muslim Nazi- and Arab-empowered soldiers were during World War Two. Yes, there once were some pockets of European-style assimilation and sophistication among Caucasus-based Muslims, Jews, and Christians in the region. Has anyone read the incomparably charming and popular novel, Ali and Nino: A Love Story written by the very Jewish Lev Nuissimbaum whose pen name was Khurbain Said? The romance captured everyone’s longing for operatic harmony between Christians and Muslims. (For the Jews, it was always more complicated). Tom Reiss has written a must-read biography of Nuissembaum titled The Orientalist: Solving The Mystery of A Strange and Dangerous Life.
But fiction and exceptions aside, ethnic and religious feuds have simmered and boiled over between the Christians of different nationalities in the Caucasus and between Christians and Muslims in the former Yugoslavia.
I have now received and posted the most challenging comments in response to my piece about the capture of Radovan Karadzic.
What I do know about the recent warfare in the former Yugoslavia is that many girls and women were brutally and repeatedly gang-raped. I know this because I spoke with their lawyers and with feminist counselors and I read everything about their plight that I could find. Had there been funding enough to protect the raped women witnesses, I might have testified to the Court in The Hague about Rape Trauma Syndrome.
Other than this, and like everyone else, I believed that, although atrocities were committed by all sides, that the Bosnian Serbs were the ones who mainly committed genocide, “ethnic cleansing” and the gang-rapes. Now, Mr. John Peter Maher writes here that the massacre in Srbrenica was a Big Lie propagated by masterful Muslim deceivers. Several other commentators, including Felix Quigley here compare this lie to the lie about a massacre in Jenin which never really took place. They claim that in fact, most of the allegedly dead Muslim boys and men made their way to Tuzla where they joined or were protected by Muslim jihadists.
I have begun to ask my sources whether any of this is true or whether none of this is true. So far, I have been told that “some” of this might be true; that “none” or “little” of it can be true; that this might be the beginning of a masterful disinformation campaign to support Karadzic’s testimony at trial; and that the disinformation campaign was begun long ago by Islamists who are covetously eying Europe.
Friends: This is not my area. Do I have any Balkan experts out there? If so, please weigh in.
Yaser Abdul Said, who honor murdered his two beautiful and brilliant daughters Sarah and Amina earlier this year in Dallas, is alive and well and has been using a calling card to allegedly threaten various Christian members of his formerly Christian wife’s family. He did so as recently as three weeks ago.
When FOX-TV recently aired their excellent documentary about honor murders in America, they showed a photo of the murdered girls’ mother when she married Yaser. She was fifteen years old and Yaser was thirty. “Tissy” (Patricia) Said looked young enough to be Yaser’s daughter. She now looks old enough to be Yaser’s mother.
I can only wonder why.
But, amazingly, in Dallas, Tissy is now allegedly living with another Muslim man–this one is from Iraq. No, they are not lovers. He is her protector and/or guard. I am told that Tissy has also sometimes been seen wearing hijab and has long ago been forgiven by her father-in-law, Yaser Said’s father, whom Tissy lives near and whom she often visits.
“Forgiven?” Yes, he has forgiven her for having run away with her daughters and their Christian, so-called boyfriends who were only trying to help the girls save their own lives.
Tissy’s Muslim captor/protector has allegedly threatened to kill some Christian members of Tissy’s family. Islam, Yaser and Tissy’s son has allegedly threatened to blow up Gail Gartrell’s house.
Gail Gartrell, whom I have quoted many times, and who is Amina and Sarah’s great-aunt, believes that Tissy’s flight with the girls may have been a planned ruse since, after all, she then subsequently lured them to their deaths. She has also been profiting from their deaths. “She played the sympathy card.”
For example, the Lewisville High School students took up a collection for both Tissy and Islam to help them “start new lives.” I am told that the total sum may have amounted to $1700.00 in cash. Tissy has allegedly used that money to buy gas, clothes, and to eat out. Tissy has also rented out her previous home to tenants who have been paying the rent. Tissy however has allegedly not been using that money to pay the bank and her tenants may eventually be evicted.
According to Gail Gartrell, at least three to four Christian relatives now confirm that Tissy was neither tearful nor filled with grief at the grave site of her two daughters.
They also confirm that when they went over to help Tissy fix up her latest marital home in order to rent it out that they discovered the following:
There were holes in the walls and doors punched there by both Yaser and Islam Said in fits of rage and to terrorize the girls. Their brother Islam, broke Sarah’s desk in half with a hammer, yelling that “the whore bitch deserved what she got.” These relatives confirm that Islam’s rage is highly volatile and “at fever-pitch 95% of the time,” and continues to this day.
Tissy took possession of Amina’s two computers. One is now hidden, the other she destroyed. Again, I can only wonder why.
Stay tuned. I may write more about the history of violence in the Said family. The reason this domestic “soap opera” is important to track is that this may be the first time that anyone involved in an honor murder in America is trying to re-create the family history and publicly share the unfolding details of how the Muslim parents, siblings, and extended Muslim family (uncles, etc.) behave both before and after an honor murder has been committed.
Yes, I wrote “Muslim parents.” Gail Gartrell now believes that Tissy converted to Islam long ago and therefore does not mind “lying to infidels” or collaborating in the honor murder of her own daughters.
People have all repeatedly asked me this question. Lately, their voices are more pained.
Westerners are in denial. And, the deniers are even more afraid of Jihad and terrorism than those of us who are crying out against it. Thus, like battered women, they seek to appease the violent offender; they also engage in self-blame in the misguided belief that if they do not “offend” their batterer that he will not batter them.
Thus, if the West had not published the “inflammatory” Danish cartoons and had not allowed the state of Israel to come into being and to stay right there, a mote in the eye of envious, corrupt, and lazy Muslim nations–then Arafat would not have launched his terrorist campaign, Muslim immigrants in Europe would not have launched their various Intifadas, and Al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, the Muslim Brotherhood would not have gained in strength.
Deniers also tend to blame it all on American foreign policy, Wall Street and the CIA. They rarely blame anything on Islamic gender and religious apartheid or on Jihad Rising.
What else other than fundamentalist Islam explains the Iranian stonings to death of perfectly innocent girls and women for the alleged crime of prostitution which is how female rape victims, those who dare allege rape, women who are not sufficiently “covered,” or who demonstrate for women’s rights– are all viewed. Read my book, The Death of Feminism for a longer discussion about this.
Read the foreign press. For example, I have just learned that the Saudi, UAE, and (to a lesser extent) Iranian governments will not allow female athletes to compete in the upcoming Olympics. This decision has nothing to do with the CIA. However, I would agree that America’s policy towards Saudi Arabia must radically change, both because of their mistreatment of women and in terms of our being held hostage to grossly inflated oil prices such that we have been funding the Islamist war against the West.
I have just also learned that the Pakistani-based Taliban has demanded that un-Islamic businesses “shut down” within fifteen days or “face dire consequences.” The businesses targeted are CD shops, internet cafes, and cable service providers. And, the Taliban are threatening any woman who is not wearing proper hijab with disfigurement by acid. (Read about it in the Daily Times of Pakistan).
Contrary to myth, the U.S. did not fund the Taliban to fight against the Soviet invaders. In fact, after the Soviet military withdrawal in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Washington simply washed its hands of Afghanistan. The Taliban did not even exist until about 1996, when Pakistan created them for its own purposes.
Finally, also in the Pakistani Punjab, (are we really allied with this awful country?–yes we are, and there is no choice), two Christian sisters, aged 10 and 13, were abducted by Muslim men who married them and forced them to convert to Islam. The local police refused to help the parents find their children. Now, a judge has ruled that the children cannot see their Muslim husbands or their Christian parents and has placed them in a woman’s shelter.
The persecution of infidels, forced conversions, and forced marriage to female children is typical of 7th century Islam which alas, is still alive and well today.
Folks: It’s not our fault. We didn’t break it (Islamic fundamentalism) and we may not be able to fix it. But we do have to prevent it from invading our shores. If not, all the Western women will be veiled, the intellectuals silenced, the technology used only for jihad, and not to spread modernity.
The Death of Feminism: What’s Next in the Struggle for Women’s Freedom
Women and Madness
The New Anti-Semitism: The Current Crisis and What We Must Do About It
Woman’s Inhumanity to Woman
Women of the Wall: Claiming Sacred Ground at Judaism’s Holy Site
Letters to a Young Feminist
With Child: A Diary of Motherhood
Feminist Foremothers in Women’s Studies, Psychology, and Mental Health
Patriarchy: Notes of an Expert Witness
>Sacred Bond: The Legacy of Baby M
Mothers on Trial: The Battle for Children and Custody
About Men
Women, Money & Power
