“Last week Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-Dutch polemicist, spoke to a gathering of what The Spectator called ‘Britain’s biggest brains – politicians, editors, academics’. She told them that they were ‘actually at war, not just with Islamism, but with Islam itself’. Apparently, a good Muslim has no choice but to strive ‘to establish Sharia law’. Martin Amis, too, has recently informed us that moderate Muslims, if they ever existed, have lost out to radicals in Islam’s civil war. In any case, Islam is ‘totalist’: ‘There is no individual; there is only the umma – the community of believers.’ Never perhaps in history has so much nonsense been so confidently peddled about a population as large and diverse as this planet’s billion-plus Muslims.”
Pankaj Mishra in the Guardian, 8 December 2007
BERLIN — German Muslims have hit out at Chancellor Angela Merkel for suggesting that mosque minarets should not be higher than church steeples, saying her provocative remarks were politically motivated.
“Hospital chiefs who told nurses to point Muslim patients’ beds towards Mecca five-times-a-day last night climbed down. They said they would now only do it for the ‘terminally ill’. Nurses had been breaking off from health care duties to perform the ritual at Dewsbury and District Hospital in West Yorks….
A hospital in northern England is playing down media reports saying that nurses have been ordered to stop normal duties five times a day to turn Muslim patients’ beds so that they face Mecca.
Lu Gronseth listens regularly to WWTC, a conservative talk-radio station in Minneapolis, and even advertises his mortgage-loan business on the station. But when he learned that a nationally syndicated radio show host had told WWTC listeners that Muslims should be deported and made rude comments about what they could do with their religion, Mr Gronseth pulled his ads from the station.
“Doubtless the safe return of Ms Gibbons from a sinister and genocidal rogue regime, which from 1992-1996 hosted Osama bin Laden, will be spun as a great triumph for multicultural diplomacy…. The true moral of the affair is that we are dealing with a concerted onslaught on our values by people whose barbarism is evident to anyone with eyes to see it but which has effectively been ruled out of polite usage by government and the security services who witter on abstractly about ‘ideas’ and ‘ideology’ as if they have no apparent connection with one religion.