“‘A Woman’s Right To Choose.’ This slogan, made famous by pro-abortion activists in the United States, now has a new meaning, as in ‘Hijab: A Woman’s Right To Choose’.
“That is the slogan for a conference coming up on July 12 in London, hosted by none other than the extreme left-wing mayor of that city, Ken Livingstone. The gradual takeover of the left by Islamists is something truly amazing to behold.”
“The congressionally funded United States Institute of Peace will host an event today in Washington on reforming Islam, with a guest panelist who has threatened the United States and openly supported terrorist groups, Kenneth R. Timmerman claims.
Not unexpectedly, Daniel Pipes joins in the witch-hunt, accusing USIP of associating with groups “on the wrong side in the war on terrorism”. Pipes states: “I believe that President Bush appointed me to the USIP board in part to serve as a watchdog against militant Islamic groups. Unfortunately the management of USIP is not listening to my advice.”
“Of all the many fashionable phobias that we are meant to reach inside ourselves and disavow, Islamophobia is the most stubbornly resistant to expulsion. Islamophobia, we might argue to ourselves and to others, is an entirely rational state of mind. After all, why should we not have a ‘morbid fear [of] or aversion’ to something which, at its most extreme, at its most crass, wishes us all dead? How could we not be averse to a religion which seems to provide the ideological legitimacy for the following chilling and triumphalist statement from al-Qa’eda: ‘You want to live: we want to die’? That’s a pretty alien concept for us, wanting to die.”
Rod Liddle in the Spectator, 20 March 2004
“To the extent that Western liberals see Ramadan as an ‘authentic’ spokesman of Arab and Muslim culture, while dismissing Arab and Muslim liberals as too Westernized, they’ve forgotten their own universal values.”
Lee Smith in the American Prospect, 1 March 2004
“Western Europe’s 15 million-strong Muslim community is growing in power and size. The birthrate among Muslims in Europe is three times that of non-Muslims. While the Muslim population could double by 2015, the non-Muslim population is expected to shrink by 3.5 per cent.
“As this community grows, it is also flexing its political muscle. As the columnist Mark Steyn, writing in defence of Kilroy in the right-leaning The Daily Telegraph, put it: ‘When free speech, artistic expression, feminism and other totems of Western pluralism clash directly with the Islamic lobby, Islam more often than not wins.’
“This would not be a problem if it weren’t for the distressing but unavoidable reality that small but significant sections of that growing Muslim community are either outright hostile to or at least ambivalent toward Western values.”
Robin Shepherd, in the Washington Post, 25 January 2004
Daniel Pipes complains that “the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) is gaining acceptance among the gullible, the ignorant, or the foolish as a legitimate ‘civil liberties group’.”
Robert Spencer is not a fan.
Prosecuting Kilroy-Silk would set a much-needed marker for social relations, Faisal Bodi argues.
“A Swiss scholar who has been accused in France of sowing anti-Semitism and is considered by some analysts to be an apologist for radical Islam will be coming to America this fall to teach at University of Notre Dame in Indiana.”
Eli Lake launches the campaign to get Tariq Ramadan barred from the US, with the assistance of Campus Watch.
“What do they think we feel about them? That we adore them for the way they murdered more than 3,000 civilians on September 11 and then danced in the hot, dusty streets to celebrate the murders? That we admire them for the cold-blooded killings in Mombasa, Yemen and elsewhere? That we admire them for being suicide bombers, limb-amputators, women-repressors?”
Robert Kilroy-Silk in the Sunday Express, 4 January 2004