Cartoon credit: Ruben L. Oppenheimer,
President Obama is wrong. Free expression and a free press are clearly not “universal values,” as he asserted in his condemnation of the attack on Charlie Hebdo’s office in Paris. The terrorist attack today was merely an enforcement of decades-long Islamist intimidation and terrorism campaigns against the West.
The leading Islamist terrorist group, the PLO, has pioneered the use of libel suit as threats against those who exposed their terrorist agenda and corruption. In the early 1990s the threatened to sue the Wall Street Journal and me for publishing a detailed expose of Yassar Arrafat’s corruption. The National Review was threatened in the late 1980s, after publishing my documentation of the terrorist nature of the Hamas affiliated Holy-land Foundation. But they failed to scare us.
Al Qaeda’s 9/11 attacks on America, marked the increase of Islamist intimidation of free expression. At first, it was in the form of economic warfare, by filing expensive libel suits against those who exposed the funders of al Qaeda. London became the “libel Capital” of the world and the British Bar was paid well to abandon its pride.
The riots following the Mohammed cartoons in 2005 marked the escalation into physical attacks and submission to financial restitution for imagined insults to the prophet or the religion of Islam. That strategy was defeated in the United States by the SPEECH Act, in 2010, that protects American writers, cartoonists and film makers from the enforcement of foreign libel judgment. However, decades of financial and physical intimidation worked and political correction took hold in the West.
The Obama administration’s aversion to identifying Islamist terrorism took this further by choosing phrases such as “violent extremism” committed by “militants”.
This despite the fact that the United States was first officially informed about the Islamist ideology in the March 28, 1786, report by John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. They reported from London that the motive behind the Ottoman corsairs’ piracy was in the Koran:
“It was written in the Koran, that all Nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon whoever they could find and to make Slaves of all they could take as prisoners, and that every Mussulman who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise.” (The Diplomatic Correspondence of the United States of America, page 605, Volume 1. Curiously, Google books‘ listing the State Department book does not mention this specific correspondence).
The ideology behind al Qaeda’s bloody attack today is the same, and it is shared by Boko Haram, Hezbollah, the Islamic State, the Mullahs of Iran, the Taliban, and all Palestinian terrorist groups. All proudly yell: “Allahu Akbar,” when murdering innocent civilians.
The attack in Paris was facilitated by political correctness and reluctance to face increasingly violent attacks by practitioners of the 20th Century invention of the Muslim Brotherhood: “Political Islam.” The deliberate attempt to deceive the West by suggesting a distinction between the religion of Islam and its politics succeeded probably far beyond the dreams of the Brotherhood founder Hassan al Banna and his disciple Sayyid Qutb.
The deception of “political Islam” helped willfully ignorant, reluctant and often sympathetic and apologist Western leaders to argue against any criticism of Islam in the name of tolerance. In recent years, when they could no longer ignore the jihadists’ zeal to murder infidels, they contended that changes in Islam must come from within.
We should not delude ourselves that “Free expression and a free press are principles…that…can never eradicated,” as Obama stated today.
The United Nations’ Secretary General confirmed today that “the Palestinians will become a member to the International Criminal Court and other international treaties on April 1, 2015.” This is a shot in the arm of the jihadists, and an affirmation that bullying the West into submission works.
It remains to be seen if growing global Islamist terrorism to “avenge” perceived offenses to their Prophet Muhammad and their religion would help to remind the West that it is running out of time.