Go where the heart feels free

My commiseration with any of you readers who also peruse the BBC Online Have Your Say forum. You will already know that the quality of most of the comments is sub-grade school. And the politics of the moderators means that the visible political spectrum on the forum would encompass slightly right-wing right across to venomous left-wing communist anarchist. The absence of the moderate to far-right is not surprising. All political voices can be heard in Britain but the conservative/rightist. If you don't believe me, find me a genuine full-blooded right-wing comment on any topic in the Have your lefty Say forums.

The reason this irks me particularly today is I posted a comment which I thought highly pertinent and well presented, which was ignored ignominiously.

So I'll repeat it here.

The forum discussion was about whether Iran should get to have a nuclear weapons program. My view is I'd rather that Muammar Ghaddafi had nuclear weapons than Iran, thats how stupid it would be. But what struck me most in reading through the comments was the hatred for Britain and America that was endlessly repeated, especially by the foreign settlers on both our shores and those of Canada and the US. And my comment was, please go and live in these countries whose interests you promote (Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Syria etc.), and when you get there go out and have a good long public rant about what pisses you off about THEIR societies. Your life may end shortly thereafter but you'll die in a place where your heart feels free!

Mr Kipling makes exceedingly good points

Dane-Geld

It is always a temptation to an armed and agile nation
To call upon a neighbour and to say:
--"We invaded you last night
— we are quite prepared to fight,
Unless you pay us cash to go away."

And that is called asking for Dane-geld,
And the people who ask it explain
That you've only to pay 'em the Dane-geld
And then you'll get rid of the Dane!

It is always a temptation for a rich and lazy nation,
To puff and look important and to say:
--"Though we know we should defeat you,
we have not the time to meet you.
We will therefore pay you cash to go away."

And that is called paying the Dane-geld;
But we've proved it again and again,
That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld
You never get rid of the Dane.

It is wrong to put temptation in the path of any nation,
For fear they should succumb and go astray;
So when you are requested to pay up or be molested,
You will find it better policy to say: --

"We never pay any-one Dane-geld,
No matter how trifling the cost;
For the end of that game is oppression and shame,
And the nation that pays it is lost!"

By Rudyard Kipling

Hark ye, quisling BBC;
listen up, pusillanimous Daily Telegraph, Times, Guardian, Daily Express et al.
You haven't got that much more time of getting this stuff ALL WRONG.

Palestinians have money troubles...

The contrast between the world of building things and that of blowing up things has never been starker. On one side Israel, booming and building and trying to solve things, and on the other, the Palestinian non-state, busting and bombing and trying to kill people.

The outcome of these respective ways of going about life is spectacularly different of course. One of which is that people LIKE to give money to Israel because it goes towards positive ends. And increasingly, the Palestinians are finding that people are becoming resistant to giving them money to buy missiles and detonators and mortars and AK47's. Certainly westerners are.

But according to Dr Omar Abel Razeq, Hamas finance minister of Nowhere, "the whole issue is not actually real. We hope that Europe at least will change its mind and talk to us, and respect the choice of the people."

This mellifluous drivel actually tells us quite a lot. First, Hamas have no intention of changing their stated goals of destroying Israel and killing all its citizens, and have the expectation that the largely Jew-hating, Palestinian-loving Europeans will give up their official positions of not funding terrorist organisations. Second, the Palestinians understanding of the concept of peaceful resolution of conflicts is completely debased. And third, it is Palestinian policy to split the western world into Europe on the one hand and Britain the US on the other, and go on from there to use westerners against each other in the diplomatic war effort against Israel.

The smell in the air is of European resolve (weak from the beginning) falling away, and the coffers being re-opened to be poured into the missile workshops and mortar factories of the West Bank and Gaza. What Europeans won't see for their money is any other kind of workshops or factories being built, or indeed anything positive at all.

US Citizens: Don't come to London

This is an urgent message to all US citizens: don't come to London. Spending money in London is against you and your nations interests. The communist anti-semite Ken Livingstone, Mayor of London has these things to say about your country:

- The US Ambassador is 'a chiseling little crook'
- George W Bush is "greatest threat to life on this planet that we've most probably ever seen. The Policies he's initiating will doom us to extinction"
- Denounced the Bush Administration as "a gang of thugs."

Whatever your views on the Iraq war, the language used is extremist and imflammatory. And this is a guy with one of the most prestigious and important jobs in Britain.

My suggestion is, take your dollars to somewhere where they appreciate them.

Red Ken with Ma Moonbat

BBC decides to join the insurgency

This is an absolute disgrace, and steps over the line from moral equivalency to the straightforward reporting of propaganda as truth.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/4850108.stm

"Approximately 18 innocent men who were inside the mosque performing sunset prayers were killed and became martyrs," Bayan Jabr added in an interview on Dubai-based al-Arabiya television. "They were killed unjustly and wrongfully." Some members of the ruling Shia Islamist alliance repeated allegations - denied by US officials - that Americans and Iraqi troops under their command had tied people up at the Mustafa mosque in north-east Baghdad's Sadr City up and shot them in cold blood.

News footage taken after the attack seemed to belie US assertions that troops had not entered or damaged any sacred building during the raid.
The room where the killing occurred appeared to be a prayer hall. The floors are carpeted and the walls covered with religious posters.
The tape showed a tangle of male bodies and spent 5.56mm bullet casings on the blood-smeared floor - the kind of ammunition used by the US military.

Not that anybody is going to believe them, but,

The US military said the bloodshed happened after Iraqi commandos and soldiers from the Iraqi counter-terrorism force came under fire during a house-to-house search for insurgents.
Members of the US special forces were present but only in an "advisory capacity", officials said.

So the BBC is perfectly happy to have the major impact of this story be "US soldiers murder poor ickle muslim men in their mosque while they're praying".

There is absolutely no context written into this article. Any attempt at sane and balanced reporting of this incident would state the following facts: ever since US forces arrived in Iraq, Moqtada Al Sadr and his cadre of self-styled martyrs have been fanatically opposed to their presence in Iraq. Al Sadr has already attempted one holy war against the coalition forces, which failed dismally. Even Sistani, the senior Shia cleric in Iraq, has trouble dealing with Sadr and his thugs. And of course, the one overriding consideration in Iraq, that all gangs and private armies have to be disarmed or destroyed before peace and development can come to Iraq.

But these are explanatory facts, and facts no longer interest the America-haters at TVC.

Crazy crazy Goddamn world

What society on the face of planet earth goes hell bent for leather to persuade its people that the comforting lies peddled by foriegners about themselves are actually... facts?

We do, here in Britain. Or rather, the Independent newspaper/propaganda mouthpiece.

http://crypticsubterranean.blogspot.com/2006/03/islamic-invention.html

Muslims, especially arab muslims, are famous for lying. They lie all the time, about everything. Its a way of life. It eases the pain of not being very important, powerful or creative. So they've made up loads of lists of things that they have contributed to world civilization.

1. Shoe bombing .....ah, no wait, that didn't make it onto the list!

1. Coffee
2. Photography
3. Chess
4. Human flight
Etc. etc.

Problem is, anybody with 10 minutes and access to a good encyclopedia or the internet will be able to whittle that down to... 9 out of 20. Then there's the small matter of, what does the religion of a particular individual have to do with whether they invent something really cool? If I invent something right now, would the western world get to chalk that up for Christianity? Utter bulls**t. Lastly, you have to ask what the motivation is to compiling the spurious list in the first place? Could it be that Islam presents such a dismal, backward, ignorant face today that onlookers would never guess that anything of worth was ever invented or discovered under its aegis?

Making up a non-sensical and easily rubbished list to try and persuade the average Brit that the Moslem world is abrim with intellectual vigor and creative zest is highly unlikely to be taken seriously. Especially given the average date given for the various 'inventions', over 1000 years ago.

Back to the drawing board, ye propagandists of Mohammed and Mohammedans.

No exit

It sounds like a joke, but its not. What links the CIA, the mafia and islam? Once you've joined, you can't ever leave, not really.

http://frontpagemag.org/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=16829

Prince Charles, the man who really digs islam, convened a conference to discuss the slightly embarassing matter of the murder of people who want to leave islam.

He was told by the muslim attendees that this was not something they could really approve non-muslims discussing, so please shut the hell up. And I think he did.

Lots of muslims in Britain say that we are ignorant about islam and muslim life. They will probably soon wish we were more ignorant...

Chickens and Eggs

Whose fault is Islamaphobia?

Before Sept 11, 2001 I never thought about Islam at all, just like 99% of people in the west. Why would I? It was the religion of a number of squalid backwaters dribbled across the middle east and into the dingy corners of South East Asia. Those backwaters contributed nothing to the world except that by chance nature had placed large amounts of oil under some of them. Not all, some. So I, like most people in the world happily living in advanced nations boosting ahead culturally, economically and technologically, spent exactly 0% of my life thinking about islam and muslims.

But with the bloodbath of the world trade centers, I could not continue to ignore islam. It turned out that there were 1.2 billion of these people, a significant portion of whom wanted to blow up our buildings, trains, buses, subways and people in the baddest way possible. They were trying to build nuclear weapons, poison our water, attack our infrastructure, murder us on holiday and lop off our heads on video.

Now, WEIRDLY ENOUGH, poeple didn't like it! They actaully felt that this quite bad show, just not on, really not cricket. Some of them wrote letters to their MP's, some them went to the extraordinary lengths of writing to the Times. Quite, quite extraordinary.

Now of course, this onslaught of tutting and letter-writing was bound to have its unequal and non-opposite reaction in the muslim community, who have invented Islamaphobia. Islamaphobia, for those of you who didn't know how you felt about islam, is the deep prejudice felt by all westerners against islam dating back to... probably the crusades. Its pervades our thoughts, and becomes concrete in our violence towards muslims.

Sadly, the actual evidence for the existence of Islamaphobia is very scant indeed. In fact, the evidence for its existence before 9/11 is nil. So if there is Islamaphobia now, its been caused by one thing alone- the actions of muslims across the world, but in particular those living in the nations of western europe like Britain, Spain, and France. All three have been attacked by muslim residents of their countries as punishment for 'crimes' they are supposed to have committed against muslims, crimes that don't exist and are simply the fantasies of delusional paranoics.

So what should we, as natives of these countries, think? For me, the historical perspective is informative. The last time England had a large population of non-English people living in it, who had no feelings of allegiance to it and felt its laws did not apply to them was 1130 years ago, when large numbers of Danes decided to borrow about 1/4 of the eastern side of England. It took about 50 years and lots of big battles before the English completely ruled their own land again, because every time a new Danish army wandered onto English shores, the Danes living in eastern England would give them aid and assistance. And boy, did that upset the locals.

The numbers are different this time, and we've got most of the guns, but if muslims living in Britain keep trying to kill the English, there's going to be trouble. And then running off to the European court of human rights to complain about Islamaphobia is going to be moot.

We killed the life affirmers, and brought in the death dealers

Thanks SondraK for this absolute gem-

All European Life Died In Auschwitz
By Sebastian Villar Rodriguez - Spanish Writer, September 23, 2005.

I walked down the street in Barcelona, and suddenly discovered a terrible truth – Europe died in Auschwitz.
We killed six million Jews and replaced them with 20 million Muslims.
In Auschwitz we burned a culture, thought, creativity, talent. We destroyed the chosen people, truly chosen, because they produced great and wonderful people who changed the world.
The contribution of this people is felt in all areas of life: science, art, international trade, and above all, as the conscience of the world. These are the people we burned.
And under the pretence of tolerance, and because we wanted to prove to ourselves that we were cured of the disease of racism, we opened our gates to 20 million Muslims, who brought us stupidity and ignorance, religious extremism and lack of tolerance, crime and poverty due to an unwillingness to work and support their families with pride.
They have turned our beautiful Spanish cities into the third world, drowning in filth and crime.
Shut up in the apartments they receive free from the government, they plan the murder and destruction of their naive hosts.
And thus, in our misery, we have exchanged culture for fanatical hatred, creative skill for destructive skill, intelligence for backwardness and superstition.
We have exchanged the pursuit of peace of the Jews of Europe and their talent for hoping for a better future for their children, their determined clinging to life because life is holy, for those who pursue death, for people consumed by the desire for death for themselves and others, for our children and theirs.
What a terrible mistake was made by miserable Europe.

How many Jewish artists, physicists, architects, writers, philosophers and political leaders have enriched our society?

How many Pakistani? How many Palestinian? How many Iranian? How many Egyptian?

Thank God that Britain has done a better job of protecting its Jews from the anti-semitic hordes than the rest of Europe. Long may it continue.

How vast is the cultural chasm?

To get a glimpse of how vast the gap between the ignorant islamic world and the West is, consider this:

http://www.newkerala.com/news2.php?action=fullnews&id=28322

In Pakistan a woman is raped. She then has her throat cut for bringing dishonour on her family. Or is perhaps stoned to death by the villagers.

Feminists of europe, re-train your guns.

Analysis worthy of a third-former

Oh dear. John Simpson. Tut tut tut.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/4825200.stm

How can you have access to so much real information, so many facts, so many people who could give you the real lowdown, and miss the big story by such a huge margin? If you or I wrote this article, or perhaps a third-former, we would never get it published anywhere. In fact, whoever sub-edited it would probably query our credentials for submitting this kind of work.

But Mr Simpson has all the credentials you really need to get to the top of the BBC: A vague left-wing bias, a haughty disdain for America and a rock-like faith in his own anecdotal experience. Forget burrowing into large amounts of data like the documents revealed recently by the US congress, interviewing military personnel as well as Iraqi civilians, or going outside Baghdad for a wider picture of Iraqi life- base your analysis of the whole of Iraq by interviewing a few Iraqi's in a local cafe somewhere in downtown Baghdad.

"If you see a US patrol, you should brake sharply and keep away from it. The gunners on the vehicles kill people every day for getting too close to them. Every Iraqi has a horror story about a friend or relative who misunderstood an instruction, often in English, and was shot at. "

No mention of the very active Sunni insurgency in Baghdad who never miss an opportunity to IED, bazooka and snipe into oblivion those same trigger-happer gunners. In fact, John Simpsons articles never miss an opportunity to omit the evidence that would explain the situation to his readers.

No building work in Baghdad? Hmmmm. Wonder why that might be? Do you remember the US contractactors hung from the bridge in Fallujah? I sure do. There have been many attempts at rebuilding all over Iraq, many of them successful, although you'd actually have to leave Baghdad to notice that. But in the four provinces of Iraq where the insurgency still exists, the possibility of doing peace-time activities like large-scale infrastructure and building projects is just out of the question. That is something that any reasonably intelligent person could deduce from the many military and civilian organisations reporting out of Iraq, but is beyond Mr Simpson. He would rather leave his readers with the distinct image of an Iraq that is completely broken, patrolled by lethal psychopath redneck American soldiers who don't bother to learn even basic Arabic for their work, with civil authorities who can't be bothered, or don't want to rebuild the infrastructure destroyed by war.

This is his closing paragraph:

"Few Iraqis will even think about the anniversary of the invasion. Many are still glad that Saddam Hussein was taken off their backs.
But there is a real, abiding anger that the richest nation on Earth should have taken over their country and made them even worse off in so many ways than they were before."

You could have made the same argument in Germany after Hitler was finally smashed, when Germany itself was utterly destroyed, I suppose. For most Germans the eventual outcome of the war was utterly disastrous. So who do you blame? The Russians, the Americans and the British who undoubtedly destroyed Germany? Thats not what usually happens. Mostly, people apportion blame on those who provoked the entire situation in the first place. But thats not good enough for John Simpson! So we hardly hear about Saddam Hussein any more, nor the Baathist Socialist murderer party that he led.

I know that John Simpsons ludicrous mis-representation of the real narrative of Iraq will be disregarded when history comes to be written; but he still makes me very angry for his obtuseness and his lazy journalism.

Absolute humdinger

If you want plain speaking in front of a hostile audience, it doesn't get any plainer than this:

http://switch5.castup.net/frames/20041020_MemriTV_Popup/video_480x360.asp?ai=214&ar=1050wmv&ak=null

I'd like for anybody to contradict this woman on any point of fact in her entire spiel, and why our own politicians and public figures can't bring themselves to say the same things. Notably, the Dutch and the Danes are starting to voice the same view, but nobody in Britian that I know of will call a spade a spade.

Wafa Sultan may have a short career, so hark her words well.

War, Huh, What is it good for?

I am officially sick to death of hearing peacenik anti-war claptrap.

“War, Nobby. Huh! What is it good for?” he said.
“Dunno, sarge. Freeing slaves, maybe?”
“Absol-- Well, okay.”
“Defending yourself from a totalitarian aggressor?”
“All right, I'll grant you that, but…”
“Saving civilization against a horde of…”
“It doesn't do any good in the long run is what I'm saying, Nobby, if you'd listen for five seconds together,” said Fred Colon sharply.
"Yeah, but in the long run what does, sarge?”

That is from Terry Pratchett's “Thud!”.

(Hat tip: Mark Steyn)

There are about x zillion ways that anti-war prattle from the Socialist Workers Party, various alleged anarchists and the Green party sucks, but here is my major beef.

These people are not against war as such- there were no anti-war marches when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, when Putin invaded Chechnya (again), when the Rwandan's took the long route to major genocide, when Serbs and non-serbs in Bosnia spent 4 years trying to eliminate each other, when Eritrea and Ethiopia went hammer and tongs over 100 miles of desert, when Liberia and Sierra Leone went into fratricidal death spirals, when the Sudanese recently murdered perhaps 200,000 black Christian tribesmen in Western Sudan and displaced a million more, and most notably when the Democratic Republic of Congo hosted Africa's first world war (3 million + dead and counting). You could have heard a pin drop from the Specialist Wankers Party and the other dullards. No marches, no petitions, no vigils, no debates, no sit-ins, no descent on parliament, nothing AT ALL. And why is that do you suppose? These events have all taken place since 1980. The estimates of deaths number perhaps FIVE MILLION.

Deaths in Iraq: 31,000 approx.
Reason for deaths: 98% fratricidal brutalities between Shia and Sunni

But of course the REAL difference between those 31,000 deaths and the FIVE MILLION disregarded and ignored deaths is, the US had nothing to do with them.

Tell me, what is the UN for if FIVE MILLION people can die on its watch?

Its time for the UN to say goodnight, and good luck, and for the moral nations of the world to take on the jobs that need doing.

Tell me they're kidding- ok, they're not kidding

I'm beginning to think there's life in the old French beast yet...

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/06065/666058.stm

If you thought that the cartoon controversy was a one-off, and that we'd all be back to our bingo and soap opera's before too long, forget about it. Precedents have been created. A huge campaign of subtle and un-subtle coercion is going on, and its not going to stop anytime soon. Somebody needs to start cataloguing this in a concerted way.

Doing right, doing wrong

The changed situation in Iraq since the US and Britain ousted Saddam Hussein is a difficult one for the many enemies of our nations. Because doing right is doing right, no amount of lying, misdirection, obfuscation and misrepresentation can change fact. The more that Iran and Syria send agents and enable Islamist supremacist fighters into Iraq to murder muslims; the more that the desparate peaceniks in Britain and America invent new reasons why we must always be oppressive and wrong; the more that corrupt and evil politicians across the world use Britian and America as useful lightning rods for the righteous anger of their peoples- the more clearly it shines forth that freeing the Iraqi people from a tyrant, and giving them the opportunity to create a new and successful life for themselves was right. Look at the lengths Iraqs neighbors will go to to make this experiment fail. Look how much they are willing to destroy. I predict that it will be discovered that the bombers who blew up the al-askari shrine were agents of a foreign power, not Sunni insurgents from Iraq.

When Hariri was blown up along with the rest of that street, many commentators said it couldn't be Syria because it was patently against Syrian interests to do something so obvious to distort the politics of its neighbor. They were wrong of course, it was the Syrians. They lied and lied but in the end the evidence emerged. The same is true of al-askari.

BBC website answers those topical questions for you

One of a long series on the BBC website, who don't bother covering other religions AT ALL, but who seem to be obsessed about the muslim element of Europes population to the exclusion of any other minority. Lets have a look, shall we.

Europe's angry young Muslims

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4781290.stm

Shamsul Gani sits in his home, in the northern English city of Leeds, a proud father not just a father, note cradling his six-month-old son.
I ask him about the three young men from Leeds who carried out the London bombings last year.
"You'd have left your house keys with them and gone away for a year," he told me.
... during which time they would have set up a bomb factory and used his sink to make explosives, presumably. This guy obviously has no conception of how bitterly non-sensical and non-sequitural that comment is going to sound to an average British person.
For many people, what motivated the bombers is still a mystery.
Which people exactly? Make that "no matter how plain and simple the bombers, their cheerleaders in the muslim community, and the websites that tie the ummah together make the motivation, we are determined to pretend that we don't understand their motives." Ah, the mighty intellectuals of the BBC
But Shamsul grew up with the three - all British Muslims from Pakistani families. (The fourth was a Caribbean convert to Islam.)
Shamsul admires the courage of Mohammad Sidique Khan, the leader of the group, even though he condemns what he did.
Unbelievably, the journalist does not appear to challenge this comment, or check out with him what for the British reader would be the obvious import of this statement, i.e. that the condemnation is a sham, a going-through-the-motions fraud. Blowing up completely unsuspecting people on a tube train is BRAVE? In whose world?
Khan left a videotape explaining his action as a response to Western policy in Iraq and other parts of the Muslim world.
"I have no reason to doubt the credibility of that tape," Shamsul told me.
So we now have our first concrete piece of evidence: Mo Khan believed that 57 Londoners should die because his muslim brothers in Iraq were being murdered. So what does Shamsul believe? We want to know, do you agree with Khan's justifications for mass-murder? But neither the BBC nor Shamsul want the rest of Britain to know the answer to that question, and for roughly the same reason, so the journo didn't bother asking. Instead, he gives us the answer to a completely dull and un-asked question.
"What you have to understand is his belief in what he was doing. He was prepared to put his life on the line for that."
Now we're getting somewhere. This guy is never going to get a job in PR or diplomacy, but his naivete is our gain. We DO have to understand about these peoples belief in what they are doing. What he was also prepared to put on the line, the journalist might have pointed out at this point, was any kind of decent life for muslims in Britain. At no point does the obvious fact that sh**ing on your own doorstep brings about solid, demonstrable consequences like much increased hostility from the native populace of Britain emerge from this guys words.
Is a new angry, alienated generation of European Muslims now being drawn to radicalism?
That's certainly a widespread fear. Hmmm, I wonder why
The London bombings were followed a few months later by the Paris riots. And then, more recently, the controversy over cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed. All these have reinforced that fear. The first teeny tiny inkling that maybe the MSM are putting 2 and 2 together, and not getting 1.5
In the suburbs on the northern rim of the French capital, I found young Muslims, from Arab and African families, who feel excluded by the French state. Amazingly, we have segue'd from Leeds to Clichy- Sous- Bois. Did you spot the missing part? Are we just going to take the couple of paltry comments from a guy called Shamzul as a decent representation of the topic "Europe's angry young muslims" for Britain? Dumbing down has got very dumb indeed. So so far we've got '... a response to Western policy in Iraq' as cited evidence as to why young muslims in Europe are angry. Why does that seem so... thin?
At a youth club, an audition was under way for budding stand-up comedians.
Fifou, a lively young French-Algerian student, did a sketch poking fun at the "double culture" in which she and her friends live.
At home they must be good Muslim kids; but outside they want the good life, just like their non-Muslim friends.
Blah Blah Blah, yadda yadda.
For a moment, I forgot about those thousands of cars, and hundreds of buildings, destroyed in three weeks of rioting last year.
But not for long.
Sitting in the youth club was Samir, a young activist who has set up a group to keep alive the memory of the two dead teenagers.
Unbelievable. The first muslim martyrs for France, but I'm sure not the last. And how appropriate- two small-time criminals running away from the police, jumping into an electricity sub-station and dying there like the Darwin award candidates they were. Not exactly up there with the jihadis blowing up American tanks, but never mind.
I asked him what his aim was. His answer: "To give voice to the pain."
There have been riots before, and nothing changed. This time he wants the message to get through.
What message? Give me a job, a house and some money, and make it fast? I came to your country decades ago, and the social security payments have only gone up 25%! What is this guys message? I think we all know that really, his message is, no peace til you're all in the ummah.

When is somebody going to ask (and perhaps answer) some basic questions, ones like - are muslims kids in France excluded from French life, or have they just not bothered to integrate? Do they behave like immigrants who have no love or respect for their new home? What exactly is the deal they believe has been struck between themselves and the French state? When do you think you'll hear a journalist asking these questions?

A priori

One of the first things I learned at University was that everybody starts out with a priori assumptions. Education moves everybody on from their a priori assumptions by introducing them to other points of view, mainly by revealing new facts. All pretty simple really. Trouble is, what if you never ever in your life have your a priori assumptions challenged?

All over the muslim world, yes the same muslim world which is allegedly the fount of our knowledge and learning (if only!), people grow up, live, and die without ever hearing any viewpoint than the orthodox islamic line.

Lets have a look at some of their a priori assumptions. Any territory that EVER has islam foisted on it is forever part of the Ummah. So apologies to 9/10's of the Spanish who grew up believing that Spain was a Christian country; Wrong! It used to be part of a muslim empire so it can NEVER GO BACK. Same with Israel. Why are there Jews all over the world? Because in the first bounding enthusiasm of islam back in the 8th century, so many of them were slaughtered when their country was invaded by the muslims that they took refuge wherever they could, often ending up thousands of miles from their homeland. But of course once Israel had been incorporated into the great maw of the Ummah, it could NEVER GO BACK. Which is why Israel should, in Mr Ahmadinejads handy phrase, be 'swept into the sea' because it is occupying muslim land. Same goes for much of the Balkans, Hungary, Central Asia and on and on.

Now we folks in the west who went to get an education had our own a priori assumptions challenged, one of the big reasons why each and every time we hear something that we think is stupid, insulting or blasphemous we don't go off and burn something down, or try to hang somebody. In a situation as lop-sided as this, the only good response is to make sure that we don't allow our own way of life and sophisticated polity to be battered into submission by a bunch of ignoramuses.

This should become our declaration of independence

Five cheers to the great minds below for this staunch statement of intent:

After having overcome fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism, the world now faces a new totalitarian global threat: Islamism.We, writers, journalists, intellectuals, call for resistance to religious totalitarianism and for the promotion of freedom, equal opportunity and secular values for all.
The recent events, which occurred after the publication of drawings of Muhammed in European newspapers, have revealed the necessity of the struggle for these universal values. This struggle will not be won by arms, but in the ideological field. It is not a clash of civilisations nor an antagonism of West and East that we are witnessing, but a global struggle that confronts democrats and theocrats.
Like all totalitarianisms, Islamism is nurtured by fears and frustrations. The hate preachers bet on these feelings in order to form battalions destined to impose a liberticidal and unegalitarian world. But we clearly and firmly state: nothing, not even despair, justifies the choice of obscurantism, totalitarianism and hatred. Islamism is a reactionary ideology which kills equality, freedom and secularism wherever it is present. Its success can only lead to a world of domination: man’s domination of woman, the Islamists’ domination of all the others. To counter this, we must assure universal rights to oppressed or discriminated people.
We reject « cultural relativism », which consists in accepting that men and women of Muslim culture should be deprived of the right to equality, freedom and secular values in the name of respect for cultures and traditions. We refuse to renounce our critical spirit out of fear of being accused of “Islamophobia”, an unfortunate concept which confuses criticism of Islam as a religion with stigmatisation of its believers.
We plead for the universality of freedom of expression, so that a critical spirit may be exercised on all continents, against all abuses and all dogmas.
We appeal to democrats and free spirits of all countries that our century should be one of Enlightenment, not of obscurantism.
12 signatures

Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Chahla Chafiq
Caroline Fourest
Bernard-Henri Lévy
Irshad Manji
Mehdi Mozaffari
Maryam Namazie
Taslima Nasreen
Salman Rushdie
Antoine Sfeir
Philippe Val
Ibn Warraq

Be the next person to sign on to the real values of the Enlightenment rump.