Protecting The Assassins

"The leaders of the present day Islamic onslaught on Denmark and the West make no bones about their intention to eventually impose [strict Islamic] Sharia law on the infidel population and, thus, reduce Denmark's indigenous population to a state of Dhimmitude -- that is, slaves in their own country."
Lars Hedegaard

This is seen as hate speech by those who are fully in support of overlooking the vast excesses of Islam. That is, Islam as a religion whose purpose is to subjugate in full surrender to its unique faith in the one true god all that it can sweep before its relentless juggernaut onslaught. Jihad accomplished through the medium of courteous invitation, or jihad through the experience of violent conversion. Either will do.

Islam has slurred itself through the latter-day expression of violent jihad. Those among the Islamists whose rash youth is impatient and cannot tolerate the slow expansion of Islam throughout a resistant world and whose inspiration is martyrdom and death to inspire in the uncouth non-Muslims a fear of offending Islam have brought an entirely new awareness to the world at large of the menace that it represents for their well-being.

That awareness was more than adequately addressed by the statement issuing from Lars Hedegaard. A statement which, as president of his country's chapter of the International Free Press Society, made him a target for insulting the religion that claims for itself the title of peace promoter and exemplar of love for one's fellow man.

There is a certain dissonance here to be sure; for it is also a religion whose advent caused a split in the succession and succeeding rituals and beliefs upon the death of the divine messenger of Islam. Any criticism of Islam is interpreted as an assault upon the Prophet Mohammad, and the penalty is that of a capital offense. Any diversion from 'pure' original Islam is seen as an assault on its legitimacy.


Between the major sects there is a stark animosity so great that each treats the other as an abomination to Islam, a stark, insulting, insufferable assault upon the verities and blessings of Islamic purity. The penalty of that state too is death, and death is delivered accordingly in great miserable heaps of bloodied bombed-out bodies.  Mosques may be sacred institutions but they too are fodder for destruction representing the distorted, degraded version of Islam.

While Mr. Hedegaard feared for the ongoing legacy of his country's culture and heritage being absorbed and subsumed by an introduced, alien religion whose purpose is to steadily infiltrate and overcome resistance to its eventual conquest, he became subject to a fatwa. Although he escaped the fate intended for him by assassination he writes that he will likely now be forced to live a hunted man, in secret places to protect himself from death.

It is not enough to issue fatwas against those who offend Islam. The 57 Islamic countries of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation have been attempting for a decade within the United Nations to have legislation brought into universal law to criminalize "Defamation of Religions". Lest any feel this to be an innocuous drive, one that seeks to have all religious devotion of all creeds equally respected, this is precisely the intended ploy.

But were the criminalization of defamers of religions to become fact, it would be Islamist theocracies, Muslim-majority countries of the world that would pursue legal action under the auspices of the United Nations against any perceived offenders who dare take the name of Islam, its Prophet or any of its institutions in vain. The world of religion is fairly relaxed, other than for fanatics of any religion, over the commonly increasing occurrence of religious criticism.

With the exception of Islam. Which was amply demonstrated when the cartoons of Mohammad were published in Denmark, and the world of Islam went berserk, people were killed, and boycotts of Danish products were launched. When suspicion of a Koran being abused is aroused, riots ensue. When Muslims turn away from Islam and toward another religion countries like Saudi Arabia and Iran and Pakistan consider apostates eligible for the death penalty.

Recrimination, intimidation, accusations and criminal charges are hardly what the world needs to inspire greater respect in religion. If those whose scholarship impels them to preach to their followers that they should scorn and defile the religiously significant symbols of another faith feel justified in this approach, yet feel their own religion requires protection, they should be censured.

If those who feel they are singularly entitled to abuse the human rights of others because of a belief in the superiority of their religion are enabled to do so because the larger world looks on forgivingly, then we are aiding and abetting our own downfall.  Accommodation of the politics of intimidation will agree with the Organization of Islamic Cooperation and help them institute a law criminalizing defamatory religious statements.

If we keep making excuses of misunderstandings between faiths being responsible for such awkward situations as mass atrocities, we aid and abet those politics of religious entitlements for one, denying them for all others. Left of centre thought has it that Islam is the underdog, that violence and tribal antipathies resulting in mass death can be overlooked in the greater interests of harmony.

We see this writ large in the hallowed halls of the United Nations where its human rights bodies regularly elect genocidal murderers like Sudan's president Omar al-Bashir, and Syria's almost equally murderous president, Bashar al-Assad to represent various human rights commissions, as upstanding delegates, not as the murderers and human-rights abusers that they are.

The appeasement of savagely violent Islamic terror groups like Hamas, Islamic Jihad, al-Qaeda and Hezbollah in the hopes it will assuage their rage and soothe their emotional victimhood where they imagine themselves to be insulted and attacked by the West, will only encourage them to scurry about in their zeal to commit mayhem and mass slaughter the better to beat the West at its game.

And in allowing the steady migration of religious zealots to gain entry to Western-cultured countries of the world, where Muslims have preferred to leave their countries of origin to seek out preferential opportunities available to them in wealthy, advanced nations of the world, unlike the intellectual and social backwaters they come from and then find fault with the receiving culture and resolve to alter it to more accurately reflect their own, we are advancing our own cultural and spiritual demise.