It goes without saying that insightfulcommentators find themselves challenged to face the apparently developingconfrontation with what is labeled as radical Islam. Yes, it is a confrontation. Wherever it finds succor, it consistentlypractices sedition against its host. Wesee its early stages at work in Canada and the USA and a maturerversion at work in Europe .
It knows it is fighting for the mind andloyalty of young men who can be used to attack in the name of its fraudulentversion of Islamic Jihad. It is aprofane ideology that subjugates women and its own and anyone else it canintimidate. I see it as an evil thatmust be opposed and bled dry and antidotes applied as had to be done with Nazismand Communism.
A reformed Islam may arise and stifle anysimilar reemergence, but there has been not much sign of that. The militants are permitted to threaten withimpunity and cow more liberal Muslims into silence.
Around the Muslim world, Egypt Saudi Arabia Iraq
Many commentators see only the path towar. In some situations that hashappened and surely it will continue to happen. More likely the demands of modernism will ameliorate all that.
Strangely, even with outrages ringing inour ears, I am optimistic that war can be generally avoided. It has taken military confrontation wheretribalism rules, but there a sharp lesson also serves. I recall the Canadian forces arriving in Kandahar
Outside that the rest have centralgovernments that need productive citizens. The pressure on these societies to allow their women to contribute tofamily incomes is intense and can only worsen. In time, it cannot be withstood. This all leads to freedom for women. With that the rise of a secular society becomes unstoppable. The problem today is the age old suppressionof both women and any other designated minority is ingrained and must beameliorated. This can only be done witheconomic liberation which is been forced on these societies.
AShowdown with Evil
POSTED ON DECEMBER 26 2010 9:30 PM
PhyllisChesler is an Emerita Professor of Psychology and Women's Studies at City University of New York
Dr. Jamie Glazov and his Canadian publisher,Mantua Books, have just published a new kind of “samizdat” which is the Russianword for self-publications written by dissidents and passed from hand to hand.“Self-publishing” (by hand, on typewriters, on printing presses) was a20th century way of dealing with Soviet government censorship. The Russian authorsand readers who were found with such writing in their possession were routinelysubjected to harsh imprisonment.
Westerners, (and this includes Israel
Glazov’s book is a careful compilation of selectedinterviews which he conducted with 30 dissidents, including one with himselfand (full disclosure) one with me as well, between 2004-2010. These interviewsappeared in David Horowitz’s Frontpage magazine. The book is titled: Showdown With Evil: Our Struggle Against Tyranny and Terror.Glazov understands that the new Evil Empire is the global alliance betweenIslamist totalitarianism and western liberal progressivism or leftism. Theinterviewees’ work is post the Intifada of 2000 and post 9/11.
This collection showcases some of theradically dissident work being done by those who are defamed and marginalizedby the mainstream media as “conservatives,” “Islamophobes,” “racists,” and“traitors.” Glazov stands with them. Included here are Steven Emerson,Victor Davis Hanson, David Horowitz, Andrew Klavan, Rep. Sue Myrick, RobertSpencer, and Charles Winecoff.
Glazov has consistently and persistently supportedhuman rights, women’s rights and gay rights. He has a verymoving interview with Charles Winecoff in this book. Winecoff“came out” as a conservative in the gay rights movement and had the same kindof “Darkness at Noon” experience that others, including myself have had.
Technically, Glazov did not “self-publish.”Publisher Howard Rotberg founded Mantua Mantua
Rotberg, a Jewish lawyer, self-published hisfirst novel, The Second Catastrophe: A Novel About a Book and Its Author, in2003. He was not only defamed in a Canadian bookstore when two Arabs disruptedhis lecture by calling him a “f**ing Jew” but was then labeled aracist-Zionist. His work was banned from the bookstore chain. Sincethen, Mantua has published six books, includingDavid Solway’s Hear, O Israel
The interviewer, Glazov, and his interviewees allunderstand that their difficulties here are nowhere near as perilous as arethose of their counterparts in the Islamic and communist worldwhere the media is controlled by the state and in which anyonewho publishes anything—however minor—against the party line (or whichexposes the corruption of government officials), is jailed, tortured, ormurdered.
For example, in 2006, Moscow Sweden
And, in the Islamic world: In 2006, Kareem Amer, anEgyptian blogger and former law student, was expelled from al-Azhar Universityfor criticizing some of the university’s instructors, writing in his blog thatthe “professors and sheikhs at al-Azhar who … stand against anyone who thinksfreely” would “end up in the dustbin of history”. The prosecutor admitted that hewas on a “jihad” against Amer. In 2007, he was sentenced to 3 years in prisonon charges of atheism (“There is no God except Man,” he wrote). His words wereseen as defaming the President of Egypt
In September 2010, Hossein Derakshan, known as Iran ’s “blogfather” because he helped to start Iran ’s blogging revolution, was sentenced to 19½ years in prison, supposedly for spying on behalf of Israel Iran for Canada in 2000 and visited Israel Iran
In June, 2010, Bangladeshi authorities arrested the publisher Mahmudur Rahman and closed hisnewspaper because he dared to publish reports about government corruption andabuses of power. He has been beaten incustody, and 34 charges have been lodgedagainst him. His fate remains unknown.
This does not occur in the West and in Israel
Thus, private publishinghouses as well as universitypresses have become increasingly and rigidly left in orientation; the PartyLine is an anti-American, anti-Israel, and pro-Palestinian line. No other viewsneed apply. America and Israel are, allegedly, the world’s greatestimperialists, colonialists, racists, and aggressor nations. The long and tragichistory of Islamic colonialism, racism, and jihad is not a welcome view.
More: Like the professoriate, publishers have becomeespecially cautious, some might say cowardly or sadly, realistic. They do notwant an Islamist bomb thrown through their windows, they do not want to absorbthe cost of security for an author against whom a fatwa hasbeen issued, nor do they want to pay to defend themselves against a battery ofIslamist and leftist lawyers chargingthem with “racism” and “Islamophobia.”
The lawsuits andthe fatwas are real. They have exerted a profound and chilling effect on FreeSpeech in the West. Salman Rushdie, Geert Wilders, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, MagdiAllam, Elizabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff, all come instantly to mind. All haverequired round-the-clock protection orhave been sued for “racist” or “hate” speech by those who themselves specializein telling Big Lies about America, Jews, and Israel. Theo Von Gogh was murdered, butchered, by aMoroccan-Dutch Islamist for daring to co-produce a film titled “Submission”about the normalization of barbaric violence towards Muslim women in Islam’sname.
Today, both in “Eurabia” (the term is Bat Ye’or’s) and inNorth America, any thinker, writer, academic, or intellectual who dares challenge theParty Line will be marginalized, scorned, demonized, not published; ifpublished, not reviewed; if reviewed, reviewed negatively; and, in any event, notassigned by professors, and never quoted in the left, liberal, and mainstreammedia as an expert. In addition, friendships will end, political networks willcrumble. The post-9/11 and “matzav” world viewers will not be hired asprofessors; their works will onlybe read by other post 9/11 world viewers.
Thus, in the wake of this steady tsunami, conservativeinternet sites, publishing imprints, andsmall, new publishers, such as Mantua
“Radical Islam is now the greatest threat the West faces.We are, as Norman Podhoretz has noted, in World War IV. We face totalitarianand religious zealots who seek to establish an Islamic caliphate worldwide.They hate freedom and liberty, and so they hate and need to destroy the United States and Israel
They also hate women: “…it is obvious that woman-hatred isintertwined with Islamic terror. The more fanatical and violent the Islamicterrorist and his milieu, the more misogyny you will find there…to fight forwomen’s rights under Islam is also to stick a dagger into the heart of Islamic jihad.”
Where Islamic gender apartheid is allowed to flourish,cancerous, violent extremism is destined to follow.
Glazov does not mince words about what is wrong with Islamin the 21st century. But there is a difference, he insists, between being bluntand being bigoted.
“This is not about demonizing Muslims or attackingMuslims,” he writes. “We are the allies of Muslims. I consider myselfpro-Muslim. Muslims are the victims of Islam and its totalitarian structures. Ispend a large part of my life fighting for the rights of Muslim women whosuffer under Islamic gender apartheid. Does this make me anti-Muslim orpro-Muslim? I fight on behalf of Muslims who want to live in freedom and whodon’t want to suffer the harsh punishments of Sharia Law. I fight for a worldwhere young Muslim boys and girls are not brainwashed and forced to blowthemselves up. Does this make me anti-Muslim or pro-Muslim?”
These are crucial questions and I expect that Glazov willkeep asking them.
This article was originally published by Israel NationalNews on December26, 2010.
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