The Media Again Defends Islam Against Free Speech -- "The Life of Muhammad"

The following by Andrew Harrod is reposted here with permission of The Middle East Forum:

The Media's Muhammad Blackout Defers Again to Islam

by Andrew Harrod
Frontpage MagM
May 10, 2013

http://www.legal-project.org/4070/the-media-muhammad-blackout-defers-again-to-islam

Yet again depictions of Islam's prophet Muhammad are causing controversy. The French satire magazine Charlie Hebdo has published a special edition released in January 2013 entitled La Vie de Mahomet, 1ère partie: Les débuts d'un prophète ("The Life of Muhammad, Part One: The Debut of a Prophet"; part two will follow in June 2013). Press reaction in both France and Germany, however, has not been uniformly welcoming, demonstrating once more a media aversion to open examination of Islam.

Charlie Hebdo has previously published cartoons involving Muhammad and sharia Islamic law, with the weekly magazine's offices becoming in the process the victim of a firebombing attack. Charlie Hebdo describes online its latest presentation of Muhammad as a factual transposition of "Muhammad's life as told by Muslim chroniclers into images." "In the West," the magazine explained, "everyone is able to cite episodes from the life of Jesus, but who is able to cite episodes from the life of Muhammad? Is this normal in a country like France, where Islam is presented as the second religion?" "If the form appears to some blasphemous," Charlie Hebdo argued, "the substance is perfectly halal."

From 1999: Daniel Pipes on Al-Hudaybiya and Lessons from the Prophet Muhammad's Diplomacy

The following by Daniel Pipes is reposted here with permission.

[Al-Hudaybiya and] Lessons
from the Prophet Muhammad's Diplomacy

by Daniel Pipes
Middle East Quarterly
September 1999

On 10 May 1994, Yasir Arafat gave what he thought was an off-the-record talk at a mosque while visiting Johannesburg, South Africa. But a South African journalist, Bruce Whitfield of 702 Talk Radio, found a way secretly to record his (English-language) remarks. The moment was an optimistic one for the Arab-Israeli peace process, Arafat having just six days earlier returned triumphantly to Gaza; it was widely thought that the conflict was winding down. In this context, Arafat's bellicose talk in Johannesburg about a "jihad to liberate Jerusalem," had a major impact on Israelis, beginning a process of disillusionment that has hardly abated in the intervening years.

No less damaging than his comments about Jerusalem was Arafat's cryptic allusion about his agreement with Israel. Criticized by Arabs and Muslims for having made concessions to Israel, he defended his actions by comparing them to those of the Prophet Muhammad in a similar circumstance:

I see this agreement as being no more than the agreement signed between our Prophet Muhammad and the Quraysh in Mecca.

A 1-Question Quiz To Try On Your Non-Jewish Friends

From The Corner:

I invite you to try a test with friends and family. I've done this with about 15 people in the last couple of weeks. Ask them to put the following three names in history, in the order in which they appeared: Jesus, Mohammad, Moses. I have been shocked at how many put Mohammad before Jesus, and even before Moses. I think the reason this happens is because Muslim countries look so much older on television! Now how could Americans understand Jihad, the Crusades, the relationship between the Bible and the Quran, or any thing they might hear that the Quran directs, without even understanding the historical sequence of the prophets?

The reason I suggest trying it on your non-Jewish friends in particular, is that I cannot imagine someone Jewish with even a modicum of Jewish education mistaking the correct order.

Then again, maybe I am just lacking in imagination.

Technorati Tag: Islam and Mohammed.

Mohammed: Thomas Jefferson of Arabia?

Senator, you are no Jack Kennedy.
Senator Lloyd Bentsen to Senator Dan Quayle during 1988 Vice Presidential Debate

On April 10, President Bush discussed the war on terror at John Hopkins Univesity, after which he answered questions from the students. Here is one of them:

I have a more general question about the United States' work to democratize the rest of the world. Many have viewed the United States' effort to democratize the world -- especially nations in the Middle East -- as an imposition or invasion on their sovereign rights. Considering that it was, in fact, the Prophet Mohammed who established the first known constitution in the world -- I'm referring to the constitution he wrote for the city of Medina --and that his life and the principles outlined in his constitution, such as the championing of the welfare of women, children and the poor, living as an equal among his people, dissolving disputes between the warring clans in Arabia, giving any man or woman in parliament the right to vote and guaranteeing respect for all religions, ironically parallel those principles that we hold most precious in our own Constitution. I'm wondering how might your recently formed Iraq Study Group under the U.S. Institute for Peace explore these striking similarities to forge a new relationship with Iraqis and educate Americans about the democratic principles inherent in Islam?

At The Corner, they give a link to an english translation of the Medina Constitution. One commentor notes an incongruity in that the document includes "A woman shall only be given protection with the consent of her family," and that the Athenian Constitution actually predates the Medina one by about 1000 years. But another commentor claims that:

Actually, that thing is pretty interesting. There's a lot of Jew-regulation (i.e. regulation of Jews), but some of it seems benign, given the period. It's certainly more friendly to Jews than, say, much of the stuff you find in the Arab press today (at least going by what Memri puts up).

This of course assumes 2 things:

o The line of the Medina Constitution that reads "(16) To the Jew who follows us belong help and equality. He shall not be wronged nor shall his enemies be aided" is translated from the Arabic accurately.

o This constitution, as translated, was actually put into effect.

Some things do seem to make the assumptions unlikely. First of all, Mohammed himself. As Mitchell Bard points out:

Muhammad, the founder of Islam, traveled to Medina in 622 A.D. to attract followers to his new faith. When the Jews of Medina refused to convert and rejected Muhammad, two of the major Jewish tribes were expelled; in 627, Muhammad's followers killed between 600 and 900 of the men, and divided the surviving Jewish women and children amongst themselves.(3)

The Muslim attitude toward Jews is reflected in various verses throughout the Koran, the holy book of the Islamic faith. "They [the Children of Israel] were consigned to humiliation and wretchedness. They brought the wrath of God upon themselves, and this because they used to deny God's signs and kill His Prophets unjustly and because they disobeyed and were transgressors" (Sura 2:61). According to the Koran, the Jews try to introduce corruption (5:64), have always been disobedient (5:78), and are enemies of Allah, the Prophet and the angels (2:97­98).

Bernard Lewis, who generally downplays the disadvantages of the Dhimmi status, writes in The Jews of Islam, about the recent vintage of the claim of equality under Islam:

The claim to tolerance, now much heard from Muslim apologists and more especially from apologists for Islam, is also new and of alien origin. It is only very recently that some defenders of Islam have begun to assert that their socety in the past accorded equal status to non-Muslims. No such claim is made by spokesmen for resurgent Islam,' and historically there is no doubt that they are right. Traditional Islamic societies neither accorded such equality nor pretended that they were so doing. Indeed, in the old order, this would have been regarded not as a merit but as a dereliction of duty. How could one accord the same treatment to those who follow the true faith and those who willfully reject it? This would be a theological as well as a logical absurdity.

Mohammed as a Moslem Thomas Jefferson?
Not really.

More on the propogation of the myth of Islamic equality at Soccer Dad.

Technorati Tag: Mohammed and Islam and Medina Constitution.

Comparing the Danish Cartoons to Der Sturmer?

In Cartoon Muhammads and the Academic Caricature, Alexander H. Joffe of Campus Watch notes that The Toronto Star reports the following comparison being made by Ruth Mas, a lecturer in Islamic studies at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo:

She warned such actions play into the hands of right wingers, who use free speech arguments to spread what she calls "Islamophobia," a growing trend in Europe that she says reminds her of the anti-Semitic rhetoric that swept through Europe with the rise of Nazi Germany in the 1930s."

What scares me here is the participation of the press in this," she said. "I don't expect the press to be intellectual, but I do expect them to be reflective."

A prominent German Islamic leader said the cartoons were reminiscent of the caricatures of Jews in the Nazi propaganda sheet Der Sturmer. "Press freedom shouldn't be used to insult people. We Germans need to know our history," Michael Muhammad Pfaff, of the German Muslim League told Britain's Guardian newspaper. [emphasis added]

This ridiculous comparison achieves the two-fold accomplishment of not only delegitimizing the Danish newspaper--Jyllands-Posten, but of creating a relativism between the up and coming "Islamophobia" and anti-Semitism.

Take a look again at the 12 pictures from Denmark's newspaper (click on image to see entire cartoon--at Human Events Online)


Streicher's caricatures in Der Stürmer demonized the Jews, portraying them as less than human and a threat to Germany if not all of humanity. Some of Streicher's caricatures can be viewed at Jewish Virtual Library.

First of all, if any of the pictures above are at all demonizing, they are doing no more than commenting on the events of the past several years of Islamist terrorism (see A Year of Islamist Terror: The Numbers and What a Month of Islamist Terrorism Has Wrought). Islamist terrorists have already succeeded in demonizing Islam and Moslems.

That point is already being made, according to the Toronto Star article:

"The protests in the Middle East have proven that the cartoonist was right," said Tarek Fatah, a director of the Muslim Canadian Congress. "It's falling straight into that trap of being depicted as a violent people and proving the point that, yes, we are."

Secondly, if the 12 cartoons were truly that offensive, Imams such as Abu Laban would not have resorted to adding truly offensive to the original 12--additional pictures of unknown origin that were not distinguished from the original cartoons when Abu Laban and the Danish Moslem delegation went on their Middle-East tour (see The Anti-Denmark Riots: Has Pallywood Gone Global? and Translation of The Danish Moslem Delegation Letter).

It's time to end the absurd game of equivalence. We may be at a pivotal point where the West can take a stand for basic Western principles, or cave in and continue the slide into a future of uncertainty and subservience to intimidation.

UPDATE:

Take a look at Neander News, where so far one of the 3 offensive pictures that the Imams deceptively added to the original 12--has been traced to it's source: A Pig Squealing Contest!

Other posts here on the topic of the Danish cartoons:

o The Denmark Cartoons and Moslem Moderation 2/15/06
o The Danish Cartoons and the Hijacking of Islam 2/9/06
o The Timing of the Danish Cartoon Riots 2/8/06
o Translation of the Danish Moslem Delegation Letter 2/6/06
o The Anti-Denmark Riots: Has Pallywood Gone Global? 2/5/06
o Cartoon Irony 2/5/06
o Denmark and the Cartoon Defense 2/2/06

Technorati Tags: Mohammed and Muhammad Cartoon and Prophet and Denmark and Streicher and Der Sturmer and Islam.