Fox News Channel: Changing Intelligence on Libya Attack Turns Focus Back to Anti-Islam Film, Source Says
Reuters: West’s free speech stand bars blasphemy ban
So much for Islamophobia accusations. If President Barack Obama and/or his subordinates truly have the bright idea to favor breaking away from defending free speech, then a few telephone conversations or teleconferences with Organization for Islamic Cooperation Secretary-General Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu could very well dissuade them further. While the American consulate in Benghazi was under siege from any Al-Qaeda-linked terrorists gathering to attack it, other American intelligence agents were focused on…
Innocence of Muslims. I would imagine that if both factors were present at the same time, in the sense that the terrorists really were planning to attack the consulate anyway, then they must have figured that any mobs that happened to be rioting nearby would provide the perfect cover for their assault. Remarkably, general bans on free speech appear to have exhausted my favorite Islamic intergovernmental organization precisely because the United States and European and Latin American countries decided to uphold that idea and thereby stand against such mobs, no matter where they might explode. I can only wonder what those delegations will opine once a certain movie about a certain raid to kill a certain particularly infamous terrorist mastermind gets the final green light from National Geographic Channel.:
New York Post: NatGeo TV on terror alert
SEAL Team Six: The Raid on Osama bin Laden has been scheduled for November 4, the Sunday before the 2012 presidential election, if I’m not mistaken. An avalanche of “phone calls and blog posts” against NGC has come to their attention, and – perhaps justifiably – they’re putting whatever security protocols they might already have in motion. Assuming that these terrorists include
Innocence of Muslims in their supposed grievances, well, that would just tell me that they’re willing to cite anything as an example of the United States’ infernal schemes of dominance and oppression. At any rate, NatGeo’s employees are “big believers in the First Amendment”, so neither Obama nor Ihsanoglu can count on support from them. Recollection worldwide could remain just as important for other parts of Islam.:
Center for Islamic Pluralism: Stephen Schwartz: The Legacy of September 11, 2001
As Stephen Schwartz wrote, he spent the 11th anniversary of those airplane jihad attacks meditating on their significance in this period of time, between the Wahhabi stranglehold in Saudi Arabia and the upheavals in Syria and across the rest of the Middle East. Academics throughout the West ignored the convulsions befalling communities infiltrated by Wahhabi operatives, whether out of intimidation or financial inducements. Mr. Schwartz, as he has over the years, devoted particular attention to the Balkans and other hotspots that the Islamists have only just begun to target, such as Africa, Turkestan, and Burma, no doubt encouraging other Muslims to reject all this violence. If certain trends that have even the various factions within Islam quaking in their shoes continue to hold up, then there were never any viable options to these Islamic upheavals from the start.:
Middle East Forum: David Goldman: Islamic Civilization is Dying
Muslim countries have acquired demographic rates similar to Europe and Russia in a shorter amount of time, precisely because their populations don’t believe that their traditions will survive any encounter with modernity, no matter how trivial any such encounter might be. My two favorite Muslim countries, Turkey and Iran, are the two countries with the biggest declines, with Iranian women going from 7 children to 1.5 children on average and Turks gaining the same current rate, all while the Kurds have a burgeoning population. Mr. Goldman’s accompanying book,
How Civilizations Die, pinpointed Egypt and Tunisia, the two countries I’ve come to associate most with the so-called “Arab Spring”, as the countries most likely to experience economic failure first, such that they’ll be facing what he calls a “train wreck” in the coming years and decades. While Tunisia went below 2 children as a fertility rate earlier this century, Egypt’s military dictatorship kept its people “rural, illiterate, and powerless”, with the ultimate effect of demoralizing them in the face of modernity in the 21st century. The Islamic supremacists sensed this and have been escalating their attacks against the United States and its allies, which makes
everything I ever saw of their activities, going all the way back to 9/11 itself and perhaps even beyond it, look less like efforts to take over the world and more like efforts to take down as many people as possible before modernization sweeps Islamic traditions away for good. To put it in a different way, world domination isn’t just the Islamic supremacists’ goal, but their only option left for preserving their society, if they can. For my part, this development, which got my attention about this time last year, torpedoed any faith I once had that Islam and those two aforementioned other major cultures would fit into a global system that favors freedom and individuality and thus survive the 21st century… and necessitated, at least to my mind, a search for a new global standard for humankind. The six virtues that I ended up finding had sources beyond anything I ever imagined, and I have focused my attention there ever since. As for free speech, well, should Mitt Romney win the Oval Office this November, and he or the Tea Partiers begin to realize just how dire the situation truly is, then they might as well do everything they can to prevent it from becoming a casualty of the Islamic implosions unfolding worldwide, making the concept of Islamophobia meaningless.
