It’s Anti-Jihad/Anti-Islamist Bloggers Fault?
John R. Houk
© July 26, 2011
Anders Behring Breivik is a name that will go down in history as the craziest or wickedest or both of men in history. Breivik may also go down in history as the individual icon that Leftists and Muslim apologists will utilize to condemn anti-jihadist and anti-islamist writers and bloggers as racist inciters of murder and massacres.
Breivik went on a murder spree in which the media at first told the world there were 93 victims. The victim count has continued to shrink since the original senseless murder of his fellow Norwegians. The last count I read was 76.
I have to be honest with you. I only heard of this act of terrorism in blips and pieces without paying attention. I simply presumed European Muslims went psycho again. Then I received an email from Brigitte Gabriel of ACT for America expressing her horror with the unmistakable certainty that she condemned this act of perfidy by Breivik. This is when I began to surf the Net for a bit more detail clarity.
At this moment I only knew the perpetrator was a Norwegian. So, I Googled “Norwegian terrorist” and Breivik’s name came up soon enough. As I was preparing to type his name to perhaps bring up more info on Breivik I noticed something disturbing. I noticed the MSM was associating Breivik as a Right Wing Christian fanatic that hates Muslims. I continued on to Google the terrorist’s full name.
Yep, there was no doubt. Breivik was heavily into anti-Islamic thinking to the level of hatred. He did not really identify with the Christian faith as much as he did with the civilization that has emerged from Christianity.
The Google listings made it clear that media organizations on both sides of the pond were going out of their way to blame American anti-Jihad/anti-Islamist bloggers for Breivik’s murder spree. Frankly this includes yours truly.
Breivik wrote a 1500 page manuscript of which some may have been plagiarized from actual Right Wing terrorists such as the Unabomber. The Left Wing Slanted ThinkProgress posted some rather pointed thoughts gleaned by Lee Fang.
… Many of the leading Islamophobes who inspired Breivik have also been responsible for a rising tide of hate campaigns, from the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque” hysteria to a disturbing trend of demonstrations against Muslim Americans across the country:
– Breivik cites neoconservative Islamophobe Frank Gaffney on opposition to Turkey joining the EU, and reprints a post from Gaffney’s think tank, the Center for Security Policy: Gaffney, a former Reagan official, is a regular on Fox News, a writer for the Washington Times op-ed page, a sought-after speaker at major conservative conferences, and a ubiquitous talking head on talk radio. His think tank created a website to orchestrate protests against the the (sic) so-called “Ground Zero Mosque” in Manhattan. When he is not arguing that President Obama is a secret agent of the Muslim Brotherhood or claiming that radical Muslims have infiltrated the top levels of American government, he is calling for people who practice Islam to be prosecuted under sedition laws.
– Breivik cites blogger Pamella (sic) Geller several times in his manifesto, reprints articles praising her: Geller, the writer behind the popular anti-Muslim blog Atlas Shrugs, has been perhaps the most proactive anti-Muslim activist, given the fact she was the first to smear the planned Park51 community center as a “victory mosque” and was involved in demonstrations against the construction before most of the media gained an interest. As Geller travels the country promoting her belief that Muslims are an inherent threat to American society, she has been connected to protests against mosques in California, Tennessee, and other states.
– Breivik posts a 45-minute interview with Brigitte Gabriel, a leading organizer of grassroots anti-Muslim activism: Gabriel is the author of several popular anti-Muslim books, is the founder of ACT! For America, a group Gabriel created to engineer a permanent activism base for efforts to scapegoat Muslim Americans. Her group has collaborated with Tea Party groups, pushed bans on Sharia law in states, and mobilized a vicious hate rally in Orange County earlier this year. In an interview with ThinkProgress, Gabriel confessed that she regularly advises Homeland Security Committee Chairman Rep. Peter King (R-NY).
– Breivik extensively quotes Robert Spencer, a leading anti-Muslim writer sponsored by David Horowitz: Spencer’s blog Jihad Watch, along with Geller’s site (Spencer and Geller created the group “Stop Islamization of America” to distribute action alerts), have driven anti-Muslim memes in the news for years. Sponsored by David Horowitz’s think tank, Jihad Watch has led efforts to purge the Republican Party of Muslim Americans and is a constant purveyor of strange anti-Muslim claims, like one recently that former Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY) had secretly converted to Islam. Despite his links to Holocaust deniers and other unsavory individuals, Spencer provides punditry for Fox News, National Review, and other top conservative media organs. ThinkProgress has found his books sold at CPAC, the College Republican conference, and events for Young Americans for Freedom.
– Breivik linked ten times to video clips for the movie Obsession, a documentary created by a secretive group called the Clarion Fund: In 2008, a mysterious organization called the Clarion Fund mailed the documentary Obsession to 28 million households in swing states leading up to the election. The movie argues that Muslims are waging a war against America, and will stop at nothing to destroy western civilization. Clarion has subsequently produced more films, which are distributed and publicized widely by Geller, Gabriel, Spencer and other leading anti-Muslim activists. The group is chaired by a number of prominent Islamophobes, including Gaffney and Daniel Pipes.
Lee Fang’s tone has become the norm of the Left oriented MSM and Leftist bloggers in general. Fang included a dozen or so resource links in the excerpt I used above to strengthen his position on we wicked Islamophobes – you will have to go ThinkProgress to check out Fang’s sources. Breivik’s murder spree is going to become an excuse to vilify anti-jihadist/anti-Islamist bloggers as racist spewers of hate. I am surprised Fang did not include Dutch MP Geert Wilders that had just won a free speech issue in Netherlands for the right to speak the truth about Islam in Documentary, writing and in public.
In Europe Breivik’s massacre quite possibly will reverse the success of Wilders’ victory in Court. Some Leftists are comparing the incident to the plight of Muslims in the West.
That plight goes something like this: The amount of Muslims that are violent calling for Jihad against Westerners, Americans, Christians and Jews is a small minority of Muslims. It is unfair to blame all Muslims as violent because a fraction of Muslims are violent.
The Leftist bloggers and writers trying to sound above the fray has pointed out that Breivik is not representative of Christianity and that this should be a wake-up call by the West – Americans in particular – to not look with disdain upon Islam when only a handful of Muslim preach and act out violent Jihad.
I have read in places that the percentage of Muslims that are radicalized is roughly 7% to 10%. For the sake of argument let’s go with 7% as radicalized Muslims. According to a Pew study released on 1/27/11 the Muslim population in 2010 was 1.6 billion. Seven percent of 1.6 billion is 112 million (112,000,000). That is a lot of people willing to act out violently to perpetuate the purist Islamic agenda of Mohammed in spreading Islam violently.
There are about 2.26 billion Christians (2009) in the World with about 235 million Christians in the USA (CIA World Fact Book: 75% Christian of 313,232,000 U.S. population). Of those 235 million Christians how many can be labeled as Christian Extremists that promote or act out violence to turn the world to Christianity? In full disclosure Google did not cooperate in finding those percentages or numbers of Christian Extremists. Perhaps I did not input the key correct words in my search. What I did find was a bit disheartening.
In my efforts to find statistics on Christian Extremism I found many links pointing to Breivik with denunciations of Christians who dislike Islam in general. The next thing I discovered is that many Christians and Christian organizations that stand for Biblical Morality and Family Values were lumped into the same groups as White Supremacists, Aryan Nation, Christian Nationalism or any group that would deem themselves affiliated to Christianity but promote the use of violence to bring about an American or global transformation based on the hate of those labeled as “the other” in thinking, believing or racial lines.
A classic example of this one group fits all mentality is the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). The SPLC has gone out of its way to label Pro-Life groups and Family Values groups as hate groups because they stand for Biblical Morality; e.g. abortion is murder or homosexuality is a sin. Adding fuel to the fire the SPLC is beginning to attack Anti-Jihad/Anti-Islamist bloggers as bigoted racist hating Islamophobes while ignoring the prominence of Jew-hatred in a significant amount of American-Mosques and American-Islamic organizations that promote themselves as moderate Muslims. I am not talking about defending Islamic religion as something that is threatening to life and limb of Muslims. Rather the typical literature is placing the old Czarist Russian propaganda tool of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as a fact that Jews are conspiring to bring the entire world under Jewish hegemony. Hello! Jews as a faith are an insular group as far as Orthodoxy goes. These guys want to live in their parcel of land serving the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob while being left alone. There is no desire to conquer to spread Judaism. Orthodox Jews in the West pretty much keep to themselves making an effort to be separate from non-Jews. Now this insular-inclusivity may not be the same among Jews which are Conservative, Reformed or Jews proud of their heritage and yet not religious whatsoever.
If I was a Muslim wishing to expose the nature of Christianity according to the Bible I would be saying something like, “Beware of those Christians that make a man a son of Allah and have elevated him to a position co-equal with Allah. That man was stolen from our Quran and plagiarized as Prophet Jesus. They claim Prophet Jesus died on a Cross and came back alive bodily three days later. We Muslims know that Prophet Jesus never died on a Cross and lived a full life teaching the ways of merciful Allah. Those Christian fellas will tell you there Allahs but some all three are mysteriously on Allah. And yada yada and yada yada.”
This would be Muslim exposing the difference between Christian theology and Islamic theology. However, you will not read such an exposé contrasting one truth as better than another.
Anti-Jihadist/Anti-Islamist will take texts from the Quran, Hadith and Sira and expound in context on how those holy words are there because Mohammed was the example to follow to spread Islam not only as a superior truth but to force others to accept the superiority of Allah and his Prophet Mohammed with a rigor that is still honored today – IN THE PRESENT – that require denial of human rights if Islam is insulted or dishonored according an evolving Sharia Law derived from Islamic jurists over the centuries. Friends, that apple Sharia Law has not rolled too far from the medieval concepts of rights and justice amended by an Arab reformer known as Mohammed. Let’s be honest though Mohammed did great things to reform a lot of practices that were not cool in Arabic culture. On the other hand Mohammed used religion to indoctrinate followers into believing they were operating in the will of a deity to war, collect booty, slaves and turn the conquered into people without rights as they were indoctrinated into the cult of Islam. Those that converted to Islam discovered a better life. Those that chose loyalty to their old faith continued in abject drudgery which included a tax for alleged protection. Does anyone ever ask, “Protection from what?” Surely the protection was not needed from the Religion of Peace, right?
A Muslim apologist will usually obfuscate the text of Quran, Hadith and Sira by taking Old Testament acts of violence ordered by God for Jews to come and claim their Promised Land. Let’s say those years were violent and atrocious which the Jews did at the command of God. Jews ended the genocidal conquest after the Land was conquered which was not completed incidentally. How does that compare to the Islamic call for perpetual Jihad until the whole earth is Islamic.
Ok the whole point is that Breivik is a murderer that needs to be punished, but to blame Anti-Jihadist/Anti-Islamic bloggers is ludicrous. Breivik at best is demented and at worst insane. I mean the guy became hate-filled. His hate may have grown after reading the expositions of bloggers, but the bloggers that are serious about truth in no way incited Breivik to kill around 70 people at an island camp that were not even Muslim. If this was a film the disclaimer can read: No Muslims were harmed in this movie.
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The Norway terrorist
By Brigitte Gabriel
Sent: 7/25/2011 4:35 PM
Sent by ACT for America
We in ACT! for America join those around the world who are shocked and deeply saddened by the mass murder spree in Norway. We grieve for those killed, for their families, and for their friends.
This touches me very personally. I have seen friends murdered by terrorists and I have felt the unspeakable pain of that loss.
We also join those around the world who condemn, in the strongest words possible, the unconscionable actions of Anders Behring Breivik.
Not surprisingly, Brevik’s 1,500 page manifesto is being combed for clues as to why he would perpetrate such a heinous act of terrorism.
For instance, a New York Times article states Breivik was “deeply influenced by a small group of American bloggers and writers who have warned for years about the threat from Islam…” He also frequently quoted the Unabomber.
Predictably, and sadly, there are those who have started the drumbeat that rhetoric critical of radical Islam is the cause of this tragedy. We have seen ludicrous online posts conjuring up comparisons to Breivik and conservative American political leaders that I won’t dignify by reprinting here.
This is reminiscent of what happened after the Tucson shooting spree, when many in the press jumped to conclusions that Jared Loughner was a “right winger” or a “tea party activist.”
A column by Mark Tapson in FrontPageMagazine has some very important points in this regard.
Breivik is a terrorist. His targeting of helpless schoolchildren makes him no better than the slaughterers at Beslan…. There is no connection between the legitimate, courageous, lawful work of notable anti-jihadists and such evil. No true Christian, conservative, or responsible critic of jihad would condone Breivik’s despicable, cowardly acts or deem them to be in accordance with our beliefs and values. Much less would we celebrate those acts, unlike our Islamist counterparts.
In my home country of Lebanon I saw first-hand what happens when terrorism and violence is used to undermine democracy. When 9/11 happened, I made a vow that I would not allow what happened to my country of birth happen to my adopted country.
This is why the mission of the organization I founded, ACT! for America, has ALWAYS been and will ALWAYS be a call to constructive, peaceful and democratic citizen action through education, community action, and legislation.
Always devoted,
Brigitte Gabriel
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Ideologically-driven illogic
Sent by ACT for America
Sent: 7/26/2011 1:18 PM
The ideologically-driven illogic of New York Times columnist Roger Cohen
New York Times columnist Roger Cohen exceeded all of our expectations in his remarkably illogical column below (SlantRight Editor: Not included in this post) entitled “Breivik and His Enablers.” Space does not permit a detailed analysis of what he wrote, but here are the high points.
1. He uses the phrase “racist Islamophobia,” and just to be sure we don’t miss the point, he later writes of “anti-Muslim racism.” As Cohen surely knows, Islam isn’t a “race” any more than Christianity is. But playing the race card to demonize those with whom you disagree has become standard operating procedure for people like Cohen.
2. He foolishly and falsely compares Breivik’s illusions of creating a new Knights Templar order to the call for the restoration of the caliphate by Osama bin Laden. The problem for Cohen, however, is that there is a global Islamist movement for the restoration of the caliphate, led by the Muslim Brotherhood. As far as we know, there is no worldwide movement to resurrect the Crusades.
3. Cohen calls Rep. Peter King and former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich “ideological fellow travelers” of Breivik. King’s “crime,” of course, is to have the audacity to hold congressional hearings investigating Islamic radicalization in America. Cohen can’t just disagree with King’s actions; he has to demonize King by calling him a “fellow traveler” with a maniacal mass murdering terrorist.
4. Cohen writes, “Muslims have not done enough…to denounce those who deformed their religion in the name of jihadist murder.” For Cohen to claim that the practice of violent jihad is a deformation of Islamic doctrine betrays an astonishing ignorance of that doctrine as well as its history.
We would suggest, for starters, that Cohen read the history behind why Thomas Jefferson purchased a Koran. (The short answer is that he wanted to understand why the Barbary Pirates were engaging in what they called “jihad” against Americans.) He could then move on to Andrew Bostom’s The Legacy of Jihad.
No doubt we will see more of the ideologically-driven illogic displayed in Cohen’s column. The reason is simple: the apologists for radical Islam cannot defend the facts about radical Islam, so their only play is to attempt to silence anyone who exposes the truth. This includes the shameful exploitation of a horrendous tragedy in Norway.
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Breivik Massacres because of Islam
John R. Houk
© July 26, 2011
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The Norway terrorist – and - Ideologically-driven illogic
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