British Prime Minister Tony Blair has gone on an appeasement spree and
no one seems to mind. On Friday, Blair gave a marquis interview to
Al-Jazeera's new psychological warfare platform - its English-language
channel - to celebrate its launch.
It is unclear whether Blair meant to give the impression in that
interview that he agreed with Al-Jazeera's Man-about-Town-in-Britain
David Frost's assertion that the US-British war in Iraq is "pretty much
a disaster." But Blair has made unmistakably clear that what he is
suing for now is an ignominious American-British retreat from Iraq.
In his recent statements and actions, Blair has been unambiguous in
communicating his belief that peace in Iraq begins with Israeli
surrender to the Palestinians, Hizbullah and Syria. Blair sees in
suicidal Israeli retreats from the Golan Heights, Judea and Samaria the
key to unlocking the hearts of the mullahs in Teheran and the
Ba'athists in Damascus. As Blair sees it, these enemies of Israel, the
US, Britain and the entire Free World will suddenly become reliable
friends of the non-Jewish West if Israel is left at their tender
mercies. As friends, Iran and Syria will allow the US and Britain to
surrender Iraq with their heads held high as they hand global jihadists
their greatest victory since the Soviet retreat from Afghanistan.
No less disturbing than Blair's embrace of surrender as a national
strategy is the utter lack of outrage against his decision in the
British and international media. No one questioned for instance, his
decision to grant Al-Jazeera in English an exclusive interview. It is
widely accepted, even by some of the British media, that Al-Jazeera's
Arabic satellite station is used as a recruiting tool for global jihad.
It can be reasonably presumed that the English channel will be used to
erode the West's will to defend itself against global jihadist
domination. The fact that the network is now operating an English
channel should send a chill up the spine of Western and specifically
British media outlets which will now have to compete against an enemy
propaganda arm masquerading as a news channel.
THERE ARE many reasons that actions like Blair's strategic retreat from
reason and responsibility have gone uncriticized by the media. It is
not simply that Western, and particularly European journalists are
overwhelmingly anti-American and virulently anti-Israel. One of the
central reasons for the silence of Western intellectuals and media in
the face of actions like Blair's is fear of death at the hands of
jihadists.
In France today, high school teacher Robert Redeker has been living in
hiding for two months. On September 19 Redeker published an op-ed in Le
Figaro in which he decried Islamist intimidation of freedom of thought
and expression in the West as manifested by the attacks against Pope
Benedict XVI and against Christians in general which followed the
pontiff's remarks on jihad earlier that month.
Redeker wrote, "As in the Cold War, where violence and intimidation
were the methods used by an ideology hell bent on hegemony, so today
Islam tries to put its leaden mantel all over the world. Benedict XVI's
cruel experience is testimony to this. Nowadays, as in those times, the
West has to be called the 'Free World' in comparison to the Muslim
world; likewise, the enemies of the 'Free World,' the zealous
bureaucrats of the Koran's vision, who swarm in the very center of the
'Free World,' should be called by their true name."
In reaction to Redeker's column, Egypt banned Le Figaro and Redeker
received numerous death threats. His address and maps to his home were
published on al-Qaida-linked Web sites and he was forced to leave his
job, and flee for his life. While Redeker e-mailed a colleague that
French police have set free the man they know was behind the threats to
his life, Redeker recently described his plight to a friend in the
following fashion, "There is no safe place for me, I have to beg, two
evenings here, two evenings there... I am under the constant protection
of the police. I must cancel all scheduled conferences."
For its part, Le Figaro's editor appeared on Al-Jazeera to apologize
for publishing Redeker's article.
This weekend British author Douglas Murray discussed the intellectual
terror in the Netherlands. Murray, who recently published
Neoconservativism: Why We Need It, spoke at a conference in Palm Beach,
Florida sponsored by the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He noted that
the two strongest voices in Holland warning against Islamic subversion
of Dutch culture and society - Pim Fortyn and Theo Van Gogh - were
murdered.
The third most prominent voice calling for the Dutch to take measures
to defend themselves, former member of parliament Ayan Hirsi Ali, lives
in Washington, DC today.
Her former colleague in the Dutch parliament, Geert Wilders, has been
living under military protection, without a home, for years. In the
current elections, Wilders has been unable to campaign because his
whereabouts can never be announced. His supporters were reluctant to
run for office on his candidates' slate for fear of being similarly
threatened with murder. Last month, two of his campaign workers were
beaten while putting up campaign posters in Amsterdam.
In 2000, Bart Jan Spruyt, a leading conservative intellectual in
Holland established a neoconservative think tank called the Edmund
Burke Institute. One of the goals of his institute is to convince the
Dutch to defend themselves against the growing Islamist threat. In the
period that followed, Spruyt was approached by security services and
told that he should hire a bodyguard for personal protection. Although
he couldn't afford the cost of a bodyguard, the police eventually
provided him with protection after showing up at his office hours after
Van Gogh was butchered by a jihadist in the streets of Amsterdam in
November 2004.
ANOTHER LEADING conservative voice, law professor and social critic
Paul Cliteur distinguished himself for his repeated calls for freedom
of thought and for the protection of the Dutch secular state. In the
weeks after Van Gogh's murder, Cliteur was the target of unremitting
criticism from his leftist colleagues in the press. According to a
report by the International Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights, his
colleagues blamed him and his ideological allies for the radicalization
of the Muslims of Holland.
Clituer reacted to their abuse by announcing on television that he
would no longer speak out or write about the Islamic takeover of
Holland.
As the Helsinki report notes, although the European Human Rights
Convention stipulates that states must enable free speech, "Annemarie
Thomassen, a former Dutch judge at the [European Human Rights Court] in
Strasbourg, stated that the limits to freedom of speech in the European
context lie where the expressed opinions and statements affect the
human dignity of another person. This means that, according to her, in
Europe one cannot simply write and say anything one wants without
showing some respect to other persons."
IN BRITAIN itself, the fact that no media organ dared to publish the
Danish cartoons of Muhammad last year is a clear indication of the
level of fear in the hearts of those who decide what Britons will know
about their world.
Melanie Phillips, the author of Londonistan, noted at the Freedom
Center conference that what Britons hear is best described as "a
dialogue of the demented." In this dialogue, European Islamists protest
victimization at the hands of the native Europeans while threatening to
kill them, and native Europeans apologize for upsetting the Muslim
radicals and loudly criticize the US and Israel for not going gently
into that good night.
In the meantime, jihadist ideologues and political leaders are
flourishing in Europe today. In Britain, aside from happily helping
Al-Jazeera's ratings, the government has hired Muslim Brotherhood
members as counterterrorism advisers.
In the wake of the Muslim cartoon pogroms, the BBC invited Dyab Abou
Jahjah, who heads the Arab European League, to opine on the cartoons on
its News Night program. Jahjah, who is affiliated with Hizbullah, led
anti-Semitic riots in Antwerp in 2002 in which his followers smashed
the windows of Jewish businesses, chanted slogans praising Osama bin
Laden, and called out, "Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas!" Most recently,
Jahjah published cartoons depicting Anne Frank in bed with Adolph
Hitler.
The first action that Yasser Arafat took in 1994 after establishing the
Palestinian Authority was to attack Palestinian journalists, editors
and newspaper offices. Journalists and editors were arrested and
tortured and all were forced to accept PA control over their news
coverage. The man charged with overseeing censorship was then
information minister Yasser Abed Rabbo who in a later psychological
warfare coup, signed the so-called Geneva Accord with Yossi Beilin in
2003.
This is the nature of our times. We are at war and those who warn of
its dangers are being systematically silenced by our enemies who demand
that nothing get in the way of our complacency with our own
destruction.
If journalists, intellectuals, social critics, authors and concerned
citizens throughout the world do not rise up and demand that their
governments protect their right to free expression and arrest and
punish those who intimidate and trounce that right, one day, years from
now, when students of history ask how it came to pass that the Free
World willingly enabled its own destruction, they will have to look no
further than the contrasting fortunes of Al-Jazeera and Dyab Abou
Jahjah on the one hand and Le Figaro and Robert Redeker on the other.
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