Lebanon Daily News-re Islamists and hate
At least Islamists don’t hide their hate
By DAN SERNOFFSKY
Lebanon Daily News
var requestedWidth = 0;
if(requestedWidth > 0){ document.getElementById(‘articleViewerGroup’).style.width = requestedWidth + “px”; document.getElementById(‘articleViewerGroup’).style.margin = “0px 0px 10px 10px”; } The good news out of Khartoum is that Gillian Gibbons has been pardoned and is back in England, a far, far better fate than the one she faced only a week ago.Gibbons was the school teacher who unwittingly touched off a major firestorm when, while teaching in Sudan, she was a party to naming a class teddy bear “Mohammad.” That the stuffed toy was named for a student, and not for the founder of the world’s second-most-intolerant religion, seemed not to matter.
When first arrested on charges of blasphemy, she faced a possible sentence of 40 lashes and six months in prison. When she was sentenced to 15 days, it touched off demonstrations in which crowds were clamoring for her death. These crowds were carrying with them swords and other implements that might be used in a beheading.
Gibbons never served her sentence. Sudanese authorities kept her in protective custody to prevent demonstrators from making good on their threats, and bowing to international pressure, the Sudanese president pardoned her and quickly
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helped set in motion the deportation proceedings that returned her to England.Ironically, while Gibbons was being “rescued” from her predicament, half a world away the news came out that radio talk-show host Don Imus was returning to the air after having served his “sentence” for having violated the tenets of the world’s most intolerant religion, political correctness.
For all the shock and outrage expressed over the arrest of Gibbons, which came less than two weeks after another violation of Sharia law in Saudi Arabia resulted in the imposition of 200 lashes and a six-month prison sentence on a woman who had been gang-raped — after having been in the company of a male to whom she was not related, the violation for which she was punished — there are still more than a few who insist that Imus should not have been given any sort of reprieve. His on-air comments about the Rutgers women’s basketball team were deemed so insensitive — even if they were the same words used by numerous rap “artists” — that some members of the Rutgers team felt the comments forever tarnished the team’s achievements.
It is becoming increasingly apparent that the only difference between the Sharia law Islamists would like to instituted in the United States under the flag of a new Caliphate and the political correctness the anti-American leftists would like to impose is just a matter of honesty. Although their spokesmen in the West carefully couch their words in nonthreatening phrases while seeking sympathy as victims, the proponents of Islam have made no secret about their aims. The “Great Satan” must be defeated; Western culture abolished; dhimmi imposed on those who do not wish to convert; and constitutional governance revoked.
The politically correct have similar aims, especially in abrogating the U.S. Constitution. The First Amendment guarantees freedom of speech, an anathema to both Islam and the left. Salman Rushdie, Theo van Gogh, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a handful of Danish cartoonists and others stand in testimony to Islamic opposition to free expression. Van Gogh, in fact, paid with his life.
Although they do not live under the sentence of death, Imus, Lawrence Summers, John Rocker and Trent Lott, among many others, have had their livelihoods taken away from them, their reputations tarnished for what were deemed impolitic remarks, even if such remarks may indeed simply come in the exercise of their right to free speech. Literature, including some of the greatest American novels, has become the target of censorship. Indeed, the constant push for “hate-crimes” legislation is designed to not only impose legal limits on the freedom of speech but to institute Orwellian thought control.
There is, however, one major difference between the honesty of the Islamists and the dishonesty of the politically correct. The latter can function only under an open, democratic society, but oddly enough, the proponents, in serving as apologists for the former, fail to comprehend exactly what would happen under Sharia law.
Those apologists, those who would place part of the blame of Gibbons for naming the teddy bear Mohammad by claiming that Christians would be equally incensed if someone were to name a teddy bear Jesus; those who would avoid confrontation with Islam by censoring potentially offensive manuscripts; those who, in the name of cooperation, would accede to Islamic demands in the workplace or in public facilities, fail to recognize that under Sharia law, they would be silenced. And the freedom they, and we, take for granted would cease to exist.
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Sernoffsky can be reached at:
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