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By Don Feder
www.frontpagemag.com

A committee appointed by the British government, composed of Muslims, wants the nation to scrap its Holocaust Memorial Day, in the name of inclusiveness and sensitivity. No word yet on whether they also want to eliminate Passover — said to be insensitive to Egyptians.

The committee recommends replacing the observance (started in 2001 and held annually on January 27) with a Genocide (a.k.a., Victimhood) Day, which would recognize the alleged mass murder of Muslims in “Palestine,” Chechnya, Bosnia, and wherever else followers of the Religion of Peace have come into conflict with the accursed infidel.

In making its case for inclusiveness, the committee somehow neglected to mention the many victims of Muslim mayhem — Armenians, Sudanese Christians, Kosovar Serbs (ethnically cleansed in the wake of NATO’s war on Yugoslavia), and Hindus — to name but a few. If an Arab stubbed his toe on the boot of a Christian knight sometime in the 11th century, it’s a crime against humanity that must be memorialized throughout the ages, according to the imams. On the other hand, the slaughter of infidels is seen as the will of Allah, and worthy of a Heavenly reward.

The committee maintains that Britain’s Holocaust Memorial Day fuels feelings of isolation and alienation among Muslim youth. And, well, to have a special commemoration of the systematic slaughter of one in every three Jews on earth (in an effort to annihilate an entire people), is grossly unfair, the committee suggests.

Sir Iqbal Sacranie, secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain, cautions: “We can never have double standards in terms of human life. Muslims feel hurt and excluded that their lives are not equally valuable to those lives lost in the Holocaust time.”

Perhaps Sir Iqbal also believes that 9/11 memorials should pay homage to the Muslims in the planes, as well as the infidels in the office buildings — so that his coreligionists won’t feel that their lives have less meaning.

To understand the obscenity of Iqbal’s equation of the Holocaust with casualties in the aforesaid armed conflicts, consider the Muslims favorite “genocide”: that supposedly inflicted on the Palestinians.

Since the onset of the latest Intifada (started and maintained by Muslims), 4,000 Palestinians have died, out of a population of more than 1 million. Most were combatants. At the same time, almost 1,000 Israelis have lost their lives — overwhelmingly civilians, mostly women, children, and the elderly. Palestinian society celebrates jihad and suicide bombings. Israeli society unilaterally relinquishes territory in its quest for peace.

For the Palestinian/Holocaust analogy to be valid, Israel would have to be operating death camps — herding naked Muslims into gas chambers and burning their remains in crematoria. And Jerusalem would have to have slaughtered every third Palestinian in the world.

Instead the Palestinian population has increased dramatically — as has their life expectancy and standard of living — since Israel came into possession of the territory they inhabit at the end of the Six-Days War. To put it in Shakespearean terms, genocide should be made of sterner stuff.

Muslims can’t stand the thought of Holocaust commemorations, because, with certain honorable exceptions, Islam’s attitudes toward the Jews frequently mirror those of the Nazi killers.

Islamic polemicists have three responses to the destruction of European Jewry: 1) It never happened; 2) It happened, but the numbers are grossly exaggerated, and Zionist leaders collaborated with the Nazis; and 3) It happened, and the Jews, those enemies of humanity, had it coming.

Mahmoud Abbas, capo mafioso of the Palestinian Authority and renowned moderate, is the author of a 1983 book entitled, The Other Side: The Secret Relationship Between Nazism and the Zionist Movement. In it, the first president of Palestine (if Washington has its way) maintains that Hitler killed “only a few hundred thousand Jews,” not six million. Moreover, the Zionist leadership “was a partner in the slaughter of the Jews” — supposedly to create sympathy for the Jews, thus facilitating the creation of the Jewish state.

Holocaust denial is rampant in the Muslim world.

• In 1964, then-Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nassar (who precipitated the Six-Days War) insisted:, “No one…takes seriously the lie about six million Jews who were murdered.”
• In 2000, a columnist for The Syria Times wrote, “The most famous myth is that of the so-called Holocaust… We strongly believe that gas chambers were not used for burning (sic.) Jews.”
• Also in 2000, Sheikh Adel Bin Ahmad Bana’ma, a Saudi religious authority speaking at a Jeddah mosque, charged that Jews “disseminate everywhere the lie of the Holocaust and claim that Hitler killed six million Jews in gas chambers…This is pure falsehood.”
• A year later, Palestinian religious leader Sheikh Ibrahim Mahdi declared, “One of the Jews’ evil deeds has come to be called the Holocaust.” However, the Sheikh insisted, it has been irrefutably proven that “this crime, carried out against some of the Jews, was planned by the Jews’ leaders.”

Like other Holocaust-deniers, those of the Islamic world aren’t just flat-Earth cranks, but virulent anti-Semites. Except for a handful of European skinheads and Aryan Nation types holed up in Idaho, The Protocols of The Learned Elders of Zion is still taken seriously only among Muslims — where it’s the Harry Potter of Middle East publishing.

This Czarist forgery (which purports to expose a Jewish conspiracy to control humanity) is ubiquitous in jihad land. Saudi Arabia’s late King Faisal often gave copies to foreign visitors. Yasser Arafat was a fan. Arab periodicals quote it religiously, to demonstrate the perfidy of the Jews. In 2002, Egyptian television broadcast a 41-episode, dramatized version of The Protocols, entitled. “Horseman Without A Horse.”

The roots of Islamic anti-Semitism run deep. Mohammed never forgave the Jews for rejecting his message. After he came to power, Jewish tribes in the Arabian peninsula were converted by the sword, or massacred. The Koran is rife with the Prophet’s disdain for Jews. (He called them descendants of apes and pigs.) Alongside this are calls to fight the Jews, who are indicted as the enemies of Allah.

Over the centuries, this theological anti-Semitism has evolved into a conviction that Jews are the repositories of evil in the world and Islam’s principal enemies.

It’s not surprising that the resurgence of widespread anti-Semitism on the European continent, after years of quiescence, parallels the influx of Middle East Muslims.

When Pope John Paul II paid a state visit to Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad in 2001, he must have thought he’d stepped off the plane and into a Nuremberg rally. In welcoming the pontiff, Assad proclaimed, “They [the Jews] try to kill all the principles of divine faiths with the same mentality of betraying Jesus Christ and torturing Him, and in the same way that they tried to commit treachery against the Prophet Mohammed.”

One who took the Prophet’s call to its logical conclusion was Hajj Amin al-Husseini, grand mufti of Jerusalem before World War II. The mufti spent the war years in Berlin as an honored guest of Adolf Hitler.

Working from his office in the capital of the Third Reich, al-Husseini devoted himself to a Nazi victory, recruiting spies to serve in the Middle East and raising a Bosnian Muslim division of the Waffen SS. Described at Nuremberg as one of Eichmann’s best friends, the mufti even visited Auschwitz and urged those who ran the gas chambers to “work more diligently.”

In a radio broadcast from Berlin on November 2, 1943, Hitler’s partner in genocide condemned the Jews in language that echoed Mein Kampf : “The overwhelming egotism which lies in the character of Jews, their unworthy belief that they are God’s chosen nation and their assertion that all was created for them and that other people are animals” is the reason “[t]hey cannot mix with any other nation but live as parasites among the nations, suck out their blood, embezzle their property, corrupt their morals…The divine anger and curse that the Holy Koran mentions with reference to the Jews is because of this unique character of the Jews.”

After the war, the mufti met a young Yassar Arafat in Cairo, and the torch was passed to the next generation of Islamo-fascists. (Arafat often referred to the Nazi henchman as “our hero al-Husseini.”)

In his book, The Myth of Hitler’s Pope, Rabbi David Dalin discloses, “Arafat continued the mufti’s Nazi legacy by recruiting Nazis and neo-Nazis for Fatah and the PLO. In 1969, for example, the PLO recruited two former Nazi instructors, Erich Altern, a leader of the Gestapo’s Jewish affairs section, and Willy Berner, an SS officer in the Mauthausen extermination camp. Another former Nazi, Johann Schuller, was found supplying arms to Fatah.”

There are unavoidable parallels between Nazis and Islamists. Both adhere to totalitarian ideologies (though one is disguised as a religion); each group trains its adherents to kill without compunction and to show mercy to neither the young nor old; both nurse historical grudges and long for a settling of accounts; and each see Jews as the principal obstacle to the achievement of its utopian vision.

Of course, British Muslims are offended by Holocaust Memorials. While Nazism was a European phenomenon, post-World War II Hitler wannabes are found almost exclusively in the Arab and Muslim world. After the fall of Berlin, the center of anti-Semitic agitation shifted to Cairo, Damascus, Tehran, Riyadh, and Ramallah.

If the Blair government is really in an appeasement mode, it could balance Holocaust Memorial Day — and lessen the awful sense of alienation among Muslim youth — with a Hajj Amin al-Husseini Appreciation Day.

By Joshua Muravchik
for The Los Angeles Times

The most shocking outcome of the recent U.N. summit was the failure, once again, of the world organization to take a definitive stand against terrorism. It was scarcely surprising that the 191 member-states could not come to agreement on adding members to the Security Council or on sweeping management reforms or on foreign aid, however disappointing these failures were to some. But a long-overdue declaration on terrorism had seemed well within reach.

That it was needed in the first place will surprise many. The sad fact is that the U.N. has never spoken clearly on this issue, thanks to the stubborn efforts of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, or OIC, made up of 56 states — nearly 30% of the U.N.’s membership.

After 9/11, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan took it upon himself to secure a blanket condemnation of terrorism, but it was beaten back by the OIC. Last year, after the attack that killed hundreds of schoolchildren in Beslan, Russia, Annan tried to get a resolution of this kind through the Security Council but was forced to settle for equivocal language in order to secure the votes of OIC members Pakistan and Algeria.

A proposed U.N. convention against terrorism has been stalled since 1997. The holdup? How to define terrorism. But this is nothing more than a semantic trick. The Islamic states insist that terrorism must be defined not by the nature of the act but by its purpose. Putting a bomb in a market or train or bus is not an act of terrorism, they say, if it is done for a righteous purpose; namely national liberation or resistance to occupation.

To say there is a problem of definition is to focus on a word. The real question is whether it is ever legitimate to target women, children and other noncombatants. For the Islamic states, the answer is yes.

Not only have they succeeded in blocking anti-terror resolutions, they have secured votes endorsing their approach. In 1970, the General Assembly adopted a resolution “reaffirm[ing] … the legitimacy of the struggle of the colonial peoples and peoples under alien domination to exercise their right to self-determination and independence by all the necessary means at their disposal.” This has been repeated several times by the General Assembly and the Commission on Human Rights. Everyone understands that the last phrase is a euphemism for terrorism.

Still, it had seemed that in the aftermath of 9/11, the bombings in Bali, Madrid and London and the shootings in Beslan, not to mention the continuing carnage in Iraq and Israel, that the time had come to turn a new page. In 2004, the U.N.’s High Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change proposed to cut the Gordian knot by having the U.N. embrace this common-sense language: “Any action constitutes terrorism if it is intended to cause death or serious bodily harm to civilians or noncombatants with the purpose of intimidating a population or compelling a government or an international organization to do or abstain from doing any act.”

This proposal apparently enjoyed the support of the panel’s two key Islamic representatives, Nafis Sadik of Pakistan and Amr Moussa of Egypt, who is the secretary-general of the Arab League. Annan embraced this language and included it in the proposals he sent to last week’s summit. With Annan and the U.S. representatives working together, supported by other Western diplomats, and with Moussa having already signed on, it looked as if the new language would sail through.

But then Islamic states again dug in their heels, and these words were stripped out of the final document. In its place was a ringing denunciation of terrorism, which, however, leaves Islamic leaders free to insist, as leading Sunni theologian Sheik Mohammed Sayed Tantawi did recently, that bombings of civilians in places such as Israel and Iraq carried out to “resist occupation” are not covered by this resolution because they do not amount to terrorism.

U.S. Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns claimed victory nonetheless because we had at least blocked an explicit reiteration of the U.N.’s support for terrorism. “Sometimes in diplomacy, defeating negative measures is a very important achievement,” he said.

If blocking yet another pro-terror resolution is an achievement by U.N. standards, then the institution’s moral corruption may prove harder to cure than the material corruption so much at the center of attention.

By Robert Spencer
www.frontpagemagazine.com

Pigs are disappearing all over England, but not because of some porcine variant of Mad Cow Disease: rather, the most implacable foe of the swine is turning out to be multiculturalism.

The latest assault came in the benefits department at Dudley Council, West Midlands, where employees were told that they were no longer allowed to have any representations of pigs at their desks. Some had little porcine porcelain figurines. Others had toys or calendars of cute little pigs. One had a tissue box depicting Winnie the Pooh and Piglet. All of this had to go, not because of new some new anti-kitsch ordinance, but because Muslims might be offended — particularly now, what with Ramadan beginning. How could a pious Muslim in the Dudley Council, West Midlands benefits department redouble his efforts to conform his life to the will of Allah with all these…pigs staring him in the face? It was an insult!

This was not the first anti-pig initiative in Britain. In Derby, Muslims took offense at plans to restore the statue of the Florentine Boar, which had stood in the Derby Park for over a hundred years before it was decapitated by a German bomb in 1942. Recent plans to rebuild the Boar’s head ran into resistance from local Muslims. Suman Gupta, a local Council member, warned: “If the statue of the boar is put back at the Arboretum I have been told that it will not be there the next day, or at least it won’t be in the same condition the next day at least. We should not have the boar because it is offensive to some of the groups in the immediate area.” However, after more than 2,000 locals signed petitions in favor of the Boar, local authorities decided to bend to public opinion and go ahead with their original plans to restore the statue.

Elsewhere in England pigs did not fare so well. In March 2003, Barbara Harris, head teacher at Park Road Junior Infant and Nursery School in Batley, West Yorkshire, banned stories mentioning pigs. “Recently,” Harris explained, “I have been aware of an occasion where young Muslim children in class were read stories about pigs. We try to be sensitive to the fact that for Muslims talk of pigs is offensive.” Harris didn’t mention whether or not she intended to allow Muslim students to possess copies of the Qur’an at the school, despite its repeated mention of how Allah cursed Jews and turned them into apes and pigs (2:62-65; 5:59-60; 7:166).

Why have pigs become so unpopular in Britain? Mahbubur Rahman, a Muslim Councillor in West Midlands, summed it up in explaining why the toy pigs had to go: “It’s a tolerance,” he said, “of people’s beliefs.”

How’s that again? It’s “a tolerance of people’s beliefs” to deny to others the right to display harmless pictures and figurines? Mahbubur Rahman seems unacquainted with the dictum, widely attributed to Voltaire, that “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” Yet this is what tolerance really is: the acceptance of the fact that in a free society, some will do and say things of which one may disapprove, and that one has no consequent right to command or force them to stop. If this is not recognized in any given society, that society is not in fact free at all — any more than Henry Ford’s offer that “You can have a car in any color you want, as long as it’s black” represented a genuine choice.

For Rahman instead to equate a British capitulation to Muslim sensibilities with tolerance indicates that he has confused Islamic supremacism with tolerance. This is perhaps not surprising given the near-universal tendency among Muslims and non-Muslims alike to laud Medieval Muslim Spain as a proto-multiculturalist paradise of tolerance, when actually it was a paradise for Islamic supremacists. Christians and Jews lived in harmony with Muslims only as inferiors. Historian Kenneth Baxter Wolf notes that the after the Muslim conquest, the conquerors imposed new laws “aimed at limiting those aspects of the Christian cult which seemed to compromise the dominant position of Islam.” After enumerating a standard list of the laws restricting non-Muslims (dhimmis) — no building of new churches, no holding authority over Muslims, distinctive clothing, etc. — he adds: “Aside from such cultic restrictions most of the laws were simply designed to underscore the position of the dimmîs as second-class citizens.”

Multiculturalism? Tolerance? Not by any modern standard. And neither are the disappearing pigs of Great Britain.