Does not even the US military have any standards of honor?
B General Petraeus Joins Obama in Appeasing Islamic Thuggery Read what Nina Shea and Paul Marshall at the Hudson Institute Center for Religious Freedom <http://crf.hudson.org> in Washington, DC have written. Acquiesence to Islamic Blasphemy is tantamount to appeasment of totalitarian thuggery. Witness the murders of Pakistani provincial leaders and cabinet officials who defended human rights, or Christian neighbors in the predominately Islamic country. Or witness the serious threats to Geert Wilders from the head of Shariah4Holland because of Wilders announcement of a forthcoming film Fitna-2. Shame on US political leaders like Senate Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid and GOP South Carolina US Senator Lindsey Graham, liberal US Supreme Court Judge Stephen Breyer and Gen. Petreaus, among others, who suggest punishment for exercising Constitutional free speech rights in the criticism of a religion. Last Friday at a New York State Senate hearing of post 9/11 counterterrorism in lower Manhattan, you may have seen via live streaming, Brooklyn State Senator, Eric Adams engage in histrionic defense of Islamic Blasphemy waving a Qur'an at apostate from Islam, Nonie Darwish of Former Muslims United, who experienced the strictures of Shariah in her native Egypt. This is defacto recognition of Shariah by unthinking prominent military, polltical and judicial figures in the American pantheon. Pastor Terry Jones may have been wantonly exercising his free speech rights under our Constitution by provocatively burning a copy of the Qur'an. That does not support the murders of hapless UN staffers in Afghanistan by mobs of frenzied local Muslims fulfilling the will of Allah as exemplified by his messenger Mohammed to commit violent Jihad against kafirs, ubelievers. The liberal media and the highest court in our land didn't suggest that anti-War flag burners be imprisoned or executed during the Viet Nam era. Quite to the contrary. So why are public figures suggesting that burning a Qur'an constitute grounds for passing laws infringing on our exercise of dissent under the First Amendment. Marshall & Shea suggest that we in the West should never acquiesce to intimidation and patent thuggery by self-proclaimed Islamic clerics and Imams as Blasphemy in the name of their G-d, Allah, when they commit murders of defenders of human rights and liberty the cornerstone of our Judeo-Christian values and our Constitution. <http://www.nationalreview.com/> NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE www.nationalreview.com <http://www.nationalreview.com/> PRINT Paul Marshall & Nina Shea <http://www.nationalreview.com/multiple-author-archive?author%5b%5d=207099&a uthor%5b%5d=177438&> Archive | <http://www.nationalreview.com/user/login?destination=articles%2Fprint%2F264 222> Log In April 8, 2011 4:00 A.M. Afghan Blowback There is no reason to restrict our freedoms at home. Last weekend, there were violent demonstrations in Afghanistan to protest a Koran burning in Florida. The Afghans who incited the demonstrations have delivered on several key Taliban objectives. They scored important points in the battle for hearts and minds when the U.S. president and senior American and NATO military commanders went on the defensive before Afghan audiences. More troubling, powerful American voices expressed doubts about bedrock American freedoms of speech and religion. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid debated holding hearings on Koran desecration. Sen. Lindsey Graham, who boasts of being a chief sponsor of legislation against flag burning, expressed his wish to hold people accountable for Koran burnings, since, while free speech is a great idea, America is in a war. When given a chance to explain, he dug this hole deeper <http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/print/263848> . This isnt the first time that violence has secured concessions from U.S. officials: Last September, Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer told an interviewer of his desire for a First Amendment exception that would allow those who immolate the Muslim holy book to be punished. These senior American leaders are, in effect, contemplating an Islamic blasphemy law the first U.S. federal blasphemy law for any religion. In response to this baleful drama, the first thing to understand is that accusations of apostasy, blasphemy, and insulting Islam are protean. In the Muslim world, blasphemy punishments are not used primarily against religious insult by the intolerant, but against those who express unpopular or dissenting views. International human-rights groups report that in Pakistan, blasphemy charges are also commonly used against neighbors and co-workers to settle personal scores. Muslim blasphemy has recently been defined to include: denouncing stoning as a human-rights violation (Sudan), opening girls schools (Bangladesh), criticizing the Guardianship of the Jurists (Iran), petitioning for a constitution (Saudi Arabia), use of the word Allah by Christians (Malaysia), rejecting an order for violent jihad (Sudan), praying at the graves of relatives (Saudi Arabia), translating the Koran into Dari (Afghanistan), accidentally tearing a calendar page containing a Koranic verse (Pakistan), naming a teddy bear after a boy named Mohamed (Sudan), urging that the Koran be understood in its historical and cultural context (Indonesia), teaching Shiism (Egypt), and calling for a ban on child brides (Yemen). Mob violence, intimidation, court trials, and penalties accompany these cases. And once in place, blasphemy laws are nearly impossible to reform. This year in Pakistan, Gov. Salman Taseer and cabinet minister Shabbaz Bhatti were murdered for opposing such laws. Second, complaints of blasphemy are politically manipulated, particularly when levelled against someone in a foreign country. While, with political and social turmoil overwhelming many Organization of Islamic Conference members, the Florida Koran-burning case has the potential of going viral, so far it has not caused rioting in Mecca or anywhere else in the Muslim heartland, the Arab world. In fact, it is only rare Western insults to Islam, such as the Danish cartoons or the popes Regensburg speech (which linked Islam to violence), that become causes célèbres worldwide, and these occur only after concerted political campaigns <http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/263779/new-koran-campaign-follows-old- patterns-paul-marshall> to foment outrage. Finally, by their nature, Muslim blasphemy punishments abjectly fail at bringing about social peace. Even aside from the problem of a law to protect only one religion, in the battle of ideas within Islam, blasphemy restrictions empower extremists, who use them to silence alternative voices. Muslim religious and political reformers working to lift their societies out of stunting ideological conformity are the first to be silenced. As one such Muslim reformer, the late Egyptian scholar Nasr Hamid Abu-Zayd, pointed out: Having been at the receiving end of such allegations and driven from my home in Egypt to exile in the Netherlands I can state with conviction that charges of apostasy and blasphemy are key weapons in the fundamentalists arsenal, strategically employed to prevent reform of Muslim societies and instead confine the worlds Muslim population to a bleak, colorless prison of socio-cultural and political conformity. The ultimate goal of the Taliban and other radical groups is, of course, to impose strict Islamic rule, which critically hinges on the regulation of speech about and within Islam. If our leaders now entertain proposals for restricting speech about and within Islam, one blowback from Operation Enduring Freedom may be in fact the decrease of freedom here at home. Paul Marshall and Nina Shea are senior fellows at the Hudson Institute and authors of the forthcoming <http://www.nationalreview.com/redirect/amazon.p?j=0199812284> Silenced: How Apostasy and Blasphemy Codes are Choking Freedoms Worldwide. [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] ------------------------------------ -------------------------- Want to discuss this topic? Head on over to our discussion list, [email protected]. -------------------------- Brooks Isoldi, editor [email protected] http://www.intellnet.org Post message: [email protected] Subscribe: [email protected] Unsubscribe: [email protected] *** FAIR USE NOTICE. This message contains copyrighted material whose use has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. OSINT, as a part of The Intelligence Network, is making it available without profit to OSINT YahooGroups members who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information in their efforts to advance the understanding of intelligence and law enforcement organizations, their activities, methods, techniques, human rights, civil liberties, social justice and other intelligence related issues, for non-profit research and educational purposes only. We believe that this constitutes a 'fair use' of the copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Law. If you wish to use this copyrighted material for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use,' you must obtain permission from the copyright owner. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtmlYahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/osint/ <*> Your email settings: Individual Email | Traditional <*> To change settings online go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/osint/join (Yahoo! ID required) <*> To change settings via email: [email protected] [email protected] <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [email protected] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
