Saturday, March 24, 2012

Western world is blind

Op-ed: Despite Muslim murderousness, West refrains from admitting Islam is the problem

Shaul Rosenfeld
Published: 03.24.12, 13:09 / Israel Opinion
YNET NEWS
Many in Israel and in the West have condemned the Toulouse murders and killer's monstrosity in recent days, and some even expanded the scope of denunciation to include Mohammed Mareh's jihadist sources of inspiration and the hotbeds of fundamentalist Islamic incitement. Yet still, almost everyone is staying away from pointing the finger at Islam as a whole, a religion that like an interminable production line gives rise to such phenomena, organizations and murderers.

These terror attacks, in Israel and abroad, are aimed at killing as many people as possible, at times while executing children; the Islamic terror industry knows no boundaries and cannot be satisfied. In 2010 alone, according to official figures, Islamic terror and violence slaughtered no fewer than 29,832 people. The actual numbers are likely much higher.
Yet in the West, which has turned double standards into a vocation and the rolling of one's eyes into an art form, people are looking helplessly at the numbers and horrors. Not only do they fail to even imagine that something in Muslim culture may encourage this horrifying violence, they focus on identifying the "real culprits": Western colonialism, Israeli occupation, American imperialism or Western support for corrupt, greedy Arab leaders.
And so, a terror endorser like Professor Tariq Ramadan from Oxford enjoys wonderful Western hospitality and is an honorable guest at almost any relevant academic forum in the West. Moazzam Begg, known as the Taliban's most well-known supporter in Britain, receives Amnesty's patronage, and Iqbal Sacranie is knighted after warmly endorsing Ayatollah Khomeini's religious edict against Salman Rushdie.
Meanwhile, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf became President Barack Obama's envoy to the Persian Gulf, even though he claimed that US policy contributed to the September 11 attacks and does not view Hamas as a terrorist organization.
Blame IsraelAt this time, almost any terror group on earth originates from the Muslim world, with some Muslims not shying away from executing children, in Itamar or Toulouse. Nonetheless, we see an amazing alliance flourishing between the finest members of Western and Israel's elites - which seemingly espouse equality, democracy, human rights, and women's and minority's rights - and the finest Islamic zealots, who crudely trample all of these values.
Given such atmosphere, it is only natural for an intellectual like Noam Chomsky to curry favor with well-renowned Lebanese humanist Hassan Nasrallah and slam Israel, or for an eminent feminist like Judith Butler to gleefully endorse a boycott of Israel. At the same time, she travels to the kingdom of freedom and progress in Ramallah and Jenin in order to share with local Arabs her insights on women's rights, while outside the lecture hall the subjects of her lecture walk around wearing veils, burqas or hijabs.
In the West and in Israel, there is nothing new about this hypocrisy or blindness. In the same spirit, Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir were able to wholly deny the horrific acts of Stalin and Mao Zedong, even when evidence showing otherwise was piling up. When intellectual elites are the ones to distinguish the sons of light from the sons of darkness, leftist icon Sartre can become the flag bearer of the sons of light, while a man like Albert Camus, who dared to condemn the crimes of Soviet communism, is slammed as a son of darkness.
In this day and age, when anyone who praises the violent and repressive Islamic religion and culture is assured of dubious glory, we won't see a local Camus rising anytime soon. For the time being, we shall have to settle for the likes of David Grossman and Amos Oz, who will resort to holy literary fury in order to explain why blame lies almost entirely with the Jewish state, and not with our Muslim neighbors, heaven forbid.

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NOTE: Snapshots of Islam, its victims ...

in this on-going, never-ending war.

The Fogel Family

Victims of the Toulouse shooting. Top, from left: Arieh and Gabriel Sandler. Bottom, from left: Rabbi Jonathan Sandler, father of Arieh and Gabriel, and Miriam Monsonego