Showdown with Evil

It goes without saying that insightfulcommentators find themselves challenged to face the apparently developingconfrontation with what is labeled as radical Islam.  Yes, it is a confrontation.  Wherever it finds succor, it consistentlypractices sedition against its host.  Wesee its early stages at work in Canadaand the USA and a maturerversion at work in Europe.

It knows it is fighting for the mind andloyalty of young men who can be used to attack in the name of its fraudulentversion of Islamic Jihad.  It is aprofane ideology that subjugates women and its own and anyone else it canintimidate.  I see it as an evil thatmust be opposed and bled dry and antidotes applied as had to be done with Nazismand Communism.

A reformed Islam may arise and stifle anysimilar reemergence, but there has been not much sign of that.  The militants are permitted to threaten withimpunity and cow more liberal Muslims into silence.

Around the Muslim world, Egypt isstruggling in a death grip with its own version known as the Muslimbrotherhood.  The same forces arestrongly suppressed in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere.  Except it appears that authoritarian statescan be negotiated into a devil’s deal with these forces in order to preservethemselves.  Thus it continues.  The system appears presently broken in Iraq, but theseforces are out there trying to grab control.

Many commentators see only the path towar.  In some situations that hashappened and surely it will continue to happen. More likely the demands of modernism will ameliorate all that.

Strangely, even with outrages ringing inour ears, I am optimistic that war can be generally avoided.  It has taken military confrontation wheretribalism rules, but there a sharp lesson also serves.  I recall the Canadian forces arriving in Kandahar several yearsago.  The militants saw an opportunity toattack an unseasoned force.  The resultwas several hundred dead militants after the Canadians induced them into anambush confrontation.  A local leaderdiscovered he had lost five grandsons and the local militants were hugelydiminished in reputation.

Outside that the rest have centralgovernments that need productive citizens. The pressure on these societies to allow their women to contribute tofamily incomes is intense and can only worsen. In time, it cannot be withstood. This all leads to freedom for women. With that the rise of a secular society becomes unstoppable.  The problem today is the age old suppressionof both women and any other designated minority is ingrained and must beameliorated.  This can only be done witheconomic liberation which is been forced on these societies.

AShowdown with Evil

BY PHYLLIS CHESLER

POSTED ON DECEMBER 26 2010 9:30 PM

http://www.newsrealblog.com/2010/12/26/a-showdown-with-evil

PhyllisChesler is an Emerita Professor of Psychology and Women's Studies at City Universityof New York.For extended biography visit ThePhyllis Chesler Organization.

Dr. Jamie Glazov and his Canadian publisher,Mantua Books, have just published a new kind of “samizdat” which is the Russianword for self-publications written by dissidents and passed from hand to hand.“Self-publishing” (by hand, on typewriters, on printing presses) was a20th century way of dealing with Soviet government censorship. The Russian authorsand readers who were found with such writing in their possession were routinelysubjected to harsh imprisonment.

Westerners, (and this includes Israel), do not live in a SovietGulag and are not subject to political censorship, but we do face a new kind ofOrwellian censorship and self-censorship. Independent andanti-totalitarian thinkers and activists are demonized, “disappeared,” legallysued, threatened with death—and in the name of anti-racism and human rights.Historian, journalist and Frontpage editor Glazov has been trackingthis astounding turn of events—both the censorship and its denial—for a verylong time, perhaps even in utero. After all, his parents were Soviet dissidentsand he dedicates the book to his mother.

Glazov’s book is a careful compilation of selectedinterviews which he conducted with 30 dissidents, including one with himselfand (full disclosure) one with me as well, between 2004-2010. These interviewsappeared in David Horowitz’s Frontpage magazine. The book is titled: Showdown With Evil: Our Struggle Against Tyranny and Terror.Glazov understands that the new Evil Empire is the global alliance betweenIslamist totalitarianism and western liberal progressivism or leftism. Theinterviewees’ work is post the Intifada of 2000 and post 9/11.

This collection showcases some of theradically dissident work being done by those who are defamed and marginalizedby the mainstream media as “conservatives,” “Islamophobes,” “racists,” and“traitors.”  Glazov stands with them. Included here are Steven Emerson,Victor Davis Hanson, David Horowitz, Andrew Klavan, Rep. Sue Myrick, RobertSpencer, and Charles Winecoff.

Glazov has consistently and persistently supportedhuman rights, women’s rights and gay rights. He has a verymoving interview with Charles Winecoff in this book. Winecoff“came out” as a conservative in the gay rights movement and had the same kindof “Darkness at Noon” experience that others, including myself have had.

Technically, Glazov did not “self-publish.”Publisher Howard Rotberg founded MantuaBooks and is Glazov’s publisher. On the other hand, Mantua is a small, relatively new press, onewhich was forged in fire, and Rotberg is as determined as Glazov is to publishthe truth-which-dare-not-speak-its-name in most mainstream westernpublications.

Rotberg, a Jewish lawyer, self-published hisfirst novel, The Second Catastrophe: A Novel About a Book and Its Author, in2003. He was not only defamed in a Canadian bookstore when two Arabs disruptedhis lecture by calling him a “f**ing Jew” but was then labeled aracist-Zionist. His work was banned from the bookstore chain. Sincethen, Mantua has published six books, includingDavid Solway’s Hear, O Israeland now this work by Glazov.

The interviewer, Glazov, and his interviewees allunderstand that their difficulties here are nowhere near as perilous as arethose of their counterparts in the Islamic and communist worldwhere the media is controlled by the state and in which anyonewho publishes anything—however minor—against the party line (or whichexposes the corruption of government officials), is jailed, tortured, ormurdered. 

For example, in 2006, Moscow journalist Anna Politkovskaya was murderedbecause of her opposition to Putin’s policies in Chechyna; her murderer remainsunknown. Attorney Sergei L. Magnitsky exposed officialRussian corruption against an American firm. He was jailed in 2008, and thenrefused medical treatment while in custody; this purposeful neglect killed him. Finally,professor and human rights activist Liu Xiaobo was arrested, sentenced toeleven years in prison and, in 2010, not allowed to travel to Sweden to receive the Noble PeacePrize. His crime? “Inciting subversion of state power” by crafting and signing a humanrights charter in 2008.

And, in the Islamic world: In 2006, Kareem Amer, anEgyptian blogger and former law student, was expelled from al-Azhar Universityfor criticizing some of the university’s instructors, writing in his blog thatthe “professors and sheikhs at al-Azhar who … stand against anyone who thinksfreely” would “end up in the dustbin of history”. The prosecutor admitted that hewas on a “jihad” against Amer. In 2007, he was sentenced to 3 years in prisonon charges of atheism (“There is no God except Man,” he wrote). His words wereseen as defaming the President of Egypt, disrupting public security, andinciting hatred against Islam.

In September 2010, Hossein Derakshan, known as Iran’s “blogfather” because he helped to start Iran’s blogging revolution, was sentenced to 19½ years in prison, supposedly for spying on behalf of Israel. He left Iran for Canadain 2000 and visited Israelas a Canadian citizen in 2006. Although at first he was harshly critical ofPresident Ahmadinejad, eventually he changed his mind and began blogging infavor of him, even comparing him to a modern-day Che Guevara. But the regimestill decided to make an example of him when he returned to Iran in 2008.

In June, 2010, Bangladeshi authorities arrested the publisher Mahmudur Rahman and closed hisnewspaper because he dared to publish reports about government corruption andabuses of power. He has been beaten incustody, and 34 charges have been lodgedagainst him. His fate remains unknown.

This does not occur in the West and in Israel. However, Glazov and hiscontributors have each sounded the alarm abouta different and dangerously new kind of censorship. While there is no statecensorship—there are no communist-style government-run publishing houses in the West—there is, nevertheless,“politically correct” censorship in public broadcasting which is partiallygovernment-funded and which wields enormous influence among the professoriateand the intelligentsia.

Thus, private publishinghouses as well as universitypresses have become increasingly and rigidly left in orientation; the PartyLine is an anti-American, anti-Israel, and pro-Palestinian line. No other viewsneed apply. America and Israel are, allegedly, the world’s greatestimperialists, colonialists, racists, and aggressor nations. The long and tragichistory of Islamic colonialism, racism, and jihad is not a welcome view.

More: Like the professoriate, publishers have becomeespecially cautious, some might say cowardly or sadly, realistic. They do notwant an Islamist bomb thrown through their windows, they do not want to absorbthe cost of security for an author against whom a fatwa hasbeen issued, nor do they want to pay to defend themselves against a battery ofIslamist and leftist lawyers chargingthem with “racism” and “Islamophobia.”

The lawsuits andthe fatwas are real. They have exerted a profound and chilling effect on FreeSpeech in the West. Salman Rushdie, Geert Wilders, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, MagdiAllam, Elizabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff, all come instantly to mind. All haverequired round-the-clock protection orhave been sued for “racist” or “hate” speech by those who themselves specializein telling Big Lies about America, Jews, and Israel. Theo Von Gogh was murdered, butchered, by aMoroccan-Dutch Islamist for daring to co-produce a film titled “Submission”about the normalization of barbaric violence towards Muslim women in Islam’sname.

Today, both in “Eurabia” (the term is Bat Ye’or’s) and inNorth America, any thinker, writer, academic, or intellectual who dares challenge theParty Line will be marginalized, scorned, demonized, not published; ifpublished, not reviewed; if reviewed, reviewed negatively; and, in any event, notassigned by professors, and never quoted in the left, liberal, and mainstreammedia as an expert. In addition, friendships will end, political networks willcrumble. The post-9/11 and “matzav” world viewers will not be hired asprofessors; their works will onlybe read by other post 9/11 world viewers.

Thus, in the wake of this steady tsunami, conservativeinternet sites, publishing imprints, andsmall, new publishers, such as MantuaBooks, have arisen. I want to introduce you to the steadfast and principledGlazov by quoting from him at length from the excellent interview with him which was conducted by DavidSwindle, the editor of NewsReal Blog. Here is Glazov in his own words:

“Radical Islam is now the greatest threat the West faces.We are, as Norman Podhoretz has noted, in World War IV. We face totalitarianand religious zealots who seek to establish an Islamic caliphate worldwide.They hate freedom and liberty, and so they hate and need to destroy the United Statesand Israelthe most, since these two nations are the bulwarks and representatives offreedom in the world.”

They also hate women: “…it is obvious that woman-hatred isintertwined with Islamic terror. The more fanatical and violent the Islamicterrorist and his milieu, the more misogyny you will find there…to fight forwomen’s rights under Islam is also to stick a dagger into the heart of Islamic jihad.”

Where Islamic gender apartheid is allowed to flourish,cancerous, violent extremism is destined to follow.

Glazov does not mince words about what is wrong with Islamin the 21st century. But there is a difference, he insists, between being bluntand being bigoted.

“This is not about demonizing Muslims or attackingMuslims,” he writes. “We are the allies of Muslims. I consider myselfpro-Muslim. Muslims are the victims of Islam and its totalitarian structures. Ispend a large part of my life fighting for the rights of Muslim women whosuffer under Islamic gender apartheid. Does this make me anti-Muslim orpro-Muslim? I fight on behalf of Muslims who want to live in freedom and whodon’t want to suffer the harsh punishments of Sharia Law. I fight for a worldwhere young Muslim boys and girls are not brainwashed and forced to blowthemselves up. Does this make me anti-Muslim or pro-Muslim?”

These are crucial questions and I expect that Glazov willkeep asking them.

This article was originally published by Israel NationalNews on December26, 2010.