The New Islamic Vigilantes of Speech

David J. Rusin of the Middle East Forum recently published an article on Islamist Watch about the vandalizing of "anti-Islamic" ads. He reveals just how pervasive the phenomenon is worldwide.

When Cyrus McGoldrick, advocacy director for the New York office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), logged into Facebook on August 12 to hint at his desire to vandalize anti-jihad ads that may soon run on city buses, he did not simply underline CAIR's troubling attitude toward free expression. McGoldrick's words — and the subsequent actions of others — have illuminated an overlooked aspect of the Islamist assault on Western speech: the defacement, if not obliteration, of political and commercial messages.

Of particular interest is the destruction of print or commercial ads of scantily clad women. I find this interesting because of the near psychotic or pathological mindset about women that Islam inculcates in Muslim men.

This phenomenon has been especially prevalent in the UK. A Times of London article revealed in 2005 that Muslims Against Advertising (MAAD) had launched a website with instructions on how to vandalize ads and which ones to select. "There is no longer any need to cringe as you walk past a sleazy poster," the group declared. "We'll improve it." Many answered the call, as ads pitching bras, beauty products, and even television programs were trashed. "Photographs of semi-dressed women are the most frequently targeted, with the offending body parts painted over or ripped off," the Times observed. In a telling example, thugs destroyed images of scantily clad women on an East London billboard promoting the series Desperate Housewives, but fully clothed characters were untouched. Responding to the controversy, leading British Islamist Ahmed Sheikh argued that "freedom of speech should end when you offend others."

Cultural jihad, or the de facto imposition of Sharia law on Western non-Muslims, is insidiously accumulative. In Britain it begins with such things as complaining about images or figures of pigs that Muslims might see in a bank or a shop. They are removed so that Muslims are not offended. Next will come a complaint about halal food not being served in restaurants and schools. Non-Muslims will be served it, as well, with or without their knowledge. Next will be a complaint that one must have some place to pray five times a day, and if an employer does not provide such a space, the street outside will do just as well, and damn the traffic jam caused by hundreds of Muslims mooning non-Muslims as they express their obeisance to a rock thousands of miles away.

Language must also be altered to preempt potential offense. Muslim criminal suspects are called "Asians." Polygamy is taboo among non-Muslims, but Muslim men collecting welfare and enjoying subsidized housing may have several dependent wives and a dozen dependent children. The taxes collected to pay for their special welfare is a form of jizya, or a tax levied on conquered infidels. Muslims may demonstrate en masse, displaying signs that damn freedom of speech, sneer at British culture, warn of violence if non-Muslims resist, and predict the Islamization of Britain, and not be charged with hate speech. Any other group behaving in such an obnoxious manner would see its members hauled into court.

Criticism of Islam is forbidden and regarded as "defamation," "bigotry," or "racism." Muslim activists are aggressive in this respect, going after not only titillating ads but serious discussions of Islam. Rusin writes:

Islamists also have adapted to the information age, recognizing that much of the Western speech they despise now exists online. Al-Azhar University scholars, representatives of the highest religious authority in the Sunni Muslim world, even crafted a fatwa in 2008 that sanctions hacking for the purposes of jihad. Therefore, those who criticize Islam or otherwise offend its followers often find that their freedom of expression is no safer on the internet than it is on a Tower Hamlets billboard.

Arab News sympathetically profiled one such hacker, a Saudi native, in 2011. "An Alkhobar woman studying in the United States is taking credit for destroying 23 Danish websites that denigrated the Prophet Muhammad," the piece begins, relaying material originally published by an Arabic-language source. "Nouf Rashid told the Arabic newspaper she was hacking into Danish websites having references to cartoons of the Prophet along with other sites that had questionable content in her view," including pornographic ones.

The focus here, however, is the pseudo-ironic and psychotic symbiosis between a creed/ideology that finds bare female anatomy offensive, yet is lured to it in spite of the proscriptions against it.

There is a link between such vandalizing and the rape and often disfigurement of non-Muslim women in Europe by Muslims, the "sex slave" rings recently exposed in Britain, and the honor-killings of Muslim-born women and girls who break Islamic rules and "go Western." This has everything to do with the Muslim dictum compelling women to cover themselves up as much as possible in burqas, veils or some other form of self-effacing garb, depending on the Islamic sect.

The phenomenon swings wildly, like bipolar dysfunction, between the vigilante censorship described by Rusin and incidents such as the rape of Lara Logan in Cairo, in which her clothes were ripped from her and even part of her hair torn out during the assault. That was not the only such incident endured by Western women in Cairo, but it is the most notorious. Her attackers wished to extinguish Logan, to wipe her out of existence.

This is the behavior of nihilists.

However, these incidents are all connected to the same criminal psychosis (or pathology) that is part and parcel of strict and even "moderate" Islamic upbringing. It is a concerted ideology that wishes to blank out women's existence, to negate it, to obliterate it. On the surface, this "gendercidal" wish seems based on the Islamic perception of men as uncontrollable demons who lose all reason and restraint at the sight of a bare ankle or arm or coiffed or perfumed hair or inviting lips or seductive eyes. Hide these things, and the libidos of Muslim men will not be triggered to launch criminal assaults.

If they are not hidden, a Muslim man cannot be held responsible for his criminal actions. If a woman is attacked, it is her fault, because her "immodesty" is regarded as the invitation of a whore or prostitute. Unveiled or uncovered women are just "meat" to be consumed by sex-starved Muslim maniacs. They can't help it, and so are forgiven. So goes the anti-reasoning. For an overview of the incidence of rape by Muslims of infidel women, see Jamie Glasov's Front Page article from a year ago in which he discusses the attitude of a Muslim rapist in Australia.

To compound this pathology, a notion has developed within the system of gender apartheid in which Muslims like “MSK” have grown up: the idea that a woman who does not veil herself is somehow responsible for any sexual or physical harm done to her. In the psychopathic mental gymnastics that occur in the perpetrators’ minds, the unveiled woman must be sexually punished for violating the “modesty” code.

Indeed, such assaults are not treated as crimes by Islam. Muslim criminals regularly claim the "right" to "teach" women not to tempt them by raping, humiliating, and even disfiguring them. The alternative for women is to make themselves non-values, to themselves or to anyone else, to erase their own identities, to de-sexualize themselves in public. To become baby-bearing, servile ciphers.

Infidel women who do not cover themselves up are regarded by Muslims as itinerant concubines, as "meat" for consumption. Whether or not they are married or legally underage, is irrelevant. One "reformist" Islamic site, "Light of Life," attempts to explain away this epistemology.

Islam admits that man has the right to possess concubines along with his wife, or wives, to fulfill his sexual needs. Islam presents a number of women that a Muslim man cannot marry, but it excludes "the ones under the control of one's right hand" from this list: "Forbidden to you [in marriage] are your mothers and [own] daughters, your sisters, your aunts paternal and maternal, your brother's daughters, your sister's ... and [already] wedded women, save what your right hands own. So God prescribes for you. Lawful for you, beyond all that, is that you may seek, using your wealth, in wedlock and not in license. Such wives as you enjoy thereby, give them their wages apportionate; it is no fault in you in your agreeing together, after the due apportionate. God is All-knowing, All-wise" (Sura al-Nisa´ 4:23, 24).

The Koran and other Islamic texts caution that it is wrong for Muslim men to have sex with captured enemy married women. This problem was solved by Mohammad and his followers by slaying their husbands. That has been the Islamic way from the beginning. The "Light of Life" site wistfully remarks, wanting his Koranic cake and eat it, too:

The Qur´an itself, however, is in desperate need of reform in this regard owing to the great progress humanity has made in equality between the sexes. This is the problem of the Muslim jurist or thinker today. As a Muslim he thinks that his holy Book was brought down (unzila) from Heaven and is authored by Allah. Therefore he cannot afford to admit any fault or failure in it; he is rather obliged to defend it against what people call "the insult to woman".

But the Koran cannot be edited, abridged, or altered. That is forbidden under pain of death. That is just as bad as burning it, or letting an infidel handle a Koran without gloves. The excision of its texts would be an act of repudiation of Allah's word. And if Allah's words cannot be taken literally, of what use are his words? This question eludes "reformists." "Reformists" go through what Glasov calls "mental gymnastics" in attempts to reconcile the dicta of a primitive creed with the modern world. It cannot be done with any credibility.

The Islamic perception of Muslim men is not that they are demons. In Islamic dogma Muslim men are regarded as "metaphysically" superior to women (and to infidels of either gender of various suasions, with Jews on the lowest rung) simply on Allah's say-so, or for some other invalid, rationalistic reason, and so their "rights" and whims and Islamic-bestowed privileges take precedence over everyone and everything.

One could hypothesize that when Islam was being knocked together as a religion and as an ideology in the 7th and 8th centuries (and Robert Spencer has done us a great service in this respect in his latest book, Did Muhammad Exist?), it borrowed much from the Christian view of women as recounted in the story of Adam and Eve, when Eve offers Adam the "forbidden fruit of knowledge" – and presumably that included carnal knowledge and any and all things in connection with sex. Christianity, however, retained the "anti-sex" mantra and reserved it for both genders.

That mantra lingers on in especially American conservative circles, which largely assert that life begins at conception and that the only purpose of sex is procreation. The recent scandal surrounding Representative Todd Akin's remarks about abortion not being justified by rape underscores that poisonous and immoral idea. So, the misogyny didn't begin with Islam. Islam merely took it to its logical application. The segue was comparatively effortless.

Granting the truth of Robert Spencer's argument, because Judaism and Christianity predate the founding of Islam by centuries, then Christians especially have no one to blame but their doctrinal forefathers for the horrendous and brutal misogyny of Islam. Islam, as Robert Spencer has demonstrated in his book, cadged chiefly from early Christian and Judaic texts. It picked up chiefly the Christian view of women as temptresses from the Bible's account of Adam and Eve, the Garden of Eden (the earthly or heavenly version), and Eve inviting Adam to taste the forbidden fruit of knowledge, encouraged by the devil.

One Catholic site has an interesting account of Adam and Eve.

Are we being simply told that his earthly ancestry stretches far back in time, as we read in the genealogy of Jesus Christ, where his line is traced back to 'Adam, the son of God'? (Luke 3:38) But even this is no answer! Who is this Adam? Obviously the reference says that he was the "Son of God", but elsewhere in the Bible this title is only used to refer to Christ and Melchizedek. Clearly then, this phrase does not tell the whole story, but it does indicate that Adam was not a "normal" historical man. Adam was a 'son of God', a spiritual being, not simply a part of God's Physical Creation. To confirm that detail we must read Genesis 5: 1-2 which says: "In the day that God created man, in the likeness of God made he him; Male and female created he them; and blessed them, and called their name Adam, in the day when they were created."

Islam did not burden Muslim men with an Adam and Eve-caused "original sin," as Christianity did. All the blame falls on Eve. And at the same time, Islam would have rejected the hermaphrotic nature of the original Adam, as explained on the same Catholic site.

So, if the early Mohometan crusaders were searching for a rationalistic creed that would be copasetic with their habits of war, raids, conquest, pillaging, raping, enslaving, looting, and slaughtering, the early Christian doctrinal bias against women as the prizes of war and as the inferior sex would fit perfectly into their belligerent agenda. Islamic doctrine alleges that the Koran was dictated verbatim by Allah to Mohammad. Given the patchwork nature of Islam from so many preexisting Christian, Judaic and even pagan creeds (Allah was a pagan moon god, appropriated by Mohammad), that would make Allah the premier plagiarist and Mohammad his culpable dupe and accessory.

Of course, if Allah were all-powerful and responsible for everything that happened, it means that he also created Judaism and Christianity. Then, centuries later, he introduced Islam, and counseled Mohammad and his successors to steal and adapt from preexisting creeds. Yet these unbelieving creeds were evil because they were not the word of Allah. Go figure. Omniscience and omnipotence are wondrous and contradictory things.

It could be taken a step further to link the vandalizing of the AFDI ads, in which Muslim vandals wish to eradicate any knowledge of arguments against Islam. It isn't just a matter of Muslims being "offended" by either the AFDI ads or the commercial ads. Combining the alleged "offending" excuses and the kernel misogynist policy of Islam, this is the behavior of a totalitarian ideology in action, sanctioned by its high-ranking ideologues (either the principals at CAIR or the ISNA or the ICNA et al., or by imams and mullahs) and carried out by rank-and-file "foot soldiers," although it is doubtful that Ibrahim Hooper, Cyrus McGoldrck and their cohorts would deign to personally deface a billboard or bus ad or devote their own energies to sabotaging an anti-jihad website. They merely have to slip their more ardent followers the hint, such as McGoldrick did on his Facebook page, and it will happen.

Frankly speaking, I cut Islam and Muslims no slack; I do not grant them the benefit of the doubt. Islam cannot be "reformed" as many "moderate" Muslims claim it can be so that it would not conflict with American liberties and in particular with freedom of speech. To date, they have not said just how that reconciliation can be accomplished. And I suspect that the ideologues know it can't be "reformed" without killing Islam. It is the ideologues who are more consistent vis-à-vis Islamic ethos and practice. In this respect they have the momentum and the initiative. They want total control over men's minds, and the only way to accomplish that control is to eradicate knowledge that this is what they seek to accomplish. Otherwise, no one with a fillip of self-respect would submit to it.

No bikinis for Muslims. No argumentation or debate or renderings of Mohammad, either. It is only fair. If Muslims must shut down their minds or avert their eyes or blank out existence, then everyone must pull the plug on their vision and their knowledge. To do otherwise would be blasphemy, or discrimination, or victimization of Muslims. Respect Islam and Muslims, and you won’t be hurt or killed or censored. Or your mind and mouth merely gagged or your pen stilled. Or have your face scarred with acid. Or your throat slit.