On the front of the
Arabic index page of the Al-Qassam website, any reader yesterday
would have found an animated cartoon. It consists of the Star
of David -- the symbol of the Jewish faith -- being obliterated
by a mushroom cloud.
Al-Qassam speaks for
the “militant wing” of Hamas, the party that recently
won the Palestinian election, by a landslide. The distinction
between Hamas and its militant wing is meaningless. Western reporters
habitually make this distinction, and stress that the “non-militant”
branches of Hamas run orphanages and distribute welfare. This
is like implying that President Bush is not responsible for the
Pentagon, because the U.S. government also has a Department of
Health and Human Services. It is a brainless distinction, that
can only serve to confuse people.
Hamas, like the PLO
before it, is reasonably adept at managing the “useful idiots”
in the Western media. It does not take much. If you flip over
from their Arabic to their English website, you will find much
that is frightening, but couched in a mealy-mouth that is less
than candid about the party’s chief purpose. According to
its own charter, this is killing Jews. In their defence, I could
say of many Western newsmen, that they cannot conceive of an organization
so evil, that this would be its principal purpose. They should
remember the Holocaust, and wake up.
Hamas is now the duly
elected government of “Palestine”. Because it rejects
the late Yasser Arafat’s nominal undertakings, in English
only, to recognize Israel’s right to exist, and to condemn
terrorist violence, Western governments feel obliged to cut the
very generous funding with which the Palestinian Authority has
been supported.
Enter the Organization
of the Islamic Conference, based in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. The
OIC’s members include all 56 of the world’s majority-Muslim
states, plus quasi-state Palestine. No other organization of states
exists for the purpose of advancing a religion. Most of these
states are authoritarian regimes, or absolute monarchies; a few
are counted as democracies, with qualifications necessary in every
case. The OIC contains a fair selection of the world’s poorest
and most desperate countries, but also, six of the world’s
15 largest arms importers (and none of the suppliers). It is rapidly
becoming the respectable front for what Salman Rushdie called,
"Paranoid Islam, which blames outsiders, ‘infidels’,
for all the ills of Muslim societies, and whose proposed remedy
is the closing of those societies to the rival project of modernity.”
Pakistan has now called
an “emergency meeting” (almost all the OIC’s
meetings are such), to deal with the issue of the Danish cartoons.
And no sooner called, than many members have put the funding of
Hamas on the agenda. Such oil-rich states as Saudi Arabia and
Iran already direct money to Palestine, explicitly to encourage
violence against Israelis (e.g. bounties to the families of suicide-bombers).
And there being no credible opposition to the scheme, we cannot
doubt the OIC will officially replace the U.S., the European Union,
and Israel, as the financial backers of the Palestinian regime
under Hamas. By doing which, they all explicitly condone terrorism.
Some dubious cartoons
in a private Danish provincial newspaper -- versus psychopathic
graphics on an official website, unambiguously projecting the
extermination of the Jews. Or if you want better, listen again
to President Ahmadinejad of Iran, member in good standing of the
OIC, repeatedly promising to “wipe Israel off the map”,
while his country races to produce nuclear missiles.
On the Danish cartoon
front, here is what Prof. Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, the Turk who is
the OIC’s current secretary-general, is demanding: “The
OIC member states expect from the European Union to identify Islamophobia
as a dangerous phenomenon and to observe and combat it like in
the cases of xenophobia and anti-Semitism, by creating suitable
observance mechanisms and revising its legislation, in order to
prevent the recurrence of the recent unfortunate incidents.”
(He makes similar demands of the United Nations.)
In other words, Europe
must monitor and censor its media, and introduce criminal punishments,
to prevent any affront to Islam ever happening again.
What makes this poignant
is that, Javier Solana, the EU’s bureaucrat-in-chief, who
has already delivered several obsequious apologies, gratuitously
on behalf of all Europe, has personally promised Prof. Ihsanoglu
that action will be taken. According to one report, he is considering
going to Jeddah to make an act of obeisance before the assembled
Muslim foreign ministers. Similar, continuing, cringing apologies
are coming from politicians in many Western countries -- and contrived
gestures of “respect for Islam” from Western media.
This beggars the mind.
The West is apologizing for what? And to whom?
Were we crazy to start,
or has our bedwetting fear of Muslim fanatics deprived us of our
judgement?
The more we apologize,
the more we appease, the larger the demands will get. Yet we have
not one prominent politician in the West, able to stand before
the OIC and say, “How dare you!”
Copyright
2006 Ottawa Citizen
