Tag Archives: Muslim

Free speech: Mark Steyn radio interview and Ezra Levant radio debate!

UPDATE: Welcome visitors from Blue Like You! Thanks for the link Joanne!

Canadian/American free speech activist Mark Steyn on the line with Chicago radio show host Milt Rosenberg. Commercial free!

Extension 720 – Mark Steyn – June 1, 2009

URL : http://www.wgnradio.com/media/mp3file/2009-06/47337079.mp3

Duration : 1 hours 29 mins 26 secs

He re-caps the history and outcome of his trial in Canada for offending Muslims, and goes on to discuss his previous book “America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It” and his new book “Lights Out: Islam, Free Speech And The Twilight Of The West“. He reviews the state of free speech, Western Civilization, single-payer health care, welfare, anti-Western attitudes in education, and the 2008 election results.

BONUS

Ezra Levant reports on his debate against secular-leftist professor Lucie Lamarche on CBC radio. Note that the start time is 1:12 into the show. Press pause, let the clip buffer for a few minutes, then drag the slider to the 1:12 position.

Last Sunday I was on Michael Enright’s CBC radio show, The Sunday Edition, debating human rights commissions along with Keith Martin, the Liberal MP, and a nutty professor called Lucie Lamarche.

You can listen to the show here — it’s the May 31 edition. The debate starts at about 1 hour and 12 minutes into the show.

[Lamarche] loses her grip at 1:25 when Enright challenged her on the lack of due process and natural justice in HRCs. Her first response is to dismiss the horrors of HRCs as my own personal story. When I pushed back, citing the very section of the Alberta act that allows warrantless search and seizures, and pointing out that targets of HRCs don’t get legal aid, she just collapsed, saying that “discrimination is about attitudes… and transformation. It’s not only about due process.”

Oh. So to hell with the law or fairness. Guys like me need to have our attitudes transformed. It’s not law. It’s brutal politics pretending to be the law.

I like this Lucie Lamarche — for her honesty.

After a few minutes of her reading her talking points — likely authored by the battallion of PR flacks at the Canadian Human Rights Commission — she just stops pretending that HRCs are about justice. They’re about politics and propaganda — making political dissidents like me conform to the “official line”. And the high costs? That’s just an additional punishment for our thought crimes.

Seriously: when she ran out of her prepared talking points, she said what she truly believed: this was about transforming attitudes.

Ezra also hints at which kind of people fight back to defend human rights, and what kind of people destroy human rights:

Readers, do you think that Orwell or Solzhenitsyn would call Lamarche a defender of human rights, or a destroyer of them?

Do you think that giving the state the power to transform your attitudes is a protection of your freedoms, or an abridgement of them?

Do you think that Lucie Lamarche follows in the footsteps of dissidents who challenged the conventional wisdom, like Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi — or is she a descendant of the censors and bullies who tried to shut those two up?

Do not miss this debate podcast! Ezra is on fire!

And remember: we know that the secular-left believes in pounding down the good and lifting up the evil, so that moral judgments become impossible and no one feels badly for being morally evil. Remember Evan Sayet’s explanation for how progressives think: moral equivalence, postmodernism and moral relativism. And atheists do not have the ability to resist Islamo-fascism: they want to be happy, not to be heroes.

Michelle Malkin asks: Is an abortionist worth more than a military recruiter?

Michelle Malkin
Michelle Malkin

My friend Andrew drew my attention to Michelle Malkin’s most recent column. It’s a must-read!

Michelle starts by talking about two murders that occurred at almost the same time. Which one was more important to Obama and the left-wing media, and why?

She writes:

When a right-wing Christian vigilante kills, millions of fingers pull the trigger. When a left-wing Muslim vigilante kills, he kills alone. These are the instantly ossifying narratives in the Sunday shooting death of Kansas late-term abortionist George Tiller versus the Monday shootings of two Arkansas military recruiters.

Tiller’s suspected murderer, Scott Roeder, was white, Christian, anti-government, and anti-abortion. The gunman in the military recruiting center attack, Abdul Hakim Mujahid Muhammad, was black, a Muslim convert, anti-military, and anti-American. Both crimes are despicable, cowardly acts of domestic terrorism. But the disparate treatment of the two brutal cases by both the White House and the media is striking.

In the column Michelle notes the following differences between the two stories:

  • Obama issued a statement condemning the murderer of the abortionist, but not the murder of the military recruiters
  • The Justice Department dispatched federal marshals to protect abortion clinics, not military recruitment offices
  • The left-wing media labeled the murderer of the abortion doctor a terrorist, not the murderer of the military recruiters
  • The left-wing media blamed conservative media for one murder, but militant Islam was not blamed for the other murders

Michelle asks what Obama had to say about the deaths of two of our brave soldiers:

…President Obama said nothing. The Justice Department was mum. And so were the legions of finger-pointing pundits happily convicting the pro-life movement and every right-leaning writer on the planet of contributing to the murder of George Tiller. Obama’s omission, it should be noted, comes just a few weeks after he failed to mention the Bronx jihadi plot to bomb synagogues and a National Guard airbase during his speech on homeland security.

She goes on to catalog some more incidents showing where the real threat of domestic terrorism lies. Most of them I had never even heard of. It just goes to show you that some victims are more equal than others, especially when you are trying to squash down the good and lift up the evil – so that the distinctions that make people able to judge others will be demolished. Abortion good, patriotism bad. Feminism good, military service bad.

Watch this video with Evan Sayet and you’ll learn how the secular-left thinks.

Another video by Evan Sayet is linked here.

We need to understand how it has become possible for the secular-left to be viewed as “moral” while faithful conservatives are viewed as “immoral”. One worldview views the universe as an accident and human rights as fictions. The other believes that God grounds human rights and that every person has a purpose that makes them valuable: to know God.

UPDATE: Nice Deb says that the anti-war left is to blame for the death of the military recruiters. Turnabout is fair play. She has a lot more at that link, too.


What is it like to be a Christian in an Islamic state?

Robert Spencer’s Jihad Watch links to some interesting stories.

First, this story from Singapore, from AFP:

A Christian Singaporean couple were found guilty of sedition on Thursday for distributing evangelical publications that cast Islam in a negative light, court officials said.

Ong Kian Cheong and his wife Dorothy Chan had been charged with distributing a seditious publication to two Muslims in October and March 2007 and sending a second such booklet to another Muslim in December that same year, a district court official told AFP.

The publications were found to have promoted feelings of ill-will and hostility between Christians and Muslims, the Straits Times said on its website….

The sedition charge carries a jail term of up to three years or a fine of up to 5,000 Singapore dollars (3,437 US) or both….

I’m surprised, because Singapore has one of the most free economies in the world, next to Hong Kong. I guess someone there cannot tolerate a public discussion about which religion is more likely to be true. This story reminds me of atheists, who sometimes sue people for offering to pray for them.

Second, this story from Pakistan, from Compass Direct News:

Nine pastors from two neighboring villages in Pakistan could face prison time for using loudspeakers to broadcast prayers and sermons from their churches on Easter Sunday. Martinpur and Youngsnabad, 150 kilometers (93 miles) east of Lahore, are majority Christian villages. The nine pastors who lead congregations there say that local Muslim security forces have twisted the law to solicit a bribe….

This reminds me of the left-wing ACLU, which sometimes sues people for mentioning Jesus in speeches.

Third, this story from Tanzania, from Compass Direct News:

Worship in a house church near Zanzibar City, on a Tanzanian island off the coast of East Africa, did not take place for the third week running on Sunday (May 24) after Muslim extremists expelled worshippers from their rented property. Radical Muslims on May 9 drove members of Zanzibar Pentecostal Church from worship premises in a rented house at Ungunja Ukuu, on the outskirts of Zanzibar City.

Angered by a recent upsurge in Christian evangelism in the area, church members said, radical Muslims had sent several threats to the Christians warning them to stop their activities. The church had undertaken a two-day evangelism campaign culminating in an Easter celebration. On the morning of the attack, more than 20 church members had gathered for Saturday fellowship when word reached them that Muslim extremists were about to attack.

As the radical group approached, the Christians fled in fear of their lives. “The group was shouting, saying, ‘We do not want the church to be in our locality – they should leave the place and never come back again,’” said one church member who requested anonymity.

Scary, but free speech is regulated in Canada, too, thanks to those Human Rights Commissions.

Fourth, this story from Pakistan, from Worthy news:

Suspected Muslim militants with links to the terror groups Al Qaeda and the Taliban attacked a historic church in northwestern Pakistan and burned Bibles and other Christian books, but police are reluctant to investigate the case and detain suspects, Christians said Tuesday, May 26.

The destruction of the St. George Grecian Church was discovered by workers renovating the building, said the church’s pastor Ijaz Masih in a statement distributed by rights group International Christian Concern (ICC).

Masih said that shortly after he presided over a Sunday service, workers “were shocked when they arrived” in the morning of May 12, “and found the church’s cross broken in pieces, the altar demolished and partially burned, Bibles and hymnbooks burned and torn apart, and the pews reduced to ashes.”

Well, the secular left does commit violent acts against defenders of traditional marriage.

I was surprised to learn from an Indian commenter that Christians are also persecuted in certain areas of India for evangelizing. Why do states insist on forcing their view of evangelism on individuals who have a different view? I wouldn’t force my view on anyone else, yet atheists and some nationalist Hindus and fundamentalist Muslims seem to do it all the time.

And it isn’t just dogma or strongly-held beliefs that causes extremism. There is no room for coercion in Bible-based Christianity. The more you believe in Christianity, the less you believe in coercion, and the more you believe in persuasion by reason and evidence. That’s what Jesus did.