In the latest issue of the New Yorker, in a piece called “Intolerance,” Lawrence Wright compares me to the radical Danish imams who incited the Islamic world to riot over the cartoons of Muhammad that appeared in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten. Ironic, isn’t it, when we are so tolerant of a fatal ideology, and worse, a subversive, dangerous media is shilling for our mortal enemy.

Wright reports that the Danish cartoons were published without incident. This is true. I posted about the cartoons at my website AtlasShrugs.com in October 2005, before the international riots over them began. But then he goes on to erroneously state that the extremist Danish imams to whom he compares me are the ones who ginned up the ummah. Not so. These imams did create false cartoons that were more inflammatory than the ones in Jyllands-Posten in order to give some heft to their incitement to murder, but it was the Organization of the Islamic Conference, a global international body, that initiated the cartoon jihad in December 2005.

And as for his equation of me with these imams, patriots and freedom lovers across the world have not set Muslim embassies on fire and slaughtered non-Muslims, as Muslims did when they rioted and rampaged through various countries. How dare Wright make such an ugly and false comparison. (more…)

We sent a clear message to the West regarding the red lines that should not be crossed.

That was the arrogant declaration of victory from the Organization of the Islamic Conference nearly two years ago, regarding the shrewdly orchestrated Muslim mayhem around the world protesting such infidel abominations as the Danish Muhammad cartoons and Geert Wilders’ short film Fitna.

“Red lines” indeed – a phrase chillingly reminiscent of Samuel Huntington’s famous observation that “Islam has bloody borders.” Except that the red lines the OIC is referring to aren’t geographical – they are the ever-tightening limits that Muslim fundamentalists are imposing to choke off our freedoms.

The influential OIC is the world’s largest Muslim assembly, consisting of 57 member states (you know, the same number of U.S. states candidate Obama campaigned in). Its primary aim is “conducting a large-scale worldwide effort to confront Islamophobia.” (As I’ve written here before, Islamophobia is a mythical beast that the OIC and collusive groups like CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, use to intimidate us into craven appeasement.) Their goal is to abridge our free speech by making criticism of Islam an international crime; their strategy works because the West has been so emasculated by multiculturalism that we’d rather embrace cultural suicide than offend the tender sensibilities of such violent barbarians as the Danish cartoon rioters. (more…)

Back when George W. “Miss Me Yet?” Bush was President, liberals exercised their right of free speech ad naseum to complain about how Bush was taking away their right of free speech. So you might expect that a liberal or two would express at least a little concern when freedom of expression in the western world is threatened in reality, instead of in theory. After all it’s happened just across the border in Canada and it’s happening right now, just across the pond in the Netherlands.

Try searching MSNBC or the Daily Kos for information about the Geert Wilders trial. Find anything? Me neither. Democratic Undergound, to their credit, did run a version of the story, although the fact that it was Al Jazeera’s version is disappointing, if predictable. A commenter or two even dared to suggest that perhaps Wilders should be free to criticize any religion he wants, including Islam. That kind of heresy was, of course, quickly slapped down with replies like this one:

It’s informative that your ideological hostility, towards major religions, leads you to sympathize with this rightwing European xenophobe: the fact, however, that you can patch his anti-Islamic rants into your own simplistic worldview, does not really qualify as evidence that Wilders is “on trial for telling the truth.” He is on trial because a court decided his remarks might violate the criminal law against incitement to hatred. (more…)