The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) objected to the use by the New York City Police Department  (NYPD) of a factual documentary film called The Third Jihad in their counterterrorism training courses. CAIR, which has ties to terrorist organizations, demanded that the NYPD stop using it. The NYPD meekly submitted to CAIR’s demand. 

Here’s a trailer of the film:

A 30-minute version of the full video may be found here.

The film’s director, Wayne Kopping, writes:

In May 2010, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg posited that the individual who packed a Nissan Pathfinder full of explosives and parked it in Times Square, was likely a homegrown American “with a political agenda who doesn’t like the health care bill or something.”  …

The terrorist turned out to be Faisal Shahzad, a Pakistan-born U.S. citizen. And, not surprisingly, Shahzad wasn’t upset about the health care bill. After pleading guilty in court he said, “I consider myself a Mujahid, a Muslim-soldier.” He was upset, as he put it, over “American occupation of Muslim Lands.”

Shortly after the attack, Bloomberg prematurely asserted that there was no evidence suggesting the bomber was part of any recognized terror network. Shahzad later told the court he trained with the Pakistani Taliban to learn bomb-making and other related skills.

Could it be that Bloomberg has underestimated the threat of Islamist terror, or is there another agenda?

The issue has again become relevant in recent days. The New York Times ran a series of articles and editorials blaming the NYPD for using the film The Third Jihad: Radical Islam’s Vision for America as part of their counter-terrorism training. …

Following publication of the articles, Mayor Bloomberg stated that NYPD used “terrible judgment” in showing the film, despite admitting that he had never seen it.

We were not aware that the NYPD was using the film, but when we learned of it some months ago, we were pleased that the officers would have an opportunity to learn about the indoctrination taking place in certain segments of Muslim society in America. The film reveals what viewers are unlikely to see on the evening news: What terrorists, radical preachers and Islamists are saying in their own words, in their own mosques and media, to their followers.

The film exposes how radicals employ the dual strategies of “violent Jihad,” along with a “cultural Jihad,” … to gradually expand their influence over Western society.

Now, Mayor Bloomberg, The New York Times and others want to bar law enforcement officers from seeing the film. The question is, why?

We reject, outright, the charge that our film is anti-Muslim or that it casts a shadow over the entire Muslim community. …  The film is narrated by, Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, a devout Muslim-American, who has dedicated his life to exposing the threat of radical Islam. 

Our critics have failed to mention these points and have chosen not to challenge the film on the merits of its thesis or content.

Perhaps the reason Mayor Bloomberg wants The Third Jihad banned is the same reason he insinuated the Times Square bomber was a health care terrorist — namely, CAIR.

CAIR (Council on American Islamic Relations) is one of many Muslim interest groups that purport to represent the Islamic community in America, but in reality have well established ties to Hamas and other terror groups.

CAIR was designated by the U.S. Justice Department for its role in terror financing during the nation’s largest-ever trial on the subject. As a result, the FBI has officially severed all ties with the “advocacy organization.”

Outside of its support for terror organizations, CAIR works to quickly and effectively to silence any discussions about radical Islam by playing the racism card and accusing critics of Islamophobia. CAIR’s devices are effective.

CAIR … branded the film “anti-Muslim propaganda” in a press release. This was followed by a CAIR-led protest on the steps of City Hall calling for the resignation of the NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly.

The entire episode could have been a chapter in The Third Jihad. We are now seeing “cultural Jihad” in action. In order to avoid agitating Muslim constituents, Mayor Bloomberg and Commissioner Kelly are backing away from the film, regardless of its merits.

The net result is that CAIR, a designated Muslim interest group with ties to terror financing, is now telling the NYPD how it should go about fighting terror. If that’s not the ultimate act of subversion, I don’t know what is.

In an article that makes good sense until the very last sentence, Ken Blackwell writes at Townhall:

The recent high-level comings and goings between Jerusalem and Washington remind us of nothing so much as all those “consultations” between top-level officials of two other democratic allies seventy-six years ago. In 1936, everyone wanted to stop the German army coming into the de-militarized Rhineland, but no one was willing to use force to prevent it. Hitler sensed this weak resolve in the Americans and the British. The Americans were still in the throes of isolationism in 1936. Britain wanted to talk about Hitler’s move into the Rhineland, but it did not want to use force, or even allow the threat of force.  Hitler could smell fear.  …

As the leaders of Russia, China, North Korea, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Iran can sense weak resolve and fear in the US leadership now.

Consider this: Iran has been at war with the U.S. for more than thirty years. When they seized our U.S. Embassy in Tehran in 1979, that was an act of war. When they recruited terrorists to kill 241 U.S. Marines and Navy corpsmen in Beirut in 1983, that, too, was an act of war. 

The Iranians are also at war with Israel. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has publicly said he can foresee a world without the U.S. and Israel. He says Israel should be “wiped off the map,” that the Jewish state is but a “two-bomb country.” What kind of bombs would those be?

U.S. policy makers are desperate, it seems, to dissuade Israel from striking Iran. Gen. Martin Dempsey has been to Israel carrying that warning. Sec. Leon Panetta publicly worries that Israel may be planning a “surprise attack.” In Britain, Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg frets that an Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear weapons installation would be “potentially destabilizing.” 

What, one wonders, does Mr Clegg understand by the word “stable”, if what is happening in the Islamic world seems to him to be stability? And Iran’s threat must be seen as part – the most dangerous part – of the jihad that Islam is waging with ever greater ferocity and determination against the West.

Looking at the chaos, violence, oppression, and tumult throughout the region today, where exactly does the Right Honorable Mr. Clegg see the stability that might become “destabilized”?

As worrisome as an Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities might be, Iran with a nuclear weapon is infinitely more dangerous. …

Israel reminds us that when a nation’s very survival is on the line, that nation will do whatever it must do to meet its sworn enemy. Israel followed the advice of American and British administrations. They urged [Israel] to evacuate Southern Lebanon. Now Hezbollah, supplied by Iran, rules there. Israel withdrew from Gaza. Now, Hamas, another Iranian cat’s paw, holds sway there. The Israelis — prodded by Bill Clinton and the illusory Oslo accords — let Yasser Arafat’s unreformed Palestinian terrorists have “authority” in the West Bank.

Today, surrounded by mortal enemies, with their backs to the wall, Israelis are told to take more “risks for peace” by a US. administration that is outraged by the sight of too many Jews in Jerusalem.

If we wait until the Iranians have sunk their nuclear weapons deep into hardened bunkers it will be too late. The Obama administration will not act in time. Later will be too late.

Israel: Don’t wait; hit the Iranian nuclear facilities now. The world will thank you for it.

The world will thank Israel?

If so, the sun will be blotted out by trillions of flying pigs.

If you like pictures of flowers opening, have a high boredom threshold, can stand monotonous religious chants and the intoning of nonsense, and would be amused to catch a glimpse of Nancy Reagan as an evil Freemason, this is the video for you.

This is from an article by Jack Doyle at the MailOnline:

The number of Muslim converts in Britain has passed 100,000 …

The figure has almost doubled in ten years – with the average convert now a 27-year-old white woman fed up with British consumerism and immorality.

Whose “consumerism and immorality”? Their own?

Or maybe it’s not so much consumerism and immorality that drives them into the arms of Islam, as an attraction to young Muslim men. If they marry them, maybe they’ll learn in time to speak of “subjugation”, and know all too well what it means.

The numbers, revealed in a study by multi-faith group Faith Matters, have led to claims that the country is undergoing a process of ‘Islamification’.

The survey of converts revealed nearly two thirds were women, more than 70 per cent were white and the average age at conversion was just 27.

But the organisation’s report argued that most converts saw their religion as ‘perfectly compatible’ with living in Britain.

It said: ‘Converts do not represent a devious fifth column determined to undermine the Western way of life – this is a group of normal people united in their adherence to a religion which they, for the most part, see as perfectly compatible with Western life.’

They’re real thinkers, you see. Done their research, understand the ideology of Islam through and through. Found not a trace of immorality in it.

And their schools never taught them that there is anything wrong with Islam, did they? Said nothing about it being incompatible with Britain’s democracy, it’s equal treatment of men and women, its traditional tolerance and freedom?

The report estimated around 5,200 men and women have adopted Islam over the past 12 months, including 1,400 in London. …

The survey … asked converts for their views on the negative aspects of British culture.

They identified alcohol and drunkenness, a ‘lack of morality and sexual permissiveness’, and ‘unrestrained consumerism’.

What’s slavery compared to the evils of alcohol, sex and shopping?

Fiyaz Mughal, director of Faith Matters, said: ‘Conversion to Islam has been stigmatised by the media and wrongly associated with extremist ideologies and discriminatory cultural practices.’

Conversion to Islam stigmatised by the media? We haven’t noticed much of that.

Islam wrongly associated with extremism and discrimination?

In 2001, there were an estimated 60,000 Muslim converts in Britain. Since then, the country has seen the spread of violent Islamist extremism and terror plots, including the July 7 bombings.

Converts who have turned to terror include Nicky Reilly, who tried to blow up a restaurant in Bristol with a nail bomb, shoe bomber Richard Reid and July 7 bomber Germaine Lindsay.

Those were reported by the media. But maybe the converts didn’t research that deeply.

(Hat tip George)

Islam has woken up to modernity. Muslims feel humiliated by their backwardness. A violent onslaught against the Western world is their foolish attempt at a remedy.

The jihad as it is being waged now is the most widespread, most aggressive temper tantrum in recorded history.

(Video from Hot Air)

On February 1, 1979, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini — the leader of Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution — returned triumphantly to Tehran on an Air France flight from Paris after 14 years in exile.

Now, 33 years later, that return was reenacted in a bizarre ceremony that saw guards carrying a giant cardboard cutout of Khomeini down the stairs of a passenger plane and a waiting crowd paying their respects to “him.”

Iranians have been faced with many unusual and absurd events in the past three decades of the rule of the clerics. The February 1 ceremony, however, may have topped them all.

Couldn’t this be described as idol worship? A terrible offense in Islamic doctrine.

Picture and commentary from Israellycool.

Adolf Hitler did not seize power in Germany; he was given power by democratic process, and then he established his dictatorship.

Hamas came to power in the Gaza strip through democratic election. It is unlikely to allow another election.

In Tunisia and Egypt, democratic elections have brought parties to power which intend to bring their countries under sharia law.

Elections in Iraq and Afghanistan will not give Iraqis or Afghans freedom under the rule of law. The majority of Iraqi and Afghan voters do not want freedom under the rule of law.  To call either country a democracy in the Western meaning of the word is to affect deliberate blindness.

Daniel Greenfield writes at Front Page:

The advocates of democracy have been unable to admit that Hamas, Al-Nahda, the Brotherhood and the Salafis are the people’s choice because they represent their values and ideals. The Salafist victory in Egypt … was not based on any external factor or political cunning, but on their core message of hate for non-Muslims, repression for women and …  tyranny for Egypt.

Democracy is not in itself a prescription for good government. The very fact that it expresses the will of the majority of a nation is precisely why it is dangerous.

The trouble with democracy is that it is representative. It is representative in Egypt, in Tunisia, in the West Bank, in Iraq and beyond. …

Democracy has not worked all that well throughout the rest of the world either.

After all the efforts made to keep the Sandanistas out of power, El Salvador’s supreme leftist pedophile Daniel Ortega is back in the Presidential Palace in Nicaragua. …

Twenty years after the fall of the Soviet Union, the second largest party in the Russian Duma is the Communist Party. Its actual vote totals are probably higher due to the fraudulent nature of the elections under the control of Putin’s United Russia Party. This roster is rounded out by the Liberal Democratic Party, which is run by a career lunatic who has proposed conquering Alaska, dumping nuclear waste on nearby nations and rounding up the Jews into camps. If Putin’s power base finally collapses, then the party best positioned to pick up the pieces is the Communist Party. It’s not at all inconceivable that within the decade we will see the return of a Communist Russia. …

Democracy is not a universal solvent. It is not a guarantor of human rights or the road to a free and enlightened society. …

A strong showing at the ballot box eliminates the need to gather a mob. …

In Turkey the electoral victories of the AKP gave [it] the power to radically transform the country. Given another decade the elections in Turkey will be as much of a formality as they are in Iran. The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt will follow the same program, bringing down the military leadership as soon as they can to the applause of the European Union and the United States who care more about the appearance of democracy than the reality of the totalitarian state they are endorsing.

When Western powers facilitate – in Iraq and Afghanistan compel  – democratic elections, they only encourage a charade; they play along with the pretense that universal suffrage will guarantee freedom. But most Russians and Nicaraguans don’t want freedom. The men of Iraq and Afghanistan, Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, do not want freedom; their religion negates freedom, commands submission to an ancient set of oppressive laws.

Democratic elections are only as good as the people who take part in them. When the people want the Koran or Das Kapital, then they will get it.

Such elections measure the character of a people …  The Egyptians failed their election test [of character] … As did the Tunisians and the Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza.

To the advocates of universal democracy such failures are only a temporary manifestation that can be reversed with enough funding for social NGO’s and political outreach. But the reality is that they represent a deeper moral and spiritual crisis that we ignore at our own risk.

Democracy worked for the West, as the least bad system of government yet devised, because the West wanted freedom under the rule of law. Nations get the government they deserve. Or, as Daniel Greenfield puts it, “Governments reflect the character of the people they rule over.”

The “democratic” elections that have taken place in Islamic states prove it.

Democracy is allowing the Muslim world to express its truest and deepest self. … By helping to liberate them we have set their worst selves free.

The video of this Afghan’s head being sawn off can be seen here.

Steel yourself to watch it.

Bearing that lurid demonstration in mind, now read this from a report about beheadings in Somalia last July:

Islamic extremists have beheaded two young boys in Somalia because their Christian father refused to divulge information about a church leader, and the killers are searching Kenya’s refugee camps to do the same to the boys’ father. …

Militants from the Islamic extremist group al Shabaab entered Yonday village on Feb. 20, went to Yusuf’s house and interrogated him on his relationship with Mberwa, leader of a fellowship of 66 Somali Christians who meet at his home at an undisclosed city. Yusuf told them he knew nothing of Mberwa and had no connection with him. The Islamic extremists left but said they would return the next day.

“Immediately when they left, I decided to flee my house for Kismayo, for I knew for sure they were determined to come back,” Yusuf said.

At noon the next day, as his wife was making lunch for their children in Yonday, the al Shabaab militants showed up. Batula Ali Arbow, Yusuf’s wife, recalled that their youngest son, Innocent, told the group that their father had left the house the previous day.

The Islamic extremists ordered her to stop what she was doing and took hold of three of her sons – 11-year-old Abdi Rahaman Musa Yusuf, 12-year-old Hussein Musa Yusuf and Abdulahi Musa Yusuf, 7. Some neighbors came and pleaded with the militants not to harm the three boys. Their pleas landed on deaf ears.

“I watched my three boys dragged away helplessly as my youngest boy was crying,” Arbow said. “I knew they were going to be slaughtered. Just after some few minutes I heard a wailing cry from Abdulahi running towards the house. I could not hold my breath. I only woke up with all my clothes wet. I knew I had fainted due to the shock.”

With the help of neighbors, Arbow said, she buried the bodies of her two children the following day.

And now another report from Somalia, dated yesterday:

According to the residents, al Shabaab fighters on Friday beheaded the three Somali teenagers in southern Somalia town of Masagway located in between Galgudud and Lower Shabelle region for suspicion of being spying for the Transitional Federal Government.

The map shows the spread of Islam round the tiny state of Israel – which President Obama wants to make even smaller – as it is now.

In the latter half of this century the greater part of Europe, if present demographic trends continue, will also be predominantly Muslim and governed by sharia law.

Think of it: a vast expanse of Asia from Bangladesh to Turkey, from Turkey across Europe to Britain, from north Africa to the top of Norway, all Islamic lands, all governed by sharia.

And no, it is not likely to be a “milder form” of Islam in Europe than in Afghanistan, Iran, or Saudi Arabia. There is only one Islam and it’s only name is Islam.

We take these extracts from an article, which needs to be read in full, by Andrew C. McCarthy at Family Security Matters. It is titled Islam is Islam:

Islam … is an entirely different way of looking at the world. We struggle with this truth, which defies our end-of-history smugness. …

So we set about remaking Islam in our own progressive image … We miniaturize the elements of the ummah (the notional global Muslim community) that refuse to go along with the program: They are assigned labels … Islamist, fundamentalist, Salafist, Wahhabist, radical, jihadist, extremist, militant, or, of course, “conservative” Muslims adhering to “political Islam.”

There is a “real Islam” – McCarthy’s “we” pretend – which is  a “religion of peace”. “The vast majority of Muslims,” it is said ad nauseam, “are peaceful and law-abiding”. Abiding by what law given a choice? It’s a question “we”  don’t want answered.

We consequently pretend that Muslims who accurately invoke Islamic scripture in the course of forcibly imposing the dictates of classical sharia — the Islamic legal and political system — are engaged in “anti-Islamic activity,” as Britain’s former home secretary Jacqui Smith memorably put it. When the ongoing Islamization campaign is advanced by violence, as inevitably happens, we absurdly insist that this aggression cannot have been ideologically driven, that surely some American policy or Israeli act of self-defense is to blame, as if these could possibly provide rationales for the murderous jihad waged by Boko Haram Muslims against Nigerian Christians and by Egyptian Muslims against the Copts, the persecution of the Ahmadi sect by Indonesian and Pakistani Muslims, or the internecine killing in Iraq of Sunnis by Shiites and vice versa — a tradition nearly as old as Islam itself — which has been predictably renewed upon the recent departure of American troops.

The main lesson of the Arab Spring ought to be that this remaking of Islam has happened only in our own minds, for our own consumption. The Muslims of the Middle East take no note of our reimagining of Islam, being, in the main, either hostile toward or oblivious to Western overtures. Muslims do not measure themselves against Western perceptions, although the shrewdest among them take note of our eagerly accommodating attitude when determining what tactics will best advance the cause.

That cause is nothing less than Islamic dominance.

‘The underlying problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism,” wrote Samuel Huntington. “It is Islam, a different civilization whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture.”

Samuel Huntington famously called the conflict between the West and Islam “a clash of civilizations”. But it’s better described as a clash of Western civilization with Islamic barbarism.

Not convinced merely in the passive sense of assuming that they will triumph in the end, Muslim leaders are galvanized by what they take to be a divinely ordained mission of proselytism — and proselytism not limited to spiritual principles, but encompassing an all-purpose societal code prescribing rules for everything from warfare and finance to social interaction and personal hygiene. …

An all-purpose societal code. That is what sharia is.

Most Americans still do not know that hurriya, Arabic for “freedom,” connotes “perfect slavery” or absolute submission to Allah, very nearly the opposite of the Western concept. Even if we grant for argument’s sake the dubious proposition that all people crave freedom, Islam and the West have never agreed about what freedom means. …

The Muslim Brotherhood is the ummah’s most important organization, unabashedly proclaiming for nearly 90 years that “the Koran is our law and jihad is our way.”

Hamas, a terrorist organization, is its Palestinian branch, and leading Brotherhood figures do little to disguise their abhorrence of Israel and Western culture. …

[Yet] the Obama administration, European governments, and the Western media tirelessly repeated the mantra that the Brothers had been relegated to the sidelines. …  Surely the Tahrir throngs wanted self-determination, not sharia. Never you mind the fanatical chants of Allahu akbar! as the dictator fell. Never mind that Sheikh Qaradawi was promptly ushered into the square to deliver a fiery Friday sermon to a congregation of nearly a million Egyptians.

The Arab Spring is an unshackling of Islam, not an outbreak of fervor for freedom in the Western sense. Turkey’s third-term prime minister Recep Erdogan, a staunchBrotherhood ally who rejects the notion that there is a “moderate Islam” (“Islam is Islam, and that’s it,” he says), once declared that “democracy is a train where you can get off when you reach your destination.” The destination for Muslim supremacists is the implementation of sharia — the foundation of any Islamized society, and, eventually, of the reestablished caliphate. …

Led by the Muslim Brotherhood, Islamic parties have become expert at presenting themselves as moderates and telling the West what it wants to hear while they gradually ensnare societies in the sharia web, as slowly or quickly as conditions on the ground permit. They know that when the West says “democracy,” it means popular elections, not Western democratic culture. They know the West has so glorified these elections that the victors can steal them (Iran), refuse to relinquish power when later they lose (Iraq), or decline to hold further elections (Gaza) without forfeiting their legitimacy. …

Once in power, they are sure to make virulent anti-Americanism their official policy and to contribute materially to the pan-Islamic goal of destroying Israel. …

We should not be under any illusions about why things are shaking out this way. The Arab Spring has not been hijacked any more than Islam was hijacked by the suicide terrorists of 9/11. Islam is ascendant because that is the way Muslims of the Middle East want it.

In our time and the foreseeable future, the war between intellectual light and darkness will, we envision, increasingly be fought out by secularists, rationalists, atheists against the religious of all denominations, but most necessarily and urgently against Islam.

This is by Daniel Greenfield, from Front Page:

Alexander Aan was just another bureaucrat holding down a desk at the [Indonesian] Department of Planning until his Facebook Atheism page came to the notice of Indonesian authorities in Obama’s old stomping grounds. Now Aan is facing a five year jail sentence for using social media to spread the message that Allah does not exist. 

Alexander is being charged with “defiling” Islam by using passages from the Koran to challenge the Islamic religion. And while the State Department and the media routinely go on the attack against any manifestation of what they call “Islamophobia,” it isn’t likely that they will be rushing to Aan’s defense. This isn’t exactly the first time that atheists have run afoul of the Islamic codes under which the Muslim world operates.

Two years ago, the Palestinian Authority arrested Waleed Hasayin on similar charges of blaspheming against Islam on Facebook. Waleed Hasayin had written that, “Muhammad was no different than barbaric thugs who slaughtered, robbed and raped women” and that “Islam has legitimized slavery, reinforced the gap between social classes and allowed stealing from the infidels, taking women in captivity during wars and sexual abuse of women slaves.” 

For these and other truthful statements, he was arrested and his family demanded that he be sentenced to life in prison. He has since written a letter of apology in hopes of being released.

The regimes imprisoning Aan and Hasayin are funded by the United States. Indonesia is on the list of the top twenty countries benefiting from USAID funding and the Palestinian Authority, including its security forces and prisons, is mostly subsidized by American taxpayers. The arrests were accompanied by mob protests and violence reflecting populist Muslim hostility toward non-Muslims.

Underlying these individual incidents is a legal code that goes to the very definition of what it means to be a citizen of a Muslim country. Muslim countries recognize a limited set of legal religions. Non-Muslims who are members of legal religions have fewer rights and run the usual risks that come with being a minority group. Non-Muslims who are not members of official religions do not. This includes Muslim sects that the Islamic system does not recognize as legitimate. It includes Muslims who wish to convert to another religion, and it includes atheists who are not a recognized religious group. 

Religious identity is linked to civic participation in public life in a way that most Americans are not aware of. It appears on identity cards, it is a basic requirement for doing anything from attending a university to getting married. Without membership in an officially recognized religious group, the atheist is a non-person.

Well, that’s in the Islamic world. We know how it is there. We know that in some Islamic countries – Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Iran, Sudan, Afghanistan – the punishment for “blasphemy”, which of course includes atheism, is death.

But in our Western world, where freedom is a high value, and freedom of speech a right enshrined in a constitution (as in the US) or established by tradition (as in the UK), such tyrannous bigotry is not tolerated.

Or is it?

Atheists no longer have to live in the Muslim world in order to be subject to Islamic rules. At Queen Mary, University of London, a public research university with roots going back nearly a thousand years, the Atheism, Secularism and Humanism Society attempted to hold a discussion on “Sharia Lw and Human Rights.” The discussion came to an abrupt end when a man entered the room and warned that they would be murdered if they said anything critical about Mohammed. 

The return of blasphemy laws to the United Kingdom has been slow, but not all that stealthy. At the University College London, the president of the Atheist, Secularist and Humanist Society resigned after the college student union backed a Muslim student association’s complaints about a cartoon strip of Mohammed having a drink that was posted on Facebook.

The steady flow of Muslim immigrants into London has turned it into Londonistan with nearly a tenth of the city answering the Call of the Mosque. In two decades their numbers will double and with 40 percent of British Muslims polling for Sharia, it’s not difficult to see that the trajectory for atheists in London is not a very promising one.

Atheists are a minority with legal protections in the West. Which is why the majority of the signatories on the Manifesto for a Secular Middle East and North Africa were activists who had left the Muslim world and were living in Europe or the United States. The impossibility of signing a similar manifesto while living full time in Iran or Pakistan went without saying.

But as the Muslim populations of Western countries continue to grow, they are becoming dangerous places for non-Muslims, including atheists. If a dialogue on the consequences of Islamic law can be shut down with threats of violence at University College London, then it’s hard to think of any place that it cannot be shut down. 

We like to think of our cities as fundamentally different places than Tehran or Islamabad, but it’s the population that shapes the character and values of a city. Demographic change means cultural and religious change and as the norms of Tehran and Islamabad become the norms of London and Paris, religious minorities and irreligious minorities will both find themselves silenced. …

Muslim persecution of a hated minority group increases proportionally in relation to their numerical advantage. Atheists are a larger percentage of the population in Europe, but demographics are still catching up to them. In the United States the demographic race may already be done, as far as atheists are concerned.

In the United States approximately 0.7 percent of the population identifies as atheist and 0.8 percent of the population as Muslim. If these surveys are correct then the number of Muslims in the United States has already exceeded the number of atheists. While not a single member of Congress identifies as an atheist, two identify as Muslims.

We may accept Daniel Greenfield’s finding that 0.7 percent of Americans “identifies as atheist”, but we doubt that only 0.7 Americans are atheist. We suspect that tens of millions of Americans do not believe in the supernatural.

We think it more than likely that many members of Congress and the Senate are atheists but are aware that saying so publicly would end their political careers.

We suspect – and ardently hope – that with each generation more and more adult, sane, educated, intelligent people realize that the supernatural is superfluous to requirement; that gods do not exist; and that religion is a major cause of conflict.

Whether this intellectual evolution will dominate forcefully enough to save the world from the growing and spreading counter-movement of Islam – the darkest, most ignorant, most stupid, and in our day the cruelest of all superstitions and all systems of totalitarian tyranny – remains to be seen.