Good news. Mark Steyn is back. His latest column is full of wit and wisdom – of course. Don’t miss it. Among related matters, he discusses the international scandal of the Korans that were not burnt. We expressed our view that the best thing to do with a Koran is read it, because it’s a self-incriminating text. [See our post To fight Islam don’t’ burn the Koran – read it, September 6, 2010.]

Here’s part of what Mark Steyn says about the affair:

Take this no-name pastor from an obscure church who was threatening to burn the Koran. He didn’t burn any buildings or women and children. He didn’t even burn a book. He hadn’t actually laid a finger on a Koran, and yet the mere suggestion that he might do so prompted the President of the United States to denounce him, and the Secretary of State, and the commander of US forces in Afghanistan, various G7 leaders, and golly, even Angelina Jolie. President Obama has never said a word about honor killings of Muslim women. Secretary Clinton has never said a word about female genital mutilation. General Petraeus has never said a word about the rampant buggery of pre-pubescent boys by Pushtun men in Kandahar. But let an obscure man in Florida so much as raise the possibility that he might disrespect a book – an inanimate object – and the most powerful figures in the western world feel they have to weigh in.

Aside from all that, this obscure church’s website has been shut down, its insurance policy has been canceled, its mortgage has been called in by its bankers. Why? … Another one of Obama’s famous “teaching moments”? In this case teaching us that Islamic law now applies to all? Only a couple of weeks ago, the President, at his most condescendingly ineffectual, presumed to lecture his moronic subjects about the First Amendment rights of Imam Rauf. Where’s the condescending lecture on Pastor Jones’ First Amendment rights? …

President Obama bowed lower than a fawning maitre d’ before the King of Saudi Arabia, a man whose regime destroys bibles as a matter of state policy, and a man whose depraved religious police forces schoolgirls fleeing from a burning building back into the flames to die because they’d committed the sin of trying to escape without wearing their head scarves. …

It is a basic rule of life that if you reward bad behavior, you get more of it. Every time Muslims either commit violence or threatens it, we reward them by capitulating. Indeed, President Obama … General Petraeus, and all the rest are now telling Islam, you don’t have to kill anyone, you don’t even have to threaten to kill anyone. We’ll be your enforcers. We’ll demand that the most footling and insignificant of our own citizens submit to the universal jurisdiction of Islam. … The same people who tell us “Islam is a religion of peace” then turn around and tell us you have to be quiet, you have to shut up because otherwise these guys will go bananas and kill a bunch of people.

Yes. They are counseling us, instructing us, to be afraid of Islam.

Many of us would rather oppose it, fight it, defeat it, and ideally destroy it.

There is nothing in it that is good for the human race. Nothing.

At PajamasMedia, David Solway has a weighty article on Islam, on whether or not it is an ideology of violent conquest and intolerance, and whether or not it can be reformed. He quotes the opinions of authorities on different sides of the questions. He discusses abrogation: how some passages of the Koran that urge peace and tolerance were replaced by others that cancel and reverse their meaning, and which ones must be taken as the final word.

Finally he states his own conclusion unambiguously: that Islam is a very dangerous creed which is seriously threatening the West. He prescribes some of the measures that should be implemented to stop it encroaching further and to reverse the advances it has made. We are engaged in a war that we have to win, and we must begin to fight it seriously.

The strong recommendation is that we begin to instruct ourselves, recognize that we are involved in a war for our very survival as a civilization, know who the enemy is, and be prepared to take whatever steps are necessary to prevent our ultimate eclipse. … We must resist the plangent modalities of Islamospeak lulling us to sleep with tranquilizing platitudes about a “religion of peace,” vernal consolations, redemptive insights, and private exaltations. We should also remain vigilant against the promulgation of meretricious “facts” …

From, for instance, Barack Obama:

In his Ramadan message for this year …  [Obama] declared that “here in the United States, Ramadan is a reminder that Islam has always been part of America and that American Muslims have made extraordinary contributions to our country.” “Really?” comments Robert Spencer with scarcely disguised contempt. “Maybe Robert Gibbs will be so kind as to provide us with a list of the Muslim Founding Fathers, the Muslim heroes of the American Revolution, the names of the Muslims killed fighting in the Civil War (for the North, no doubt — you know, “racial equality”!), the Muslim Senators and Congressmen who served with distinction in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries — I’m sure the Obama administration will have no trouble coming up with all that, will they? And I trust it will also contain a list of those ‘extraordinary contributions’ that Muslims have made to our country. Aside from being the impetus for some extraordinary innovations in airport security, I can’t think of any.” …

There is undeniably a war going on. …  Both the explosive and the infusorial forms of Islam would need to be resolutely fought if we are to avoid detonation on the one hand and the gradual insemination of Islamic norms, practices and laws into the Western body social on the other. …

Vigorous, unsentimental, and politically uncorrect measures are absolutely indispensable. These would include the shutting down of terror-preaching mosques (as well as the cancellation of the Cordoba project), the deportation of extremist imams, a ramped-up prosecution of phony Islamic “charities,” the stringent oversight of Wahhabi-inspired madrassas with a view to eliminating them altogether, the delicensing of Islamic organizations allied to the Muslim Brotherhood, tightened immigration policies, the prohibiting of shari’a law and finance, the close monitoring of Middle East Studies departments in our universities whose real mandate is not to teach but to proselytize and indoctrinate in favor of Islam, and an all out campaign to dry up the sources of Islamic funding in all areas of public and professional life.

Failing the implementation of such measures, we are embarking on a long day’s journey into night. And let us make no mistake about this, the adversary is a formidable one. …

The “surge” worked in Iraq. The counter-surge of much Islamic popular feeling, exploding demographics, institutional infiltration, lawfare, forum shopping, inflammatory rhetoric, “stealth jihad” and relentless terrorist warfare may work equally well against the pusillanimous West. For this is more than a new Thirty Years War we are engaged in, but a religious and civilizational conflict that will extend into the indefinite future.

Continued from the post below, A flock of pigs:

For once, we say, Robert Fisk is telling the truth in this report on the victimization of women in Islam. We’ll qualify that as mostly the truth. He can’t resist accusing Christians and Hindus of committing the same crimes, though he cites no incidents to bear him out. Still, the report as a whole amounts to a strong – and from him astonishing – denunciation of  Islam.

Here’s a part of it:

Iraqi Kurds, Palestinians in Jordan, Pakistan and Turkey appear to be the worst offenders but media freedoms in these countries may over-compensate for the secrecy which surrounds “honour” killings in Egypt – which untruthfully claims there are none – and other Middle East nations in the Gulf and the Levant. But honour crimes long ago spread to Britain, Belgium, Russia and Canada and many other nations. Security authorities and courts across much of the Middle East have connived in reducing or abrogating prison sentences for the family murder of women, often classifying them as suicides to prevent prosecutions.

It is difficult to remain unemotional at the vast and detailed catalogue of these crimes. How should one react to a man – this has happened in both Jordan and Egypt – who rapes his own daughter and then, when she becomes pregnant, kills her to save the “honour” of his family? Or the Turkish father and grandfather of a 16-year-old girl, Medine Mehmi, in the province of Adiyaman, who was buried alive beneath a chicken coop in February for “befriending boys”? Her body was found 40 days later, in a sitting position and with her hands tied. [See our post, In the name of Allah the merciful, February 4, 2010]

Or Aisha Ibrahim Duhulow, 13, who in Somalia in 2008, in front of a thousand people, was dragged to a hole in the ground – all the while screaming, “I’m not going – don’t kill me” – then buried up to her neck and stoned by 50 men for adultery? After 10 minutes, she was dug up, found to be still alive and put back in the hole for further stoning. Her crime? She had been raped by three men and, fatally, her family decided to report the facts to the Al-Shabab militia that runs Kismayo. Or the Al-Shabab Islamic “judge” in the same country who announced the 2009 stoning to death of a woman – the second of its kind the same year – for having an affair? Her boyfriend received a mere 100 lashes.

And so it goes on, atrocity after atrocity: women electrocuted, burnt to death, buried alive, raped as punishment by judicial order, stoned to death, disfigured by acid and knives …

The headline of the story, for which Fisk himself is probably not responsible, suggests that this is happening as a “crimewave”. No, it is not. Women are subjected to this by order of the holy books of Islam, by the Prophet Muhammad, by fourteen hundred years of custom among his followers. This is the way of Islam.

We’ve seen three pigs flapping their way into the sky in the last few weeks.

The first became airborne when Barney Frank, who had protected the corrupt twins Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac with the flaming ardor of an angel at the gate of Eden, suddenly declared that they should be abolished. (See our post Gasp, August 19, 2010.)

The next swine soared up a few days ago when Fidel Castro, Communist dictator of miserable Cuba for over 50 years, announced that Communist economics don’t work. (See our post Oops! immediately below.)

Now we’ve spotted another.

Robert Fisk has spent a lifetime in journalism defending Arabs and Islam, and Palestinians in particular. He lied consistently about Israel (to my certain knowledge as I was witness to the same events during the Israeli intervention in Lebanon that he reported in 1982 and 1983 – JB.]  Now he’s suddenly discovered that Islam oppresses, tortures and murders women. We’re glad that he has ferreted out this obscure fact, that he is appalled, and that he is publishing cases, descriptions, and the names of victims. We applaud him for it. But he’s the last person we would have expected to write this report.

Harrowing though it is, it needs to be read. This time Robert Fisk, the veteran liar, is telling the truth. …

Continued in the post above, The atrocity that is Islam.

Some thirty or forty years ago, a British journal (can’t recall which) ran a competition for the most devastating headline you could wake up to find on the front page of your national daily newspaper. The winner was (in meaning, even if the wording isn’t exactly right): “Archduke Franz Ferdinand Found Alive First World War Fought By Mistake”.

It came to  mind when we read Jeffrey Goldberg’s account of his interview here and here with Fidel Castro. The old Communist dictator of ruined Cuba, who swept down from the hills into Havana with his guerrillas in January 1959 to seize his country in an iron grip and has been squeezing the life out of it ever since, now declares that the system he imposed “doesn’t work”.

I asked him if he believed the Cuban model was still something worth exporting.

“The Cuban model doesn’t even work for us anymore,” he said. …

Did the leader of the Revolution just say, in essence, “Never mind”?

I asked Julia [Julia Sweig, Latin American scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations] to interpret this stunning statement for me. She said, “He wasn’t rejecting the ideas of the Revolution. I took it to be an acknowledgment that under ‘the Cuban model’ the state has much too big a role in the economic life of the country.”

And there were more surprises. He said of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, “it wasn’t worth it all”, and that he regretted asking Khruschev to nuke the U.S.

At least Kruschev didn’t do it.

Castro invited Jeffrey Goldberg to come to Havana and interview him on the eve of the Jewish New Year. The date may have been accidental, but the particular Jewish journalist was chosen because the wild old wicked man had read an article by Goldberg on Iran and Israel and that was the subject he said he wanted to talk to him about. He had something to say that he wanted to get out to the wide world, and he chose Goldberg to be his messenger. What he had to say was something sympathetic about the Jews. Let’s give him the benefit of any doubt we may have about his sincerity. He spoke up unambiguously against the ages-long persecution of the Jews, and for the State of Israel’s survival and security (though not its nuclear deterrent). That must surely come as a mighty shock to the international Left. One of its greatest heroes defending its most hated quarry!

As great a shock as his repudiation of collectivist economics? Possibly even greater. Goldberg reports Castro as saying:

“I don’t think anyone has been slandered more than the Jews. I would say much more than the Muslims. They have been slandered much more than the Muslims because they are blamed and slandered for everything. No one blames the Muslims for anything.” The Iranian government should understand that the Jews “were expelled from their land, persecuted and mistreated all over the world, as the ones who killed God. In my judgment here’s what happened to them: Reverse selection. What’s reverse selection? Over 2,000 years they were subjected to terrible persecution and then to the pogroms. One might have assumed that they would have disappeared; I think their culture and religion kept them together as a nation.” He continued: “The Jews have lived an existence that is much harder than ours. There is nothing that compares to the Holocaust.” I asked him if he would tell Ahmadinejad what he was telling me. “I am saying this so you can communicate it,” he answered.

Perhaps Castro is overcome by genuine regret as he nears the end of his life; or perhaps it is only vanity that moves him to wish wistfully for a softer reputation, for the world to remember him as something better than a tyrant.

From the Religionof Peace:

“When not complaining about ”Islamophobia’, the Muslim community

busies itself with racking up dead Christians. Two weeks ago, a

young family was beaten to death by an Islamic mob in Pakistan.

Last week, a Protestant pastor was gunned down in Russia.

Christian children were hacked to death in Nigeria over the weekend.

And, on Monday, two Christian brothers falsely accused of blasphemy

were murdered while in handcuffs outside a courtroom (pictured).”

The Dove World Outreach Center, a nondenominational church in Gainesville, Florida, has announced an “International Burn a Koran Day” on the ninth anniversary of the September 11, 2001, attacks.

This is barbaric and counter-productive.

We are adamantly against the burning of books.

We are adamantly against the burning of copies of the Koran.

So is Robert Spencer, one of America’s foremost experts on Islam, and one of the strongest critics of it. He sensibly writes:

This church’s plan to burn the Qur’an on September 11 is stupid; I disapprove of it and of many other things about the pastor, the church, and the church’s approach to the jihad threat. I don’t support the burning of books; it’s tactically stupid, as it will make the mainstream media portray the church as a bunch of Nazis, and it’s wrong in principle: the antidote to bad speech is not censorship or book-burning, but more speech. Open discussion. Give-and-take. And the truth will out. There is no justification for burning books.

Marisol’s comments here are apposite: “‘International Burn a Koran Day’ does a grave disservice to the cause of spreading awareness about Islamic teachings and the threat that Sharia poses to our way of life. It is a gift to Islamic groups who would so dearly love to portray all of us who criticize and question Islamic teachings (and triumphalist mosques) as frothing reactionaries.”

It would be far better to prescribe the Koran as compulsory reading in all institutions of learning and non-Muslim religious assembly, to have it on open display in all public libraries, to read it aloud in classrooms and theaters, to serialize it in periodicals and daily newspapers, to endow the giving away of copies free of charge, and to place one in every hotel room.

It is an immoral, misogynistic, anti-human text, and the more widely it is read the more likely will Islam be to lose respect and protection, and the less likely to succeed with its proselytizing and jihad.

Talk about getting married and being tied down!

Here, another imam (see our post below, The etiquette of wife-beating) gives another correct interpretation of Allah’s merciful instructions.

Men are told to Hajr disobedient wives before beating them. The root meaning of the verb means to isolate, or tie up and leave alone. English interpretations of the Quran translate it as “forsake”, saying it means to have the wife sleep alone until she comes to her senses (to properly obey her husband).

But is that the correct translation? How does one of Islam’s most famous expositors, Al Tabari, explain Hajr? “It does not mean forsake, because to just leave her and not talk to her is useless for the woman, since she is arrogant and does not want to listen or talk to her husband. If he leaves her alone, he will be doing exactly what she wants! The correct explanation of the verse means to tie her to the bed – like the Arabs tie a camel – and have sex with her by force.”

An interview with an Egyptian Muslim cleric:

Sa’d Arafat: Allah honored wives by instating the punishment of beatings.

Interviewer: Honored them with beatings? How is this possible?!

Sa’d Arafat: The prophet Muhammad said: “Don’t beat her in the face, and do not make her ugly.” See how she is honored. If the husband beats his wife, he must not beat her in the face. Even when he beats her, he must not curse her. This is incredible! He beats her in order to discipline her.

In addition, there must not be more than ten beatings, and he must not break her bones, injure her, break her teeth, or poke her in the eye. There is a beating etiquette. If he beats to discipline her, he must not raise his hand high. He must beat her from chest level. All these things honor the woman.

She is in need of discipline. How should the husband discipline her? Through admonishment. If she is not deterred, he should refuse to share the bed with her. If she is not repentant, he should beat her, but there are rules to the beating. …

Interviewer: With what should be beat her? With his bare hand? With a rod?

Sa’d Arafat: … He can beat her with a short rod. … The honoring of the wife in Islam is also evident in the fact that the punishment of beating is permissible in one case only: when she refuses to sleep with him.

Interviewer: When she refuses to sleep with him?

Sa’d Arafat: Yes, because where else could the husband go? He wants her, but she refuses. He should begin with admonishment and threats…

Interviewer: Allow me to repeat this. A man cannot beat his wife…

Sa’d Arafat:  …over food or drink. Beatings are permitted only in this case, which the husband cannot do without.

All clear now?