New Media » Islamist politics

My Interview with Blazing Cat Fur

jnarvey — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 06:11:44 +0000

Recently interviewed Blazing Cat Fur about religious encroachment on secular schools, political correctness and the dreaded HRCs. Have a listen.

I’m Speaking At Northern Voice! Political Propaganda 101 Combining my two great interests, politics and social media, I’ll...

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How Close Did Iranian Protesters Come to Winning?

jnarvey — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 17:02:32 +0000

A lot closer than most people realized. A new Guardian documentary reveals “a ruling elite so unsettled by the uprising that it had a plane on standby ready to fly the president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and the supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, to Syria at a moment’s notice.”

What might have been.

H/T to Harry’s Place

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Galloway Gets No RESPECT

jnarvey — Sat, 08 May 2010 16:00:22 +0000

As reported at Nexus, George Galloway has been soundly defeated in Bethnal Green and Bow. He will undoubtedly remain an annoying demagogue, but he will do so without the aura of respectability conferred by membership in the British House of Commons.

Now, how much longer will we have to wait for Galloway to be charged for providing materiel support to a terrorist organization? Perhaps it would have been too unseemly to go after him while he was still an active member of parliament. Those political considerations have changed.

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Why A Suitcase Bomb is Worse than the Old Soviet Threat

jnarvey — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 15:33:35 +0000

The US President hit the nail on the head at the Washington Nuclear Summit as to why we are more at risk from nuclear attack now than in the last decades of the Cold War: radical Islamists of the Al Queda or Iranian regime template. I explain in my latest essay in the Mark, The New Nuclear Threat, as to why this threat seems more urgent than when we were facing off against a revolutionary regime willing to imprison and murder millions of its own citizens in order to retain power:

Islamist theocracies and terrorist groups, however, are very different. It’s not because they aren’t rational actors. They may be perfectly rational. It’s just that they’re working from an entirely different set of assumptions.

Islamist ideology is all about rejecting the decadence and wickedness of this corrupt world for a better existence in the afterlife. Even for Islamists ensconced within relatively comfortable Western countries, electric cars, iPads, and medical technology that can extend life by decades are no consolation for the fact that Satan rules this plane of existence.

How do you escape this hell on Earth? Why, please God and go to heaven of course. What’s the easiest way to do that according to their ideology? Kill infidels. How do you kill the largest number of infidels in the least amount of time? Nuke them.

But what if this results in a counter strike by the infidels? Even better, say the Islamists. All those tens of millions of Muslims who could be killed in a nuclear retaliation would also go to heaven. Mutually Assured Destruction becomes a win-win.

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Amnesty Digs in Heels to Support Jihadist. Why?

jnarvey — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 15:11:10 +0000

The saga of Amnesty International’s decision to stand by an extremist who characterizes the armed struggle type of jihad as “tourism” has gone from bad to worse. Gita Saghal, who was suspended from her position as head of Amnesty’s Gender Unit for criticizing this relationship in public, succinctly sums up the nefarious themes at work in a recent interview:

Amnesty has come out with a statement saying that Mozzam Begg defends something called defensive jihad. He believes in this concept and we do not believe, (that is Amnesty’s senior leadership) that it is antithetical to human rights. Now that is a most extraordinary statement which they have not made before they were forced to the media and to defend their position in the media…

Now it appears they feel his views are not antithetical to human rights and it seems that they do not understand anything about what defensive jihad means…

Is is extremely worrying if they think that ideologies that are promoting systematic violence and discrimination against women, against religious minorities…

This concept of jihad, according to Begg in an article he wrote, is an individual obligation on all Muslims. Now many Muslims would say that jihad is a spiritual obligation, it’s about an intellectual and spiritual struggle. Not everyone believes it’s about war. He specifically rejects that idea. He thinks that it is about war, and that it is an individual obligation and that people should go and fight.

What do you do when the leaders of an organization most associated with the protection of human rights decide to partner with someone whose agenda would lead to the systematic destruction of human rights? Revoking your membership with Amnesty International and canceling your monthly donations could be a start.

Gita Saghal on Amnesty and Mozzam Begg

H/T to Harry’s Place.

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Will Israel Become a Pariah State?

jnarvey — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 21:48:26 +0000

It’s looking more and more like a strong possibility. The odd support of the left around the world in support of an extreme right wing violent agenda may make this a reality:

This problem is not exactly new, though the trends have certainly worsened over the past few years. For years after Oslo, virtually everyone agreed on a two-state solution. This made sense, since Palestinians themselves were asking to remain separate from Jews.

But now, we hear lots of talk of a one-state solution, in which the Jewish remnant in a unified nation would very soon lose its unique character through simple demography. “It would have been beyond the pale years ago, but now they talk of an Apartheid state, even though Israel is a multicultural country where all citizens, Jew and Arab alike, have the very same civil rights — and next door in the Palestinian territories and the Arab lands, Jews were kicked out of their homes and would not be safe in those countries today. Yet none of this is even discussed.”

Read the full article, The Case of the Kidnapped Conscience

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Size Doesn’t Matter. It’s All About the Angle

jnarvey — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 09:05:25 +0000

The Size Doesn’t Matter campaign is a brilliant counter to the Israel Apartheid Week. When debate is rendered meaningless, but turning the other cheek isn’t your bag, satire and counter-culture jamming makes a lot of sense.

Instead of images of Palestinians at checkpoints, we get a shot of a nearly-naked supermodel. Forget Gaza — look at this Mediterranean beach! What happened to the kids throwing stones at a Merkava tank? They must be hiding behind the stage at that rock concert. Forget for a moment the statistics on the number of Palestinians living below the poverty line. Let’s have a look at some facts about Israel’s achievements in the fields of science, medicine and the protection of civil rights (for both Israeli Jews and Arabs in equal measure, naturally).

Cynics will look at this social media campaign and its publicized events at campuses across Canada as an offensive distraction to the grim IAW movement. But that’s the point. It’s meant to be.

IAW is itself a distraction and a decisively unhelpful one when it comes to actually solving the horrendous challenge of Middle East peace. Putting out Size Doesn’t Matter as a distraction to the distraction is exactly the strategy to use.

We live in a culture where political correctness has dulled the ability of both students and their teachers to distinguish between a liberal democracy and a lawless tyranny. In that context, sowing confusion among the holier-than-thou fundamentalists and proto-fascists with a campaign of big boobs, bright lights and some reminders about the gay-friendly, women-friendly and eco-friendly nature of the Jewish state just plain works.

“It may be small, but it has brought the driest places to life!”

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An Apt Metaphor for the Global Islamist Movement

jnarvey — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 18:12:25 +0000

Twenty three seconds in.

H/T to Blazing Cat Fur.

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Killing Terrorists. It’s All About Location, Location, Location

jnarvey — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 21:40:54 +0000

Just so we’re all on the same page, killing dangerous jihad-obsessed fanatics hunkered down along the Pakistan frontier with drone-fired Hellfire missiles is good.

The US has recently stepped up its drone attacks as the CIA hunts a bomber who killed seven CIA employees late last year in the border area.

In contrast, there seems to be a problem with killing a dangerous jihad-obsessed fanatic enjoying a stay at a Dubai luxury hotel.

Britain’s relations with Israel are entering a period of crisis over the apparent use of cloned UK passports in the assassination of a Hamas official in Dubai.

OK, got it. Keep the game in bounds, gentlemen. After all, what distinguishes us is that we play by the rules — as opposed to the enemy, who uses children as human shields.

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Amnesty International and Strange Bedfellows

jnarvey — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 17:27:36 +0000

A whistleblower finally came forward (and was promptly sacked) for reporting on Amnesty International’s odd relationship with Cageprisoners, an organization that advocates on behalf of the “innocent victims” of the war on terror at Guantanamo — many of whom return to the battlefield to wage jihad as soon as they are released.

It may sound odd to use the word whistleblower to describe someone who merely comments on a public relationship. Though I think it fits in that here we have an insider who breaks with their organization’s formal talking points in comments to the Times of London story entitled “Amnesty International is ‘damaged’ by Taliban link” and is immediately punished for it.

H/T to Terry Glavin, Harry’s Place and Stroppyblog.

Amnesty International and Cageprisoners
Statement by Gita Sahgal

7 February 2010

This morning the Sunday Times published an article about Amnesty International’s association with groups that support the Taliban and promote Islamic Right ideas. In that article, I was quoted as raising concerns about Amnesty’s very high profile associations with Guantanamo-detainee Moazzam Begg. I felt that Amnesty International was risking its reputation by associating itself with Begg, who heads an organization, Cageprisoners, that actively promotes Islamic Right ideas and individuals.

Within a few hours of the article being published, Amnesty had suspended me from my job.

A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when a great organisation must ask: if it lies to itself, can it demand the truth of others? For in defending the torture standard, one of the strongest and most embedded in international human rights law, Amnesty International has sanitized the history and politics of the ex-Guantanamo detainee, Moazzam Begg and completely failed to recognize the nature of his organisation Cageprisoners.

The tragedy here is that the necessary defence of the torture standard has been inexcusably allied to the political legitimization of individuals and organisations belonging to the Islamic Right.

I have always opposed the illegal detention and torture of Muslim men at Guantanamo Bay and during the so-called War on Terror. I have been horrified and appalled by the treatment of people like Moazzam Begg and I have personally told him so. I have vocally opposed attempts by governments to justify ‘torture lite’.

The issue is not about Moazzam Begg’s freedom of opinion, nor about his right to propound his views: he already exercises these rights fully as he should. The issue is a fundamental one about the importance of the human rights movement maintaining an objective distance from groups and ideas that are committed to systematic discrimination and fundamentally undermine the universality of human rights. I have raised this issue because of my firm belief in human rights for all.

I sent two memos to my management asking a series of questions about what considerations were given to the nature of the relationship with Moazzam Begg and his organisation, Cageprisoners. I have received no answer to my questions. There has been a history of warnings within Amnesty that it is inadvisable to partner with Begg. Amnesty has created the impression that Begg is not only a victim of human rights violations but a defender of human rights. Many of my highly respected colleagues, each well-regarded in their area of expertise has said so. Each has been set aside.

As a result of my speaking to the Sunday Times, Amnesty International has announced that it has launched an internal inquiry. This is the moment to press for public answers, and to demonstrate that there is already a public demand including from Amnesty International members, to restore the integrity of the organisation and remind it of its fundamental principles.

I have been a human rights campaigner for over three decades, defending the rights of women and ethnic minorities, defending religious freedom and the rights of victims of torture, and campaigning against illegal detention and state repression. I have raised the issue of the association of Amnesty International with groups such as Begg’s consistently within the organisation. I have now been suspended for trying to do my job and staying faithful to Amnesty’s mission to protect and defend human rights universally and impartially.

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