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| Death Threats and Tolerance |
| 2005-07-01 |
| By Robert Spencer âMay Allah rip out his spine from his back and split his brains in two, and then put them both back, and then do it over and over againâŠ.Amen.â âI believe heâs already on the hit list, nothing new.â âwe make dua [i.e., we pray] Allah allows your blood to spill over our hands.â These are threats I have received recently. Last week, when I spoke at the New York Tolerance Center about âThe True Nature of the Jihad Threat,â I discovered that news of these threats have somehow found their way to the New York Police Department, which -- unbeknownst to me until I arrived at the venue -- dispatched its âHercules Teamâ to ward off any who might have wanted to make those threats reality. The Team, a group of courteous and accomplished plainclothesmen, turned away one young man with a backpack at the door, after he refused to let them search his bag. Against that somewhat ominous backdrop, I spoke about the violent intolerance of the Islamic jihad: its imperative to impose Sharia, with its institutionalized discrimination against non-Muslims and women, and its mandate to commit violent acts that is rooted in the Qurâan and Sunnah, supported by mainstream understandings of those texts, and elaborated by Islamic law. I tried to impress upon the crowd the threat that the jihad poses to central notions of human rights enshrined in the UNâs Universal Declaration of Human Rights and derived from the Judeo-Christian tradition. Bravo for lifeâs little ironies: after this talk about the need to defend the West from this furious and fanatical form of intolerance, I was confronted by a young man and a young woman who were quite offended by my -- you guessed it -- intolerance. The Muslims who made it necessary for us to have our conversation under armed guard because of death threats did not offend them. My talk did. We had a brief discussion -- until the young man refused to shake my hand and I realized that no real exchange of ideas was going to be possible -- in which I found that their views reflected not just their personal opinions, but a large number of common prejudices and false assumptions about the nature of the present conflict, the meaning of tolerance itself, and more. Rest at link. |
| Posted by:ed |
| #2 Beautifully written. Imminently quotable throughout. Excellent piece - Thx ed! |
| Posted by: .com 2005-07-01 16:18 |
| #1 I find it simply baffling how the "tolerant" cannot tolerate the intolerant. And that they cannot ever see that there are times that intolerance is the correct and reasonable response to these murderous people. How can these "tolerant" people tolerate the only religion that overtly, regularly and actively calls for the death of others. |
| Posted by: PlanetDan 2005-07-01 10:19 |