Another Tack: "The Dearborn omen".(JPost).By Sarah Honig.
It’s perhaps no quirk of fate that the latest episode in Dearborn’s annals is about protecting the honor of a prophet via anti-blasphemy laws – the draconian sort which proliferate in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and other centers of Islamic enlightenment. It’s all along the lines of the international ban on anti-Islam speech proposed at the UN General Assembly by Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood and darling of America’s own elected leader, Barack Obama.
This is hardly insignificant because the impetus for the outcry about the supposed insult to Muhammad’s repute was given by no other than Obama himself.
It was he and his administration’s mouthpieces who assiduously disseminated the insult-narrative as the pretext for Muslim violence worldwide. They repeatedly underscored, harshly condemned and profusely apologized for said insult – even if in the same breath they also sanctimoniously preached that rioting isn’t a proper response to what they nevertheless did portray as a genuine grievance.
Obama’s flattery of fanatics constitutes a prime feature of his outreach-to-Islam policy. His premise is that sycophancy from a president boasting the middle name of Hussein should, in and of itself, create an affinity, make Muslims trust him and accept him as a kindred spirit.
But what Obama in fact does is appeal with superficial presumption to Muslim xenophobes, elevating their intransigence to undeserved equality with the West’s carte blanche tolerance.
Thereby Obama reinforces in his Muslim listeners the sense that they are actually wronged and deserve redress. At this point his entreaties for calm are lost in the tempest of unforgiving Islamic indignation which he helps stir up.
This perception of righteous resentment, accentuated by their own favorite president, brought Dearborn’s Muslims out for an extraordinary rally to urge that legal prohibitions be legislated against free speech, if that speech is deemed hurtful to “the religious feelings of Muslims.”
The inescapable subtext is a campaign to silence freedom of expression and effectively submit to Islamic censorship whatever is put out in the public domain.
Needless to stress, in the hallowed name of the First Amendment, America tolerated the massive Dearborn anti-First Amendment protest. It also turned a blind eye last June to the stoning of Christian demonstrators in Dearborn, the American city with the largest proportion of Arabs in its population (estimated at between 40 and 50 percent), as well as home to the nation’s largest mosque and Islamic center – and there are numerous other mosques and competing Islamic centers in Dearborn.
It’s a far cry from what Dearborn once was. The township was catapulted to prominence by Henry Ford, who was born and bred nearby (within today’s city limits), would make it his home, headquarter his automobile manufacturing conglomerate there and in it develop his innovative mass production concept, replete – for better and worse – with the conveyor belt and assembly line.
But Dearborn would imprint a heavy mark on humankind not only in terms of modern industry and labor relations. If Ford could posthumously catch a glimpse of this locale today, he’d apoplectically somersault in his grave. He serially conjured up doomsday visions of ogre Jews taking over WASP dominions. Yet in his direst nightmares he couldn’t imagine that Dearborn would become the most Arab of American cities.
Dearborn, of course, cloaks itself with good intentions in the best of American tradition.
According to rally-organizer, self-proclaimed “moderate” Osama Siblani, “there’s a need for deterrent legal measures against those individuals or groups that want to damage relations between people, spread hate and incite violence.”
And so under the cover of anti-hate laws, one group would seize for itself exclusive rights to silence any opinion which it would denounce as an affront to its religion, and to it alone. Through the distorting prism of Shari’a law, rights which we consider inalienable might certainly be misrepresented as hate-speech. But they are not. Non-fawning appraisal of any aspect of Islam isn’t perforce hate.
On the other hand, hate is what’s propagated blusterously by Hamas, which hardly comes under fire in Dearborn.
Indeed Hamas is highly popular there and is even actively supported via fund-raising for ostensibly charitable causes. Many in Dearborn don’t dispute Hamas’s claims to possess divine rights to annihilate an entire nation – Israel.
There are no rallies in Dearborn against the blunt assertion in the Hamas Charter’s opening section that “Israel will rise and will remain erect until Islam eliminates it as it had eliminated its predecessors.”
Nor is there any quarrel with the definition of Hamas as a “humane movement,” which merely stipulates that “safety and security can only prevail under the shadow of Islam… Members of other religions must desist from struggling against Islam... for if they were to gain the upper hand, fighting, torture and uprooting would follow.”
There is ample backing in Dearborn for the Hamas historiography which maintains that Jews “stood behind the French and Communist Revolutions and behind most all revolutions.... They also used money to establish clandestine organizations... to destroy societies and carry out Zionist interests. Such organizations are: the Freemasons, Rotary Clubs, Lions Clubs, B’nai B’rith, etc. All of them are destructive spying organizations.”
Nobody, contends the Hamas Charter, denies that Jews “stood behind WWI, so as to wipe out the Islamic Caliphate... and established the League of Nations in order to rule the world by means of that organization. They also stood behind WWII....They inspired the establishment of the UN and the Security Council to replace the League of Nations, in order to rule the world by their intermediary.”Read the full story here.
I didn't realise how close Dearborn was to Chicago...!
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