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Ayaan Hirsi Ali writes on Islamic faux outrage.
It is a strange and bitter coincidence that the latest eruption of violent Islamic indignation takes place just as Salman Rushdie publishes his new book, Joseph Anton: A Memoir, about his life under the fatwa.
In 23 years not much has changed.
Islam’s rage reared its ugly head again last week. The American ambassador to Libya and three of his staff members were murdered by a raging mob in Benghazi, Libya, possibly under the cover of protests against a film mocking the Muslim Prophet Muhammad.
They were killed on the watch of the democratic government they helped to install. This government was either negligent or complicit in their murders. And that forces the U.S. to confront a stark, unwelcome reality.
Until recently, it was completely justifiable to feel sorry for the masses in Libya because they suffered under the thumb of a cruel dictator. But now they are no longer subjects; they are citizens. They have the opportunity to elect a government and build a society of their choice. Will they follow the lead of the Egyptian people and elect a government that stands for ideals diametrically opposed to those upheld by the United States? They might. But if they do, we should not consider them stupid or infantile. We should recognize that they have made a free choice—a choice to reject freedom as the West understands it.
How should American leaders respond? What should they say and do, for example, when a spokesman for the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s newly elected ruling party, demands a formal apology from the United States government and urges that the “madmen” behind the Muhammad video be prosecuted, in violation of the First Amendment? If the U.S. follows the example of Europe over the last two decades, it will bend over backward to avoid further offense. And that would be a grave mistake—for the West no less than for those Muslims struggling to build a brighter future. …
… And the defining characteristic of the Western response? As Rushdie’s memoir makes clear, it is the utterly incoherent tendency to simultaneously defend free speech—and to condemn its results.
I know something about the subject. In 1989, when I was 19, I piously, even gleefully, participated in a rally in Kenya to burn Rushdie’s book The Satanic Verses. I had never read it.
Later, having fled an arranged marriage to the Netherlands, I broke from fundamentalism. By the time of Sept. 11, 2001, I still considered myself a Muslim, though a passive one; I believed the principles but not the practice. After learning that it was Muslims who had hijacked airplanes and flown them into buildings in New York and Washington, I called for fellow believers to reflect on how our religion could have inspired these atrocious acts. A few months later, I confessed in a television interview that I had been secularized.
The change had consequences. …
… Rushdie felt particularly aggrieved that many of the attacks came from people whose worldview he shared. His leftist credentials were undisputed, given his positions on apartheid, the Palestinian question, racism in Britain, and Margaret Thatcher’s government. What’s more, Rushdie considered himself a friend, not an enemy, of Islam. He believed that his roots in Islam—though his family was not particularly religious—gave him credibility. His previous book, Midnight’s Children, had been a hit in India, Pakistan, and even Iran. He had no clue that Verses would trigger a hostile reaction among Muslims.
How wrong it was to accuse him of provoking those who sought to silence him—and for the British government to urge him to apologize as a way of accommodating Muslim leaders. In the past 23 years, we have learned a lot about the danger of giving in to the demands of extremists. We now know all too well how it incites them to demand more and to refuse reason and a peaceful settlement.
Or at least some of us know it. …
… We must be patient. America needs to empower those individuals and groups who are already disenchanted with political Islam by helping find and develop an alternative. At the heart of that alternative are the ideals of the rule of law and freedom of thought, worship, and expression. For these values there can and should be no apologies, no groveling, no hesitation.
It was Voltaire who once said: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” As Salman Rushdie discovered, as we are reminded again as the Arab street burns, that sentiment is seldom heard in our time. Once I was ready to burn The Satanic Verses. Now I know that his right to publish it was a more sacred thing than any religion.
Jennifer Rubin tracks 15 media certitudes about the Romney campaign.
It is remarkable that anyone pays attention to the mass of pundits, both left and right, who have gotten so much so wrong in this election cycle. You’d think after three or five or even 10 goofs, the pundits would be more sheepish and the readers and viewers more wary.
Here’s a brief recap of some of the media assertions, delivered with great certitude, which proved to be dead wrong.
1. Romneycare would prevent Mitt Romney from getting the nomination.
2. Romneycare would prevent Romney from making an argument against Obamacare.
3. Texas Gov. Rick Perry was a sure thing.
4. The GOP would pick a tea party favorite as its nominee.
5. Romney’s $10,000 “bet” in a primary debate was going to wreck his campaign. …
… You do have to wonder if anything the media have propounded as political wisdom has been right. No one gets everything right in a campaign, but if a pundit or reporter got most of these wrong, why pay any attention?
Here we sit with Romney as the presidential nominee. Ryan energized his ticket, was a hit with the base and has put Wisconsin in play. None of the supposed “gaffes” have changed the course of the race. Romney never released more tax returns than he initially promised. Eastwood’s “empty chair” was a hit with the base. The DNC bounce is gone. One of the most effective arguments the Republicans have made is that Obama took $716 billion from Medicare to pay for Obamacare. Obama fell in foreign policy approval in the latest Wall Street Journal-NBC poll, and attention is now turned to whether the administration was lying when it said the attacks were spontaneous and all about an anti-Muslim movie.
So when the media mavens on the right and left are in hysterics over Romney’s 47 percent remarks, think how accurate the media’s judgment has been. Consider whether the pundits think everything is a disaster for Romney and just don’t like him.
You might say the biggest inaccuracy the media have come up with is the notion that they matter. They have proved to be more tone deaf and irrelevant than most conservatives even imagined.
Toby Harnden also wonders what the big media Obama fuss in about.
Mitt Romney’s presidential bid has been gleefully portrayed as doomed after a series of supposed stumbles that have delighted Democrats.
Voters, however, apparently view things rather differently.
Romney has closed to just one point behind Barack Obama – a drop of six percentage points in a week for the President, according to the latest Gallup tracking poll released on Tuesday. Obama is now on 47 points and Romney 46.
The survey was taken before the current furore over comments made by the Republican nominee in a fundraiser at Boca Raton, Florida in which he said that 47 per cent of Americans were dependent on the government and ‘it’s not my job to worry about these people’.
But the poll, and another by Rasmussen that puts Romney two points ahead, strongly indicate that Obama’s Democratic convention ‘bounce’ has all but evaporated and the 2012 race is wide open. …
Similar thoughts from Jonathan Tobin.
So while some of us were celebrating the Jewish New Year and taking the last couple of days off from politics, it appears a video has more or less decided the election. That’s the assumption of much of the mainstream media about the impact of the release of the video of Mitt Romney speaking back in May at a private fundraiser about the 47 percent of the country that doesn’t pay taxes. They think this means it’s time to put a fork in the Republican candidate. They believe the pile-on from both the Democrats and their media allies will be enough to effectively push Romney far enough behind the president that he will never be able to make it up in the weeks remaining to him. This is, to understate matters, something of a self-fulfilling prophecy since the reason the video is considered to be such a big deal is because it has been covered as an earth-shaking gaffe that ought to spike Romney’s hopes of ever winning the presidency.
As much as I’ve taken a dim view of some of the pie-eyed optimism on the right that wrongly discounted Barack Obama’s advantages, the assumption that Romney has been fatally damaged is incorrect. …
David Harsanyi weighs in too.
All we’ve heard these past two weeks is how much Mitt Romney is “struggling.”
Apparently, he’s struggling to keep President Barack Obama’s poll numbers from falling too quickly. It seems that voters have the temerity not to be particularly interested in what pundits are telling them to think about the race. Obama has dropped six percentage points in a week, allowing Romney to close to within one point of the president, according to the latest Gallup tracking poll released on Tuesday. …
Finally, we here from Andrew Malcolm.
Forget the Republican doom and gloom drumbeat peddled elsewhere in the media this week.
A new Gallup Poll out this morning finds President Obama’s convention bounce fading and the 2012 presidential race reverting to its previous tight margin. What a bummer for the preferred media narrative of recent days!
The poll, of 1,096 registered voters in 12 key swing states, finds Obama and Mitt Romney virtually tied at 48% for the Democrat and 46% for Romney with less than seven weeks to go.
Gallup’s Daily Tracking of registered voters nationally finds the margin even closer with Obama at 47% and Romney at 46%.
The crucial swing states polled were: Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin. Obama handily won all 12 states over John McCain in 2008, but at this point this time the race is much closer. …
There is disappointment in MA as Brown is dropping in the polls. Seth Mandel fills us in.
The disconnect between the polls that show Mitt Romney and Barack Obama in a dead heat and the media conventional wisdom desperately pronouncing Obama the easy victor is being turned on its head in the Massachusetts Senate race. There, it is Republican Scott Brown that seems to be running the better campaign, yet the polls are starting to show a consistent lead by his challenger, Elizabeth Warren.
Though Brown’s approval rating is no longer the stratospheric 73 percent it was only last year according to a Democratic committee poll, he is still above water at 55 percent among registered voters and 57 percent among likely voters. A new poll shows Massachusetts voters think Brown is running the more positive campaign, 35 percent to 21 for Warren. And Brown’s strong ties to the state are not lost on voters, nor is Warren’s lack of same; only 13 percent of voters think she has a strong connection to the state. Brown’s approval rating among independents is 67 percent and 30 percent among Democrats. So what’s causing Brown’s poll slide? …
However, the Boston Herald touts a poll that finds Brown in the lead.
U.S. Sen. Scott Brown has moved into a narrow lead over rival Elizabeth Warren while his standing among Massachusetts voters has improved despite a year-long Democratic assault, a new UMass Lowell/Boston Herald poll shows.
The GOP incumbent is beating Warren by a 50-44 percent margin among registered Bay State voters, a turnaround from the last University of Massachusetts Lowell/Herald poll nine months ago that had the Democratic challenger leading by seven points. Among likely voters, Brown is leading the Harvard Law professor by a 49-45 percent margin, just within the poll’s 5.5 percent margin of error.
“I wasn’t too sure of him at first, but he’s been very independent,” said Jo Ann Dunnigan, a longtime Democrat and President Obama supporter from Fall River who participated in the poll, conducted Sept. 13-17.
Brown and Warren face off Oct. 1 in a debate sponsored by the Herald and UMass Lowell.
The poll, conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates, shows nearly one in three Brown backers say they could change their mind before Election Day, compared to just 19 percent for Warren. But the poll, which started a week after the Democratic National Convention, finds no evidence of a “bounce” for Warren.
There also is some troubling news for the well-financed Warren campaign. Despite spending millions of dollars to tarnish Brown’s image, the GOP incumbent’s popularity has actually increased in the past nine months. …