Among the Allies

That day, the union of newspaper sellers in Quetta called a strike to protest the arrest of several of its members for selling publications that had recently been banned. The vendors sat in front of their shops, drinking tea. One old man blamed America for the ban on radical Islamic publications. “Musharraf is the agent of Bush,” he said. He complained of the double standards he saw: “Our army preaches jihad in the name of Allah,” he said, “but newspapers cannot.” Another seller fretted that “we did not get a list. We don’t know which books are banned. We are afraid.”

The following day, when the newsstands were open again, I returned to see what they were selling. Alongside books and journals with inviting pictures of Indian pop stars was a book entitled In the Grip of the Jews. On its cover was a snake with a Star of David slithering around the American flag. Another book cover depicted an American hand holding a cobra and giving it to a Muslim hand, while the Muslim world was shown in crosshairs. I managed to purchase two magazines that everyone seemed to agree were banned. One was called Way of Faith, and this particular issue was dedicated to the battle of Fallujah, which had become mythic throughout the Muslim world. An article claimed that hundreds of Americans had been killed in Fallujah, but the American government was silent over its losses, which were like Vietnam. There was a summary of 10 Koranic chapters that discussed jihad. Statistics were provided for the daily deaths of allied forces in Iraq.

I also purchased a weekly magazine called the Friday Special, published by the Jamaat-e-Islami political party. Its cover depicted Pakistan as a tree from which hung the “fruits of secularism,” such as music, dance, Western television channels, the promotion of pornography, changes in Islamic textbooks, the crackdown on madrasas, and the cancellation of religious publications. For a reason I could not divine, the characters of The Simpsons were standing next to the tree.

[...]

THE JAMIAT ULEMA-E-ISLAM (JUI) is one of Pakistan’s most radical and powerful religious parties, seeking to purify Islam of Western influences. The JUI spawned the Taliban, and supported it both before and after it took over the Afghan government.

The Summers of Our Discontent
(AgapePress) - Larry Summers has finally resigned. The downfall of the Harvard president began last year, when he dared suggest that women might lack an aptitude for science and math. The irate faculty, feminist to the core, responded with a no-confidence vote from which Dr. Summers never recovered. And so Summers becomes the latest casualty in the Fourth Reich's tireless efforts to enforce uniformity of politically correct thought.

That Summers apologized, promised to reform, and groveled for all he was worth (which, with a $563,000 salary, is a lot) was of no consequence. Sins against the Reich know no forgiveness.

Summers is not alone, mind you. The casualties in the Reich's war on dissent are piling up faster than puff pieces on Hillary Clinton.

Two years ago, when David McClintick, an author and investigative journalist, agreed to write an exposé on Harvard University's effort on behalf of the United States government to help Russia privatize its economy in the 1990's, he had little inkling the article would play a part in forcing the ouster of Harvard's president, Lawrence H. Summers.

In just the last week, the Reich has taken to the streets to silence a peaceful gathering of Christians in Worcester, Massachusetts, vandalized billboards that dared to question homosexual orthodoxy in St. Louis, and forced Christian high school students in Boyd County, Kentucky to attend re-education -- I mean, sensitivity training classes over the objections of their parents.

Earning honorable mention was the Ohio Board of Education, which recently issued an ultimatum prohibiting critical analysis of evolution in Ohio schools. Message to faculty and students: Critical thinking will not be tolerated in our science classes!

At the same time the Left is busy executing dissenters, it cannot pin enough feel-good medals on its own followers.

[...]

Perhaps the extremes to which the Left will go to pat themselves on the back is a result of their naturally depressed dispositions, as George Will recently pointed out in a column at NewsAndOpinion.com. It may also explain why they are so intolerant of opposition; the ranking members of the Reich may ease their angst by abusing and disrupting the dissenters.

The Taliban of Tolerance Strikes Again
In Worcester, Massachusetts, for example, they forced Christians to pay $6,200 to the local police just to protect against the numerous death threats issued by homosexual activists. But the homosexuals, led by none other than the Mayor Himself, gathered en masse (pun intended) outside the event, shut down the streets, and never had to obtain a permit, much less pay a dime for the extra police necessitated by their actions.

In Islam, as much as Judaism and Christianity, as this Christian understands it, the core theological tradition so affirms such otherness of the deity that no merely familial, tribal, or national claims can be made upon it. Indeed, that the Holy One is wholly other is the first principle of human toleration, since no single person or group has an exclusive claim on the divine. The second principle of toleration is that God, as its author, belongs to the entire cosmos, not to any mere part of it.

[...]

Obviously, Islam, Judaism, and Christianity have all had trouble keeping these principles of toleration straight, with each of the monotheisms having regularly reduced God to a tribal deity, and loyalty to God to a cause of war. We see just such a thing unfolding in the streets of Muslim cities today, as self-appointed defenders of the greatness of God are the ones, in fact, defiling it.