islam-under-the-spotlight

January 12, 2015 12:35 pm By Robert Spencer 9 Comments

Islam Under the Spotlight
by Michael Devolin

“Muslims living in Canada or anywhere else are going to feel under the spotlight or feel that, somehow, they’re implicated in what happened, even though they had nothing to do with it.” –National Council of Canadian Muslims Representative Amira Elghawaby

The above statement is the NCCM’s public response to the terrorist attack on the Charlie Hebdo magazine headquarters in Paris, France. Quite the usual and expected renunciations from Islam’s silent majority. What is telling is the admission that most Muslims will feel they’re “somehow implicated in what happened.” How could any Muslim living the good life in a democratic country in the Western hemisphere not feel in some measure connected to this atrocity? This mass murder was carried out to punish those ordinary French citizens for merely satirizing the Prophet Mohammed and the religion of Islam.

And how could these ordinary French citizens forget the golden rule about Islam and Muslims? That rule is: It’s quite permissible for Muslims, even “moderate Muslims,” to excoriate, even publicly besmirch Christianity or the Judaism and national aspirations of Zionist Jews, but Heaven forbid any “infidel” of any nationality should mock Islam for its proverbial violence and anti-Jewish hatred—a violence and a hatred that seem to follow this religion around like a fiddler’s wife. Gary Clement, the cartoonist for Canada’s National Post newspaper, writes of Wednesday’s horror: “The cartoonists and editors of Charlie Hebdo were murdered that day for doing, more or less, the same thing that I do. The ideas and images that flowed from the minds and pens of my fellow artists had sufficient power, were considered dangerous enough, to provoke an outburst of shocking violence.”

But, of course, the Western media continues inventing placating euphemisms (e.g. “Islamists”) in order to deflect blame away from this so-called “religion of peace.” The Western world is becoming impatient with what by now has become an Islam-in-hiding, but even more disgusted with this overt bloody version apologists reassure us could never be the real Islam but simply the original hijacked and transmogrified by Muslim terrorists.

The simple truth is, what happened in France at Charlie Hebdo headquarters is merely another example of the religiously motivated violence that has been ceaselessly transpiring within Islam’s sphere of influence since the time of the Prophet Mohammed. Only in this modern age, when religious violence of any other kind, of any other religion, would offend Western sensitivities, the wanton slaughter of journalists and cartoonists bold enough to tell the truth about Islam’s darker side is become an elephant standing in our living room, and the bigger this elephant becomes, it seems, the more pretermitted its horrendous presence.

Raphael Israeli writes in his powerful book Islamikaze, “…after long years of a steady but relatively meagre stream of violence in the name of Islam, on 11 September, this long-contained current of hatred and violence gushed out with unexpected force and fury, causing imagination to challenge reality and making it recoil.” And we continue to recoil. The Western world’s primary problem with Islam can be found in our failure to publicly condemn the incapability of our Muslim communities to “feel” implicated in the terrorism that is now overflowing into our streets. Our media and our politicians encourage the “moderate Muslim” NOT to feel “implicated in what happened.” We assure our Muslim communities that Islam is NOT “under the spotlight.” Meanwhile, every newspaper and media outlet in the Western Hemisphere is reporting on terrorist attacks daily without mentioning the fact that every terrorist is a Muslim, an overused obfuscation that does more to make Islam the salient—albeit silent—element in every report than if Islam had been blamed outright as the source of the terrorist attack in the first place.

In 1942, during the Nazi occupation of France, and before she was deported to Auschwitz, Irene Nemirovsky wrote, “They’re trying to make us believe we live in the age of the community, when the individual must perish so that society may live, and we don’t want to see that it is society that is dying so the tyrants can live.” The satirists and the cartoonists of the Charlie Hebdo magazine were murdered because they dared to be individuals and mocked certain elements of Islam that should cause good Muslims to feel implicated in Islamist terrorism. The “community” these Islamist terrorist have planned for us is one where no criticism of Islam is tolerated, where Christians and Jews and Buddhists are to run from the very thought of dissent. But this is not the future that Jews and Christians and Buddhists have in mind. We do not want a Caliphate and we want to say what we feel and what we think, and what we want, more than anything else, is to laugh at ourselves.
Irene Nemirovsky also wrote, “I’m prepared to die but as a French citizen and I insist there be a valid reason for my death…” The French citizens of Charlie Hebdo magazine died as free French citizens, for valid reasons and without surrender, because they put Islam under the spotlight.

Michael Devolin has been a member of JDL Canada since the 1980s, and has served as the personal bodyguard to Meir Weinstein, National Director of JDL Canada, at several high-profile trials, including the Jim Keegstra hate crimes trial and the Imra Finta war crimes trial.