UPDATE: According to the Deutsche Welle, a German author of Egyptian origin has gone into hiding after getting death threats. His name and crime?
The news of the death threats against Abdel-Samad was announced by his publisher on Tuesday.
“Hamed Abdel-Samad is taking the call for him to be murdered seriously and has gone into hiding,” the head of the Munich-based Droemer Knaur publishing house, Margit Ketterle, said in a statement.
The calls for the author to be killed apparently came after a speech he gave in Cairo last week in which he criticized radical Islam and Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, accusing them of spreading “religious fascism.”
Abdel-Sadam reportedly also said he did not intend to insult Islam but had a right to express his views.
Not according to some Islamists.
Numerous Islamist web sites subsequently published a picture of the author with the words “wanted dead” written above.
_______________
America has its share of conspiracy theorists, but they’re far more prevalent in the Middle East, at least when it comes to Israel. There is no Muslim brutality, it seems, that can’t be blamed on Israel. The latest is the attacks on the Charlie Hebdo staff and people in a Paris kosher grocery store, which nobody with any brains doubts were a). committed by Muslim terrorists and b). were, at least according to the terrorists’ own statements, motivated by religiously-based ire of the depiction of Muhammad and animus towards Jews.
But that sensibility doesn’t extend to Palestinians, who are, for crying out loud, blaming the Paris violence on Israel, particularly Mossad, the Israeli secret service. (Remember that many Palestinians also thought that the 9/11 attacks were a conspiracy by Zionists. Even the supposed “myth” of the Holocaust was supposed to be orchestrated by Jews.)
Now you may want to question this poll simply because it was reported by Palestine Media Watch, but it was in fact conducted and originally published by an official organ of the Palestianian Authority (PA):
Following the terror attacks against the Charlie Hebdo magazine and a Jewish store in which Muslim terrorists killed 17 people in France earlier this month, columnists writing for the official Palestinian Authority daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida have claimed that Israel was behind the attacks.This view is shared by the vast majority of Palestinians, according to a poll conducted by Ma’an (an independent Palestinian news agency). The poll found that 84.4% support the claim that “the operation (i.e., terror attack) was suspicious, and that Israel may be behind it,” while “only 8.7% believed that the murder of the French [citizens] in Paris was a natural result of the spread of Islamic extremism in Europe.” [Ma’an, Jan. 19, 2015]
Why would Mossad or Israel try to murder Jews in France, you ask? Why, to get French Jews to emigrate to Israel! Or so says the same organ (as reported by PMW):
The writers of the official PA daily have argued that Mossad, the Israeli Secret Intelligence Service, planned the attacks because Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders want to encourage Jewish immigration and take “revenge on European governments… because of their… support for… an independent Palestinian state.” [Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Jan. 15, 2015] (Longer excerpts of all quoted articles appear at the link].
Here’s a bit more Holocaust denial, from a debate that took place five days ago on the Arabic channel of Al-Jazeera (from Qatar), that supposedly “objective” news source. It was translated and put up by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), which describes it as follows:
The U.S.-based Egyptian author Magdi Khalil and Tunisian scholar Shakir Al-Sharafi recently clashed in a heated TV debate on freedom of speech, following the January 2015 Paris attacks. “The Jewish Holocaust is an indisputable and irrefutable fact,” said Khalil. “Why is it only the Muslims who deny the Holocaust?” Al-Sharafi, for his part, cited French Holocaust denier Roger Garaudy, said that Germany and Europe were still “paying the price for this imaginary Holocaust, and added that the Charlie Hebdo attack had been a conspiracy, filmed in advance. The debate aired on Al-Jazeera TV’s show “The Opposite Direction” on January 20, 2015.
Click on the screenshot to hear the heated exchange:
Putting a debate like this on television, at least on a station like Al-Jazeera, is like having a televised debate between creationism and evolution. Evolution, like the Holocaust, is indisputable. And Magdi Khalil is a brave man to say stuff like this. Even though he lives in the U.S., remember that Ayaan Hirsi Ali does, too, and she has bodyguards.
And Murtza Hussain, Glenn Greenwald etc called Harris and Dawkins racists citing their statements “The Islamic world is a tissue of theological conjectures and conspiracy theories” and “Islam is the greatest evil in the world today…”
Jerry- in your very last sentence – ‘lives’ in the U.S., not ‘lies’.
Al-Sharafi is right that not just muslims deny the holocaust; lots of white neonazis do too. The difference, however, is that western governments don’t deny it through things like official state-sanctioned textbooks and public school history class curricula. AIUI, textbooks in islamic nations are pretty dismal/bigoted in their coverage of anything jewish.
Other than that, he (Sharafi) seems to be off the deep end.
“Muslims behaving badly” is one of your tags?
Yes, and there are also tags for “Jews behaving badly” and “Christians behaving badly.”
Al Qaeda has claimed responsibility for the massacres. I guess the Palestinians think they’re lying.
Al Jazeera English doesn’t broadcast stuff like this. I wouldn’t call it unbiased, but there’s an attempt at fairness. Of course, if they did broadcast such things, they’d soon lose all credibility and much of their audience.
Likewise our local FOX affiliate anchors/commentators seems to be a lot saner than the national version.
My mother watches Al Jazeera to the exclusion of most non-BBC news sources. She’s ‘shopped around’ and believes Al Jazeera to be the fairest and least biased news channel she can find. The fact that their editorial line on the Paris killings was revealed recently didn’t seem to bother her too much.
I can see that Al Jazeera’s skewing of the political context when it comes to extremist Islam is so much more subtle than the kind of bias you find on other news channels, like RT or Fox or even MSNBC. They are far more adept at disguising their editorialising and only an outright, caught-in-the-act admission like the one revealed in the emails recently is enough to demonstrate that there’s an agenda.
Still, I read those emails, and by comparison with the diktats handed down from Moscow to RT I reckon the Al Jazeera emails were relatively restrained.
The good news I suppose is that the Palestinians presumably can’t think that Israel engineered the Charlie Hebdo murders in order to discredit an Islam which would never do such a thing over blasphemy and simultaneously believe that Islam did such a thing over blasphemy in order to show what happens when you do that.
I mean, having it both ways wouldn’t be consistent.
Inconsistent or not, “having it both ways” seems to be a given for a Muslim, maybe any “believer,” in the modern world – maybe always! Many believers, not all obviously, trust modern medicine but reject what biology tells us about the natural world. They enjoy the benefits of artificial selection for dog and cat breeds, but refuse to accept the idea of natural selection, or accept it for “animals” but. It humans. They cheer space exploration and are protected with nuclear weapons, but reject what physics tells us about the universe. They root for the “CSI’s” on TV with their DNA analysis and scientific methods, but ultimately hold that “facts” and “theories” are just “opinions” no more dispositive than ancient tribal campfire stories. So it’s no surprise when a person can cheer Al Qaeda for punishing the West and its assimilated Muslims, and also pin the blame for the attack on Israel – it may actually be among the least crazy inconsistencies they hold in their heads at once.
“but. It humans” = but not humans
AutoCorrect has gone bonkers since iOS 8 (and my proofreading skills are not taking up the slack).
BTW, my post sounds very earnest as written; I did not miss Sastra’s sarcasm, I was (clumsily) amplifying her (or his?) very good point.
Reading that put me in mind of fundamental Christians who seems to espouse the same dichotomy in their thinking. I have in mind the creationists. It’s why we should shun all dogmatic thinking – it always leads to trouble.
Actually, if one believes like many Muslims do that Al Qaeda is really a wholly owned subsidiary of the Mossad, there is no inconsistency in their heads.
That’s a very good point.
You don’t have to be a religious nut to be inconsistent like that. There’s an old lawyer joke about a defense attorney explaining to the jury why his murderous client should be found innocent:
“Esteemed jurists, my client has a rock solid alibi. He was somewhere else and we will prove it. Besides which, it was self-defense.”
I didn’t do it and I’ll never do it again!
I think I just went cross eyed with that but sadly this is true.
sub.
I might well be the only person who doesn’t know this, but what does ‘sub’ mean as a post? I did Google it but ended up places I didn’t want to go … Sorry to be a pain, but if anyone could explain in a few words I’d be v grateful.
It means to subscribe. If you want to receive updates by email but don’t have anything to say at that time, you can type “sub” in the comment box and click the two “Notify” checkboxes beneath the comment box before clicking the “Post Comment” button.
There is no other way to subscribe in WordPress, at least not in this particular implementation.
Thanks, Diana.
Thank you for that comment. It made me laugh out loud, very hard, for quite a long time. I can only imaging where you might have ended up googling that.
Imagine, not imaging.
I tried that and got page after page of pictures of sandwiches, also people in wetsuits.
Sub
I hope Hamed Abdel-Samad remains safe. He be (in the “offending” instance anyway) bold.
The silver lining is, at least this means that they think the murders were a bad thing.
And would have been a bad thing, even if perpetrated by Muslims (otherwise the standard view that Muslims did it wouldn’t be a calumny)
True, but I suspect that you’re putting more thought into this then they did.
What’s the point? I just dropped by Scientia Salon and was greeted by a book review: Free Will, the Basics[1]. I was reading that and it was like a rerun of Dawkins with the blonde creationist. The reviewer is quite happy the other side is heard and exposing “all sides” is far better than giving an argument for one side.
[1] https://scientiasalon.wordpress.com/2015/01/28/book-review-free-will-the-basics/
Often it is the people or participants themselves who deny or refuse to accept proven events. Most Germans in WWII claimed not to be Nazis. The Japanese did not do all the atrocities in China. The southern folks in America were only fighting for states rights. Often they put out their own history of these events and teach them in the schools. The Muslims just take this to a higher level and throw in the conspiracies to complete the delusion.
All of this, they believe works for them. Even the republicans do some of this in their politics to justify their crazy behavior.
Did the Israelis also issue the fatwa against Salman Rushdie?
Are the Israelis behind ISIS? After all, both start with the same letter, eh?
ISraelIS! It’s obvious!
I’ve so had it with dumb asses and honour culture.
Yup. Makes you wonder WTF is wrong with some people.
And black is white and war is peace and the pope’s female.
He does often wear a dress…
When propaganda is institutionalized in a society, it’s not difficult to get large numbers of people to agree on all kinds of crazy beliefs- I’ve said for decades that the real struggle in this world is not that of “good” v/s “evil”- it’s that of knowledge v/s ignorance, and ignorance always has an unfair advantage in that it’s so easy.
I think it’s interesting that, if you polled Palestinians as to whether Israel should be destroyed and all of the Jews killed, you’d probably get a similar figure in favor (if not higher), yet few seem to think that the murder of a few people in France could be “the natural result of the spread of Islamic extremism in Europe”- I guess they have a different idea of what “extreme” means.
” . . . it’s not difficult to get large numbers of people to agree on all kinds of crazy beliefs . . . .”
(Sigh,) there are too many ill-advised conceptions on this planet.
I wish Khalil hadn’t muddied his otherwise righteous defense of free speech by attempting to justify the criminalization of Holocaust denial (and erroneously claiming that denying slavery is a criminal offense). As he himself said, freedom of speech is only meaningful if even the most shocking and deviant opinions are protected.
We will notice that it is typically in countries that actually experienced ground war with the Nazis and significant losses by the Holocaust that Holocaust denial in public speeches in not allowed. They have a better idea than the U.S. about where that kind of speech can lead.
And there is now a multidecadal record of restriction of certain types of hate speech in many European countries. And while there have been some instances of over zealous prosecutions, for the most part these excesses have been corrected in review. And Europe is not sliding int a sea of totalitarian thought control as far as I can tell.
Being a ‘free speech absolutist’ is easy in the U.S.. But it is also a bit hypocritical. There is a ton of speech which is restricted in the U.S. and has been for decades and it has survived plenty of legal challenge. There are aspects of speech restricted in the U.S. which are not restricted in Europe, so it cuts both ways.
Personally, I don’t understand the line drawn in the sand here. I don’t see how the criminalization of a few well-defined topics of political speech is not a standard as easily acceptable as our own.
I don’t accept the concept that all political speech must be protected because it is all valuable. Sorry, but some ideas are better than others. Some have more value than others. And some are more dangerous than others.
I do not see how yet another asshole spouting Holocaust denial in a public oration adds anything valuable to a national conversation. And I don’t think that the many European countries that take that view are any less enlightened than the view that all speech (except, of course for the many types of speech which are already not protected) must be allowed all the time in all venues.
These are two different approaches, but I don’t think that one of them is necessarily wrong.
“… some ideas are better than others. Some have more value than others. And some are more dangerous than others.”
If you can give me a foolproof way of determining which ideas are which, I might consider suppressing or outlawing the most dangerous ones. But pay particular attention to the borderline cases. And don’t ignore the history of ideas, which teaches us that some of what we believe today will be considered absurd tomorrow.
I think I’ll take my chances with an open market on ideas, just on the chance that one or more of them, reviled today, may turn out to be the next leap forward for civilization.
The death threat against Abdel-Samad is from 2013.