If you haven’t yet watched this stirring exchange between MoToons publisher Ezra Levant and Officer Shirlene McGovern of the Alberta Human Rights Commission, I urge you to do so now.

Here’s Levant’s opening statement. Note Officer McGovern’s expression throughout.

And on the subject of ‘permissible’ intentions, 

Officer McGovern said “you’re entitled to your opinions, that’s for sure.” Well, actually, I’m not, am I? That’s the reason I was sitting there. I don’t have the right to my opinions, unless she says I do.

A transcript of Levant’s opening statement can be read here. Here’s a brief extract:

For a government bureaucrat to call any publisher or anyone else to an interrogation to be quizzed about his political or religious expression is a violation of 800 years of common law, a Universal Declaration of Rights, a Bill of Rights and a Charter of Rights. This commission is applying Saudi values, not Canadian values. It is also deeply procedurally one-sided and unjust. The complainant – in this case, a radical Muslim imam, who was trained at an officially anti-Semitic university in Saudi Arabia, and who has called for sharia law to govern Canada – doesn’t have to pay a penny; Alberta taxpayers pay for the prosecution of the complaint against me. The victims of the complaints, like the Western Standard, have to pay for their own lawyers from their own pockets. Even if we win, we lose – the process has become the punishment.

The cartoons were published to illustrate this article (free registration required), which is also discussed here. Words of support can be sent via Mr Levant’s website, where more clips and commentary are available, including this on the causes of Islam’s image problem.

Update. 

Related. And. Also. Plus.

Please bankroll my insensitivity. 

Further to comments on how stating the obvious can scandalise PC sensitivities, this seems relevant. Andrew Bostom comments on the firing of jihad terrorism specialist, Stephen Coughlin, and notes the contrast with America’s first encounter with the jihad phenomenon, some two hundred years earlier.   

Bill Gertz, Washington Times national security columnist, reports that the Pentagon has fired Stephen Coughlin, its most knowledgeable specialist on Islamic Law and jihad terrorism. As Gertz observed aptly, the Pentagon thus ended the career of its most effective analyst attempting to prepare the military to wage ideological war against jihadism.

This past September, 2007, I lectured with Mr. Coughlin, a US Army Reserves Major, at The Naval War College, and witnessed his brilliant, tour de force presentation which elucidated the reliance of contemporary jihadism on Islamic Law. Coughlin demonstrated meticulously that Jihad fi Sabil Allah – “Jihad in the cause of Allah,” is the animating principle which underlies the threat of global jihad terrorism, and how this understanding should form the basis for rational, effective threat development assessment, and war planning. That Coughlin’s analyses would even be considered “controversial,” or worse still lead eventually to his firing… is pathognomonic of the intellectual and moral rot plaguing our efforts to combat global jihadism…

Coughlin’s reasoned conclusions simply update and complement, exquisitely, what serious scholars of jihad have long argued about revivalist movements throughout Islamic history. For example, forty years ago (in 1967), John Ralph Willis observed regarding the 19th century jihadist movements in West Africa, specifically, and such historical movements in general,

The jihad… is essentially an instrument of revival, employed for the purpose of extending the frontiers of Islam and leading the faithful back to [its] roots.

…In 1786, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, then serving as American ambassadors to France and Britain, respectively, met in London with the Tripolitan Ambassador to Britain, Sidi Haji Abdul Rahman Adja. These future American presidents were attempting to negotiate a peace treaty which would spare the United States the ravages of jihad piracy—murder, enslavement (with ransoming for redemption), and expropriation of valuable commercial assets – emanating from the Barbary States (modern Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya). During their discussions, they questioned Ambassador Adja as to the source of the unprovoked animus directed at the nascent United States republic. Jefferson and Adams, in their subsequent report to the Continental Congress, recorded the Tripolitan Ambassador’s justification:

… that it was founded on the Laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their [Qur’an], that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as prisoners, and that every [Muslim] who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise.

Stephen Coughlin understands and enunciates what was stated openly to then Ambassadors John Adams and Thomas Jefferson – and what they apparently understood – by the Tripolitan Ambassador Adja. During his September 2007 presentation… Coughlin updated this timeless Islamic formulation into its modern context:

If the enemy in the War on Terror states that he fights jihad in furtherance of Islamic causes that include the imposition of Shari’a law and the re-establishment of the Caliphate; And Islamic law on jihad exists and is available in English; Then professionals with WOT responsibilities have an affirmative, personal, professional duty to know the enemy that includes all the knowable facts associated with the law of jihad.

Stephen Coughlin has been fired for reminding his peers of this basic obligation.

The whole thing.

As former jihadist Tawfik Hamid has repeatedly pointed out,

Without confronting the ideological roots of radical Islam it will be impossible to combat it… It is vital to grasp that traditional and even mainstream Islamic teaching accepts and promotes violence… The grave predicament we face in the Islamic world is the virtual lack of approved, theologically rigorous interpretations of Islam that clearly challenge the abusive aspects of Sharia. Unlike Salafism, more liberal branches of Islam typically do not provide the essential theological base to nullify the cruel proclamations of their Salafist counterparts.

It is ironic and discouraging that many non-Muslim, Western intellectuals have become obstacles to reforming Islam… They find socioeconomic or political excuses for Islamist terrorism… If the problem is not one of religious beliefs, it leaves one to wonder why Christians who live among Muslims under identical circumstances refrain from contributing to wide-scale, systematic campaigns of terror… All of this makes the efforts of Muslim reformers more difficult. When Westerners make politically correct excuses for Islamism, it actually endangers the lives of reformers and in many cases has the effect of suppressing their voices.

And yet there are those, among them the incorrigible Seumas Milne, Madeleine Bunting and Karen Armstrong, whose lists of “root causes” include almost anything except the obvious, of which we must not speak.

Andrew Bostom is the author of The Legacy of Jihad and The Legacy of Islamic Anti-Semitism.

Related. And. Also.

Further to this, Mona Charen ponders the nature of the enemy.

The next to last assassination attempt on Benazir Bhutto came… when a man in the crowd got the former prime minister’s attention. He was holding a one-year-old baby – Bhutto said later she thought it was a girl – and tried to hand the child across the sea of bodies. Bhutto said, “He kept trying to hand it to people to hand to me. I’m a mother. I love babies. But the [street lights] had already gone out and I was worried about the baby getting dropped or hurt.” So she turned away and ducked into her armoured vehicle. Just then, the baby’s body, rigged with explosives, detonated.

That is the nature of the enemy. Thursday morning brought news that another bomber has succeeded in killing Bhutto. Early reports suggest that this time the terrorists relied on a suicide bomber and a gunman. Al-Qaida was quick off the mark. “We terminated the most precious American asset which vowed to defeat [the] mujahedeen,” said commander and spokesman Mustafa Abu al-Yazid in a phone interview with Adnkronos International. Whether al-Qaida really did the killing or opportunistically claimed credit is unclear. But there is no doubt that Bhutto represented a modernising movement within the Islamic world and was accordingly seen as a threat by the seventh century zealots who rig babies with explosives.

A vile ingenuity not without precedent. 

A few weeks ago, I wrote,

The “dialogue” [Tariq] Ramadan forever alludes to, somewhat vaguely, is by implication a dialogue on strictly Islamic terms – which is to say, on terms that are censorious, often circular and profoundly unrealistic. In this, Ramadan is far from alone. I’ve lost count of how many people seem to imagine that it’s somehow possible to challenge jihadist ideology and related horrors without mentioning Muhammad’s rather central role in the origination, sanctioning and perpetuation of those horrors, and without offending an apparently endless menu of other ‘sensitivities’.

Robert Spencer – he of superhuman patience – also wonders why a debate in good faith is so hard to find.

It remains true that Islamic spokesmen, while denigrating and dismissing my work, have never actually refuted it… And this is a much larger issue than simply who will or will not debate me, because it highlights the fact that peaceful Muslims have never formulated an Islamic response to the jihadists’ claim to represent pure and true Islam – and as long as they do not and apparently cannot do so, the jihadists will continue to hold the intellectual initiative within Islamic communities worldwide. “Moderate” Muslim spokesmen such as those above have not just not answered me; they’ve done nothing to seize that intellectual initiative and blunt the force of jihadist recruitment among Muslims.

In case yesterday’s post on apostasy seemed a little theoretical and remote, here’s more, via Mick Hartley:

The daughter of a British imam is under police protection after she received death threats from her family for converting to Christianity. The woman, aged 32, whose father is a Muslim imam in Lancashire, has moved house 45 times to escape detection by her family since she became a Christian 15 years ago… Hannah, who uses a pseudonym to hide her identity… has been in hiding since her home was attacked by a group of men armed with knives, axes and hammers, in 1994. The latest threat was a text message from one of her brothers, warning that he could not be responsible for his actions if she did not return to Islam.

Ah, smell the piety. Antony Barnett’s Dispatches documentary on apostasy in the UK can be viewed online in two parts.