◼ Radical Islam doesn't like being mocked. Funny how we don’t have to worry about our lives after mocking the Pope, isn’t it? - David Harsanyi/The Federalist
◼ Paris: Islam Strikes Again - Roger L. Simon/PJM
After the brutal mass murders at the office of Charlie Hebdo magazine in Paris, the airwaves and the Internet are filled with pundits and “experts” wondering whether this horrendous act is the work of al-Qaeda, ISIS or were these evil maniacs “self-radicalized,” as the new phrase goes.
I have news for them – there is no difference! Al-Qaeda, ISIS and the Muslim man on the street all work from the same play books; they need no outside advice. And those play books are the holy texts of Islam, the Koran and the Hadith. All you need to know is there.
Egypt’s el-Sisi is right. Islam is in desperate need of a reformation, because right now it is not even a religion. It is a virus.
What the world should do now is nothing short of an intervention, just how we would treat a drug addicted or alcoholic relative. Unfortunately, given the terrified international leadership, that isn’t in the offing. They are more likely to call the murder at Charlie Hebdo “workplace violence,” as ludicrous as that sounds and is.
Meanwhile, one of the terms that should have been shot dead with these is murders as well is “Islamophobia.” From Hamas to ISIS to the Paris psychopaths, anyone who does not fear Islam is irrational, not the other way around. I fear Islam because I criticize it frequently. Some religious nutcase could run through my door and shoot me and my family at any time. It’s the simple truth. The folks at Charlie Hebdo are my brothers and sisters and I grieve for them.
◼ Atheist Richard Dawkins Has a Message About Islam in the Wake of France’s Deadly Terror Attack - The Blaze
No, all religions are NOT equally violent. Some have never been violent, some gave it up centuries ago. One religion conspicuously didn’t.
— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) January 7, 2015◼ The Blame for the Charlie Hebdo Murders - GEORGE PACKER/The New Yorker
The murders today in Paris are not a result of France’s failure to assimilate two generations of Muslim immigrants from its former colonies. They’re not about French military action against the Islamic State in the Middle East, or the American invasion of Iraq before that. They’re not part of some general wave of nihilistic violence in the economically depressed, socially atomized, morally hollow West—the Paris version of Newtown or Oslo. Least of all should they be “understood” as reactions to disrespect for religion on the part of irresponsible cartoonists.that Islam is a religion of peace, or that, at most, the violence represents a “distortion” of a great religion....
They are only the latest blows delivered by an ideology that has sought to achieve power through terror for decades. It’s the same ideology that sent Salman Rushdie into hiding for a decade under a death sentence for writing a novel, then killed his Japanese translator and tried to kill his Italian translator and Norwegian publisher. The ideology that murdered three thousand people in the U.S. on September 11, 2001. The one that butchered Theo van Gogh in the streets of Amsterdam, in 2004, for making a film. The one that has brought mass rape and slaughter to the cities and deserts of Syria and Iraq. That massacred a hundred and thirty-two children and thirteen adults in a school in Peshawar last month. That regularly kills so many Nigerians, especially young ones, that hardly anyone pays attention.
Because the ideology is the product of a major world religion, a lot of painstaking pretzel logic goes into trying to explain what the violence does, or doesn’t, have to do with Islam. Some well-meaning people tiptoe around the Islamic connection, claiming that the carnage has nothing to do with faith, or
