America is nowhere near in as much trouble as, say, Londonistan, but that doesn’t mean Americans should turn a blind eye to Muslim coercion and intimidation. After all, Europe is the canary in the mine for us here in the States; I don’t want to see Muslims calling for the death of Americans outside of American cathedrals, as in this beautiful scene from London: http://catholiclondoner.blogspot.com/2006/09/very-rushed-post.html

have their been any analogous cases where synagogues have brought suits against threatening or anti-semitic notices posted across the street? i certainly remember cases in the past where hate crime suits were brought against white supremacists who had flypostered public areas of neighbourhoods with racist and anti-semitic screeds. so there are precedents set by non-muslims. It doesnt appear as if the group that made the complaint is trying to push the law to make it more extreme, they appear to be working within its existing framework. this is presumably a problem with hate crime legislation being too broadly defined across the board, rather than a dastardly plot by muslims to criminalize anti-islamic thought. After all CAIR are an advocacy group, its their job to take silly positions and huff and puff, just like the ADL. (which has not a few hysterical overreactions of its own under its belt)

personally im against hate-crime legislation, but your disavowal of it seems disingenuous. Somehow its worse for a muslim to use a law to protect themselves from offence or bludgeon people whose ideas they dont like, than for anyone else to do so. why? because muslims are eeeeeeeeevil?

If these two (well, one and a half) examples are all you/ve got i dont think america should be too troubled by the advancing caliphate.

Check out this real world example, then, of Muslim pressure groups going after someone who dared insult Islam: http://www.cair.com/default.asp?Page=articleView&id=39918&theType=NB.

From CAIR’s own site we can read about the dastardly crime of hanging a poster that mocks Islam and Mohammed on a dumpster that is not even on a mosque’s property, but does in fact face that mosque. As the article says, “The words, transliterated from Arabic into English spelling, distorted a common Islamic prayer about Mohammed into an insult.”

So is it proximity to a mosque that now defines hate crimes? After all, no one’s property was damaged or stolen; no underlying crime seems to exist.

Bonus poop:

“I still CONTEND that IF a Bible were thrown into a toilet by a Muslim that there would never be felony charges lodged against the person who did it. You folks write amusingly and well, but I can’t get around that FACT.”

you invent another hypothetical situation, and based on how it plays out in your head, claim its imagined outcome is a “Fact” that undermines your opponents’ positions? seriously dude, wtf is wrong with you?

There is of course no chance of haria law being imposed any time soon in the States. The danger is that Islam receives special protection here, with insults to the Koran (and who knows what else) punished severely by law, all under the guise of protecting the special rights of a certain group. This will be interpreted as an acknowledgement of the exceptional suzerianty of Islam, and down the slippery slope we go.

What sense does it make to oppose the evangelical Christians who wish to influence public policy, education, etc and turn a blind eye to Muslims who wish to do the same? I still contend that if a Bible were thrown into a toilet by a Muslim that there would never be felony charges lodged against the person who did it. You folks write amusingly and well, but I can’t get around that fact.

I guess I’m just not sure what GB thinks this is. He appears to have mistaken a blog with, and I don’t think I’m giving anything away here, a higher than average commenter population of uppity women, queers of all sorts, various religionists and atheists, and people for whom pre-marital sex is just kind of a default until or unless one gets married, for the Islamic Jihad American Front Cheerleaders.

His tone is even odder, basically attempting that fine line between reasoned debate and snark and ending up with a message that can be distilled to: Hey, you weirdos, now that you’ve appeased the Islamofascist terrorists so much, no one can so much as recite in a whisper the publisher’s information on the title page of The Satanic Verses alone in their basement at midnight without the jihadpolice hauling them away and charging them with violent felonies against Allah. Hope you’re all happy!”

Since, as far as I know, none of us has done much appeasing lately, presumably being all tied up with that pre-marital sex thing, I’m not entirely sure why he’s bothering. Also, it seems like if his thesis were remotely true, it would not be possible to go over to LGF or Free Republic or Malkin’s place or any of the big name wingblogs and find anyone at home as they’d all be getting fingerprinted for Insult Crimes Against Islam. It’s not like any of them have been forced to *stop* calling Muhammad a goat raper or a pedophile or a satan worshipper or whatever the hell they’re going with this week.

Until such time as Lucienne.com becomes a howling wasteland scrubbed clean of all anti-Islamic invective, I’m going to worry about other things. Hey, I’m busy. I have to prioritize.

Nobody in this thread ‘assumed a priori that an insult to islam was a crime’, as GB off-handedly suggested a few posts ago. Far from it in fact, I think you summed up the S,N! position quite aptly.

My earlier line about “all religion being for losers” was a bit of a gag to get the whole ‘pointing out GB’s tunnel-vision hatred of islam’ ball rolling. I really don’t care what people do in their own homes and minds, just where it intersects policy making, education and the like.

Playing with trolls is really pointless of course, but for all his fears about islamic interests shaping public policy and some vast conspiracy of influence and over-arching strategy for muslim overthrown of the US, GB insists on this annoyingly obvious veneer of even-handedness; saying he would do the same if any other religion was making such an attempt.

Of course he is intentionally ignoring the fact that US christianists have huge conventions where they clearly and openly state their desire to convert their religion to the leading political force of the land, to protect it from attack, and to assert its supremacy. Further, these groups, which are nearly countless, have huge membership rolls, octopus tentacles in every branch of government and the market, and rake in crazy cash. And that is the public face of the movement, entirely discounting the kooky kristian krews practicing rifle drills deep in the woods.

Of course you can find quotes of muslim religious leaders talkin’ shit about being the one true faith, and being more-true and super-real than other myths. Every religion asserts its unique claim to dominance and supremacy — afterall, who would wanna follow a cult that claimed to be number two? When did anybody start taking that BS seriously?

But what kind of chance does GB’s urine-stain-inducing muslim conspiracy (comprised, apparently of a tiny minority of citizens, an advocacy group, and some foreign investments) have to make headway in our great land of porn and beer, when even a really powerful domestic sect can’t do more than write letters about half-time show nip slips?

What a joke, there is about as much a chance of this country being conqured from within by GB’s imagined muslim protocals as it does of being taken over by furries.

Also, all the important and easy to understand distinctions about the actual case (as opposed to the imagined one GB is fixated on) aside, its not legal precedent of any value until their is an upheld conviction. People get charged for all kinds of crazy shit that doesn’t get upheld, and never has any effect on the way the law is enforced. So in the umpteenth way, again, none of this bullshit matters beyond being a thin veil in which a certain breed of bigot can cloak their hatred.

Look, idiot, don’t steal or vandalize anyone’s property while you express your disgust for them, and you don’t have to worry about being charged with *anything* for your various unproven and bigoted utterances here or anywhere else.

You may have noticed, or not, because you don’t seem that bright, that no one here is all that interested in appeasing Islam or any other religion. There’s a distinct anti-religious bias here, which is not to say a bigotry but simply a leaning. In particular, even the religious here seem to be pretty down on *any* religion whose followers want to convert everybody and determine religiously the rules under which we should all live, which incidentally is more or less the definition of any evangelical sect.

We’re no more enamored of the nutjobs who want to make us wear burkas than we are of the nutjobs who want to make us to stop having premarital sex or the nutjobs who want to make us to stop marrying inter-racially. Fuck ‘em all.

Perhaps you could go find some actual appeasers and harass them?

Pointers then: it usually only applies when, you know, someone has had something to do with the situation.

The leverage they are using is the court system, of course. It greatly magnifies their power and influence; well, that and the obscene amount of Saudi money that they receive.

mikey

Is stealing a Koran a felony? No, it is not, unless of course Muslims want to argue that its worth is infinite. So it is quite appropriate that the young man in question be charged with the misdemeanor crime of taking it. No one is questioning the fact that the Koran wasn’t his.

However, Muslim pressure groups successfully forced the charges to be changed to felony hate crimes. Your argument is, in one sense, unassailable since you assume a priori that any insult to Islam is a hate crime. I think that even distasteful criticism of Islam – like throwing a Koran in the toilet – should be protected free speech. Thus the felony hate crime charges become a mechanism to intimidate criticism of Islam.

In other words, since any criticism of Islam can be construed as an insult to Islam, and any insult to Islam is an attempt to intimidate Muslims, and any intimidation of Muslims is a crime, then QED insulting Islam has become criminalized in this country.

I didn’t put any words in bold but I think this argument still makes sense.

If he was motivated by a dislike for the person’s religion, ethnicity, race, or any other legally-protected trait—it then becomes a hate crime.

What the fuck about that don’t you understand?

If you are going to make a point, that’s okay. But get the facts right. No one (except your fellow xenophobes) will take you seriously otherwise.

As for congratulations, I guess that was, you know, snark. I learned that here ;).

You haven’t demonstrated that, and congratulations on what?

As far as I can tell, I’ve used the word “idiotarian” three times in my life, all of them quoting other people, all of them in 2002.

I mean, what’s to worry about pre-emptive war prosecuted by batshit ideologues and old Nixon-Ford hacks when there are hippies and Chomksyites to bash?

That’s me! Ford Administration apologist!

It is true, I was “agnostic” about a war that I should have seen was a clusterfudge. (Though, unlike Matthew Yglesias & Kevin Drum, I never supported the idea.) And I also criticized Noam Chomsky at least three times in my life, possibly five, and I’ll probably do so again. But Alito apologist? Come on, Menck.

Have a good evening; see you around.

RB,

From what I understand, the young man was charged with a misdemeanor property crime for taking the Koran. This was then changed to felony hate crimes after intense pressure from Muslim “civil rights” groups here. If I’m wrong, please let me know.

But as for now, Muslims have managed to criminalize insults to Islam. Congratulations.