Stay Quiet and You'll be OK

By Robert Spencer

FrontPageMagazine.com | June 23, 2004

Here's a new slogan for the zeitgeist: stay quiet and you'll be OK. This was the message, according to the tapes released last week, that Muhammad Atta gave to the passengers on the ill-fated airplane that he and his fellow terrorists had commandeered.

Stay quiet and you'll be OK. Don't mention that a Saudi imam who spoke at the opening of a large new Islamic center in London once preached a sermon in which he called Jews "evil offspring, infidels, distorters of [others'] words, calf-worshippers, prophet-murderers, prophecy-deniers... the scum of the human race 'whom Allah cursed and turned into apes and pigs," and "an ongoing continuum of deceit, obstinacy, licentiousness, evil, and corruption." AP noted that in London he said that Islam's history was "the best testament to how different communities can live together in peace and harmony." The BBC called him "one of Islam's most renowned Imams" and reported his praise for British Muslims for having "taken great steps towards achieving community cohesion."

Neither said anything about his hate speech.

Stay quiet and you'll be OK. Have you heard about the churches destroyed in Kosovo? "To keep the Serbs from claiming this area as part of their national heritage," says Mikhael de Thyse of the Council of Europe, "some Albanians are attacking their churches." In March, the cathedrals in Pristina and Prizren, Kosovo's two main cities, were burned to the ground. Others that have been destroyed include the Holy Archangels Monastery, a charming and, of course, irreplaceable jewel dating from the fourteenth century. The local bishop has had harsh words for NATO peacekeepers, who he says have done little or nothing to protect the churches. But the media establishment has kept mum. Jihad in Kosovo? Come on. Everyone knows the Balkan Muslims are the victims, not the perpetrators!

Stay quiet and you'll be OK. UN Secretary General Kofi Annan went to Harvard to give the commencement speech and receive an honorary degree. The intrepid Charles Jacobs of the American Anti-Slavery Group was ready for him, saying at a rally the day before: "Kofi Annan does not need to come to Harvard tomorrow, he needs to go to Sudan. ... He needs to go to the North, and he needs to tell Khartoum to free the slaves. There are tens of thousands of slaves like Francis Bok, still serving their masters in Sudan. Kofi Annan needs to tell the truth:
For a decade Khartoum wages ... what they call a Jihad against Christians and tribalists in the South. Kofi Annan never once said that the war was a Jihad.
It's not diplomatic to say...but it's the truth. Two million people died because of this war. Tens of thousands were enslaved. Arab militias storm African villages, kill the men and capture the women and children like Francis Bok. Kofi Annan needs to tell the world about Jihad slaves. It's not diplomatic...but it's the truth."

Stay quiet and you'll be OK. In Saudi Arabia, a young Indian Catholic, Brian Savio O'Connor, has been imprisoned and tortured by the religious police, the mutawa. Says L'Osservatore Romano: "Officially the Mutawa has accused O'Connor of using drugs and praying to Jesus Christ, accusations which imply he runs the risk of being punished with the death penalty. The family says that the proofs of his use of drugs have been fabricated by the police, while it does not deny that Brian is a good Christian." Where is the outcry? Why haven't you read about Brian O'Connor in the New York Times? Why hasn't 60 Minutes gone to Riyadh to put a Saudi official or two on the hotseat?

As Ralph Peters has had the courage to declare, "It's time to end the politically correct baby-talk insisting that Islam isn't the problem. In the decaying Arab world, Islam is the problem - because of the way bitter old men interpret and deform its more humane precepts while embracing its cruelest injunctions." It's time to end the baby talk, and the silence. For whatever combination of political correctness, fear, and indifference has made for the silence on these stories and others like them, it does nothing but play into the hands of those who would destroy us.

Stay quiet, and the jihad will continue to advance: in Iraq, and Afghanistan, and Israel, and Indonesia, and Nigeria, and the Philippines, and Western Europe, and elsewhere - and if you think we will not feel its impact here, just remember where Atta was when he said those words, and what happened next.

Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and the author of Onward Muslim
Soldiers: How Jihad Still Threatens America and the West (Regnery Publishing), and Islam Unveiled: Disturbing Questions About the World's Fastest Growing Faith (Encounter Books).