Terry Firma, though born and Journalism-school-educated in Europe, has lived in the U.S. for the past 20-odd years. Stateside, his feature articles have been published in the New York Times, Reason, Rolling Stone, Playboy, and Wired. Terry was the founder and Main Mischief Maker of Moral Compass, a now-dormant site that pokes fun at the delusional claim by people of faith that a belief in God equips them with superior moral standards. He was the Editor-in-Chief of two Manhattan-based magazines until he decided to give up commercial publishing for professional photography... with a lot of blogging on the side. These days, he lives in an old seaside farmhouse in Maine with his wife, three kids, and two big dogs.
Via the Huffington Post’s religion channel, we learn that the folk-pop artist formerly known as Cat Stevens is currently on a tour of the United States. What we inexplicably don’t pick up from the article is why Stevens, who has gone by Yusuf Islam since the late 1970s, is persona non grata among many people who care about free speech (the HuffPo just gives us some vague allusions to “dragon-sized myths” and “unsavory controversies”). I’d like to correct that oversight. We’re going to have to time-travel back to 1989. Only a week after Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini issued an Islamic death sentence against Salman Rushdie for publishing the supposedly blasphemous novel The Satanic Verses, Stevens/Islam was asked about the affair. Before an audience of London college students, he answered: “[Rushdie] must be killed. The Qur’an makes it clear — if someone defames the prophet, then he must die.” The next day, he walked back that statement by explaining that he had only meant to illustrate what the Qur’an says about blasphemers and apostates. Mr. Islam hadn’t personally advocated Rushdie’s execution, he said. And at that point, he might still have deserved the benefit of the doubt (although why anyone would follow a religion with such barbaric, illiberal precepts remains, as always, an open question). Read more
Poking the eye of doctrinal religion is its own reward. Drinking wine while doing so is, I think, a welcome bonus. An Australian anti-Islamic organization is selling a sparkling wine called 72 Virgins to raise money for its movement. The Q Society, a self-proclaimed secular group that is critical of Islam and Sharia law, is selling Hal & Al’s 72 Virgins sparkling wine manufactured in Barbossa Valley, reports Australia’s news.com. Hal & Al. Halal. Get it? Formed in 2010, Q Society claims that radical Islam is a leading force behind “repeated acts of discrimination and violence.” The drink pokes fun at the Islamic faith, which bans alcohol consumption and believes that martyrs who carry out jihad will be greeted in heaven by virgins. Read more
In Islamic countries, and by swaths of the political left in the West, condemnations of radical Islam are often rejected as attacks by bigoted Westerners on a culture and religion that these critics do not understand. This is then presented as prima facie evidence of Islamophobia and racism. One of the things that habitually gets lost in that tiresome trope is that the people who suffer the most at the hands of Muslims are… other Muslims. While we rightly deplore the relatively rare atrocities that radical Islamists carry out in America and Spain and Russia and the U.K. and France, the day-to-day death-and-misery toll inflicted on non-Islamic countries by Muslim terrorists pales in comparison to the violence that these radicals rain down on fellow followers of Islam. Nigeria’s Boko Haram is almost the poster child for this horrible phenomenon. Via the New York Times: A wave of attacks across northern Nigeria, including two on Monday — a suicide bombing at a market and an assault on security facilities — showed that the Islamist terrorist group Boko Haram remained able to strike at will in the region, especially against civilian targets. … The attacks followed a bombing on Friday in a central mosque in Kano, the principal city of northern Nigeria; 120 people were killed in that attack. Read more
Eight years ago, Pakistani citizen Imran Firasat obtained political asylum in Spain after he had received multiple death threats from Muslims because he’d left the One True Faith to become a Christian. Under Sharia law, apostasy is punishable by death. Fast-forward to today: Firasat faces extradition to Indonesia (more on that in a minute). What happened? Did he commit a crime, or lie on his asylum application, or break Spanish law in any other way? For Spain, the main trouble with Firasat seems to be that he won’t keep his head down and instead criticizes Islam in no uncertain terms. Two years ago, Firasat shared his 71-minute documentary The Innocent Prophet: The Life of Mohammed from a Different Point of View on YouTube. It’s virtually unwatchable (slow, disjointed, amateurish in almost every way, with a heavily accented voice-over and a cringe-worthy introduction by certified idiot Terry Jones — yes, that Terry Jones)… but it’s impossible to understand why a bad movie — à la Fitna — should drive its maker into the arms of his would-be freelance executioners. Read more
