Beating Freedom of Speech by Robert Spencer

Beating Freedom of Speech by Robert Spencer

On Thursday, April 12, a gang of Somali thugs on a downtown Oslo street attacked Kadra, a Somali woman who now lives in Norway, and beat her senseless, breaking several of her ribs. They were enraged at her for her recent statement that the Qur’an’s views of women needed reevaluation. They also might have been angry because of her role in revealing the widespread support among imams in Norway for female genital mutilation; Kadra exposed their support for this horrific procedure using a hidden camera in a 2000 documentary for Norwegian television.
As they beat her, Kadra’s attackers shouted Allahu akbar – Allah is great – and recited verses from the Qur’an. “I was terrified,” she said. “While I lay on the pavement they kicked me and screamed that I had trampled on the Koran.”

The following Tuesday, two men in Mississauga, Ontario, attacked journalist Jawaad Faizi, who writes for the Pakistan Post, a newspaper based in Mississauga. The attackers told Faizi to stop “writing against Islam,” and particularly to stop criticizing an Islamic organization, Idara Minhaj-ul-Quran, and its leader, a Muslim cleric named Allama Tahir-Ul-Qadri.

Faizi, a native of Lahore, Pakistan, said, “I had so many problems back home as a journalist, but I’m shocked that this is happening here.”

Of course, “writing against Islam,” or being perceived as having done so, has always been dangerous, as Salman Rushdie and many others can attest. The New York Times reported in 2002 that a professor at the University of Nablus in the West Bank, Suliman Bashear, who “argued that Islam developed as a religion gradually rather than emerging fully formed from the mouth of the Prophet,” was for this novel and, from the point of view of traditional Islam, heretical teaching, thrown out of a second-story window by his students. (snip, more at link)