Radio KPFA Cancels Richard Dawkins talk
On July 21, KPFA Radio, Berkeley, Calif., canceled a talk by Richard Dawkins set for August 9, claiming, “… We didn’t know that Dawkins had offended and hurt — in his tweets and other comments on Islam — so many people.” They added, “While KPFA emphatically supports serious free speech, we do not support abusive speech.”
Richard Dawkins is a world renowned atheist and evolutionary biologist and one of the great intellects of our time. He is an accomplished author whose landmark book The Selfish Gene was voted the most influential science book of all time by the Royal Society of London and presently in its 40th year of publication. His current book, Science in the Soul: Selected writings of a passionate Rationalist, was called excellent by none other than Radio KPFA. His books and lectures are known for being logical and insightful examinations of religion and truth.
It would be helpful if KPFA would explain, first, what they mean by abusive speech and, second, what in Dawkins many speeches, books, youtube videos and pronouncements they deem abusive? If they mean saying insightful but inconvenient truths about the religious ideology behind the murder of 3,000 Americans killed on 9–11 and continuing mayhem throughout the world because the content was “hurtful” to Muslims, they should close their show down and sell it to someone with a spine who won’t be bullied into censorship by Muslims.
It’s hard not to say something offensive about Islam when the ideology proposed in its holy book demands its followers kill anyone who refuses to embrace their religion and demands of its followers that they replace the laws of every government on earth with God’s law, or sharia. Such a religion deserves to have questions asked about it, many of which Muslims will find unpleasant. But we the public deserve to have the questions asked and answered.
The goals of world domination through violent jihad and the imposition of sharia enshrined in the Koran 1400 years ago have not changed since Mohammed claimed to receive revelations directly from God, which he had his scribes record for posterity in what became the Koran. Some people come to Islam’s aid by pointing out that Christianity was just as violent at one time, which is true. But the bible was written by about 40 religious leaders over two centuries who tried to divine God’s will, which is why the bible has had about 100 versions (not translations — versions) and can be reinterpreted even today. The verses in the Koran, on the other hand, being the actual words of God, according to itself, are not open to interpretation and cannot be changed or added to in any way, and so must be obeyed as written, and those words overwhelmingly demand violent jihad. Furthermore, an instruction from Jesus to, “Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s and unto God that which is Gods,” made it acceptable for Christians to live under and embrace secular law. Judaism later made a similar pronouncement. Islam has no such permission from Allah or Mohammed. Muslims are to destroy all man-made laws and replace them with sharia by negotiation, deceit, and intimidation if possible, otherwise by violence. Taking over the world, forcing all to convert, and replacing all laws with sharia will never happen. But fundamentalist Muslims believe that, it they try hard enough, long enough, and are intimidating enough, they can eventually make it so, inshallah (God willing). That is why fundamentalist Muslims will always be dangerous and why our best inoculation against them, and they know this very well, is a thorough knowledge of their religion. As Iran’s Ayatolla Khameini said in a speech, “We are not afraid of economic sanctions or military intervention. What we are afraid of is Western universities.”
Numerous polls have shown that even moderate Muslims agree with the goal of spreading Islam throughout the world and replacing democracy with sharia, even right here in the good old U.S.A. They don’t, however, agree on how to do it, with the vast majority rejecting violence. It is an inconvenient truth, however, that their holy book demands it of them, so many try to comply in some way falling short of actually committing violent acts themselves. Some by taqiyya, or deception, supporting jihadis either directly or indirectly, others by trying, and often succeeding, in silencing truth through threats against college administrators, talk show hosts, and speakers such as Richard Dawkins, who know Islam and want to reveal the truth about it to an American public pathetically ignorant of the subject — and who Muslims want to remain that way.
The topic of Islam presents an opportunity to divulge truths that make Muslims squirm in their seats, and some to seethe with trumped up rage, but they are issues that need to be explained, and they bring up questions that need to be answered. For example: How can a person not support violent jihad, as Allah demands, and still call himself a Muslim? Mohammed called them heretics, the most deplorable of all people, who will burn in the eternal fires of hell. How can a Muslim claim Mohammed was peaceful when he carried out robbery, rape, slavery, and slaughter on an industrial scale until the day he died? How can Muslims claim that, as a single verse in the Koran proclaims, “there is no compulsion in religion” when the rest of the Koran demands conversion of all infidels or their deaths? And that any Muslim leaving his religion should be murdered? How can any Muslim deny that ISIS fighters are obeying, to the letter, the verses in the Koran and examples in Mohammed’s Sunnah for the prosecution of violent jihad? And how can any Muslim deny that the Koran is the virtual word of God and must be obeyed to the letter by all Muslims, and that includes those demands for violent jihad and the killing of all infidels?
Islam is not a subject for the faint hearted. It takes a certain amount of courage to stand up to the organized and relentless assault on freedom of speech that Muslims wage in an effort to silence the truth about their religion. They understand, in the deepest and darkest corners of their minds, that Islam exists on a foundation of fear and deception. Without them Islam is nothing. Muslims biggest fear today is that Mohammed, the de facto founder of Islam, not Allah, will be exposed as a mass murderer, destroyer of entire cultures, an illiterate, mentally unstable sheep herder that carried out the most successful scam in world history, enslaving a whole people, relegating them to second class status in almost every way, until today they are forced to leave their homelands of poverty, ignorance, intolerance, repression, and violence to seek shelter in Western countries which they were taught from birth and throughout history are inferior to them. They, as a people, are desperate to hold onto their belief that they are perennial victims of infidels, that they have nothing to learn from their infidel hosts and are here only to teach and, most of all, they cling to their fragile belief in their superiority over the infidels that, as a people, exceed them by virtually every meaningful measure. Their defense against their infidel hosts is to silence any meaningful discussion of Islam, and especially any criticism of their example of the perfect man, Mohammed.
The biggest thing we, as Americans, and non-Muslims, can do to defend ourselves from fundamentalist Muslims is, first, accept the truth that they will in all likelihood never be eliminated. Like a few followers of communism, fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism, but with a much longer history, there will always be Muslims who hang on to the failed ideology of Islam and long for the good old days described in Mohammed’s hadith when most of the known world trembled at the approach of the Muslim hoards. Second, we can defend ourselves through knowledge of Islam by making sure that every non-Muslim, and Muslims as well, since they are as ignorant of their religion as many Christians are of theirs, understand this religion completely. And that means listening to experts on Islam giving speeches at colleges, on radios, appearing on TV and youtube, reading their books and becoming so knowledgeable about Islam that we can support intelligently created laws and regulations that will inoculate us against fundamentalist Islam while making the U.S. a safe and secure place for non-violent Muslims to live with us in peace. That takes backbone on the part of both those who know Islam and are willing to share their knowledge with the public, and those who are asked to provide a platform from which they can speak.
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