by EDWARD  CLINE:

David J. Rusin of the Middle East Forum recently published an article on Islamist  Watch about the vandalizing of “anti-Islamic” ads. He reveals just how  pervasive the phenomenon is worldwide.

When Cyrus McGoldrick, advocacy director for the New York office of the  Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR),  logged into Facebook  on August 12 to hint at his desire to vandalize anti-jihad ads that may soon run  on city buses, he did not simply underline CAIR’s troubling attitude toward free  expression. McGoldrick’s words – and the subsequent actions of others – have  illuminated an overlooked aspect of the Islamist assault on Western speech: the  defacement, if not obliteration, of political and commercial messages.

Of particular interest is the destruction of print or commercial ads of  scantily clad women. I find this interesting because of the near psychotic or  pathological mindset about women that Islam inculcates in Muslim men.

This phenomenon has been especially prevalent in the UK. A Times of  London article revealed in 2005 that Muslims Against Advertising (MAAD) had  launched a website with instructions on how to vandalize ads and which ones to  select. “There is no longer any need to cringe as you walk past a sleazy  poster,” the group declared. “We’ll improve it.” Many answered the call, as ads  pitching bras, beauty products, and even television programs were trashed.  “Photographs of semi-dressed women are the most frequently targeted, with the  offending body parts painted over or ripped off,” the Times observed. In a  telling example, thugs destroyed images of scantily clad women on an East London  billboard promoting the series Desperate Housewives, but fully clothed  characters were untouched. Responding to the controversy, leading British  Islamist Ahmed Sheikh argued that “freedom of speech should end when you offend  others.”

Cultural jihad, or the de facto imposition of Sharia  law on Western non-Muslims, is insidiously accumulative. In Britain it begins  with such things as complaining about images or figures of pigs that Muslims  might see in a bank or a shop. They are removed so that Muslims are not  offended. Next will come a complaint about halal food not being served in  restaurants and schools. Non-Muslims will be served it, as well, with or without  their knowledge. Next will be a complaint that one must have some place to pray  five times a day, and if an employer does not provide such a space, the street  outside will do just as well, and damn the traffic jam caused by hundreds of  Muslims mooning non-Muslims as they express their obeisance to a rock thousands  of miles away. Language must also be altered to preempt potential  offense. Muslim criminal suspects are called “Asians.” Polygamy is taboo among  non-Muslims, but Muslim men collecting welfare and enjoying subsidized housing  may have several dependent wives and a dozen dependent children. The taxes  collected to pay for their special welfare is a form of jizya, or a tax  levied on conquered infidels. Muslims may demonstrate en masse, displaying signs  that damn freedom of speech, sneer at British culture, warn of violence if  non-Muslims resist, and predict the Islamization of Britain, and not be charged  with hate speech. Any other group behaving in such an obnoxious manner would see  its members hauled into court. Criticism of Islam is forbidden and  regarded as “defamation,” “bigotry,” or “racism.” Muslim activists are  aggressive in this respect, going after not only titillating ads but serious  discussions of Islam. Rusin writes:

Islamists also have adapted to the information age, recognizing that much of  the Western speech they despise now exists online. Al-Azhar University scholars,  representatives of the highest religious authority in the Sunni Muslim world,  even crafted a fatwa in 2008 that sanctions hacking for the purposes of jihad.  Therefore, those who criticize Islam or otherwise offend its followers often  find that their freedom of expression is no safer on the internet than it is on  a Tower Hamlets billboard. Arab News sympathetically profiled one such  hacker, a Saudi native, in 2011. “An Alkhobar woman studying in the United    States is taking credit for destroying 23 Danish websites that denigrated the  Prophet Muhammad,” the piece begins, relaying material originally published by  an Arabic-language source. “Nouf Rashid told the Arabic newspaper she was  hacking into Danish websites having references to cartoons of the Prophet along  with other sites that had questionable content in her view,” including  pornographic ones.

The focus here, however, is the pseudo-ironic and psychotic symbiosis  between a creed/ideology that finds bare female anatomy offensive, yet is lured  to it in spite of the proscriptions against it. There is a link  between such vandalizing and the rape and often disfigurement of non-Muslim  women in Europe by Muslims, the “sex slave” rings recently exposed in Britain,  and the honor-killings of Muslim-born women and girls who break Islamic rules  and “go Western.” This has everything to do with the Muslim dictum compelling  women to cover themselves up as much as possible in burqas, veils or some other  form of self-effacing garb, depending on the Islamic sect. The  phenomenon swings wildly, like bipolar dysfunction, between the vigilante  censorship described by Rusin and incidents such as the rape of Lara Logan in  Cairo, in which her clothes were ripped from her and even part of her hair torn  out during the assault. That was not the only such incident endured by Western  women in Cairo, but it is the most notorious. Her attackers wished to extinguish  Logan, to wipe her out of existence.

This is the behavior of  nihilists.

Read more: Family Security Matters

Edward Cline is the author of the Sparrowhawk novels set in  England  and Virginia in the pre-Revolutionary period, of several detective and  suspense  novels, and three collections of his commentaries and columns, all  available on  Amazon Books. His essays, book reviews, and other articles have  appeared in The  Wall Street Journal, the Journal of Information Ethics and other  publications.  He is a frequent contributor to Rule of Reason, Family Security  Matters,  Capitalism Magazine and other Web publications.