Behead All Those Who Insult Islam - This is the enemy. Jihadi’s Guide to Etiquette Rule 11: Never leave home without your matches, effigy-hanging sticks and death threat placards. You never know when they’ll come in handy. In Pakistan, dutiful followers of the jihadi guide have found a new pretext this week for an anti-Western bonfire party: the knighting of author Salman Rushdie in Britain. Muslim groups are burning Queen Elizabeth and Rushdie in effigy. The Union Jack is in flames. The Religion of Perpetual Outrage strikes again. It’s not just some obscure spokesman for a “tiny minority” objecting to Rushdie’s knighthood and leading the renewed calls for Rushdie’s death and Britain’s submission. Pakistan’s religious-affairs minister, Mohammed ljaz ul-Haq, bellowed: “If someone blows himself up he will consider himself justified. How can we fight terrorism when those who commit blasphemy are rewarded by the West?” He says he was misunderstood, but the message is as loud and clear as t...

By Raymond Ibrahim Islamic apologist extraordinaire Karen Armstrong is at it again. In an article entitled “ Balancing the Prophet ” published by the Financial Times, the self-proclaimed “freelance monotheist” engages in what can only be considered second-rate sophistry. The false statements begin in her opening paragraph: Ever since the Crusades, people in the west have seen the prophet Muhammad as a sinister figure.… The scholar monks of Europe stigmatised Muhammad as a cruel warlord who established the false religion of Islam by the sword. They also, with ill-concealed envy, berated him as a lecher and sexual pervert at a time when the popes were attempting to impose celibacy on the reluctant clergy. This is just an obvious error of fact. Armstrong and others try as a routine to tie European sentiments toward Islam to the Crusades, but in fact, “people in the west” had something of a “dim” view of Mohammed half a millenium before the Crusades. As early as the 8th century — just a fe...