From Foehammer’s Anvil:
The Religion of Peace Needs Our Help!
No, not that ‘Religion of Peace.’
This one.
An individual that I refuse to name here again (but many of my regular readers will know of and who’s name may be found quoted below) has targeted the gentle folks at The Religion of Peace in an effort to shut down the site just as he attempted to shut down the Anvil and Jihad Watch and others. The results of this phony reverend’s actions provoked a number of internet companies to incorrectly categorize The Religion of Peace. These incorrect categories have caused the site to be listed as a hate site, and consequently blocked by some servers. I know that the accusations made by Sutter, and the various companies are patently false. The Religion of Peace provides accurate facts about Islam – not lies. The site is not racist. Islam is not a race but a political and cultist ideology. The Religion of Peace speaks out against all violence that is directed towards non-Muslims and Muslims alike.
From the editor at TheReligionofPeace.com:
Anyone who has a blog that attempts to defend the west from radical Islam or Marxists knows that they are constantly at risk of being labeled racist, and shut down by individuals and organizations who do not want the truth to be known. The efforts to silence our voices will increase. We are all in this fight together. Therefore, it would be greatly appreciated if all of you would post a notice on your blogs, urging your readers to support The Religion of Peace by sending protest e-mails to the offending companies. Islam and the thought police are coming after all of us. Free speech is in jeopardy. We need to pull together into a strong and united force to combat those who intend to crush us.
I have permission to make this appeal on their behalf and I am happy to do so.
Please write to the email addresses listed below and state clearly that The Religion of Peace -
http://www.thereligionofpeace.com
(include the url in the e-mails) is against violence, not racist and should be categorized appropriately under labels such as General News, Politics and Religion.
- Secure Computing: sites@securecomputing.com
- SonicWall: cfssupport@sonicwall.com
- SurfControl: customerservice@surfcontrol.com
Here is in-depth analysis of the situation and the problem:
Case Study: TheReligionofPeace.com
How did Jim Sutter manage to get an anti-violence and anti-hate website by an anti-racialist owner classified as “violent,” “obscene,” “hateful,” and “racist?” Here is the story from the preferably anonymous editor of TROP.
About TheReligionofPeace.com
From the Editor of TheReligionofPeace.com:
TROP was originally started in 2002 to help Muslims understand that there are more important things going on in the world than a woman being asked to remove her veil in front of a judge, or a Muslim man getting his feelings hurt at an airline security gate.
In an effort to spark moral perspective on the part of organizations like CAIR, we document acts of deadly violence committed in the name of Islamic supremacy, similar to the way other sites compile data on victims of all supremacist ideologies, whether racial, ethnic or nationalist.
In addition to maintaining a database of terrorist attacks, TROP presents news and articles from the Muslim world, as well as open reference information for anyone beginning research into Islam. We do not promote a particular religion and we try to stay non-partisan.
Although we obviously oppose the doctrinal elements of Islam that inspire violence or are in contradiction to liberal values, TROP has always taken a strong, documented stand against judging individuals by their group identity. In many places on our site we openly denounce harming, harassing or stereotyping any Muslim based on his or her religion.
Our site also has a record of acknowledging and condemning rare acts of violence against Muslims by American criminals, either in the U.S. or overseas. We publicly oppose desecrating the Qur’an and do not even use the term ‘Islamofascism” in our writings. Since we only want to publish truthful information, we welcome dialogue and post any corrections that are proven necessary to us.
We focus on the moral failings of Islam and its incompatibilities with Western values, including women’s rights, democratic freedoms, religious tolerance, and (ironically) freedom of expression among others. Nevertheless, we try to be balanced and accurate in our writing and to avoid using absolutes. We also make a documented effort to discourage bigoted thinking.
Although our site has nothing to do with race, we have let it be known that we are anti-racialist. Over the years, we have championed the cause of Africans, Arabs, Hindus, Buddhists and anyone else victimized in the name of Islam. We have received praise from liberals, conservatives, Jews, Christians, Hindus, atheists, gays and even a few disenchanted Muslims.
Jim Sutter Targets TheReligionofPeace.com
In July of 2007, I was contacted by a man eventually calling himself “Reverend Jim Sutter” regarding my website, TheReligionofPeace.com (TROP).
Sutter at first played the “Bad Cop” under an alias, claiming that ours site is a “hate site:”
“I will make it my business and consider it a solemn duty to condemn and expose the site called thereligionofpeace. IMO it is no different in any discernable way than a site run by Al Qaeda, the KKK, or the Nazi party.”
I replied politely to Sutter, pointing out that he was going to need to do more than just state an opinion, and I challenged him to support what he was saying. I told him that I was open-minded and would make any corrections that he could prove needed to be made. I also directed him to a page on our site in which we plainly separate ourselves from the insidious organizations to which he associated us.
In his reply, Sutter made it rather evident that he did not read the page to which we had directed him:
“You invite me to read “what to do about” which is just another bigoted exhortation to hate & violence. Wow. Then we have you writing this “this makes me suspicious”. That figures too, since paranoia usually accompanies bigotry.”
I then spelled out out for him what he was unwilling to read for himself – that TROP openly and unambiguously denounces all forms of violence and bigotry. The writings that we post which are critical of Islam are solidly supported by the Qur’an, Hadith, Sira (biography of Muhammad) and the historical record.
Sutter then contacted us the next day under his real name, pretending to have seen the site for the first time and clearly wearing the “Good Cop” hat. He complimented us on TROP, but suggested the changes that we needed to make in order to meet with his approval. I generously ignored his earlier correspondence and entered into a lengthy dialogue of about 20 e-mail messages, in which I challenged him to prove that his requested modifications were necessary.
(It is important to note that Sutter never once accused TROP of being either a “hate” site or a “racist” site once he began using his real name. I suspect that he told the URL search engines something entirely different in order to punish me for not backing down to his demands.)
Over the next week or so, I noticed a pattern with Sutter:
He would say things that weren’t true. A good example:
“The FBI states that hate crimes against Muslims currently number higher than against any other group. Those hate crimes include murder, arson, rape, and kidnapping.”
This is blatantly false, of course. No Muslims have been raped or kidnapped in America because of their religion, and 70% of the targets of religious hate crime are Jewish. (source)
When caught, Sutter would always ignore any lies, no matter how freshly told. This happened when I sent him the above link and asked three times where he got his erroneous information. I got no reply. It became obvious that he was making things up, but there was not the slightest bit of shame or even an attempt to divert blame. It was as if he felt entitled to say anything he pleased – all while making his usual claims of “fact, logic and evidence.”
Sutter would play games in his replies. Sometimes he would plagiarize entire sections of text from other sources and pretend that they were his own words. Often times he would ignore an argument that wasn’t going his way, and simply not quote it in his reply. Sometimes he would be intentionally naive, and pretend not to understand ideas that were made quite obvious.
When I realized that Sutter was not taking the conversation seriously, I let him know that there was no basis for our continuing the discussion. (I dialogue with sincere objectors, but I simply don’t have time to get into food fights with disingenuous hacks).
It was only about a week later that I began hearing from military families and ordinary Internet users who were unable to get to our site. Despite being unable to make his case against us in open debate, Sutter decided to make good on his original threats to us:
“I’m contacting the proprietors of several databases of internet hate-sites to report thereligionofpeace, this will have the effect of blocking your site from being referenced, linked or quoted on the many discussion forums that bar those listed hate-sites, such as democratic underground.”
After operating for five years without any sort of problems, Secure Computing, SurfControl and SonicWall had TROP blocked overnight by wrongfully classifying our site according to Jim Sutter’s demands… all because we would not adopt his political and theological positions!
The correspondence with Internet censors concerning our site is not public information, but it is obtainable through a court order, since these are public corporations. Only then will I know whether Sutter used his real name, an alias, or had one of his gullible groupies do the dirty work for him. I do know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that he is behind the censorship and miscategorizing of our site as well as the many other anti-Jihad sites across the Internet that have suffered recent problems.
Sutter is very good at sounding important. He often recites a small handful of court cases in order to embellish his correspondence with the Internet’s largest censors (although even a small dose of legal research will find that these are not what they appear). Still, there is something terribly wrong with the system when one small bully is allowed to dictate personal ideological standards to large corporations and thus millions of Internet users.
Aftermath
The damage that Jim Sutter and others, including SonicWall, Secure Computing and SurfControl, have done is going to take months, perhaps years to rectify. For my site to be labeled as hate speech, “obscene” or “extreme” merely because we object to the extremist elements of the Islamic religion is anti-intellectual and smacks of McCarthyism.
How is it that a website primarily concerned with ending violence against people just because they worship a different god is labeled extreme and obscene? Have we really reached such a low point in America when one is not free to criticize violence and religious totalitarianism?
The association of TROP by SonicWall and the others with “racist” and “hate” sites is particularly slanderous to me, since I have a strong and provable record of actively opposing bigotry and racism, both professionally and personally. Anti-racialism and the utter ridiculousness of even categorizing people by race is one of the major themes of the novel that I wrote several years ago, for example. I also have a family member, who published a book about her childhood experience in a Nazi concentration camp, and who would be quite surprised by these public slurs.
For Jim Sutter to punish people like me for petty personal grudges is one thing. For companies like Sonic Wall, Secure Computing and SurfControl to go along with it is absolutely unconscionable.
Exhibits
How do the censors rate TROP against sites that are pro-Jihad or blatantly anti-Christian?
Let’s use answering-christianity.com and JihadUnspun.com as examples.
“Answering-Christianity” is a Muslim site that is dedicated to promoting Islam and trashing Christianity using distortion and misinformation. The author once started to create a list of “Christian Terrorist Attacks” that he promised would be “5,000 times worse” than our list. He quit after only a few dozen entries that included such gems as terror attacks by Columbian drug lords and a 40-year-old church bombing by the Klan.
The editors of Jihad Unspun are blatant apologists for Islamic terrorism. They proudly make the connection between Islam and terrorism a lot more forcefully than does TROP, and they even criticize other Muslims for not joining. Recently, they posted a flattering review of Osama Bin Laden’s videotaped address, complimenting the man who massacred thousands of Americans for inviting the survivors to embrace Islam.
Like TROP, Jihad Unspun reports Islamic terrorism. They report suicide bombings as ‘martyrdom attacks’ and provide justification for other ‘Mujahideen’ violence. They also inflate casualties from attack by several factors and even make up attacks that never happened.
So, how do Secure Computing, SurfControl and SonicWall feel about this?
Secure Computing
Secure Computing says that TROP is “Extreme, Violent, Obscene and Mature.” However, it merely categorizes “Answering Christianity” as “Religion and Ideology.” (Secure Computing and Answering Christianity).
Secure Computing also rates “Jihad Unspun” as “General News, Politics and Religion” (Secure Computing and Jihad Unspun)
SurfControl
SurfControl says that TROP is “Violent,” however, the pro-Jihad and consistently unreliable “Jihad Unspun” is categorized as “News.” (SurfControl) One also wonders why the list of terror attacks on TROP counts as violence, but not the list of attacks on IraqBodyCount.net (which is categorized as “Politics”) nor that of Antiwar.com (“News”).
SonicWall
SonicWall is particularly shameful. They say that TROP is “Violence/Hate/Racism” even though we are actually opposed to all three of these. But the company actually ranks the anti-Christian site, “Answering Christianity,” as “Religion” and the pro-terror “Jihad Unspun” site as “News and Media.” (SonicWall and TROP, SonicWall and Answering Christianity, SonicWall and Jihad Unspun).
Also see:
Gates of Vienna: Sutter Strikes Again
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