This week is Banned Books Week. The Banned Books Week website says: “Banned Books Week is an annual event celebrating the freedom to read. Banned Books Week was launched in 1982 in response to a sudden surge in the number of challenges to books in schools, bookstores and libraries. Typically held during the last week of September, it highlights the value of free and open access to information. Banned Books Week brings together the entire book community — librarians, booksellers, publishers, journalists, teachers, and readers of all types — in shared support of the freedom to seek and to express ideas, even those some consider unorthodox or unpopular.”
Yet its list of “the Top Ten Challenged Books of 2017” consists of the nothing genuinely unorthodox or unpopular at all, at least among the Leftist elites. One book is even included because it “was thought to ‘lead to terrorism’ and ‘promote Islam,’ as if those things would make the book unacceptable to the people who run “schools, bookstores and libraries.” The Left has a near-total stranglehold on the educational system, the entertainment industry, the means of communication, and the culture in general, yet Leftists still like to pose as fearless outsiders confronting the establishment. They are the establishment.
If Banned Books Week really wanted to feature books that are considered “unorthodox or unpopular,” it should highlight books by people who are hated by the Leftist intelligentsia that dominates everything: Donald Trump. Alex Jones. Gavin McInnes. Dennis Prager.
And me. I’ve recently been banned from Patreon and GoFundMe, and MasterCard and Discover card won’t process donations to Jihad Watch. It’s clear that I am in their crosshairs, and Muslim Brotherhood-linked Congressman Keith Ellison has demanded that Amazon stop stocking books by people who are blacklisted by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
I wrote The History of Jihad From Muhammad to ISIS as a challenge to the elites’ narrative about jihad and Islam. And it’s clearer every day now that the elites are brooking no challenges to their narrative, and are moving as fast as they can to muzzle them. It’s Banned Books Week: the perfect time to pick up a copy of The History of Jihad From Muhammad to ISIS, while you still can. The establishmentarians who run Banned Books Week won’t tell you this, but I will: the authoritarian Left is working energetically now to ban all dissenting voices, in the run-up to the 2018 elections. Nor will they stop after those elections. Strike a blow for freedom and read a real “unorthodox” book this week: The History of Jihad From Muhammad to ISIS.