The Khaleej Times is reporting that the Danish consul to Dubai has said:
The massive protests in the Muslim world against the Danish cartoons have helped Denmark, as also Europe, have a better understanding of, and respect for, Islam
Well that is both quite correct and completely false, but of course a diplomat is someone whose job it is to lie for his country. It has indeed given millions of Europeans a better understanding of Islam… and thereby led them to an utter lack of respect for it. Now every time I hear someone saying “Islam is one of the world’s great religions”, I tend to get very rude rather quickly.
The diplomat was quite sound on the core issue however.
The Danish diplomat made it clear that, however, ‘We will not change our constitution (to exert controls over the media)’.
And that is why this site has a ‘support Denmark: no burqa on free speech’ graphic in the sidebar. Hold the line.
Update: It would appear that Imran Khan is now officially a moron:
I don’t think the message has got through that for us it’s far more painful than perhaps even the Holocaust for the Jews. Any caricature or any ridicule or any humiliation of the holy prophet is far more painful for the Muslims
These cartoons are more ‘painful’ that the mass extermination of six million Jews? And this from a much acclaimed ‘moderate’? Yes indeed, I think a great many people’s understanding of Islam is improving pretty much by the day.
I commented on this article below, but you pipped me at the post, so to speak. Of course, we assume the Danish envoy, given who the prime minister of Denmark is, was lying for his country, yet this appeasement, even as a lie, worries me.
The attitude that occasioned these Islamic offences and hysteria around the world need to be nipped in the bud; not massaged. These appeasements by everyone from the NY Times to The Times and the Telegraph and politicians on the Continong and in the Anglosphere, are empowering the Islamoloonies with a sense of righteous grievance.
The tone should be condemnation and no quarter given.
It’s not a matter of debate or negotiation. The organised and apparently inflamed Islamics did not have a point. They were in the wrong. There can be no negotiation and discussion. The onus is on the Muslims to understand that their laws are not universal and they must come to terms with that. The West has absolutely nothing to come to terms with and nothing to apologise for.
I’m developing a strong despect for islam, not respect.
Ten years ago I was in Malaysia and got the impression that islam was compatible with a modern society. Wrong impression, as I can see now.
Perry,
I do feel that you fall into the trap of viewing ‘Islam’ as one entity, just as certain extreme elements would wish it to be (represented by themselves as the true, self appointed voice, of course).
However, I have several Muslim friends who regard the actions of some of those who claim to represent Islam with as much disgust as you or I, including the whole outcry over cartoons and Denmark. In fact, my Muslim friends have a general outlook on life little different from most people in this country.
So there is not one Islamic view. Extremists of whatever hue always try to claim some sort of authority based on god, marxism, fascism, etc. – take your pick – and impose it on others. Sadly, they will always find gullible followers.
HJHJ – Sorry, but they’re not “extremists”. You may have very intelligent friends and colleagues who are Muslim and who find this distasteful, but it is they who are the minority – not the protesters and wailers and ranters. Sadly, Islam = mass hysteria and mass delusion.
Scratch a Muslim – not that I ever have – and you will find the veneer chips off very easily and they revert to proclaiming there is one universal law: theirs. It’s very a very primitive attitude.
Yes they are extremists. Most Muslims aren’t tlike that. But it isn’t the “overwhelming majority” beloved of his high Tonyness. A very large minority of muslims in the UK have very unpleasant ideas. According to a Times ppoll 42% expressed belief in assorted Jewish conspiracy theories. Our old friends at Al Jazzera run those as though they were absolute truth.
Whatever, now it’s time for a skit:
Yes, I could have been an Ayatollah but I never had the Arabic, never had the Arabic for the Ayatollahing. I just never had sufficient of it to get through the rigorous ayatollahing exams. They’re noted for their rigour. People came staggering out saying “By Allah, what a rigorous exam” – and so I became a jihadi instead. A suicide jihadi. I managed to get through the jihading exams – they’re not very rigorous. They only ask one question. They say “Do you want to be a martyr?”, and I got 75% for that.
Apologies to the immortal Pete and Dud.
Gasp! Don’t you have any respect for the muslim race?
Yeah, they’re a um… race, now. Just a heads up, people are going to think you are racist for not immediatly granting tons of respect to barbaric murderers based on their non-whiteness.
BTW: hate criminal.
Nick M – That was funny.
Josh – for allah’s sake, learn to spell! It’s respeck.
I’d love to hear a gangsta rappa doing Mo … god, that would be funny!
I do recall people asking in wonderment….they still sometimes do……why the Germans didn’t deal with Hitler before it became too late.
My opinion is that the term “moderate Muslim” is an oxymoron. Recent polls would suggest the truth of this.
I would be interested to know the attitudes of HJHJ’s Muslim friends who, I am sure, tut-tutted politely for him when the twin towers (and some 3000 folk) came tumbling down. What are they doing to prevent the impending catastrophe? No prizes for the correct answer.
Thanks folks!
Maybe I should post my poetry. I’m not sure if that constitutes a threat or not.
Oh well, the muse must not be silenced…
Mohammed – An Epic Romance.
Mohammed was a guy with a beard,
whose thoughts were rather weird.
He didn’t like wine,
Or the eating of swine.
With a towel round his head,
He took a nine year old to bed.
And the citizens of Mecca,
Didn’t like where he’d stuck his pecker.
So, with scimitar in hand,
He formed an angry band.
Who massacred Jews*,
And then he brought Good News.
His follows still lived in the sand,
And that ain’t too grand.
So they went on a spree,
From Spain to Trinkamalee.
But at the battle of Tours,
Their performance was poor.
And to be Frank, Charles Martel,
Just knew fighting too well.
But with God on their side,
His followers retreated for the long ride.
Their Prophet by then, Allah had took.
Disheaterned, No! – he’d left ’em a book!
Back to square one, fight them once more,
It’s long been a bore…
With much suffering and gore.
But now our leaders tell us to respect ’em,
Though we’d much rather dissect ’em.
*And Pagans, Apostates, Eastern Orthodox, Zoroastrians, Hindus, Greek Orthodox, Copts, Catholics, Agnostics, Darwinists, Seventh Day Adventists, Mormons, Athiests, Danes, British, Spanish, Russians, Israelis, Americans, Me, You…
In the original the starred list is longer and diminishes in point size with each term.
Why can’t that bugger Motion come up with stuff as good as this?
permanent expat – anyone who has lived in an Islamic country knows the truth of your statement: Moderate Muslim is an oxymoron. There are charming, worldly Muslims – some of them will even take a drink – but push comes to shove and they are fundamentalists under the camouflage. Imran Khan is the perfect example of the “moderate Muslim”. The bonkers is large. We must not negotiate with it.
I used to believe there was a large moderate body of Mulsim opinion until quite recently (as many of my articles will attest) but I do not think that theory has stood the test of the Jyllands-Posten incident.
My guess is that the only way ‘Islam’ can be moderate is for it to be come more secular, like the nominally Christian mainstream in Europe… Indeed that was my first hand experience of Bosnians Muslims in Sarajevo and Mostar in the 1990’s, they got drunk with me and their ladies wore short shirts, and they were only ‘Muslim’ in the way most British people are ‘Christians’, in other words, they were not very religious at all.
Until I see evidence that there really are a significent number of secularised ‘Muslims’ merging into the mainstream and speaking out against the excesses of the more intolerant factions, I am stuck with the unhappy notion that Islam really is damn as close to inimical to enlightenment values as communism or fascism. I looked in vain for some large heartfelt, non-stage managed “not in our name” protests by Muslims regarding the Jyllands-Posten matter… no disrespect inrended to the valiant few Msulims who did indeed stand up for free speech. The unpalitable fact seems to be that the people who really do speak for Islam are not at all tolerant when actually faced with the hard questions.
I can only conclude that the identity politics and welfare statism of past years has finally managed to create in one community what they wanted all along with all ethnic communities but failed to do with now increasingly assimulated Africans, Hindu Indians and Chinese communities.
I have respect for many Muslim people… I have none whatsoever for Islam.
HJHJ writes:
“I do feel that you fall into the trap of viewing ‘Islam’ as one entity, just as certain extreme elements would wish it to be (represented by themselves as the true, self appointed voice, of course)”
Come off it, HJHJ. If there is a substantial body of anti-fundamentalist Islamic opinion in this country, it should let itself be known.
I’m sick to death of being told that a silent majority of ‘reasonable’ Moslem opinion exists in the UK. I want some evidence.
How about marches in defence of freedom of speech? Against Iran’s nuclear strategy?
In the absence of such, I’ll continue to believe we have breached our own walls and dragged in a Trojan horse.
Islam has been an ignorant, angry threat to the West as we have moved forward through these last 1400 years. They are nasty, vicious primitives who kidnap innocent people and video themselves sawing through their necks for their later viewing pleasure – probably while spooning up a tub of (Western – Hagen Daz). The NY Times does not seem to have a problem with this manifestation of Islamic faith.
Never mind the NY Times et al and Yale accepting as a student (on a student visa – WTF?) the former ambassador of the Taliban, these individuals are still the enemies of civilisation and progress. Fourteen hundred years later and they haven’t invented anything but a suicide vest (may they use it in the privacy of their own homes – pieces be upon them).
Within the living memory of my parents generation, and to a lesser extent, mine, have occurred the following lunacies:
a multi-cultured empire composed of deeply religious people was taken over by an ideology of militant aetheism and economic determinism which resulted in the murder of dozens of millions of people;
a highly developed culture, both artistically and scientifically, plunged into a nightmare of racial supremacy and belligerent nationalism resulting in a fanatical militarism which caused the deaths of over 100 million people;
an ancient, highly insular culture became so entranced with a mythical messianic mission based on its own self conception of racial supremacy and divinely inspired cultural superiority that it launched a fanatical war of conquest against several major world societies which led to its utter defeat, the shattering of most of its cultural illusions, and the deaths of millions;
an ancient and highly sophisticated culture, with philosophical and social traditions going back across several millenia, decided to enter the modern age by adopting a totalitarian ideology of economic determinism and class warfare that resulted in the deaths of uncounted millions under the rule of a leader held to be all knowing and infalliable;
and so on and so on.
I am not defending this current crop of lunatics operating under the banner of Islam. I am trying to point out that many of the cultural flaws and ideological errors we point out as being part of the Islamic fundamentalists worst characteristics are nothing new at all, but very much in the abysmal traditions of a great deal of human history.
It is the open, cosmopolitan, secular, non-ideologically-driven culture of the Anglosphere that is the anomaly.
This current conflict is but another in a series of confrontations between rational, scientific, Enlightenment-based culturally diverse societies and the authoritarian/totalitarian priest/king absolutist societies that traditionally held sway in human affairs.
The mystics of spirit and the mystics of muscle have joined forces once again to challenge those who believe that rational inquiry and productive effort are the fundamental principles of a truly human society.
The question is: Whose believers will generate the required courage of their convictions to see the clash through to a victorious end?
I too have actually met the much sought after “moderate muslim” It is my experience that they quite cleverly keep a low profile, precisely because of the historical record of western fecklessness vis-a-vis the vaunted liberties of western societies. Note that in majority muslim countries, the buggers could only muster a few thousand protesters out of cities with populations in the millions, over the “satanic cartoons”. As my acquaintances have pointed out, each time an Islamist thug makes a threat and cowardly western elites cave, they lose heart. At present, much hope is vested in G.W. Bush, but there is fear as to what comes next. It was pointed out to me, rather pointedly, that when the west puts a line in the sand and then retreats at the slightest provacation,
(Vietnam, Lebanon, Somalia) and now the craven rantings of the American left to bugger out of Iraq, that thousands of people then die who took the chance to align themselves and their families with the west.
I believe we will see more moderate muslims when the west starts to play hard with the Islamist thugs and not let dirty oil money by off our politicos and media elites.
Uain – STFU.
I believe we will see more moderate muslims when the west starts to play hard with the Islamist thugs and not let dirty oil money by off our politicos and media elites.
Uain – there are no moderate Muslims. Let’s get ourselves accustomed to this concept. It’s Allah Or Nuthin’ At Allah … (Mark Steyn would have done that a thousand times better, but it needs to be said.)
There are no compromises in this fight.
Uain – on rereading your post, I may have misjudged you and if I did, I apologise.
This battle is urgent, because they have already succeeded in getting the collaborators in the MSM over to their cause.
Were gathered on the battlefield! Where is the Shakespearean king to call us to arms?
Verity, I don’t think that you have Steyn’s position quite right. The difference is important.
One example of a frequent theme in his writing:
“I believe that. I’ve met plenty of “moderate Muslims” in Jordan and Iraq and the Gulf states. But, as a reader wrote to me a year or two back, in Europe and North America they aren’t so much “moderate Muslims” as quiescent Muslims. The few who do speak out wind up living in hiding or under 24-hour armed guard, like Dutch MP Ayaab Hirsi Ali.”
Verity
I am coming to believe that there are two kinds of Muslim. The Jihadis and their ilk rioting and ranting in the street over things like the cartoons. The other kind is the “moderate, we are part of the West” Muslims.
The difference is that the first kind wants Islam to control the world tomorrow, the second kind is more patient, more polished, more willing to let the first kind get killed in the process. At the end of the day they want the same thing, the difference is in the method.
Verity writes (on another thread)
everyone’s favourite heroine Hirsi Ali but also Manjit Irshad the Toronto gal who hasn’t deserted the faith, but speaks out against Islam in its current form. They are both so fine.
Quite right!
The point is that there clearly are people who still call themselves Muslims who agree with the concepts of individual freedom, free expression, secular law etc. and strongly oppose those who would use Islam to impose stone-age, misogynistic tyranny on the world.
Many of those people have first hand reasons to fear Islamo-fascism and have fled to the West to save their lives. They are our allies. They are our fifth column. We need them to speak up. Trying to portray all Muslims as extremists will just make them keep their heads down.
The Belmont Club has the text of a manifesto published in the same Danish paper as the Mohammed cartoons, signed by 12 rather diverse people, including Hirsi Ali.
The comments are drivel, but that site has been taken over by a small group of circle-jerkers. The article is interesting.
No, resident alien – “The point is that there clearly are people who still call themselves Muslims …” There clearly are not: Hirsi Ali is an apostate. She is under a threat of death and is surrounded by secret service 24 hours a day. She is incredibly brave.
For the life of me I cannot understand writers who talk about the “clash of civilizations.” What the hell has happened to their senses of perspective & what is the other “civilization”(?) but a (very large) horde of dangerously unreconstructed mediaeval lemmings who riot & kill at the drop of a turban, egged on by self-appointed clerics commited to gratuitous violence which is inculcated in lobotomised teenagers in the Madrassas, funded generously by the House of Saud There have always been civilizations, good, ugly & mostly fleeting but no way do I see Islam among the players
“Very retired” reminds us that in recent history, a large portion of which I have also experienced, bad things happened; it was fortuitous that “The West” was able to see the Cold War, for example, as a struggle that simply couldn’t be allowed to go pear-shaped despite the unpopularity of the job in hand. The limp-wristed cold war dissidents owe it to some very corageous folk who saved us from having to learn Russian as a first language. Flower Power didn’t prevail apart from begetting a generation of multiculti PC fascists who have better moustaches than their mothers ever did.
The last century was probably as awful as any period in history. We were fortunate in being able to prevail because, among other factors, we had been touched a tad by “Enlightenment”
This time round, kiddies, it’s a mite different. In 1939 we did not have a large embittered immigrant German population marching for recognition & the return of their colonies. with banners intimating that the only good Engländer is a dead one.(they did all that sort of thing in Nürnberg)
As a previous commenter pointed out we have been gleefully dragging in Trojan Horses by the millions…& there’s seemingly no let-up. Add to that the competition with rabbits for the turf in the ghettoes.
The great majority of these sullen humourless, uneducated, ignorant & brainwashed individuals are here with enormous extended families (half of which suffers appaling denigration & oppression from the macho males in the group. There is little or no integration & those with a tendency to small independence, can look forward to an H2SO4 facewash or worse………..or, if a girl, sent back home…Oh yes, it is STILL their home, from wherever they come, to marry an octogenerian fourth cousin, twice removed.
This, kiddies, is definitely not a part of our way of life.
And don’t say that we haven’t been warned….times without number. My God, how you hated the messengers! “What an awful man!” “The man’s a trouble maker!” (huh) etc.
Like the messengers or not. The imporrtant thing is the message………..which you heared……and trashed.
I hope you can remember what it was. There’s not much time.
Tim Blair notes:
MO SENSITIVITY
The forbidden cartoons of Mohammadness have been published more widely in Muslim countries than in Australia, New Zealand, and Canada combined. In Malaysia alone, three newspapers ran images – compared to just two newspapers in Australia.
Not a single major US daily went near them.
——-
If the images of mo hurts them so much then A. Iran shouldn’t be selling pics/key chains and B. they should have never been published in the muslim world.
I’m not sure expat has caught what I was pitching. There is no point in demonizing everyone who accepts Islam as a religion. They are not all “lemmings” or monsters or heartless killers.
It is a tendency that I struggle against constantly, as I am impatient with apologists, mad bombers, hysterical mullahs, and conniving political types (which is just about all of them as far as I can tell).
There are several hundred million hindus who don’t think the way I do, several hundred million Chinese, several hundred million (fill in the blank). The world is never going to be a big picnic where we all hold hands and sing Kumbaya, old Coke commercials notwithstanding.
The danger is, and always has been, within ourselves, i.e., can we grasp what is going on and formulate a sufficient response without falling into some type of maniacal hatred that subverts everything we would like to be.
One of the glories, and burdens, of our culture is the neverending self-examination, criticism, and search for a truly moral position. Part of the difficulty is the various moral errors we have allowed to gain so much influence in what constitutes the “conventional wisdom”.
This whole thing with the Islamic fanatics is like one of those old Dracula sequels where the vampire was killed in the last show, so the new plot has to find some way to resurrect him, or his son, or his third cousin twice removed, so that the creepy suspense can continue.
We’re always surprized when some vicious, murderous obscenity of an ideology pops up and starts causing trouble. We keep driving stakes through their hearts and burying them, only to wake up in the middle of the night and discover something else has started kicking at the door trying to get in.
I sometimes think the worst danger is not our adversaries, but the weariness that comes from having to keep generating the energy to get back in the ring and go another ten rounds with some new variation of the same old BS that we thought we had knocked out in the last bout.
I devoutly pray that my children, and their children, have a deeper understanding of, and committment to, the fragility of liberty than my generation has shown. I doubt this is the last match we will be called upon to play.
Verity,
You should probably join Hizb ut Tahrir or one of the other salafist cults. Your current view of Islam is so similar to theirs: “There are no moderate Muslims because anyone who is moderate is not a Muslim.”
You’ve also maintained in these columns that there are no moderate Muslims because those who say moderate things are in fact lying in order to deceive and conquer the west. Which is it?
Perry,
While the words reported by Khaleej Times report are plainly an absurd interpretation–and with any Gulf publication one needs to look out for further reinterpretation in the reporting–it ain’t true that European understanding of Islam is improved by all this, because there was next to no Islamic content to the controversy.
What Europeans ought to have gleaned from this is a clearer picture of the savagery of some Islamic mobs, and the way Middle Eastern and South Asian politicians play on them. The Danish public might have got the simplistic message “all Muslims are bastards”. But accepting the idea that changed (whether lowered or raised) opinion of Muslims constitutes better information about Islam is surely buying into Khaleej Times‘s fictional worldview.
PS – I thought it was already well established that Imram is an idiot. His charm, good-looks and wealth have allowed him to get away with spouting nonsense for years. If Graham Gooch took to making geopolitical pronouncements, nobody would take the slightest bit of notice, and many would suggest he stick to what he’s good at.
Last week in the Gulf News, the Middle East’s biggest selling English language daily, we had a chap calling for:
A civilised reply by educated Arabs and Muslims to offensive Danish cartoons.
Read a bit further(Link), and you’ll see what passes for a civilised reply out here.
This is the same newspaper whose poll returned over 60% believing violence to be justified in response to the cartoons.
Verity is right, moderate Muslims are very much a minority, especially in the Middle East. That said, the reactions to the cartoons by Muslims in the Middle East blogosphere were very reasonable, and makes me wonder if being computer literate, and by extension better informed, can help some people moderate their views.
I think alot of the current hatred of Islam misses the point.
The problem isn’t with Islam in particular but rather with religion in the general. All organised religions when they feel the cold breeze of rational thought threatening their existance lash out with brutal and ruthless barbarity. As some have mentioned above Christianity has had its fair share of holy wars. Bitter experience has led us in the west to contain religion’s baser instincts with secularism. But those impulses are never far from the surface…death threats against the makers of Jerry Springer the Opera and the routine murder in USA of nurses and doctors in abortion clinics are testament to that.
Therefore talk of clash of civilisations if misleading. If there really is to be a clash let it be those who reject the idea that a god determines what is right and wrong and who lives and dies against those who feel they cannot make those decisions for themselves.
Sure, we have our nutters too but they are just an ambient problem but when Mormons start crashing airliners into buildings, I will start worrying about them too. ‘Religion’ is not the issue, rationality is and Godless socialists and regulatory statists are every bit as irrational as religious fundamentalists.
We have only recently defeated Communism and still have more than enough internal woes with regulatory statism (sort of fascism-lite with smile-face armbands) to see this as a crusade against religion generally. We are simply facing the latest totalitarian world view and it happens to be an Islamic one.
‘Sadly, Islam = mass hysteria and mass delusion’. Perhap the same could be said of this country in the week following the death of Diana? Or of all religions and ideologies? Verity consistently portrays Islam as being uniquely wicked. It is true that no-one can hurt you unless you choose to be hurt and many muslims choose to be hurt by what we in the west see as trifling issues. This is a major problem. But the Jewish community gets upset when Livingstone says some off colour (though certainly not racist) comments to a journalist, scousers get upset when the Sun alleges criminality at Hillsborough, Austrians get upset when David Irving comes up with his usual tripe. Over-sensitivity isn’t solely Islamic and needs to be confronted everywhere. The danger is we”ll all be legislated into silence. Focussing solely on muslims leaves us (rightly, in my view) open to double standards and likely to encourage more opprobrium from islamists.
Yeah but Mickey you don’t see Scousers, the Jewish community or the Austrians running around burning embassies, beheading people or calling for mass exterminations in response to such perceived slights. Nor was there any such behaviour upon the death of Diana.
From Islam though you do however see exactly that, on a global scale in response to a bunch of piddling cartoons – think about that, some piddling cartoons for goodness sake.
To identify that is not a double standard at all – it’s merely a statement of fact. Facts of course being something Islamic apologists seem to utterly refuse to recognise.
But Mickey, how many people got murdered when Diana died? And why does Livingston’s offensive remark to someone become less offensive because it was not ‘racist’? Is ‘racist’ the only standard that matters now? And when scousers get upset when Hillsborough is described as a hive of scum and villany (as indeed it is), how many embassies got burned down and how many death threats got issued?
I think the ‘sensitivity’ to Islam might have something to do with flying airliners into building and suicide bombers in London and signs carried through the streets of capital threatening to behead people in Britain who disrespect Mohammed. Just a guess mind you.
Point taken chaps. But my most recent muslim experience was defending a muslim shopkeeper from a gang of aggressive white yobbos. He was entirely blameless by the way, a model small businessman in my view. The white kids were a disgrace. Should he now be saying ‘Christians are hateful scum?’ I think not.
The difference is we (ie pretty much our entire society) condemn the behaviour of those white bullies, the vast majority of Muslims either support the Islamic voilence or at best remain resolutely silent about it.
To quote PJ O’Rourke, that’s a fallacy of relevence. Or in simple English, so fucking what?
My point is that labelling people as ‘us’ and ‘them’ leads down a dangerous path. We are seeing a lot of dreadful acts of intolerance form muslims currently – and the tendency from some on this thread is to blame all muslims for it as if they are uniquely wicked. It is not on the same scale by any means, but I see the intimidatory tactics of animal rights campaigners or anti-globalisation protesters as bearing some similarities And I doubt whether the majority of them are muslims.
Intimidatory tactics – you’re kidding. WTF do you call beheading people, burning Embassies and threatening every infidel? Lovey Dovey new age love?
Jeeeeeesus.
It is strange how people who rail against state collectivism, are themselves so willing to condemn people collectively, as if the people concerned don’t have individual wills, when talking about Muslims.
I think of people as individuals, individually responsible for their actions and I have little time for those that offer religion as a reason for justification of indefensible actions. This also means that there is no reason why my muslim friends should feel any more obligation than anyone else, just because of their religion, to condem the extreme views of other people who are also muslims.
As for he percentage of Muslims that Verity or others feel are extremist. What the hell does this matter? If figures show that (and I’ve made the figure up) 70% of black men have performed a crime in the last year, does this mean that we should lock them all up automatically on the basis that, statistically, they are probably guilty? No. It wouldn’t matter if 99% have performed crimes, it doesn’t make the other 1% any more guilty than anyone else.
I was wondering when the immensely civilised and all-knowing Guy Herbert would drop in with lofty words of counsel. He writes that I say: “There are no moderate Muslims because anyone who is moderate is not a Muslim.” I’d like you to point out those words with my signature appended.
He says, referring to me: “You’ve also maintained in these columns that there are no moderate Muslims because those who say moderate things are in fact lying in order to deceive and conquer the west.” This is correct. Not to “conquer” the West, but to deceive, most certainly. I have explained taqqiya and kitman several times and they are all taught it. Without exception.
How many Islamic countries have you lived in, by the way, Guy? Your self-righteousness is foolish, because almost every word in your post broadcasts your ignorance.
Sandy P – Two of the newspapers that ran the images, one of them in Sarawak, have had their publication supsended by the government for several weeks. The New Straits Times was forced to issue a grovelling, large print, front page “apology” in order to be allowed to continue publishing. This was in moderate, civilised Malaysia.
Mickey Duff – I usually don’t respond to the moral equivalency gang, and others above have responded to you anyway, but the Jewish community in London grumbled about Livingstone but did not, so far as I have read, kidnap people, hold them hostage in fear of their lives for weeks or months and then hack their heads of for the video camera. Scousers, so far as has been reported, have not been to a suicide bomber training camp in Afghanistan with a view to learning how to blow up Hillsborough stadium while it is packed with people. The Austrians aren’t mad enough with David Irving for thousands to rampage through the streets on their way to torch some embassies.
You defended a Muslim shopkeeper and have decided that a bunch of uneducated, unruly, drunken louts are the equivalent of hundreds of millions of people who want you dead or living under their thumb and worshipping their god – or else. What Pete_London says.
HJHJ writes: “this matter? If figures show that (and I’ve made the figure up) 70% of black men have performed a crime in the last year, does this mean that we should lock them all up automatically on the basis that, statistically, they are probably guilty? No.”
Why does the moral equivalency gang always bring up black men as an example of the foolishness of the rest of us, as though black men are the worst possible thing they can think of for an example?
Your analogy is ignorant and is offensive to black people, who are not planning on taking over the world. Muslims are. When imams and ayotallahs and mullahs and the rest of them state that the world will become Dar-es-Salaam by persuasion or at the point of a sword, but it will become Dar-es-Salaam because that is the will of allah, do you think they’re kidding? Having a bit of a larf? They say it and say it and say it and preach it and preach it and preach it and people like Guy Herbert and HJHJ and all the others wave their hands dismissively at those of us who take them at their word – given the evidence.
But my most recent muslim experience was defending a muslim shopkeeper from a gang of aggressive white yobbos.
Nice bit of moral equivalence. What we are concerned with is Muslims threatening to kill those that offend them. Polls of Muslims in the UK show that a large amount of Muslims agree with these aims.
You are talking about a bunch of white yobbos attacking a shop owner…their race/relgion is irrelevant and I would bet his is as well.
There is a difference between the two…a big one.
Stop the Dhimmitude! These cowering responses by the West just serve to embolden the Islamofascists. In their thinking, it proves them right and encourages their ambitions to conquer the infidel.
We need to understand dhimmi and avoid it.
–Bush would not have apologized to Muslim sentivities for using the word “crusade” in his speech right after 9/11.
–Every newspaper would have run the cartoons, proudly, standing up for free speech and a free press with courage.
–Muslims who break the West’s laws in the West would be prosecuted. As I see it, these rioters, building burners, Jewkillers, life-threateners are getting off scot free.
–In areas where such anti-West illegal behavior is common, why not treat it as a resident enemy and subject to Patriot Act-like scrutiny? Lord knows the rest of us are putting up with all kinds of crap.
We need an enterprising graphic artist to design a logo/theme for the anti-dhimmi movement. The word dhimmi with a red circle-slash? Ideas?
Here is an astute piece in Tech Central Station explaining the mistake made by people like Guy Herbert who think these are isolated instances and not part of a whole Why some people don’t believe there’s a threat “>(Link)
Kentuckyliz is correct.
The people rampaging through the streets of London a mere seven months after their cohorts perpetrated the mass murder and maiming on London Transport – all of them third generation – should have been arrested for threatening behaviour, tried and banged up. Abu Hamza should have been tried for treason and hanged.
If the West will not defend its citizenries and its values, there are wolves prowling and slinking around on the periphery with bright, opportunistic eyes …
Debating the number of ‘moderate’ Muslims is a rather futile exercise. If the measure of how tolerable any adherent of some ideology may be is the degree to which that individual ‘moderates’ that ideology is surely the most complete condemnation of the ideology. Or is this tautology gone mad?
Very Retired: I don’t think I was missing the very vald points you made, just, maybe, some of the detail.
HJHJ: Regarding folk as individuals is all well & good & is, moreover, laudably correct. I don’t know if you were around when “Unternehmen Seelöwe” was pending but I can assure you that I wasn’t mulling over the probable humanity of Gefreiter Schmidt. Hundreds of thousands of fanatical brainwashed Teutons bent on killing us played a larger part in my personal & very scared assessment of the situation.
I agree with Mark Steyn in that those who we deem to be moderate Muslims are, in truth, merely quiescent and, being intelligent, will allow the Jihadists to do the spadework prior to accessing power if the operation is successful.
Mickey Duff: I had been long gone from The Septic Isle when pictures of the Diana hysteria hit my TV screen. I am still speechless………and deeply, deeply ashamed.
In my comments on this crucial topic I have sought to sound the tocsin among those who do not wish to hear it….who appease, grovel in their cowardly PC diapers….who offer the well-worn excuses for inaction & who, shame on them, call themselves a moral majority. Some commenters get a bit carried away and who can blame them under the circumstances, but better that than the erudite acquiescence to PC which one sometimes reads here. A better man than most of us wrote that ” The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.” For goodness’ sake, if it looks like an elephant, smells like an elephant, feels like an elephant & behaves like an elephant…it’s an elephant, dammit. Wake up!
Sorry that should have read “then that is surely the….” Doh!
That quote is the most ridiculous thing I’ve read in weeks. There is no way that a cartoon could ever be more painful than the death of even one innocent person…much less 6 million people!
Precisely Corona – and it is absolutely disgraceful that it is not being challenged extremely loudly and stridently in the MSM.
And HJHJ Muslims on the whole do not exhibit any individual thought and do not behave with any individual responsibility for their actions. Once again I offer up the mob behaviour we have seen all around the world in recent times. Literally millions behaving with absolutely no individual thought or responsibility.
Verity, I can’t get your Tech Central link to work. Would you repeat it?
Midwesterner – I am cackhanded with links. Here it it without trying to be fancy: (Link) This works because I’ve just tested it. This is a thoughtful, intelligent article.
Verity,
“There are no moderate Muslims because anyone who is moderate is not a Muslim.” I’d like you to point out those words with my signature appended.
I said those were your views, and it is a paraphrase. But not an inaccurate one, most of the time.
Here you are above, at 11:46pm:
Scratch a Muslim – not that I ever have – and you will find the veneer chips off very easily and they revert to proclaiming there is one universal law: theirs. It’s very a very primitive attitude.
at 12:44pm:
push comes to shove and they are fundamentalists under the camouflage.
at 02:55am:
Uain – there are no moderate Muslims. Let’s get ourselves accustomed to this concept. It’s Allah Or Nuthin’ At Allah …
at 1:56pm:
…they are all taught it. Without exception.
and at 2:21pm
Your analogy is ignorant and is offensive to black people, who are not planning on taking over the world. Muslims are.
That’s just on this thread.
Why you mock me for being ‘all-knowing’ I don’t purport to know what every person among hundreds of millions is like. My case is that they are in all likelihood not all the same. If that agnosticism is ignorance then I plead guilty.
That the few Muslims I know well, and the dozen or so I know slightly have entirely different educational backgrounds and outlooks on life is of course irrelevant since I haven’t lived in a Muslim country, which would be in every respect just like every other Muslim country (as are all the Christian ones I’ve never lived in either).
That I choose to take my reading of Islamic concepts from Muslim expositories and from a range of academic works and travelogues, rather than from the shining path of ineffable wisdom leading back to Daniel Pipes; that I have had a wholly unsystematic approach in the 20-odd years I’ve taken notice of Islam, because I am not concerned to make it an underpinning of my worldview; that I take different Muslims at their word when they contradict each other, and that I am inclined always to regard the noisiest among them as the emptiest vessels, are assuredly both signs and causes of my uncertainty in coming to an unshakeable conclusion about the unity and purpose of all people who belong a worldwide, thirteen-hundred year-old bundle of tradition with no central authority in it. Of course I’m ignorant.
But I hope that I’m not arrantly or crassly assured in my ignorance as to suggest the world is simple. To claim that what is claimed by others does not follow, or is not borne out by the facts, is the sort of claim one is entitled to make from ignorance.
David,
…the Austrians running around burning embassies, beheading people or calling for mass exterminations…
Not for 60 years or so, anyway. I have seen a couple of Jewish writers calling for mass extermination of Palestinians quite recently, but I wouldn’t say that because they did that ‘the Jews’ collectively had.
I’m with Perry here:
I am stuck with the unhappy notion that Islam really is damn as close to inimical to enlightenment values as communism or fascism.
And I have been of that opinion for a long while. But like Perry and HJHJ, I don’t step from that to opinions about individual Muslims, or particular Muslim societies. I’ll judge them on their actual conduct. (I have scratched a Muslim; and they bleed.) Both Muslims personally and predominantly Muslim societies are capable of pluralism – however inconsistent that may be with a literalist theology.
Guy, yes, you know some Muslims in the West. At a bet, you don’t know any from the self-created ghettoes, clung to because they have no intention of assimilating. They came to conquer. We didn’t know this at the time, although letting in vast swathes of an alien culture with an alien and barbaric god was a mistake.
I dont see too much evidence of pluralist Islamic societies.
As for the Austrians of 60 years ago…. I’m talking not of the past I’m talking of today.
If you want to examine the past lets start condeming the Romans perhaps for their savagery or perhaps the ancient Egyptians.
No, today we see WIDESPREAD (not isolated) attacks on embassies, murdering / torturing / beheading of unbelievers, systematic pack raping of western girls, calls for slaughtering entire populations etc etc etc etc etc etc. Much of this coming from within those Islamic societies and all of it coming from Muslims.
Both Sweden and Oz have had a huge surge in rapes and pack rapes. As in several hundred per cent. All by immigrant Muslims.
An analogy for those who are persuaded by the line that there are few moderate Muslims because we seldom hear from them:-
If you attend to public discourse emanating from the US in the media or in academia, you’d think the vast majority of Americans were screaming lefties and most of the rest fundamentalist religious conservatives. In truth there’s a lot of religiosity by European standards, but it is seldom extreme, obtrusive or aggressive; and campus and Hollywood radicals are largely undetectable outside campuses and Hollywood.
Why don’t the moderate Americans speak out? Because they are busy getting on with their lives. Why should we expect them to stop doing so in order to speak out for our convenience?
I lived in the US for several years and I never once met a religious fundamentalist. This is a lie put about by the vicious British left.
Sorry, Guy, but moderate Americans certainly do speak out. I don’t know whether you’ve ever been to the US, but if you have, you heard at least a few radio call-in shows – there are thousands of them throughout the country – and the callers are in the main, rational, conservative thinkers. Do not go by the increasingly marginalised mainstream media. American conservativeds most assuredly do speak out all the time, and many of them very articulately.
Verity,
At a bet, you don’t know any from the self-created ghettoes, clung to because they have no intention of assimilating.
And you do? Or is this another prolepsis?
Well, whadya know!
Waffle waffle waffle ad nauseam….”I am prepared to…”
” Nice chaps I know”…”Individuals deserve…..”
Look guys, it meets all the criteria to suggest that is an elephant…..and that’s what it is. Oh yes…..it wants to kill you. Jesus H. Christ….WAKE UP.
Well Guy in Veritys defence I have. I happened to live for some years in a little place called Cronulla in Australia and have had the misfortune to come face to face with the demonspawn that live in the self-created ghettos of South Western Sydney.
I saw them at first hand when they came and terrorised the beachgoers. For years the locals have had to deal with their poison.
I would bet London to a brick you won’t have met or had anything to do with such scum, otherwise you wouldn’t be peddling such deluded claptrap.
Verity,
That, on America, is my very point. (Though I have met a handful of religious fundamentalists in NC.) External views and appearances, even the US at large in the world as a bullying superpower, tell you little about the moderate peaceable Americans who are evident in America. You have to go there to hear about them.
Yet America is one of the most open societies on earth. It doesn’t have a dictatorial state manipulating mobs on camera for reasons of foreign and domestic policy. It is easy to speak out for moderation there, but not interesting for foreigners to report.
Good allah! – no!
Guy – there may be some genuinely Westernised Muslims, but they are very, very few and far between. Manjit Irshad is one. And … uh … And Manjit calls herself a refusenik and is working to change Islam from within. That she is so famous testifies to how rare she is.
Obviously, having lived in a Muslim country, I have met charming Muslims. Elegant, sophisticated, don’t drink themselves but will stand their round. Etc etc etc.
And when push comes to shove, they will agree with the rioters and flag burners and embassy torchers because the cartoons “insulted Islam”. They cannot get beyond this, Guy. It doesn’t matter that we in the West are not ruled by their laws, they still hector us because depicting Mohammad is “forbidden”.
They seriously cannot understand that it is not forbidden to us. This is because they believe that the entire world is ruled by their allah. So of course, it’s forbidden to us as well. Even the most sophisticated believe the world must acknowledge this. The world must become Dar-es-Salaam. We ignore, or fail to understand this glaring fact at our peril.
MickeyDuff
“Point taken chaps. But my most recent muslim experience was defending a muslim shopkeeper from a gang of aggressive white yobbos. He was entirely blameless by the way, a model small businessman in my view. The white kids were a disgrace. Should he now be saying ‘Christians are hateful scum?’ I think not.”
Were the white kids screaming “in the name of God”? Were the white kids told to go forth and kill for God by the local vicar?
Context makes all the difference in the world.
Yet again Guy you are putting up straw man arguments. There may well be many divergent viewpoints in America, indeed I suspect you won’t get too many people disagreeing with you on that. That does not prove that there is a similar divergence in the Islamic world.
There is by contrast however, not a complete silence eminating from America in response to thousands of Americans torching foreign embassies, killing foreigners for simply being foreigners, threatening to slay everybody outside America etc etc etc. The main reason for that is of course because Americans, unlike Muslims are not doing those despicable things.
And before you start drawing some absurd parallel with the Iraq war we’ll simply note that there is a strong and outspoken anti Iraq war voice in America – so again we see a quite clear contrast to whats happening in the Muslim world.
David,
I’ve no doubt of the existence of vile gangsters living in and controlling ghettoes (London is full of little pockets); nor that there are traits in many Muslim cultures that encourage gangs of youths. The Taliban regime in Afghanistan shows what can happen when gangs of ill educated boys get a cultural boost. But the same happens with non-Muslim groups with macho creeds. Visit any garrison town on any continent if you doubt it.
But how does that make it deluded to suggest that (1) not everyone who might be marked ‘Muslim’ is like that, and/or (2) there is no inevitable trend to intercommunal violence. The existence of the mafia does not make my Italian-American lawyer acquaintance unclubbable.
No all I’m suggesting is that there is never any voice of dissent from the Muslim community in any country towards this sort of behaviour.
Therefore my conclusion is that there is no vast swaith of moderate Muslims who disagree with it.
They are damned by their global silence.
No; it is not a straw man. Though the response to it is.
I am not trying to misrepresent your argument to knock it down, but rather trying to get you to see that it is absurd by presenting a parallel with which I hoped you would agree, viz:
There are many moderate Americans not represented by overseas stereotypes, and it is unreasonable either to claim that there are no moderate Americans because the world’s news media doesn’t show them, or to demand that any who do exist tear themselves away from pursuing quiet, moderate, lives in order to speak out with such force that the world can hear them.
Likewise moderate Muslims.
I am not trying to prove anything about America or to compare the conduct of the American population with the Syrian.
Its not a parallel I accept.
Very true, but then a check through Samizdata’s rather large archive will show we are quite happy to put the boot in to animal rights activists and anti-globos as well. I do not regard radical Islam as the one and only (or even biggest) threat to liberty, I am just sure that it is indeed a significant threat.
There are moderate muslims, some of whom are quite heroic ones in fact, but I no longer believe that moderate are either a majority of muslims or that the silent majority are not sympathisers with the more vocal extremists.
For crying out loud — ashamed? What on earth happened in England when Diana died? Lots of people cried? I showed up in London at the end of August and there were some flowers lying about. If anyone was harmed it did not make the news in the US (not that’s the best defense, but still, I did have net access). Unless I missed something huge (and I do not discount this possibility), English people did not run around trampling other English people to death in mobs or setting fire to random Chilean embassies. Why is this even being drawn into the comparison? I’m not trying to attack anyone here — I am sincerely baffled.
Guy – the Mafia is not Islam. I despair. That someone comes from Italy doesn’t mean they’re connected to the mob or has the faintest feeling about it except revulsion. If you come from Saudi Arabia, you are an Muslim and your entire life is in the service of allah and allah wants everyone to obey his tinpot laws. If you come from the nation of Islam as they call it, as they don’t recognise national borders, you believe that everyone was born a Muslim. Everyone. Everywhere. You deserted Islam, you wicked thing, so you don’t count as a human anymore, so it’s OK to murder you by any means at hand. If you convert or, as they call it, “revert”, you regain your human status and the respect of lovely Muslims everywhere.
Guy, you are singularly uninformed about this religion and your normally well-anchored points are, on this matter, completely all at sea.
PS – I agree with Perry. There are indeed some heroic and brave Muslims, but they are in an infinitely tiny minority against their 1.2bn co-religionists.
precisely
Here in the United States we had large demonstrations on both sides of the question of going to war in Irag; we have protestors on both sides of the abortion debate – and they are quick to condemn extremist tactics from both sides as well.
When Pat Robertson makes some idiotic comment the condemnations ring out loud and often from his co-religionists as well as from others.
Now, the world has just endured an Islamic tantrum over some drawings. Were there Islamic counter protests against the violence and calls for limiting free speech? Did they actually draw any significant number of people in comparison to the anti-cartoon thugs?
And when was the last time there was an Islamic march against suicide bombing? How about a protest march against beheading some foreign aid worker for kicks?
I too believed in the possibility of moderate Islam – in fact I still do. But post-cartoon wars, I no longer believe moderate Islam is relevant. They have chosen to sit down; they have chosen to let others speak for them; they have chosen to give tacit support to the beheaders and jihadis – so I don’t care about them and I don’t acknowledge them as a factor in the discussion.
Agreed, Bombadil. And there aren’t as many of them as some people here fondly believe. We are speaking about people who have been brainwashed within an inch of their lives, since birth. They cannot, cannot, cannot conceive of any alternate view. They simply do not understand it and their brains have such an steel fence around them that they are unable, literally unable, to entertain the notion.
They think the cartoons were intentionally provocative. (It wouldn’t matter if they were; but they weren’t.) They cannot conceive of freedom of expression. It’s not that they disagree with freedom of expression. They do not believe it exists. Allah has forbidden it, so it does not exist. So there was a plot against Islam evidenced by their publication.
Let’s be clear about one thing, it doesn’t take universal agreement about Islam, from within, for it to be a problem.
As a general rule, most notions about something fall into 1/3rds (for example it’s estimated that 1/3 of the colonists were in favor of revolution, 1/3rd were against it, and 1/3rd were fairly neutral). All it takes is a radicalized 1/3rd to find their ways into the corridors of power and flesh out the “Brownshirts”, and a neutral 1/3rd keeping their heads down low, and voila, you’ve got an aggressive State looking do ill upon others, that is unless you’ve got an opposing 1/3rd remainder so digusted with how things are that they will risk civil war.
So I’ve never been one to condemn all Muslims in one feel swoop. But the recipe seems to be in place for several aggressive Muslim States that have no more ~1/3rd truly cracked.
toolkien – Dream on.
Actually I am quite ready to accept that only 1/3 of Muslims are “radicalized”.
So what? It could be 1/10 or 1/100 as long as the rest keep their mouths shut.
Islam = the things that Islam does. Its constituent parts only matter to me insofar as they have influence on the outcome of events. Right now the radicals are driving the Islamic bus – which makes it a radical bus. As long as the moderates sit in the back with their thumbs up their asses it is going to remain a radical bus, and neither you nor I nor the west in general are obligated to see the bus as a collection of seats rather than a single vehicle trying to run us over.
Bombadil – You have bought into this myth of “radical Islam”. All of Islam is radical. We are not talking about Christianity or Hinduism, where there are some people more fundamentalist than others. Islam is a fundamental religion. There is no moderate Islam.
I agree (roughly) with Toolkien. All it takes is for a good man to do nothing. That said, I think there is a very large number of muslims who are not actively involved but broadly support the likes of Bin Laden. They’re more concerned with day-to-day life than overthrowing Zionists/Crusaders but they agree with the actions of suicide bombers et al. These are the people who’s minds we must either change (or, if it comes to it, destroy). I am reminded here of Martin Luther King. He always held the moderate whites who were in favour of an “injust peace” rather than the potential turmoil of achieving equality more in his sights than the Klansmen, who he regarded as pretty much beyond redemption.
That said. Can we make the “Arab Street” understand us? With every day I doubt it ever more. If we could prevail upon them by force of arms, or force of argument, this war would be half-won already. I think it’s gonna have to be force of arms.
Aren’t people pissed off with trying to “build a bridge between cultures” (on one side I don’t see anything I would call “culture” anyway)? There is a limit, surely, to what we can put up with.
We can never negotiate because they won’t even kick off with anything even vaguely worth discussing. We should never discuss because of 9/11, 7/7, Madrid, Beslan… I could go on and on. I won’t. Is there anyone on this blog who hasn’t wondered quite what they’d do to the Hamas leader if they were alone in a room with a well-sharpened HB pencil? They hate us because we have succeded where they have failed. We hate them because of their nihilistic depravity. What’s to talk about?
Verity:
I think Islam could be moderate if its adherents chose to interpret it that way. Or rather, I think a peaceful religion whose prescriptive tenets were rooted in the Koran could be possible, so long as those religionists agreed that the Koran was not to be interpreted literally, nor considered to be the unblemished, unchanging direct word of god.
The above would unfortunately not be a fair description of modern Islam.
Again, I don’t care if there are 5 moderate Muslims in the world or 500 million; I only care about the net effect. Right now there are Islamic mobs burning down buildings and planning my murder in support of their hateful creed, while their peaceful fellows (in whatever number) silently stump in and out of the mosque, drop their contributions into the Hamas collection bin, and keep their mouths shut. Result: from my point of view, Islam is radical. QED.
Moderates don’t demonstrate. That’s why you don’t hear them. Doesn’t matter whether they’re Moslems, Christians, atheists or rock-worshippers.
When did you last see the Chingford branch of Middle Class Professionals for Reasonableness out demonstrating?
EG
Nick M says: These are the people who’s minds we must either change
Do you have the faintest, tiniest, scintilla of a flea’s eyelash what you are talking about?
Euan: you are defining the term moderate to mean “he who doesn’t voice his opinion.”
With that definition it is true that only radicals would be heard.
But (to use a previous example) in the US we had demonstrations both for and against the war in Iraq. We had quite mild peace marches and mild “support the troops” gatherings as well as things sponsored by MoveOn and the Klan.
Similar statements can be made about abortion, free speech, etc.
Are you claiming all those voices are by definition radical? If so, your classification is so broad as to be of little use.
Where is the Islamic equivalent of this ? Or this ? Or this ? Or this ?
Notice the common thread? No calls for beheadings, no burning buildings, no suicide bombings. And when (so very very rarely) there is violence, it is immediately condemned by all sides.
When I say radical, I mean: calling for the death and destruction of those who disagree with you; using violence not as one end to your means, but as the primary end to your means; believing that your cause is so just that anything is justified to achieve it.
That is radicalism. You can come back with some horseshit about how BusHitler is just the same – why, didn’t some Korans in Guantanamo get torn covers? but that is crap. If we (meaning the west) made it our policy to pursue our ends with the same indifference to the lives of others that the jihadis display, there would not be any of them left, nor much of anybody left at all in Iraq, Syria, Saudi Arabia, or Afghanistan.
No, but although you can get peaceful demonstrations on both sides of the argument, you don’t often get people marching under a banner of “No Strong Opinion Either Way,” and that’s the category most people fall into about most things.
Moderate doesn’t simply mean non-violent. It means middle-of-the-road, don’t have a view strong enough to go marching about it, got more important things to do, marching doesn’t pay the rent, kind of thing.
I know and have lived & worked with a few Moslems in both Moslem and non-Moslem countries. Most of them aren’t particularly radical. They have their faith, they believe it, and yes they are indeed taught that people are “naturally” Moslem. But they aren’t generally bent on taking over the world, pace certain commenters’ increasingly strident and frankly bizarre interpretations. Insh’allah perhaps it will happen, or perhaps not, seems to be their view of it.
They’re human beings just like the rest of us. They aren’t some sinister band of brainwashed Khomenei-clone kill-droids programmed to destroy everything. If Islam takes over the world, of coure they’ll go along with it – just as millions of others would go along with it if liberal democracy took over the world, or millions of yet others if Christianity did. That’s a long way from actively supporting violence.
The thing that really annoys me about the anti-Islamism one reads so much of is that there is little difference in style (and, I suspect, substance) between that and the portrayal of the Jews in the early 20th century. Scratch a Moslem and he’s a radical underneath, scratch a Jew and he’s a Zionist conspirator underneath, all Moslems are radicals, all Jews are Zionists. And so very tediously on. I find this most disquieting.
Unfortunately, the impetus to hate the other is a deep-rooted part of the human psyche, given that humans are social creatures. Tribalism and chauvinism come distressingly easily to us, but I think we should strive to overcome that – many hereabouts clearly do, but many others plainly don’t, can’t or won’t.
EG
Verity you keep saying there is no such thing as moderate Islam or moderate Muslims. But your own words…..
Manjit Irshad the Toronto gal who hasn’t deserted the faith, but speaks out against Islam in its current form
contradict you.
So were the people who allowed Hitler and Stalin’s rises to power, oh so very human. What a foolish windbag you are.
I see, so all Germans are Nazis and all Russians are Communists, and they’re all bent on world domination?
What leaders say and what people think aren’t necessarily the same.
EG
No, but although you can get peaceful demonstrations on both sides of the argument, you don’t often get people marching under a banner of “No Strong Opinion Either Way,” and that’s the category most people fall into about most things.
That is a fair statement. We get people with strong feelings pro an issue, and strong feelings anti an issue. Net effect: moderation.
Where are the “strong feelings anti” suicide bombing in the Islamic community? I read a few editorials, but that is a poor balance to bombs going off in markets.
Where are the “strong feelings anti” beheadings? How about censorship of other (non-Islamic) religious beliefs? Where are the “strong feelings anti” on putting out $1,000,000 bounties on cartoonists?
Your Moslem friends are indeed all human beings like the rest of us. Klan members are human beings, even the ones whose only participation is to send in their annual dues and keep their mouths shut. Does that improve your opinion of the Klan?
Islam is what Islam does. There may in fact be a massive peaceful majority of Muslims – but I have no empirical evidence to support that claim.
Having provided myself with a good Alentejo vinho tinto & a corkscrew I was pondering the comments on this thread & remembered the mention of the plague of beach barbarians in The Lucky Country. I had read about these Middle Eastern rapist trash some months earlier and was, then as now, surprized that the Aussies actually tolerate this sort of thing. During a number of visits I was impressed with the no-bloody-nonsense attitude typical of down-to-earth Aussie blokes. I had supposed that they would have rounded up the obviously well-known culprits & sent them, with their holy books, to an Attitude Rehab Camp in one of the dryer parts of the Red Center.
What’s the matter, blokes? Got too many Poms in your community?
And don’t anyone, PUH-lease, give me your humane PC answers……….at least not until your daughter has been gang-raped.
No, I think moderation is more than just lots of pros plus lots of antis cancel out and give moderation.
Nor – and this is the point – do you have any to support the contrary view. Given that it is extremely unlikely that a billion people across all social classes and all races are going to be radical just because they happen to share a religion – the only thing they have in common – the probablity is against the absence of a moderate majority.
Some Christians are extremely unpleasant people. Look at the odious Fred Phelps, for example, or consider the Christians who murder abortion doctors in the name of the God of Love. How representative are they of Christianity? Where are the moderates marching under banners of “God loves *all* people” or “It’s the sin and not the sinner to blame”? Shouldn’t we say all Christians are fundamentalist loonies?
Vocal minorities and obssessive monomaniacs are no basis for drawing conclusions about extremely large groups.
EG
Verity,
I know what we’re up against. I know it at least as well as you. That is why, if you read my posts, you’ll notice that I’m not averse to letting the thermonukes fly, if it comes down to it.
Acknowledge an ally when one comes to you. I’m pretty much with you…
Now, Euan Gray. I acknowledge what you say. I have met muslims who fulfill your criteria. Thing is, I don’t believe anymore that they are the sort of people you think them to be. Let me get personal. Muslims “protect” their women in a way that makes any kinda meaningful dialogue utterly moot for me. Even sharing a joke is off-limits. How then can our cultures get to know each other? If a muslim man is not prepared to shake hands or look a woman in the eye how can we respect them? The sexual equality (by and large – certainly compared to Islam) of The West is the reason for this. It is there because it is fair. It is there because otherwise we would be sacrificing half of our economic capacity. It is there because otherwise I would have missed out on countless, priceless, friendships with equals. It is there because it is right and doin’ right has no end.
If anyone wins this fight, short of the nukes flying, it will be women.
Maybe permanent expat has been drinking too much wine but if his last comment is suggesting muslims are rapists, I really do wonder about how edifying some of these contributions have been.
MickeyDuff,
Read the Koran and the Hadith.
Raping non-muslim women is a suitable tactic for the spread of the Umma. It was used by big Mo himself. How else would the leader of a small bunch of ragged-assed renegade of got anywhere if ti weren’t for his ability to buy support from assorted warlords by the promise of “war-booty”. This included women. It still does. Islam is evil.
A very large number of Germans were either Nazi supporters or sympathisers with enough of the Nazi world view for them to come to power via politics that were probably no more corrupt than many places in the western world today. As you will no doubt refuse to see that I will waste no more time on you.
resident alien – doesn’t the fact that this one gal/person is so famous tell you anything? Duh?
MickeyDuff: Grow up. I did not suggest that Muslims, per se, are rapists…………..
Any more than you are suggesting that I am drunk because I have opened a bottle? I can even read when I’ve had a beer…..how’s that for accomplishment.
I do agree with you, however, that some of the comments may be unedifying &, in that respect, your last offering puts you at the top of the class.
Now, finish your cocoa & go to bed.
To the degree that a person subscribes to the doctrines of the inhuman, mindcontrolling death cult that is islam, then i shall regard them, proportionally,with suspicion ….. and as a potential deadly threat to my wellbeing.
Even if they are outwardly friendly , i wouldnt like to rely on a mosque-monkey to take my side against their more violent co-religionists.
Check the excellent link for a part interview with apostate, Ali Sina, on the matter of shaming & ridiculing muslims as an essential moral duty for all mankind.
(Full length interview in 2nd link if you want to read it all)
(Link)
(Link)
Albion writes:
” As you will no doubt refuse to see that I will waste no more time on you.”
Another one joins the club. You don’t so much argue with Mr. Gray as get drawn into an intellectual swamp where you wrestle with marsh phantoms and malarial delusions, as the argument mutates and shifts before your very eyes.
Someone, months ago, called him a troll (which isn’t, as ‘net newbies sometimes think, a Danish cartoonist hiding beneath a bridge in fear of his life – it’s someone who trolls: i.e. drags bait along in the water).
There are those who have objected to this description. They may be right, but the end result is much the same: endless, pointless, attritional debates, at the end if which the washing up still needs doing and no one is any the wiser. Nor even better informed.
Nor – and this is the point – do you have any to support the contrary view. Given that it is extremely unlikely that a billion people across all social classes and all races are going to be radical just because they happen to share a religion – the only thing they have in common – the probablity is against the absence of a moderate majority.
Some Christians are extremely unpleasant people. Look at the odious Fred Phelps, for example, or consider the Christians who murder abortion doctors in the name of the God of Love. How representative are they of Christianity? Where are the moderates marching under banners of “God loves *all* people” or “It’s the sin and not the sinner to blame”? Shouldn’t we say all Christians are fundamentalist loonies?
I do have evidence to support to opposing view. There were Islamic protests in London calling for the death of Europe; there were no Islamic protests calling for an end to Islamic extremism etc etc etc. or if there were, it was 10 people at a shopping mall.
Re: Fred Phelps – first, do you really think Fred Phelps speaks as loudly as Islamic Jihad or Hamas? How many people has Fred Phelps killed? When did the last Fred- Phelps supported riot burn down an embassy? Second, there are many Christian groups who condemn Fred Phelps (or repudiate the vile things he stands for).
Link
Link
Link
A snippet from that last link: The ABCUSA officially states that “the practice of homosexuality is incompatible with Christian teaching.” However, gay-affirming congregations remain affiliated with the denomination. When conservative regions have disfellowshiped such congregations, those congregations have simply affiliated with a more liberal ABCUSA region. ABCUSA Crusdaers, a national Baptist fundamentalist movement, has responded by calling for a nationwide “day of blood and vengeance” against the breakaway congregations.
Ok, I confess it: I added that last sentence myself. See how silly it looks?
Again, Islam is what Islam does. This is not a special condition for Islam; Christianity is as Christianity does, as well. But it is the net effect I am interested in. You keep comparing a tiny fringe Christian group, which is a small voice of idiocy in a sea of moderation, to these massive Islamic conflagrations. Calls for “death to infidels” are not the small voices in the Islamic world – they are the large ones. You cannot truthfully say the same about Christianity or Hinduism.
There is no equivalence. And I am damn sick and tired of groping around for a Muslim who doesn’t advocate “killing Jews wherever he finds them” every time there is a massive Islamic riot in Karachi or Palestine or London. When I want to form an opinion on the current state of Islam I will cock an ear; I will look at Al Jazeera and Arab News. Will I see something there that will convince me that Islam is truly a religion of peace? I haven’t yet.
Damnable markup! I declare a jihad on thee … off with your head!
Some Christians are extremely unpleasant people. Look at the odious Fred Phelps, for example, or consider the Christians who murder abortion doctors in the name of the God of Love. How representative are they of Christianity? Where are the moderates marching under banners of “God loves *all* people” or “It’s the sin and not the sinner to blame”? Shouldn’t we say all Christians are fundamentalist loonies?
should be in italics in my post above as well, as it is a quote from Euan’s previous posting. I did not generate this piece of equivocating, and I will behead anyone who suggests that I did!
Around 45 Muslims have died wordwide in their moronic riots, which is encouraging evidence of the Darwin theory at work. It’s not enough, but it’s a start. If they confine their rioting to their own countries and killing one another (duh), we might pick up some steam here.
Why are so many silly men reading and responding to Euan Gray’s deeply boring, wordy, windy, grinding posts? GCooper puts it so well: “Another one joins the club. You don’t so much argue with Mr. Gray as get drawn into an intellectual swamp where you wrestle with marsh phantoms and malarial delusions, as the argument mutates and shifts before your very eyes.”
I particularly liked “malarial delusions”.
Between the densely packed, humourless Euan Gray and Kodiak, give me Kodiak! He was a troll, but he was funny in two languages and very light on his feet. Euan Gray comes clumping in in carpet slippers and a heavy cardigan with the notion that he is going to teach you a wordy lesson. Kodiak was all over the place, and very irritating, but at least you felt there was a quick, interesting intelligence there.
This should not be taken as a suggestion that Kodiak is missed. No.
Verity,
Euan has it right – I tried to write something last night, and didn’t post it, but he has put it more elegantly than I could:
The thing that really annoys me about the anti-Islamism one reads so much of is that there is little difference in style (and, I suspect, substance) between that and the portrayal of the Jews in the early 20th century. Scratch a Moslem and he’s a radical underneath, scratch a Jew and he’s a Zionist conspirator underneath, all Moslems are radicals, all Jews are Zionists. And so very tediously on. I find this most disquieting.
All I’d add is that if any commentator wrote the same things about blacks or Jews that you and others write freely about Muslims, I am convinced they would be banned in a week. It is sickening.
Your utter refusal to engage with the perfectly straightforward points I (and EG rather more lucidly) make puts you in this self-defined category:
They cannot, cannot, cannot conceive of any alternate view. They simply do not understand it and their brains have such an steel fence around them that they are unable, literally unable, to entertain the notion.
This is also true of some less frequent comentators who take a very similar line, but only pop-up on threads where Muslims are being discussed. They too dismiss people who take a different view as ‘ignorant’, while offering a position that seems to consist of catchphrase and witchfinder’s logic.
There is no dialogue. The only thing I can do is give up reading posts on this blog that relate to the problems of Islam.
Again Guy you dodge the real issues and questions. You still refuse to answer the issue of the thousands of Muslims burning, raping, beheading and killing.
You come up with little side avenues and diversions but refuse to address the real problem that is Islam.
Your attempts at moral equivalence are shown by all and sundry on this thread to be foolish and baseless yet you still refuse to accept that there is a serious global problem with the totalitarian political movement that is Islam.
You attempt to link peoples views here with Nazi anti semitism yet you willfully refuse to see that a simple difference in that the Jews in 1930’s Germany were not burning, raping, killing etc etc etc. Modern 2006’s Muslims are doing so on a huge scale.
You continue to attest to the vast pool of moderate Islam yet there is simply no evidence to suggest it exists, if it did surely we should have seen some evidence in recent weeks.
In fact the only people who utterly refuse to engage with perfectly straightforward points are yourself and Euan. You deal in petty obfuscations, half truths and denials.
Extremely simplistic points.
But not in unthinking bigotry, nor fear of the different, nor petty cultural chauvinism, nor attributing to the many the psychotic delusions of the few.
EG
Anybody been to the Alhambra at Granada? It’s fantastic. The European rooms added to the palace are dark and ugly in comparison.
Anybody read the poems of the Sufi mystic Rumi? Wonderful.
Don’t forget that Prince Charles, our dissident monarch in waiting, is a fan of Islam too.
And I just love a curry on a Friday night (my local restaurant is run by a gang of friendly Bangladeshis – top men).
There are commenters on this blog who are only here when the subject is snowboarding & express their opinions to the exclusion of much else.
“There is no dialogue. The only thing I can do is to give up reading posts on this blog which relate to snowboarding.”
Do you have today’s great & thrilling fashion accessory: “Blinkers.”? No head-in-sand fan should be without this great product, the great one-upmanship must-have for the chattering classes. (garanteed PC friendly) Order before noon & receive an absolutely free halo (one size fits all) Be the envy of your friends with “Blinkers.”
I don’t read any posts by Euan because they are too grindingly drab and predictable, but I do read Guy Herbert, whose writing is lucid and usually a pleasure to read even when one disagrees.
But his self-righteous refusal to accept that Islam is extremely dangerous to the West baffles me.
I would suggest that if he would read Bat Ye’or, Oriana Fallacci, Robert Spencer, Ibn Wariq he might get a firmer grasp on this “religion” (more a brainwashing warrior cult, but we won’t quibble). They’re all respected writers and scholars. Not a moonbat among them.
Guy, you are missing the key point: Islam is aggressive because a key tenet of the belief system is the inevitability of it taking over the entire world. Every single one of them believes this is going to happen and the world will become a peaceful Dar-es-Salaam. Imposing this serene theocracy will require terrorising everyone who’s not a Muslim, raping and gang raping, kidnap, mass bombing, sawing off heads (the beheader of that poor, captured Japanese man who was kidnapped last year was captured yesterday. He has committed 116 beheadings and is a hero), murder, oppression, controlling 50% of the word by making them go out with their faces covered, performing clitorectomies on them, not allowing them out of the house except in the company of a male, even a young son – just as long as it’s someone with a penis.
Don’t you see how crazy this is? And they subscribe to it 100% because it is the direct word of god as dictated to Mohammad, who was illiterate. A Christian is not less Christian if he thinks the virgin birth is a bit of a tall tale, but understands it was important in the context of the time. A Jew who doesn’t keep kosher isn’t less of a Jew. He knows that this priestly prohibition was because the population at large thousands of years ago didn’t know about trichinosis. But you cannot ignore a single word of the koran because it came directly from god.
Therefore, you cannot be a moderate Muslim. The goal of Islam is Dar-es-Salaam, at the point of a sword or a suicide bomb if we won’t come peacefully. There are not secret hordes of “moderate” Muslims who silently disagree with the riots, suicide bombings and beheadings.
Your attitude, Guy, is that you are taking the mature, sophisticated point of view and wouldn’t dream of tarring everyone with the same brush. In this instance, you are wrong and uninformed. You cannot be a Muslim if you doubt any part of the koran. If someone tells you they are a Muslim, that means they believe everything in the koran.
We all know pleasant, witty, kindly Muslims. But when push comes to shove, they believe the koran is the holy book of the universe and is the direct word of god.
Handyman: “Anybody read the poems of the Sufi mystic Rumi? Wonderful.”
Indeed they are. Just for reference, though, the Sufis maintain they were in extistence long before Islam absorbed them into their religion.
Thanks watcher. Some see the poems as a coded attack on the rigid arabic mindset. They’re brilliant.
Verity,
I generally concur. There is a huge difference between the Bible and the Koran. Christians and Jews (almost all) believe the Bible to be inspired by God, whereas the Koran, to Muslims, is the word of God and not just that, the last word of God. Mohammed being the last of the 128,000 prophets sent to Earth by the big fella. I’m not religous, but I see religious belief as perfectly rational if it essentially restricts itself to the moral sphere. When Islam starts imposing dress codes and any number of other bizarre restrictions (most of which are down to either C7 Arabic tribal practises or the prophets own personal kinks) I have a problem.
Last year I saw a C4 documentary about Brit muslim girls who had taken the hijab and veil off their own bat. There was a lot of affirmative multi-cult stuff about “how they felt free of being objectified accord to their looks”. The sad truth is that it is only in Islam (within the civilized world) that women are regarded as property. This TV show didn’t answer (or even ask) the questions I wanted to know about. I wanted to know, “is it hot in there?”, “how much communication do you lose because you can’t use facial expressions?” and most importantly, “how can you expect wider society to understand your beliefs if you are symbolically and literally cutting yourself off from it?”
That last point is paramount. How can we respect (as they demand) a group of people who won’t let us talk to their girls? Inter-marriage is the single biggest catalyst for cultural understanding yet Islam is so forbidding that no white English lad would ever dare strike up a conversation with a BMO (Black Moving Object – US Mil slang from Desert Storm).
Of course you’re right, Verity. Islam is aggresively expansionist. Have you seen the birth rate of the Palestinian Authority? They’re trying to breed the Israelis out of the game. And Islam always was aggresive. Just ask the Parsees about that one.
Is Islam singularly aggressive? Well, yes. If I drew the nastiest cartoons of John Wesley or the pope, I would probably get a load of annoyed letters from Methodists and Catholics. I very much doubt they would include death threats or that anything would get burned down. I do not recall any Jews demanding the beheading of David Irving.
There are just a coupla things you said that I’ll take a minor quibble with. FGM is not an Islamic practise. It belongs to a substratum of earlier tribal belief which Islam (admittedly) has done very little to combat. The prophet himself (according to the hadith) advised a woman who was circumcising girls “not to cut too deep because it will reduce the pleasure of her future husband” which neatly shows the depraved mentality at work here. As I said, minor quibble.
That said, the muslims deserve a rocket up them for tolerating the practise for 1400 years when Mao (an ace git, but this was a positive thing he did) ended foot-binding in a generation. You are also right to point out the health connotations of eating pork in a hot climate before refrigeration. There is another reason why Jews and Muslims frowned upon the eating of swine. Pigs require a lot of water, something in short supply in a desert.
Interesting comparison between binding women’s feet and genital mutilation. Both diminish women and make them – apart. Especially when you have not only mutilated the woman, but make her wear a black bin liner over her head. I hadn’t thought of that before.
Interesting, I had thought foot binding and the burka to serve the same function. They both prevent woman for moving among men as equals.
Verity, Midwesterner,
Nice points. Both foot-binding and FGM were designed to prevent women straying (literally and sexually). They are both absolute abominations. Interestingly, they were (and are) primarily performed by women. That said, there is an important difference between the two. A foot-bound women is not capable of doing much work in the fields. It was therefore a sign of class. A sign that her owner/father/husband was rich enough not to need her in the paddy fields. The reasoning behind FGM is rather more various. Many explanations, all of them abhorrent, have been put forward. I’ll be happy to discuss, if you wanna know more. The only reason I’m not posting it all now, is that it is rather involved and also threatens to go way off-topic. The only reason I know much about this is that I’m a curious character who is, alas, drawn to things which are evil beyond my initial powers of imagination.
Nick M,
That was useful. I hadn’t realized that part of foot binding’s social meaning.
I don’t really want to know any more about FGM. My opinions are rather set in that department, but if there is anything of political or Islamic related significance that you think would be useful for us to know (relevant to the thread) I would like to learn it.
FGM is praticed in many “societies” including animist. pagan, Islamic etc. Where tribes live side by side in a given area you find that some do & some don’t. In most cases, the womenfolk who have, for tribal reasons, escaped this barbarity are regarded, along with the whole tribe, as loose & deserving of contempt. Part of my “education” was being a bystander at such an horrific event; performed by (unbelievably to someone of a different culture) women on girls, (sometimes pregnant!). The abhorrent practice seems to be as old as time itself and the victims (seem to) accept it as a passing into maturity. Friends & relatives stand around making sympathetic noises & throw money, sometimes in large amounts, at the victim.
Ohmigod! You witnessed one of these? I’d have been impelled to try to stop it.
Verity: Coward that I am…..I valued my life
I don’t blame you, permanent expat. Anyway, how would one stop such a thing? The horror of it!
Permanet expat,
You’ve certainly lived a rather various life.
Midwesterner,
I wasn’t going to go into the gory details. They disgust rather than interest me. I am interested in the socio-politics behind the practice. I only know about FGM because Leeds University Maths department (I was a postgrad there at the time) was involved in a campaign to stop the practice. It was fruitless but at least we nailed our colours to the mast.
Which is sometimes all you can do.
I know it’s vaguely off-topic, but if any of you know a way we can do anything to stop this horrific “surgery”, I’m all ears.
I’m not normally one for causes, but… In this case I make an exception.
I know it’s vaguely off-topic, but if any of you know a way we can do anything to stop this horrific “surgery”,
Defeat Islam.
Its roots are burrowing down into our own civilised, enlightened society. We’ve got to pull them up pronto. FGM, “honour killings” (there are over 100 in Britain currently being “investigated” – as in, yeah, right, it’s Islam, it’s their tradition … we should respect murder of young women because, it’s like, their culture). For young women who it would be too dangerous to murder in Britain (alert school teachers? alert neighbours? the girl’s friends?), they are shipped off to Pakistan for “a holiday” and, I guess fall absolutely in love with the country because they never come back.
Verity or others,
There is a hostage syndrome, I forget what it’s called, where the hostages become dependant on their masters. It makes rescue rather difficult.
How do we address this problem with Muslim family members without invoking the big brother we pretty universally reject?
Verity, some of those girls do come back. cowed, raped, controlled and with half the in-laws.
I heard a female labour MP from Sheffield, not too long ago, bemoaning the fact that at least every week a terrified young “muslim” girl appeared at her constituency surgery and there was nothing the government was prepared to do to help such UK citizens threatened with rape and forced marriage.
I think you can imagine my feelings about “multi-culturalism”. It is enough to make Santa Claus himself vomit with rage.
You say defeat Islam. OK. I’m with you, but… See the problem. Me, you and the rest of the samizdatistas can bandy this one back and forth till the end of time, but we’re not going to win by doing that. How can we win? If you can tell me a way, you’ve got my undivided attention. If anyone can say how to defeat the islamofascists they have my undivided attention.
I hate what Islam stands for. I hate it’s gross obscenities and I hate the continual corrosive drip-drip-drip of it’s attempt to micromanage every aspect of human existence.
All I can suggest is that we must have enough faith in our own values to get tough and not yield to moral relatavism. It was the West that invented science. We invented the telephone, the internet and the jet engine. We had the industrial revolution, we had the enlightenment, we created the modern world. We created a world of (albeit imperfect – but what is perfect?) sexual equality. It is because of The West that I can have a female friend or colleague or boss and not feel that demeans my masculinity. It seems trivial to type that in a room in Mancheste but try saying that in Riyadh.
I feel passionately about this one though.
What do I think we should do? I’ve already posted this today, but I think Pershing had a point:
http://www.breakthechain.org/exclusives/pershing.html
Bloody hell, I’ve even written poetry about it!
I’m glad Verity, that like me, you regard us as being at war. We are at war against the most dangerous idea anyone has had for a good couple of thousand years.
A couple of thousand years at the least.
Midwesterner,
It’s called “Stockholm Syndrome” after a particular kidnapping in Sweden. “Big Brother” need not intervene. The sensible rule of law and the absolute of Western values is enough. Practically, these marriages are usually concocted in order to get the in-laws into the country. They could apply tougher laws on this (as they are doing in Holland). This is a nasty piece of “multi-cult” because the UK authorities gave me a hell of a time when I tried to marry a US citizen, a few years ago. It goes without saying that I only wanted to be with her for the most genuine of reasons.
I’m listening to a Monty Python album. “I like Chinese” states that there are 900mil of them. Bloody hell, that wasn’t recorded that long ago. Oy vey Gewalt!
And I’m not even Jewish.
I heard a female labour MP from Sheffield, not too long ago, bemoaning the fact that at least every week a terrified young “muslim” girl appeared at her constituency surgery and there was nothing the government was prepared to do to help such UK citizens threatened with rape and forced marriage.
That is an immigration scam- it’s easier for someone married to a citizen to get into the country.
The best solution I can think of is to make people married to a citizen wait in the queue with everyone else- it’ll still happen, but at least one of the perverse incentives will have been eliminated.
You say defeat Islam. OK. I’m with you, but… See the problem. Me, you and the rest of the samizdatistas can bandy this one back and forth till the end of time, but we’re not going to win by doing that. How can we win? If you can tell me a way, you’ve got my undivided attention. If anyone can say how to defeat the islamofascists they have my undivided attention.
So long as we’re talking about islamofascists, and not muslims in general, I’m fine with killing them. The main difficulty is determining which muslims are also islamofascists.
As far as muslims in general are concerned… let them live under a representative government instead of a despot, and we’ll see if they moderate. If they don’t, it’ll be proof that Verity is correct- but I insist on proof before coming to that conclusion. The implications are too serious to do otherwise.
rosignol – Here is the problem. You have been too lazy to do any reading. If you read about Islam, you will learn that they are all Islamofascists – save the odd one here and there. Did you see the faces (when the faces were available to see, which was rare) of those women rampagers? Contorted with fury and hatred of the enlightened West.
They do not believe, as we do, in ‘live and let live’.
For the millionth time, all Islamics believe allah is the god of the entire world, and it is an affront to him that we do not acknowledge this. Only when the entire world has acknowledged allah – Dar-es-Salaam – will there be peace. Again – they are crazy, remember – we were all born Muslim – there cannot be any other way – and we wickedly left this wonderful religion. We need to mend our ways and go back. This is why they do not refer to anyone “converting” to Islam. You are already Islamic because that is the natural state of a human being. The word they use is “revert”. They’ve been on this lunatic kick for 1400 years. Nothing’s changed.
The blogs and writers like Robert Spencer, Ibn Wariq, Daniel Pipes, Bat Ye’or are doing a fine job of explaining Islam. Go to Dhimmiwatch.org – Robert Spencer’s excellent site.
This “religion” is toxic and I think we have to realise that it cannot co-exist with other religions or open societies.
I repeat the parody:
“If…..you can keep your head when those about you are losing theirs, you are obviously not aware of the seriousness of the situation.”
rosignol,
Verity is right. You say, ” As far as muslims in general are concerned… let them live under a representative government instead of a despot, and we’ll see if they moderate.” There is a teeny problem with that.
Democracy only works if it is imposed from within. Too a large extent, the form of a nation’s constitution is a refection of the people of that nation. Democracy doesn’t just happen it is the product of a massive struggle. Essentially democracies occur where they’re wanted.
Over a number of years we have all seen muslims engaged in massive struggles for (actually, usually against) x,y and z. I don’t particularly recall too many of those struggles being aimed at producing a secular democracy. The islamic rent-a-mob will burn flags at the drop of a hat, but do any of them protest against the murderous tyranny in Iran? The rampant corruption of the Palestinian Authority? Do they buggery.
And make no mistake,”secular” is the key word here. Look at the unholy mess the Iraqi’s have got themselves into over Sunni and Shia Islam? We should’ve insisted their constitution made no mention of religion, except something first ammendment-ish.
The problem Islam has is that muslims regard “secular” as intrinsically anti-islamic. This is because Islam regulates all aspects of life. It tells you what to eat, what to wear and how to go to the toilet. The prophet even had a viewpoint on women plucking their eyebrows (he didn’t like it). When you have a religion so all-pervasive it is impossible to get a proper seperation of church and state.
The closest thing to an Islamic democracy we have is Turkey and that is because of the prodigies wrought by Ataturk with fire and the sword and the fact that ever since the Turkish military has jumped on the islamo-fruitloops whenever they’ve pointed their beards above 45 degrees. Obviously it’s not grand to have a constitution moderated by millitary coup, but this is the best the islamic world has ever managed.
Islam and democracy don’t work together. Most other religions don’t have this problem. Most other religions don’t have an overarching concept like the Umma. Islam can (and has) worked well with communism, which I think says all we need to know about it.
Oh, Nick. Sometimes the whole thing fits in one little sentence. Great comment.
Nick, second what Midwestern said. A good comment indeed.
The rigidity of thought on the part of some of the posters here is alarming. “Let’s all sit down and be decent folks. We’re all the same. We all want the same things. We just need to clear up some minor misunderstandings and we can all rub along together.”
This is wishful thinking. Yes, most of mankind is amenable to discussion and most of mankind, being pack animals, wants to get along with other people. Except Islam, who demand that others live according to the tenets of their diety. Most of mankind recognises the justice of being expected to obey the laws of the country in which they find themselves. Except Muslims, who place their own law above national laws.
Islam is antithetical to independent thought. It is antithetical to a pluralistic society. It is a controlling philosophy that demands everyone adhere to the tenets of their religion, their god, their customs. Anything less is regarded as blasphemy. And in Islam, blasphemy attracts the death penalty.
There is no room for cozy thinking and complacency.
Democracy only works if it is imposed from within. Too a large extent, the form of a nation’s constitution is a refection of the people of that nation. Democracy doesn’t just happen it is the product of a massive struggle. Essentially democracies occur where they’re wanted.
Yeah, the Japanese were really enthusiastic about becoming democratic in 1945- so much so that we had to drop multiple atomic bombs on them before they decided that militaristic fascism was a really bad idea.
And then there’s Germany, a country where most of the people didn’t have too much of a problem with Mr. H until it was clear he’d lost the war and that their remaining options were 1) being overrun by Anglo-American forces, or 2) being overrun by the Red Army.
You say that democracy has to be ‘imposed from within’, but the lesson I draw from history is that a ruthless despot with firm control of a national military is quite capable of preventing a nation from becoming a democracy, even when most of the people in a country want it, and that most people would rather live under a despot than risk their lives, fortunes, and family to be rid of him. However, when some outside force casts down the despot, people are frequently willing to give democracy a try, and sometimes it works (and it must be admitted that sometimes, it doesn’t).
I do not think that the prerequisites for becoming a successful democracy are what you say they are.
The islamic response to the cartoons reminds me of the satirical version (due to Iain Banks – I think) of Mel Gibson’s line in Braveheart.
Has anyone in the middle-east had the balls to point out the (to all non-muslims) the blindingly obvious point that this is all about cartoons?
It might’ve been Irvine Welsh, actually.
Do any of you remember a Simpson’s which featured a T-shirt with the slogan “Ayatollah Assahola”? Does anyone know where I can get such a shirt? Marge wants Homer to get rid of the old thing stating that Khomeni has been dead for years. Homer counters along the lines of “Even as we speak Ayatollah x is consolidating his power”.
Does anyone know if the Simpsons ever syndicated in the Islamic world?
Does anyone know if any of the Islamoloons actually died in the protests from flag-burning related injuries, heat-stroke or just good ol’ fashioned apoplexy? I would laugh my ass off if I heard that some superannuated Grand Mufti got himself so overwrought that his ticker gave out. That would be fitting and sweet.
Self-Righteous Apoplexy – Yet Another Opportunity to be a Martyr.
Death toll – Islamic foamers: 45
Normal people – Nil
rosignol said,
Oh I disagree. What I said were (as you put it) the prerequisits. They are are the absolute basics. Democracy absolutely requires a general outlook in which the individual is the fundamental unit of society. If you ain’t got that (and the whole baggage train that comes with it) you ain’t got a hope. Having said that it is a necessary not a sufficient condition.
The German and Japanese examples are telling. Obviously the culture of those nations is compatible with democracy (though Jap democracy has been rather more of an gerontocratic oligarchy). OK, they had moved way out of line with fascism. But you have to bear in mind that neither country existed in the modern sense before the mid C19 (Bismark – Meiji restoration). They hadn’t had much time as states before the fascists took power.
Then both Germany and Japan got shocks of awesome magnitude. If losing the world’s greatest conflict isn’t a phenomenal shock, then I’m buggered if I know what is. In many respects fascism was a reaction against communism and surrender by some German, and all Japanese forces to the allies was a necessary because the alternative was surrendering to Uncle Joe. Many important people in Germany supported Hitler simply because they saw him as a bulwark against the commies. The irony of this leading to a capitulation against those same commies would not have been lost on those folks.
Also. The Germans and the Japs had the good grace to acknowledge that they had been beaten and the realism to appreciate that there is a cost associated with losing wars. Having said that the Jap surrender was couched in rather odd language – “the situation in the Pacific has developed in a way not entirely favourable to the Empire of Japan” (yeah, folks, you just had 100,000 citizens vapourised in 5 seconds).
Many Iraqi’s don’t have this grace. The “insurgency” is a prime example of (sizable parts) of a nation not knowing when it’s beat. They keep on coming because they are sustained by something beyond ideology. They are sustained by religion. It is much easier to hope for a better life in the next world than to work hard to build a decent one in this. This is the key to my thesis because it is quite obvious that from utter ruin the Japanese and Germans have built effective economies with high material standards in a mere 60 years. Do you think the Iraqi’s will do what Germany or Japan has done given 600 years?
I was disappointed that “Shock and Awe” was not awesome or shocking enough. Perhaps if we’d really shown ’em that our tech knocked Allah into a cocked hat we’d have a chance of building something worthwhile in Iraq. But the stun level would have to have been staggering. It would’ve made great TV.
rosignol,
If you meant to imply that democracy was imposed on Japan at the end of the war, I disagree.
We imposed a constitutional republic.
Here is key quote –
I think pure democracy cannot be imposed. It is a mistake for us to attempt it in a nation like Iraq. The heritage that democratically gave us constitutional republics is a long one not to be found in hardly any other place. And not even at home anymore, it seems.
Well said Midwesterner!
Assuming you are a midwestern US citizen could you please clear up something that has confused me for a while. Exactly which states make up the midwest? I’m particularly confused as to the staus of Ohio and Illinois. And I’m not 100% as to whether Kansas is in the South or Midwest. This might sound trivial. It is triival I guess. It is certainly not malacious because I’m not that kinda Brit. I just like putting issues to bed, regardless of whether they matter or not. Any help gratefully received. I like neat lines, I’m a physics MSc.
Thanks Perry for this comforting post. These murderous muslim protests have levelled the understanding of Islam by all Europeans. Too many French people were ahead in repulsion or in submission. Now the resistants have found friends and supportive media everywhere.
I hope they will form a tough net including Samizdata.
Nick,
My explanation got a little long and OT so I sent it to your email. If any one else is interested, let me know.
I’m afraid the lines aren’t very neat.
Thanks, Midwesterner. I sent you an email in reply. I hope it got through. I just worry since Samizdata turned into a 404 zone.
Have no fear, if anyone wants an explantion from me I’ll turn to yours. Don’t worry about the neatness of your lines. I know America well enough to know that it ain’t neat. Your country works well, and that’s all I need to know. That and it’s beautiful.
I dunno why I have to say this. Our media is just so anti-American that I feel the need to say that I’m not. I must seem such a Klutz hammering this point home!
Again, thanks.
Well said Nick, you’re not alone, the media here don’t speak for everyone.
AHH Don`t worry, there were no muslims in star trek for a reason… Its set in the future and unfortunately there`s gonna be a lot of cracked heads between now and then