Peak Talk has the perfect summation of the tragic affair of the murder of Dutch film maker Theo Van Gogh by a Muslim fanatic.
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July 28th, 2005 | 61 comments - (Comments are closed)
In some ways Islam is at the stage that Christianity was centuries ago. Religious texts and debates are in classical Arabic, a language which most Muslims can not understand – just like medieval European peasants could not understand Latin but were still expected to live by the Latin version of the bible. I have not read the Koran or the Bible but from excerpts and quotations I have seen it would be perfectly possible to justify anything you wanted with selective quotations from either work; suicide bombings, slavery, non-tolerance of homosexuality, wearing a veil, whatever. The Christian Bible has at least been translated into most European languages and interested parties can refer to the source text and argue things out. The Koran has, by and large, not been translated into local Arabic languages and is therefore beyond the practical understanding of the ‘Arab Street’ The interpreters of the Koran are those scholars who have taken the time to learn classical Arabic and therefore may tend to have a different outlook on life than people who have to earn the money that pays for them. The other point is that Koranic scholarship still regards the Koran as the literal word of God, no metaphors, no allusions – straight word of God no dispute allowed. This type of fundamental literalism was abandoned by mainstream Christian theologians a long time ago. The West could do worse than translate the Koran into local dialects and publish it on the Internet or even drop it from airplanes! We need an Islamic Martin Luther to open up the religion. July 23rd, 2005 | 56 comments - (Comments are closed)
Let us listen to what Dr. Azzam Tamimi of the Muslim Association of Britain is saying:
People reading this blog may or may not share my enthusiasm for the war in Iraq, but even if you were an ‘anti’, make no mistake, what these ‘senior Muslims’ are demanding is nothing less that capitulation to terrorism. Dr. Tamimi is quite unequivocal: change your foreign policy or these people will continue to blow you up. And when Massoud Shadjareh, chairman the Islamic Human Rights Commission, says:
He had better think deeply before making such statements again or an increasing number of British people may start concluding that the ‘underlying factor’ that needs the most urgent action is the existence of his community in Britain. I look forward to the large body of ‘moderate’ Muslim leaders that is allegedly out there to unequivocally damn Al Qaeda and all their works (and that means not a single use of the word ‘but…’). It is becoming increasingly urgent that this occurs soon and over a sustained period. Until that happens, I suspect the majority of British people who do not live in Islington will see people like Azzam Tamimi and Massoud Shadjareh as part of the problem rather than part of the solution. July 22nd, 2005 | 97 comments - (Comments are closed)
A figure from the youth wing of the Tory Party, no less, claims that the powers that be need to talk to Muslim extremists in order to bring them into the mainstream political process, otherwise the poor diddums, obviously so sensitive about their plight, might go beserk again and start interrupting our peaceful existence as happened on July 7. You have got to hand it to the Conservatives. We tend to think of the party as being the party of Winston Churchill, Margaret Thatcher and Robert Peel. It is also, as this moron demonstrates, the party of Neville Chamberlain. As I said in a rather angry comment the other day: Britain is a country, not a hotel. July 19th, 2005 | 37 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Mirror may not be the most august of newspapers but if half of what they are saying is true, this could be very interesting indeed and puts the whole psychological makeup of the ‘suicide’ bombers in question. Maybe it was not suicide at all!
So perhaps it was all done with timers and those little terrorist shits were told a porky about exactly when they were going to blow up. If this is true then the more widely this is known, the less likely it will be that non-suicidal Muslim terrorist supporters might not be quite so willing to act as couriers or bomb planters for ‘the cause’. Maybe the whole deranged ‘Shaheed’ thing has rather less resonance with the UK Islamic fringe than we thought. If the facts are correct, it is a pretty compelling interpretation. July 18th, 2005 | 79 comments - (Comments are closed)
Whilst watching the BBC news’ report about the horrific terrorist attacks against Shi’ite civilians in Iraq, I was astonished to hear the following uttered:
Excuse me? These poor people have just had the centre of their community blown out and many people killed but the desire to defend themselves is denounced by the BBC as… ominous? It might tell you something about what is happening in Iraq but it also tells you quite a lot about the mindset at the BBC. It seems to me that locals taking up arms to defend themselves against terrorism directly are exactly what the USA should be encouraging whole heartedly. The fact is that people will start doing so regardless of the wishes of the USA if the security situation continues to deteriorate, so not only would it be pointless to try and stop them, why not make a virtue of necessity and show that the occupying powers welcome Iraqis becoming more self-reliant and willing to confront these murdering bastards themselves? Iraqi territorial para-militaries could be quite an asset fighting the insurgency precisely because they are not going to be centrally directed, at least to some extent. Counter-insurgency by its nature relies on more than just firepower, which the US has in abundance. It also relies on local knowledge and a willingness to be ruthless, something pissed-off locals could certainly provide. The idea that Al Qaeda can only be fought in Iraq ‘top down’ (i.e. directed from Washington using US and Iraqi government forces) is probably a mistake, so arming the people who are taking the brunt of the attacks seems a pretty sensible way to go. July 17th, 2005 | 65 comments - (Comments are closed)
Sky News and its sister television channel Fox is reporting, along with Channel 4 News, that the bombers last Thursday may heve been killed in the act of detonation. I am watching a police press conference as I write. A number of police raids are going on in Yorkshire, northern England. I don’t believe in the existence of Hell, but if there is such a place, may the mass murderers of last Thursday spend much time in it. July 12th, 2005 | 37 comments - (Comments are closed)
Charles Moore is one of the finest essayists around, in my view, and hits the mark with one of the sanest, clearest and most honest appraisals of Islam and the United Kingdom I have read for ages. Go and read the whole thing, like they say. July 10th, 2005 | 53 comments - (Comments are closed)
Recovering as we still are from Thursday’s mass murders in central London, a few questions start to arise. For starters, it seems to me that if, as we are, at war, then the members of Parliament need to be on the same page as far as the defence of this realm is concerned. It does not mean, of course, that MPs should not criticise the conduct of the government’s military operations or anything else, but it does mean that MPs should not actively support groups determined to do us harm. Which brings us to George Galloway. His support for the Iraqi “resistance” (ie, the mixture of Baathist dead-enders and assorted jihadists) is a matter of shameful public record. While not – yet – conclusively proven – there remain serious allegations relating to his financial connections to Saddam Hussein and the Oil For Food Programme. And within hours of the bombings in London, this thug sought to deflect blame from the killings from the monsters who carried them out to the UK government for its overthrow of the Taliban and Hussein. I am an ardent believer in free speech and I would be the first to defend Galloway’s right to say what he wants, no matter how thick or unpleasant. That is a non-negotiable issue for me. It is pretty clear, however, that in the current heightened threat to our national security, that Galloway should be removed from Parliament immediately. July 9th, 2005 | 48 comments - (Comments are closed)
I came across a text of a speech by Democrat Senator Richard Durbin here which, at least from my reading, did not liken what is going on with suspected terrorists in U.S. captivity and the old Soviet gulag, on the other. The speech contains a lot that one might reasonably dispute but it is not rabid Michael Moore moonbattery, as far as I can tell. (Of course, his speech on his website may have been edited later on with the offending para taken out, but one should not assume that out of fairness to the senator). So where did the reference to the “Dick Durbin slanders our boys” come from? Seriously, I’d like to know. I posted similar thoughts over here. It appears Durbin did make a reference to the gulag and the Nazis in the speech text I have now seen, so the guy clearly deserves some of the heat coming his way. But like I said, it doesn’t overall appear to be a rabidly silly speech. June 21st, 2005 | 65 comments - (Comments are closed)
Hospital patients here in the UK are occasionally known to get rather tetchy about the waiting times and the bureaucracy. But, thus far at least, none of them has seen fit to take their complaints this far:
Call me old-fashioned but I reckon that even in this crazy, mixed-up world most people making a trip to the hospital dream about leaving it alive. Still, I am sure things will return to normal the very moment the Palestinians get their own state. June 21st, 2005 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
I am watching the BBC Ten o’clock News, and the lead story is Condoleezza Rice, spelling out the Bush doctrine:
Indeed. In order to have seen this one coming, you would have had to have read some of President George W. Bush’s speeches, in particular his Second Inaugural Address, and to have then made the even greater mental leap of realising that President George W. Bush had actually thought about what he was saying, and had meant it.
As the BBC immediately explained, the worry is that democracy in the Middle East may result in Islamomaniacal governments which “hate America”. As opposed to regimes like the ones in Egypt and Saudi Arabia now, which permit no anti-American sentiments whatsoever. Now the BBC is explaining that Egypt, like the USSR before it, is immovably non-democratic. Mubarak will be followed in the fullness of time only by further Mubaraks. We shall see. President George W. Bush is a physically quite little guy, or so he seems in the photos that I have seen. He has an eccentric way with the English language, his pauses extending to the point where they flirt dangerously with embarrassment. He believes – really believes – in God. So, he is an easy man to underestimate, and all of Europe now does this. Yet if US Presidential greatness is defined as determining a new course for the USA and then making that new course the actual course that is then steered by (which it is, although there is also the matter of whether the new course is good and wise to consider), then President George W. Bush is getting greater by the month. June 20th, 2005 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
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