We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
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Azedine Berkane, held in France for the stabbing of Bertrand Delanöe, the homosexual Mayor of Paris, in October this year, may be refused a trial on the grounds that he is a nutter.
Two psychiatrists have concluded that the Islamic fundamentalist who was assumed to have acted in accordance with Islamic hatred of homosexuality, is in fact suffering from a psychosis which often leads to violent behaviour “within a religious context”.
A second opinion is expected before prosecutors have to decided whether Mr Berkhane, 39 years old unemployed and without fixed abode, can be considered mentally fit to stand trial for attempted murder.
In fairness to the psychiatrists, Mr Berkhane has a history of mental illness, and has allegedly claimed that he was being pursued by a “satanic cult”. In 2001, Mr Berkhane was a voluntary patient at a psychiatric hospital in the Paris suburb of St Denis. In March 2002, he was reported missing to police by his mother.
If the French authorities deal with homophobic attacks by Muslims by shaking their heads, saying “poor chap, he’s off his rocker”, locking them up indefinitely, and giving them drugs or electroshock treatment, it doesn’t seem a very glorious path for a young Mudjaheddin to follow. Might this be better than the death penalty? Or is it too cruel?
Good news: it wasn’t merely some US policy wonk/adviser/pundit doing the calling, it was a Muslim. Bad news: it got him a death sentence. Good news: this death sentence has been and continues to be big news.
I know I’m following tracks trod by many, many others. Nevertheless I here add my little vocal chords to the chorus of support for thoughts along these lines, and of complaint that the man has been sentenced to death for voicing them.
I’ll spare you any further profound thoughts from me about Islam, exact nature of, menace of, blah blah blah, except to say that it seems to me a particular moral duty that those, like me, who have complained about such things as the “inherently beligerent” nature of Islam should note at least some evidence to suggest another interpretation of Islam’s nature, at least potentially, as and when it crops up.
So here’s a quote from the man himself, Hashem Aghajari, from his already much quoted speech of June 2002 that got him into all the trouble:
The Islam of today is different. It is very clear that we have a different understanding of it in all areas, including economics. It has to suit the thoughts and realities of today. Just as people at the dawn of Islam conversed with the Prophet, we have the right to do this today. Just as they interpreted what was conveyed [to them] at historical junctures, we must do the same. We cannot say: ‘Because this is the past we must accept it without question.’ This is putting too much emphasis on the past. This is not logical.
For years, young people were afraid to open a Koran. They said, ‘We must go ask the Mullahs what the Koran says,’ [since] it was used primarily in mosques and cemeteries. The new generation was not allowed to come near the Koran; [young people] were told that [first] they needed [training in] 101 methods of thought and they did not possess them. Consequently, [the young people] feared reading the Koran.
Then came Shariati, and he told the young people that these ideas were bankrupt; [he said] you could understand the Koran using your own methods – you could understand as well as the religious leaders who claim to have a ton of knowledge. The religious leaders taught that if you understand the Koran on your own, you have committed a crime. They feared that their racket would cease to exist if young people learned [Koran] on their own.
Ignoramus that I am, I have no idea who “Shariati” is (comment please).
Follow the link above, and you also find Thomas Friedman in a New York Times article (“A story worth watching”), reproduced by The Iranian, saying this:
What’s going on in Iran today is, without question, the most promising trend in the Muslim world. It is a combination of Martin Luther and Tiananmen Square – a drive for an Islamic reformation combined with a spontaneous student-led democracy movement.
And there are plenty of other enticing links. Follow. Copy. Paste. Comment. When the words “Hashem Aghajari” are typed into a search engine, let the hit number just keep on rising and rising.
I got this far by going to IndyMedia from (who else?) Instapundit, who has long been saying, for example here and then a few days later here, that all public Muslim moves in the right direction deserve the blogosphere’s support. Indeed.
Richard Miniter, who gave a speech at the Libertarian Alliance conference described by David Carr, enthusiastically recommends this essay by David Warren, entitled “Wrestling with Islam”, which I missed when it came out during last month.
Choosing paragraphs to excerpt is difficult, because, as Miniter says, it is all so good. Try this:
Elsewhere, we encounter the old elites, but find them like beached whales, still nominally presiding over the societies which they have helped destroy, economically, socially, religiously, and in every other practical way, so that there was nothing left for them but to find a new excuse for holding on to power, and someone else to blame for what happened.
In Pakistan, for instance, the elites are certainly still there, only beginning to be diluted by the arrivistes from the Islamist madrasas. From the other side, they are bled by emigration, for the engineers and the technocrats, and the other functionaries of the New Class, are leaving as fast as they can to the West. It is an economic imperative, there are diminishing opportunities at home; for where there is no oil to pump and refine, there tends to be precious little else in the way of an economy. They wash their hands of all those five-year plans, and get quite peacefully on planes for Europe and America, where they can hope at least to stay solvent. And all they are really leaving behind is the poor of their societies, to fend for themselves.
The New Class that remains, which by now is becoming rather an old class, finds itself enmired in a more and more urgent search for some new silver bullet, some fine new theoretical scheme to replace the tried-and-failed socialism, if for no other reason than to justify their own purchase on elitehood. The alternative is to slide down from eminence, into those mushrooming brick, stick, tin & mud suburbs that they must fear in a way that we, who have not seen them up so close, can never fully understand or empathize with. It is no small thing to lose your place in the social order; and especially in an order with such deep shafts.
→ Continue reading: David Warren wrestles with Islam
Islamic preacher Abu Obeida, an Algerian asylum seeker in Britain, has allegedly said that Islamic law requires Muslims everywhere to come to the assistance of Ba’athist Socialist Iraq if it is attacked by the West.
British journalist A.N. Wilson decries British and American threats against the Iraqi regime in his article called War on Iraq is madness, claiming that Anglo-American actions make Abu Obeida’s call to British Muslims to take up arms against British forces seem quite reasonable.
But it is the achievement of Tony Blair’s government that he has managed to make Mr Obeida and his friends sound like the voice of common sense.
Of course one should not think for a moment that A.N. Wilson has qualms about governments using violence, particularly against their own nationals, as he favours the forcibly sterilisation of social undesirables. Thus given his taste for violence backed state enforced eugenics I suppose his de facto support for Ba’athist National Socialism is not so hard to understand, i.e. he favours the type of regime which could actually implement the sort of views he holds.
Saddam may be a brute to his own people, but surely, by the standards of international law, this is less threatening than the Israeli occupation of territory that is simply not theirs. Think of Mrs Thatcher’s reaction when General Galtieri “did an Ariel Sharon” on some barren little rocks in the south Atlantic.
So Saddam Hussain, who used poison gas to exterminate entire towns which opposed him, who invaded Kuwait and before that Iran, is less of a threat that Israel? And Wilson’s history seems to have airbrushed out the fact Israel is in occupation of the West Bank and Gaza because its neighbours repeatedly attacked Israel first. I was not aware of any recent British attacks on Argentina prior to General Galtieri’s military occupying the Falklands but perhaps A.N. Wilson is privy to some secret history which I am not aware of.
If I were young enough for military service and was compelled to fight either for Iraq or America, I would fight for Iraq, on the simple grounds that the Iraqis and their surrounding countries should be allowed to work out their own destinies without Western bullying. If I feel that, how much more strongly would it affect a young British Muslim?
And there we have it. Presumably if A.N.Wilson were old enough to have been available for military service in 1939 and was compelled to fight either for Nazi Germany or Britain, he would have fought for Nazi Germany, on the simple grounds that Germany and its surrounding countries, such as Poland, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, the Netherland, Beligium, France and Austria, should have been allowed to work out their own destinies without British, and later American, ‘bullying’.
No doubt… after all, his views of forcibly castrating and spaying the underclass would have been very well received in Berlin in those days.
I have been wondering recently why all the Al-Qaeda attacks happen in countries that would be at the bottom of the list of expected targets for a terrorist group with their agenda. They aim at American or Israeli targets but that does not explain the exotic selection of places they chose to do so. Here is a list of suspected Al-Qaeda attacks, by no means exhaustive:
- Djerba, Tunisia, 9th March – A truck explodes near the El Ghriba synangogue, killing 14
- Rishon Letzion, Israel, 11th April – a suicide bomber kills 16 and wounds 60 at a billiard hall
- Karachi, Pakistan, 14th June – suspected suicide bomber kills 14 outside Sheraton hotel and a car bomb outside the US consulate explodes later killing 11 and injuring 45
- Aden, Yemen, 6th October – an explosion of the French tanker Limburg kills a crew member
- Bali, Indonesia, 12th October – bombs explode outside the Sari Club disco at Kuta Beach resort killing 185 people and injuring hundreds more. A third bomb explodes near the US consulate in Sanur, no-one is hurt.
- Zamboanga, Philippines, 17th October 2002 – two bombs detonated at a shopping center leaving 6 people dead and 144 injured.
- Mombasa, Kenya – 28th November – a vehicle crashes into the lobby of the Paradise Hotel and together with a second device explodes, 14 killed and 80 injured. Two Stinger missiles are fired at an Israeli passenger jet at it takes off from Mombasa airport, narrowly missing 260 passengers.
These are not obvious terrorist destinations. One explanation is that the developed Western country have higher security, which makes it more difficult to carry out same style of attacks. I very much doubt that, as the IRA used to manage just fine disrupting life in London and I am not aware of any security measures that would make terrorist attacks impossible.
Any more theories about why the strange collection of targets? It is the ones that are missing from the list that puzzle me…
My previous posting about ‘ironic Jihad’ was satirical but this is certainly not!
The militant Islamic group Hamas is urging followers to conduct a three-day ‘electronic Jihad’ on Jewish websites, starting today, Novermber 29th. Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Los Angeles said the latest find this week was particularly alarming: “We have had numerous hackings back and forth between Israeli and Islamic sites since the Intifada began two years ago.
But this is something we have not seen in some time. There seems to be an entire portion of a We site which is devoted to a ‘how to’ get involved in that kind of activity.”
The term ‘Jewish’ websites could mean anything from Israeli government sites to any company that does business with Israel.
Apparently, the same way bloggers are using the Internet as a forum for ideas and for additional sources of information, increasingly computer literate Islamic groups are using it to transform the Islamic and Islamist world and to circumvent official sources of information.
“….The Internet has become not only a battlefield, as this announcement would seem to indicate… of electronic wars, but it is also a key element in propaganda battles in Arabic, Persian and in English.”
Someone tried to shoot down an airliner full of Jews, not in Israel but in Africa…
Jew on holiday. Legitimate target
anywhere in the world, apparently.
But Jews = Israel and Israel = bad, in fact very bad as it is not just ‘Jewish’ but also ‘White’. Therefore the people who did this must be misguided ‘Islamic activists’. Terrible but ‘understandable’ to idiotarians and other sundry folk who take Noam Chomsky seriously. You know, the sort of people who say “Who are we do judge the value of other cultures?” and “Of course I deplore terrorism, but…”
Kikambala in Kenya is ripped apart by the same people who tried to shoot down the passenger jet and slaughtered Kenyans are photographed in the ruins of the resort which used to bring much needed foreign money into Kenya’s economy…
Vanquished capitalist tools perhaps? CIA agents maybe?
Black people in the Third World lie dead, therefore people who did this must be capitalists, um, imperialists, errr, Americans, no, Mac Donalds, um, er, ah…
I see pictures like those and I am soooooo sick of the people who say “It is all about Israel!” or “It is all about oil!” or “It is all about US policy!“… those dead Kenyans are not in Israel, I rather doubt they owned shares in any oil companies and they did not get to vote for who became the President of the United States.
What “it is all about” is that there are people using violence who advocate coercive pan-Islamic collectivism and who wish to force submission on everyone else. Once this is understood, all that needs to follow is to determine the best way to exterminate them as expeditiously as possible.
Doubtless co-ordinated with gun-attacks inside Israel, Arab/Al-Qaeda terrorists have also bombed a resort hotel in Kenya.
The death toll from the hotel bombing is now 14 people, 11 Kenyans and 3 Israelis (two children).
Even more ominously, there was a simultaneous rocket attack on an Israeli civilian airliner. Mercifully unsuccessful, but a very worrying development.
The way that the blogosphere in particular and West in general is slowly but surely focussing in on the all-too-human life of the very founder of Islam himself reminds me strongly of the way that we anti-Soviet elements in the 1980s finally stopped pratting around with nonsense about how Communism had been “betrayed” by Stalin, and said, no, it had just been done, by Lenin himself, and by Stalin, and by all Communists since then.
This from Scrappleface last Friday is a send-up correction note by the Nigerian newspaper that had sparked off the rioting by venturing a few mildly humorous observations about the Lenin of Islam:
“We regret our statement earlier this week that Mohammed would have chosen a bride from among the Miss World contestants. Upon further study of the life of the religious leader, we determined that he would have preferred to marry someone much younger than these women–since his favorite wife was Ayesha, who was six years old when he wed her.
“In addition, it is unlikely that Mohammed would have chosen just one bride from among the contestants, since he was married at least 11 times after his first wife died. The editors regret having printed such a poorly researched assertion.”
And how about this, from the “in fact” section of the December 2002 issue of Prospect (no link, you have to subscribe to view), picked up from the November issue of Commentary?:
The prophet Muhammad engaged in 78 battles, only one of which was defensive.
→ Continue reading: Muhammed and Lenin – the similarities and the differences
“This is my open letter to the Great Satan America.
You may ask, why do I hate America and fight against it? I answer, because America is the propogator of all the evil in the world and you worship only Jewish Usury and Krispy-Kreme Donuts. What kind of a culture is that? Only America sends coach-parties of Senior Citizens to desecrate and despoil our Holy Lands. I can but weep for despair amidst an ocean of Land’s End polo shirts and stretch pants. Is there no end to your cruelty, America?
Until now, I have been content with making rude gestures to them behind their backs and grossly overcharging them for bogus relics and bottled water. But no more can I suffer these indignities. Now is the time to act.
I now declare endless jihad on the Great Satan but, you have one last chance, America, to avoid this eternal war which will lead to your destruction, by agreeing to meet my demands:
1. Bill Clinton is not black and he must get over it.
2. Britney Spears must perform her next music video wearing chador
3. Do something about Michael Jackson. Now!
4. It is time for Barbra Streisand to retire. Nothing worth so much as a camel-dropping has come out of that woman’s mouth since ‘Funny Girl’
5. You must arrange a guest starring role for me on ‘The Simpsons’
6. Please tell Al Gore to shut the f*ck up about the Florida recount. He lost! Enough whining already.
7. You must immediately refund the sum of $275 that was outrageously stolen from my cousin, Musal, by a Jew-inspired tax audit of his dry cleaning business in Chicago.
Unless you accede to all of my demands, America, then I will be all over you like a cheap burqa. You will know no respite from me. I will haunt you both by day and by night. I will take the women from your homesteads, the cattle from your farmsteads and the knobs from your bedsteads.
You have been warned, Infidel.
Osama”
According to Ros Coward of the Wanker, we should be grateful to the Islamic rioters in Nigeria for reminding us of our shortcomings and just how far we have strayed from acceptable civilised standards:
“What an irony that fundamentalist Muslims managed to do what feminism ultimately failed to do: make Miss World a global political issue. As contestants flee to London, and Nigeria counts its dead, it is almost impossible to retain the idea that an annual parade of female flesh is just an innocent quest for universal beauty acceptable to all reasonable people.”
Of course! (Slap to the forehead) I should have realised that ‘Miss World’ is a deeply symbolic manifestation of class and gender struggle; the very antithesis of the dialectic rationale for the liberation of..er..something or other.
“In the west, the contest became as naff as bingo. It was feminism that represented modernity.”
That’s funny, I thought things like the silicon chip and the space shuttle represented modernity.
“Last year’s winner, Miss Nigeria herself pointed out that she is “the first black African woman to win”, because, for all its multiculturalism, the winners from black countries remained resolutely pale.”
That’s right, they weren’t ‘black’ enough. They were the wrong sort of ‘black’. In fact, they were all Uncle Toms still grovelling to ‘de White Massa.’
“How was this circus of womanhood going to respond to an issue of global political concern for women: the sentencing of Amina Lawal to death by stoning for adultery? Even a bunch of brainless bimbos would have found this a problem, but our post-feminist intellectual beauty queens couldn’t avoid it.”
‘Brainless bimbos’? Excuse me, but isn’t that a rather pejorative, sexist remark? Hate speech, in fact?
“The riots in Nigeria were ultimately triggered, not by the contest itself but by a piece in a local paper claiming the prophet himself might have chosen a wife from these beauties.”
If only all newspapers could be as sensitive as the ‘Wanker’ then surely there would be world peace!
“This is the same cultural naivety exposed by the bombing of the Sari club in Bali. The consolation some clubbers exchanged after the outrage betrays this same sense that the world is a playground where the true human (western) values can be paraded. Because no harm is meant, no offence should be taken. One clubber mourned the passing of the club on a website, saying “it was the United Nations of decadence” without any sense that this is what made it a target.”
Translation: the victims of the Bali bomb got what deserved and deserved what they got. They should have shrouded themselves in self-effacement and sensitivity. Instead they recklessly taunted and tortured those poor Islamic terrorists until they could tolerate it no more. They are the real victims.
“Now the reluctance to attack representatives of western values has disappeared even among those with no involvement in extremist organisations.”
And, let’s face it, in that extremist organisation known as the ‘Wanker’, that reluctance never existed in the first place.
“In such a world we should think carefully about what values we want to parade. Democracy, equality and tolerance certainly. But a beauty contest?”
We must abandon our sinful ways and foreswear all this drinking, dancing, laughing, carousing, loving and generally celebrating our lives. It’s unseemly; it’s uncivilised; it’s dangerous, dammit. We must aspire to the true hallmarks of civilised behaviour, like wearing sensible shoes, cross-referencing files in the Department of Social Security, exchanging Outreach Initiatives and discussing gender politics over an organic vegetable curry in a ‘Fair Trade’ workers co-operative canteen. That is the zenith of Western civilisation and it behoves us well to aspire to nothing more than that.
In order to survive we must be boring, po-faced, monochromatic, insecure, shot through with crippling guilt and terminally earnest. Just like…well, just like Ros Coward I should imagine.
Would somebody please send a message to Al-Qaeda to the effect that the editorial staff at the ‘Wanker’ are planning to sponsor a Naked Lesbian Dance Collective in Mecca. With a bit of luck, they’ll be next on the hit-list.
In response to rioting by Muslims in Nigeria which has left over a 100 people dead, the organisers of Miss World have hastily arranged for the whole competition to be moved to Britain.
Rumour has it that the international beauty pageant will resume in Finsbury Park
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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