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} | 978 | FAES Analysis Group Article 155: a political... and constitutionally adequate solution
At times, it seems to be forgotten that the Constitution is the supreme legal norm because it expresses sovereign political will. In other words, the legal supremacy of the Constitution is nothing more than the translation of the political principle of popular sovereignty into the legal world, a principle which constitutes the only source of legitimacy of power according to the democratic principle. In Javier Pérez Royo’s words, the Constitution is the intersection point between Politics (which creates it) and Law (which finds in it its last foundation of validity).
Well, few articles of the Constitution are so revealing of that specific political nature as article 155. A precept that, until a little more than a year ago, was almost a perfect unknown not only for the Spanish public opinion but also for a great part of scholars dealing with Public and Constitutional Law in Spain. Only a few experts had paid attention to commenting on it, analysing its significance and background, normally underlining its similarity -despite some differences- with the mechanism included in the German Fundamental Norm.
In this context, as is natural, the mere possibility of using it for the first time gave rise to prior debates on almost all its aspects, including its scope and possible limits: as if it were a quicksand zone, entering seems simple... but it is not easy to predict if it will come out and under what conditions. Subsequently, its application in Catalonia made it possible to observe its effects in practice, simultaneously opening the way for the Constitutional Court, in strict compliance with its function as supreme interpreter of the Magna Carta and guarantor of its validity, to analyse it. Indeed, as long as there are unconstitutionality appeals pending, the Court will have to pronounce not only on the instrument, but also on its specific use in the present case, which will undoubtedly make it possible to specify more precisely the possibilities and conditions of its application.
In any case, and while the High Court resolves these appeals, reflection on these points can contribute to the legal-constitutional debate, in particular, and to the political debate, in general.
Thus, at this stage, it is obvious that the mechanism provided in Article 155 underlines precisely the primacy of “the political” when the law is faced with its limits. If Law, as a normative order, is always characterized by resting, in the last instance, on the coercive capacity of the State, this precept (which, in this logic, defines a “federal coercive mechanism,” common in federal States) welcomes (legally) an appeal to the supreme political will of the Nation. In this way (and thus giving reason, paradoxically, to those who defend the need for a “political solution” to the breach of the legal system in force in Catalonia by the authorities of that Autonomous Community), article 155 is configured as the constitutionally adequate political solution, expressly provided by the constituents against certain threats to the system, which are also defined politically... precisely because they question its limits.
Thus, the Constitution foresees this mechanism as the ultimate ratio to face an essentially political conflict, which can be conceived as the stark confrontation between sovereignty (national, of article 1.2; and therefore, inclusive of the will of the Catalans) and autonomy (of nationalities and regions, article 2). When instruments of “[ordinary] control of the activity of the organs of the Autonomous Communities” (foreseen in article 153) are revealed as useless or insufficient, article 155 introduces this other procedure, whose political nature is expressed in practically all its characteristic elements.
1. It is only applicable in a conflict between two political subjects defined by the Constitution: the State, on the one hand, and an Autonomous Community (or, to put it better, its authorities), on the other.
2. The enabling circumstance for its use is not -as has sometimes been attempted to emphasize- the simple breach of legal or constitutional obligations, however serious they may be. On the contrary, it is a politically “qualified” breach, due to its extraordinary and serious nature, according to its literality.
• It is obvious that the generic constitutional reference to a breach of “the obligations that the Constitution or other laws impose on it” has to be completed, to the contrary with the exclusion of all those “ordinary” breaches (or conflicts), reducible to the control mechanisms of 153.
• The other, less concrete case refers to actions “that seriously threaten the general interest of Spain;” it is certainly an alternative case, but at the same level (“a” or “b”) as the previous one; from which it follows that gravity must be common to both.
3. The constitutionally foreseen procedure leaves in the hands of exclusively political subjects (excluding any prior legal control) the assessment of the concurrence of the factual assumption, the decision on the application of the mechanism, and the definition of its content: at first, the Government of the Nation must require a rectification from the President of the Autonomous Community concerned. Only “in the event of not being complied with” that requirement, the Government, “with the approval by an absolute majority of the Senate, may adopt the necessary measures to oblige the former to comply forcibly with those obligations or for the protection of the aforementioned general interest.”
In short, article 155 introduces into the very heart of the “State of Autonomies” a mechanism of political solution (i.e., founded on the political will of the people) to the legal and political conflict and which has nothing to do with the “conflict” with which independence seeks to legitimise the rupture of the constitutional order. The conflict that article 155 remedies is the one that arises when the authorities of an Autonomous Community exceed their power (constitutionally limited by the express political decision of the constituents) and lack the loyalty inherent in the political and constitutional principle of solidarity (STC 64/1990), that is, when they ignore those limits of their power and pretend to assert themselves as politically sovereign power.
#Catalonia #Constitution #Democracy #155 article | https://fundacionfaes.org/en/news/46842/article-155-a-political-and-constitutionally-adequate-solution | isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2020-40
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} | 2,252 | Spanish Constitution of 1978
The Spanish Constitution is the fundamental law of the Kingdom of Spain. It was enacted on foot of the 1978 referendum, as part of the Spanish transition to democracy. It was preceded by many previous constitutions of Spain.
The constitutional history of Spain dates back to the Constitution of 1812. After the death of dictator Francisco Franco in 1975, a general election in 1977 convened the Constituent Cortes (the Spanish Parliament, in its capacity as a constitutional assembly) for the purpose of drafting and approving the constitution.
A seven-member panel was selected among the elected members of the Cortes to work on a draft of the Constitution to be submitted to the body. These came to be known, as the media put it, as the padres de la Constitución or "fathers of the Constitution". These seven people were chosen to represent the wide (and often, deeply divided) political spectrum within the Spanish Parliament, while the leading role was given to then ruling party and now defunct Unión de Centro Democrático (UCD).
The writer (and Senator by Royal appointment) Camilo José Cela later polished the draft Constitution's wording. However, since much of the consensus depended on keeping the wording ambiguous, few of Cela's proposed re-wordings were approved. One of those accepted was the substitution of the archaic gualda ("weld-colored") for the plain amarillo (yellow) in the description of the flag of Spain.[citation needed]
The constitution was approved by the Cortes Generales on October 31, 1978, and by the Spanish people in a referendum on December 6, 1978. 88% of voters supported the new constitution. Finally, it was promulgated by King Juan Carlos on December 27. It came into effect on December 29, the day it was published in the Official Gazette. Constitution Day on December 6 has since been a national holiday in Spain.
Writing the preamble to the constitution was considered an honour, and a task requiring great literary ability. The person chosen for this purpose was Enrique Tierno Galván. The full text of the preamble may be translated as follows:
:The Spanish Nation, wishing to establish justice, liberty and security, and to promote the welfare of all who make part of it, in use of her sovereignty, proclaims its will to:
Guarantee democratic life within the Constitution and the laws according to a just economic and social order.
Consolidate a State ensuring the rule of law as an expression of the will of the people.
Promote the progress of culture and the economy to ensure a dignified quality of life for all
Establish an advanced democratic society, and
Collaborate in the strengthening of peaceful and efficient cooperation among all the peoples of the Earth.
Consequently, the Cortes approve and the Spanish people ratify the following Constitution.
Structure of the State
The Constitution recognizes the existence of nationalities and regions (Preliminary Title).
Preliminary Title
As a result, Spain is now composed entirely of 17 Autonomous Communities and two autonomous cities with varying degrees of autonomy, to the extent that, even though the Constitution does not formally state that Spain is a federation (nor a unitary state), actual power shows, depending on the issue considered, widely varying grades of decentralization, ranging from the quasi-confederal status of tax management in Navarre and the Basque Country to the total centralization in airport management.
Article 143
Section 1. In the exercise of the right to self-government recognized in Article 2 of the Constitution, bordering provinces with common historic, cultural and economic characteristics, island territories and provinces with historic regional status may accede to self-government and form Autonomous Communities in conformity with the provisions contained in this Title and in the respective Statutes.
Social rights
The Spanish Constitution is one of the few Bill of Rights that has legal provisions for social rights, including the definition of Spain itself as a Social and Democratic State, subject to the rule of law (Sp. Estado social y democrático de derecho) in its preliminary title. However, those rights are not at the same level of protection as the individual rights contained in articles 14 to 28, since those social rights are considered in fact principles and directives of economic policy, but never full rights of the citizens to be claimed before a court or tribunal.
Other constitutional provisions recognize the right to adequate housing [1], employment[2], social welfare provision[3], health protection[4] and pensions.[5]
Due to the political strength of the Communist Party of Spain during the Transition, the right to State intervention in private companies in the public interest and the facilitation of access by workers to ownership of the means of production were also enshrined in the Constitution.[6]
The Constitution has been reformed once (Article 13.2, Title I) to extend to citizens of the European Union the right to active and passive suffrage (both voting rights and eligibility as candidates) in local elections.
The social democratic PSOE government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero has announced its intention to undertake a major reform of the constitution during its tenure. The proposed modifications would include
1. succession in the monarchy on the basis of age only, and not gender, thus abandoning the traditional Castilian rules set in the Siete Partidas. While the rights of the current heir apparent Felipe, Prince of Asturias, are to be maintained, the goal is to reform before his eventual children are born. This issue has been refreshed when Felipe's wife, Letizia Ortiz, announced her first and second pregnancies and after the birth of the Infanta Leonor of Spain. The Prince however has reminded reformers that there is time since he comes first in the succession line.
2. an overhaul of the Spanish Senate transforming it into a chamber of territorial representation
3. officially incorporating the European Constitution (should one be approved)
4. listing the names of the existing autonomous communities
The proposal has been met with scepticism from some quarters (notably in the main opposition party Partido Popular, PP) because some of these reforms deal with protected sections of the constitution, which would require supermajorities in order to be modified (see below). Furthermore, even an amendment of a non-protected part of the Constitution would require the agreement of the main opposition party or at least some of its representatives, because it would require the support of three-fifths of each House, which is 210 votes in the Congress of Deputies and 159 in the Senate.
The current version restricts the death penalty to military courts during wartime, but the death penalty has since been removed from the Code of Military Justice and, hence, has lost all relevance. Amnesty International has still requested an amendment to be made to the Constitution to firmly and explicitly abolish it in any eventuality.
Protected provisions
Title X of the Constitution establishes that the approval of a new constitution or the approval of any constitutional amendment affecting the Preliminary Title, or Section I of Chapter II of Title I (on Fundamental Rights and Public Liberties) or Title II (on the Crown)—the so-called "protected provisions"—are subject to a special process that requires (1) that two-thirds of each House approve the amendment, (2) that elections are called immediately thereafter, (3) that two-thirds of each new House approves the amendment, and (4) that the amendment is approved by the people in a referendum.
Curiously, Title X does not include itself among the "protected provisions" and, therefore, it would be possible, at least in theory, to first amend Title X using the normal procedure to remove or reduce severity of the special requirements, and then change the formerly protected provisions. Even though such a procedure would not formally violate the law, it could be considered an attack on its spirit.
The reform of the autonomy statutes
The "Statutes of Autonomy" of the different regions are the second most important Spanish legal normatives when it comes to the political structure of the country. Because of that, the reform attempts of some of them have been either rejected or produced considerable controversy.
The plan conducted by the Basque president Juan José Ibarretxe (known as Ibarretxe Plan) to reform the status of the Basque Country in the Spanish state was rejected by the Spanish Cortes, on the grounds (among others) that it amounted to an implicit reform of the Constitution.
The People's Party attempted to reject the admission into the Cortes of the 2005 reform of the Autonomy Statute of Catalonia on the grounds that it should be dealt with as a constitutional reform rather than a mere statute reform because it allegedly contradicts the spirit of the Constitution in many points, especially the Statute's alleged breaches of the "solidarity between regions" principle enshrined by the Constitution. After failing to assemble the required majority to dismiss the text, the People's Party filed a claim of unconstitutionality against several dozen articles of the text before the Spanish Constitutional Court requiring for them to be struck down.
The amended Autonomy Statute of Catalonia has also been legally contested by the surrounding Autonomous Communities of Aragon, Balearic Islands and the Valencian Community[7] on similar grounds as those of the PP, and others such as disputed cultural heritage. As of January 2008, the Constitutional Court of Spain has those alleged breaches and its actual compliance with the Constitution under judicial review.
Prominent Spanish politicians, mostly from the People's Party but also from the ruling Socialist Party (PSOE) and other non-nationalist parties[citation needed], have advocated for the statutory reform process to be more closely compliant with the Constitution, on the grounds that the current wave of reforms threatens the functional destruction of the constitutional system itself. The most cited arguments are the self-appointed unprecedented expansions of the powers of autonomous communities present in recently reformed statutes such as:
• The amended version of the Catalan Statute prompts the State to allot investments in Catalonia according to Catalonia's own percentage contribution to the total Spanish GDP. The Autonomy Statute of Andalusia –a region with a lower contribution to Spain's GDP than the one of Catalonia– requires it in turn to allocate state investments in proportion to its population (it is the largest Spanish Autonomous Community in terms of population). These requirements are legally binding, as they are enacted as part of Autonomy Statutes, which rank only below the Constitution itself. It is self-evident that, should all autonomous communities be allowed to establish their particular financing models upon the State, the total may add up to more than 100% and that would be inviable[8]. Despite these changes having been proposed and approved by fellow members of the PSOE, former Finance Minister Pedro Solbes disagreed with this new trend of assigning state investment quotas to territories based on any given autonomous community custom requirement[9] and has subsequently compared the task of planning the Spanish national budget to a sudoku.
• The Valencian statute, whose reform was one of the first to be enacted, includes the so-called Camps clause (named after the Valencian President Francisco Camps), which makes any powers assumed by other communities in its statutes automatically available to the Valencian Community.
• Autonomous communities such as Catalonia, Aragon, Andalusia or Extremadura, have included statutory clauses claiming exclusive powers over any river flowing through their territories. Nearby communities have filed complaints before the Spanish Constitutional Court on the grounds that no Community can exercise exclusive power over rivers that cross more than one Community, not even over the part flowing through its territory, because its decisions affect other Communities, down or upstream.
See also
1. Article 47 of the Spanish Constitution states: "All Spaniards have the right to enjoy decent and adequate housing. The public authorities shall promote the necessary conditions and establish appropriate standards in order to make this right effective, regulating land use in accordance with the general interest in order to prevent speculation. The community shall have a share in the benefits accruing from the town-planning policies of public bodies".
3. Article 41 states: "The public authorities shall maintain a public Social Security system for all citizens guaranteeing adequate social assistance and benefits in situations of hardship, especially in case of unemployment. Supplementary assistance and benefits shall be optional."
4. Article 43 states: "The right to health protection is recognized. It is incumbent upon the public authorities to organize and watch over public health by means of preventive measures and the necessary benefits and services. The law shall establish the rights and duties of all in this respect."
6. "La elaboración de la Constitución", Miguel Herrero y Rodríguez de Miñón
7. Admitidos los recursos de Aragón, Valencia y Baleares contra el Estatuto catalán.
8. Solbes cuadra un sudoku de 23.000 millones · ELPAÍ
9. "Solbes rechaza vincular la nueva financiación a las balanzas fiscales", El País. 03/12/2007 | http://www.uniblogger.com/en/Spanish_Constitution_of_1978 | robots: classic
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Monday, 5 june 2017 | EDITORIAL
Why Europe should welcome a referendum in Catalonia
The Catalans' historic grievances with Spain have intensified in recent years. A deadlock has been created by the Spanish refusal to even consider repeated proposals coming from Catalonia, including an honest attempt to renegotiate the 1979 autonomy charter. Starting in 2005, a new text was drafted and approved by the Catalan Parliament, and subsequently endorsed by the Spanish Cortes, but not before several key provisions had been pared down or simply removed. In the end it was ratified, resignedly, by the Catalan people in a referendum. But then in 2010 a not unbiased Constitutional Court ruled that several articles were unconstitutional and gave a restrictive interpretation of many others. In practice, the resulting text, far from improving the earlier charter, served to set limits to the scope of Catalan self-government, and the entire process revealed how little the Spanish side was willing to advance in that direction. At that point it became clear that the current system of territorial administration, established in 1978 after a long period of centralized rule, was being used to perpetuate the Catalans' status as a permanent minority in Spain. Today a growing number of Catalans feel that their collective affairs are being run by Madrid without regard for their needs and often against their vital interests, and many have lost all hope of a fairer bargain within the Spanish framework.
The Catalan government has pledged to hold a referendum on the relationship that Catalan society should have with Spain – whether to maintain in some form the present state of political subordination or start off as a new independent nation. That was the course of action chosen by Quebec in 1995 and by Scotland in 2014 and respected by the governments of Canada and the United Kingdom. But the Spanish authorities, relying on a narrow – some say partisan – interpretation of the Constitution, have declared such a referendum illegal and have vowed to prevent it. They are also working to undermine its preparation. In their reaction to alleged acts of disobedience by Catalan elected representatives, the state institutions seem to be reverting to some of the ways of the dictatorial past, to the point of threatening the very pillars of democratic governance.
The stated resolve of the ruling coalition in Catalonia to hold a referendum regardless should not be seen as a show of defiance but as an act of democracy. In this the leadership is following the mandate given by the hundreds of thousands who have been peacefully demonstrating year after year since 2010; by the 2.3 million who cast their ballot in a symbolic vote in November 2014; by the nearly 2 million who handed a majority to pro-independence forces in the September 2015 elections to the Catalan Parliament; and, last but not least, by the three-quarters of the Catalan population that, according to every opinion poll, favor holding a referendum, irrespective of their eventual vote in it. It is for Catalans to decide on their society's collective future, and asking them directly is the only reasonable way to find out where everyone stands on such a fundamental issue.
In the end, a referendum is a good solution for all. Certainly for Catalans, because, whatever the result, it will necessarily open a dialogue on a fresh relationship with Spain, one that must be based on the recognition of their rights as a people, including the right to have the final word on the shape that such a relationship should take.
It may ultimately be good for Spain too, by forcing its government and the rest of political forces to reassess the foundations of the regime installed in 1978. This was the outcome of a transition to democratic rule designed and implemented by a political establishment whose members grew up under Franco's dictatorship. A satisfactory resolution of the Catalan question will give Spanish society a chance to finally break free from the ghosts of its authoritarian past and to address the flaws of a political system that is gravely conditioned by its origins.
And it will also be good for Europe. First, for a practical reason, because it will help to solve an age-old problem that, if allowed to fester, will only escalate, adding another front of instability on a continental scale. And second, and most important, as a matter of principle. In these days of political uncertainty, when in many countries the European project is being questioned from different camps, the Catalans' stance, determinedly pro-European, firmly grounded on democratic principles and relying on strictly peaceful methods, should be held up as an example for all as the only acceptable way of resolving controversies between nations and within states.
Sooner or later all European countries as well as their common institutions will be called to take a stand on this issue. It is a matter of democracy that the Catalans' legitimate claims as a historic nation and their inherent collective rights as a people are recognized, and it is a matter of justice that their constant and peaceful struggle is rewarded.
This is a joint statement prepared by Col·lectiu Emma and endorsed by Col·lectiu Praga and Col·lectiu Wilson.
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} | 3,888 | Catalonia is facing its most important vote in its modern democratic history. Regional elections on 21 December 2017 are supposed to finally settle the independence issue once and for all. Following the triggering of Article 155, which allowed the Spanish government to impose direct rule over the region, political parties have been regrouping and preparing for the decisive vote. But will things look any clearer the day after the elections?
The vote is expected to be tight. Record turnout is expected (possibly more than 80% of eligible voters) and most polls suggest a tie between separatist and unionist parties. Every single vote will count in the race to get to the 68 seats required for an absolute majority in the regional parliament.
What do our readers think? We had a comment from Paul arguing that, whatever the result (and given potential boycotts), it’s unlikely the elections will really “settle” the issue. At best, Paul says, a pro-unity vote might delay any call for independence for a while, whereas a vote for separation will open a huge can of worms Europe-wide.
To get a response, we put Paul’s comment to Charles Powell, Director of the Elcano Royal Institute, a think tank in Madrid. What would he say?
I don’t really agree. I think that even if the pro-independence parties win, they have now realised that the unilateral route to secessionism is closed, and they can exercise power but I very much doubt they would press for independence as they have been doing in the past. If the parties in favour of Spanish national unity win, then it will be obviously a much quieter period. I’m basically expecting a stalemate, whatever the result is, without any significant change.
To get another perspective, we also spoke to Rafael Arenas García, a Professor of Private International Law at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and a former leader of the anti-separatist Catalan Civil Society organisation. We asked him if he agrees with Paul:
Next up, we had a comment from Susana, who thinks that the situation after the election will be even worse than it is today. She predicts pro-independence parties will win again, but with a strong showing for pro-unity parties. Meaning, essentially, a divided Catalonia.
Does Charles Powell think the situation has become even more complicated?
I don’t think they will be worse because democratic elections are always a good thing. I think Catalan society is more or less evenly split into two blocs, and whoever wins will win by a very small margin. In fact, the outcome I am predicting right now is almost a repeat of the 2015 election results. In other words a situation in which the pro-independence parties would have more seats, but without a majority of votes, and I don’t think that will significantly change the status quo.
Next, we also put Susana’s comment to Carles Boix I Serra, Professor of Politics and Public Affairs at Princeton University in the USA, and currently leading a research project at the University of Barcelona. What would he say?
The elections will probably not settle the issue. If the pro-independence parties win, they will take back control of Catalan institutions and will try to open a negotiation with Madrid – yet we know that Madrid has already said it will maintain Article 155, which allows it to intervene in the governing of Catalonia. If the unionists win, which I think to be unlikely, the issue will not be settled either. Unionists are divided between a ‘hard’ and a ‘soft’ wing. The latter – mainly the socialist party, is basically supported by very elderly people, so over time they will lose votes. Besides, they won’t be able to deliver on any of the promises they are making now. So it’s going to be hard to settle the issue in the sense of a ‘Spanish victory’.
To answer Susana’s question, well, the thing is that both blocs are divided and they are divided between Left and Right, so yes, there is a possibility – and this complicates things – that there will be a sort of hung parliament, where maybe the pro-independence parties do not have the majority of seats, and clearly it doesn’t look like the pro-unionist parties will have that either. There is a group in the middle, called the “Comuns” (Catalonia in Common) that may hold the key to governing and it’s going to be difficult, if that happens, to have a stable government. We don’t know, but there’s a chance, and we will know more a week from now.
Finally, Mino suggests that the only way to finally resolve this question is to hold a legal referendum like the one in Scotland. What does Charles Powell think?
I don’t agree because basically we would have a “never-endum” rather than a referendum. In other words, whichever party wins – let’s assume the parties in favour of Spanish national unity win – that will not put the issue to rest. Those who advocate independence will continue to want a referendum until they win it.
How would Carles Boix react to the same comment?
If Mino means a referendum agreed by Spain in Catalonia, then yes, I think it is the optimal way to settle the issue, and this what the pro-independent Catalan parties are asking for. In fact, the strategy behind the referendum of October 1st was mostly to force the Spanish government to negotiate because, up to that point, Spain has said ‘no’ to all demands for a referendum, which, by the way, is possible within the constitution.
Notice that the pro-independence block, instead of going all the way to independence, just went for some sort of symbolic declaration of independence, preferring to avoid a full conflict. They really wanted the Spanish government to sit down and negotiate. That strategy didn’t work out. Spain simply took over the Catalan institutions. In any case, yes, a referendum is the best, most democratic solution. But Spain has been rejecting this systematically, so I’m not sure exactly where this leaves us at this point.
And how would Rafael Arenas García respond to Mino’s comment?
Will the Catalan elections settle the independence issue? What will change for Catalonia after the elections? Let us know your thoughts and comments in the form below and we’ll take them to policymakers and experts for their reactions!
IMAGE CREDITS: CC / Flickr – La Moncloa – Gobierno de España
81 comments Post a commentcomment
What do YOU think?
1. Ivan Burrows
They tried democracy & when they didn’t like the answer they sent in the attitude correction police. Welcome to freedom of expression, the EU way.
• Karolina
No, they didn’t because the referendum was not centrally organised and was not legitimate. There was no proper debate prior to allow people to decide and many didn’t vote because it wasn’t legitimate.
What Ivan Borishnikov is posting above is the how the Kremlin propaganda machine wants it to be in order to give some legitimacy to its own illegal referendum in Crimea.
• Philip Cantos
You have any clue about the matter? I don’t think you did your research right. Democracy doesn’t mean complete freedom to do whatever you want. Laws exists.
• Ivan Burrows
Philip Cantos It means listening to the people who elected you, not beating them.
• Karolina
The ones that want to remain part of Spain they also voted the same government, theoretically. The gov’ment’s role is to implement Spanish law and not to listen to groups of people selectively…
• jthk
Do you mean that democracy has no different from totalitarianism? So, why people using democracy to represent everything good?
2. Tarquin Farquhar
No, the Spanish will either fix the elections or the succession will result in Catalunya being an ‘independent state’ WITHIN Spain!
• Karolina
Hi Tarquin have you get credible data we can look at that the central gov’ment in Madrid is planning to cheat at the elections?
• Tarquin Farquhar
Hi Karoliar, you’re confusing opinion/predictive-insight with fact – your command of English is well, erm, oh – not so commanding!
I have a right to opine just as you have the right to conjure up facts and present them as real.
The Spanish constitution is corrupt – it does not allow a region to self-determine.
The Spanish police are corrupt – in the last vote they beat up and abused Catalunyans.
The Spanish judiciary are corrupt – they imprisoned people for merely exercising their right to self-determination.
Spain has a history of corruption – I rest my case.
QED :)
• Karolina
In other words, you have no proof, so you are just commenting on typos and trying to make the most out of it, because belittling other people is what you are here for. Makes you feel better about yourself and your invented accusations…
• Karolina
And by the way, expressing yourself against a democratic constitution of a country=you are an enemy of that state and if the law worked properly, you would be arrested.
3. Karolina
It depends on the outcome. If the pro-unity parties win, then, yes, the issue will have been settled. However, if the secessionists win, then there will need to be a proper credible referendum. You can’t hold back the tide for ever…
• Francesc Del Arca Hernàndez
Did you know Portugal declared indepence from Spain? Hahaha It was because the spanish Army was in Catalunya, once more, opressing us (its the only way the castellanos feel more spanish…). The joke’s on you.
• Conrad Miranda
Did you.know that the company Inc charge of vote counting “Indra”. Has been linked un corruption cases with the goberment party un Spain ?
• Eduardo Tomé
Francesc Del Arca Hernàndez well you have since 1640, so 377 years to reverse the situation nnd to deal with the Spanish army, And you only maneged a referendum that was a joke.
• Francisco Caleira
Funny thing. Catalonian independentists have shortage of memory. They suddenly forgot Jordi Pujol and family. Artur Más also convicted. All CiU and PDeCAT are a nice example of very democratic people. At least Europe have something to laugh about. Only irrational people point fingers to PP before looking to the mirror and see who appointed the Puigdemont clown is as bad as who they criticise. Dumb people…
4. Christine Harris
Upcoming elections will be democratic, free and fair. The result will reflect the will of the electorate
• Sami Sami
democratic and fair?
and those in prison and exile who can not even campaign?
• Pilar Riesco
Sami Sami actually they will get more votes because they are in prison. Puigdemont is on holidays, no exhile
• Русский Шпион
La compañia encargada de contar los votos se llama Indra, imputada por financiar ilegalmente al partido popular, intervenir en los resultados electorales de diferentes paises y por múltiples irregularidades desde que se encarga de el recuento de votos. En las elecciones generales pasadas se detectaron votantes que hacia mucho tiempo que ya estaban fallecidos, las residencias de ancianos religiosas llegaron a entregar los sobres cerrados y llevar masivamente ancianos que no sabian que tenia el sobre. Los censos no cuadraban y asi un monton de irregularidades las cuales son de conocimiento de todos. Intentar maquillar estas o cualquier otras elecciones en españa solo puede significar dos cosas. Una. Desconocimiento anormal del país donde Vives. Dos… Intento fracasado de intervenir en la opinion de lectores de los cuales es mejor que no sepas lo que piensan de tu absurdo comentario…
• Clare Carline
How will it be free and fair when the contrct to run the elections wasn’t even put out to tender, then given to a company being investigated for illegally tansferering funds the the ruling P P party?
5. joan
We demand her immediate freedom that of all the political prisoners catalan in the spanish jails.
Visca la llibertat i la democràcia!
• Susana
Tehere is no political prisioners are they are not in prison for hteir ideas, (note that other independentist are not inprison). They are in provisionary prison because of their crimes. Do not manipulate truth
6. Русский Шпион
7. Anna Domenech Rifa
The company in charge of counting the votes is a corrupted and pro-PP one. I won’te believe the results
• Francisco Caleira
No problem it’s a development from the 1-O, where people voted multiple times and Amazon included some extra votes in the polls boxes. LOL. At least people around Europe are having a laugh…
8. Olga C-K
Brexit is a proven mess. Catalun-exit would be an even bigger one. Only big countries can have a significant role in the world scene. Catalanists are so fanatic that they ignore law and talk about freedom although they live in a democracy; they invoque fake news when they don’t have valid arguments; they turn against EU for not supporting them, although they claim they want to be part of it. Like spoiled children they accept only what suits them. Pathetic!
9. Sam
The separatist movement in Catalonia has a long history stretching back more than 100 years in its modern phase. Put simply, Catalonia feels that it is different from Spain and should have control over its own affairs, the PP Spanish feel that Catalonia shouldn’t be different, and should be run on centralist Spanish lines. The election won’t change these underlying sentiments, so tension will remain whatever the election outcome. 155 has created a situation where the party with just 8% of the local vote is running the region and those who were elected to run Catalonia are now in prison.
The only hope is that the election becomes the start of a proper constitutional debate and reform which could then ease the situation in the long term. Currently PP will not let that happen leaving no other outlets for Catalan frustration other than towards the independentists. Without movement from PP this current vote is a harsh choice between PP’s Spain or Catalan separatists with practically no middle ground, as neither PSC/PSOE or Cs seem to have any inclination to force PP to give ground, and the separatists have no political power to make the changes they want.
10. Pineda Bp
Let’s not forget that these elections were imposed by the spanish government. The campain has not been fair, with the president in exile and 3 candidates in prison, and we will see if the spanish government interferes in the counting of the votes. So far we have seen some problems with most of the international community not receiving their vote in time.
Having said that, these elections are not going to solve anything, they are not a referendum and until the Spanish government doesnt want to dialogue and keeps on repressing the catalans, no solution will be met.
• JM Comba
Well if you break the law that’s what you get, kiddo. It’s called state of law; you should check it; it may give you some valuable information. Obviously this is not going to settle anything. It is difficult to try to get along with supremacists, xenophobic biggots who are driven by hatred. Perhaps that is why your best friends are vlaams belang; a far right wing party. Anyway is your choice to decide to be leadered by mr. Puigdemont who has as much of a democrat as he has of courage. Funny to see him flee the country and act as he were the promised leader. He was meant to guide you to the promised land yet it was only him who went somewhere else; to Brussels. Nobody can take this man too seriously especially when other independentist leaders have at least had the guts to face their deeds.
• Pineda Bp
Thanks for answering JMComba, your lack of respect toward other opinions illustrates what I was talking about ;)
• Conrad Miranda
JM Comba , the was a state of law to when Franco was Alive . That’s what you people dont undarstant , when there is conflict between law And democracy , democracy ALWAYS takes preference , hence its the Will of the people . Laws are not the Will of the people , laws ( speatially in Spain ) are made by corrupte people with there on selfish interest in mind
• Pedro Castro
Conrad Miranda, democracy says there’s not a majority for independance. That should cover it.
• Pineda Bp
But Pedro Castro it says there is a 47.5% of people in favor of independence, I think that even though it doesnt reach 50% it means that a huge amount of the society is in its favor and therefore Spain should listen to the population and at LEAST talk about it instead of repressing the independentists and jailing their leaders
• Jokera Jokerov
JM Comba, “supremacists, xenophobic biggots who are driven by hatred.”, is that you, because it looks like you!
11. Imir Vlad
1. separatist parties represents will of less than 50% population
2. separatist parties received less votes in 2015 than non-separatist parties (because of Catalan voting system, they had close majority in parliament)
3. separatist parties received in referendum again less than 50% participation in referendum. Referendum itself was totally uncontrolled (in the end of chaos, people were able to print their voting papers themselves and throw them to urn in any place they wish, even on street)
4. despite of everything mentioned in first 3 points, separatists parties representing minority of population (significant 40+% minority, but still minority), declared independence unilaterally, just showing how they do not care about others which do not share their point of view (in my point of view, they are just intolerant as any other nationalists in the world – nothing new here, nationalism is everywhere the same, from 19th century to now on)
5. I also think that these election will not solve anything, but Spanish government has full right to protect country (Spain, but also Catalonia itself) against intolerant minority. I really doubt, that Spanish government will change its stance, if separatists will still represent less than 50% of Catalan population.
6. Spanish government is just putting borders to minority which thinks, that they can do anything.. against Spanish law, against Catalan law, against constitution and against other people in Catalonia. Spanish government will just continue putting these borders. This game can continue even for years, either until separatists understand that there are also others, not just themselves, or until separatists gain overall decisive majority which will force Spanish government to reflect that.
• JM Comba
I absolutely agree with you.
• Conrad Miranda
If its all so clear And simple as you say . Why the hell dont you let US have a referéndum And we finally have a propper answer ???
• Mònica Gonyalons
Someone from Slovakia, living in Alicante, knows a lot about Catalonia 👍😂😂
• Mònica Gonyalons
Conrad Miranda, bc they know we will win, thats it! And they will lie, and pay money to everybody to talk against Catalan Independentism!! Margallo, made a tour all around Europe and the World. And now he owns to many favours!!
• Júlia Riot
How can you still argue that secessionism is minoritary when you need a majority in the Parliament to be able to form a government?
• Imir Vlad
I meant minority in votes.. not representing more than 50% of population.. in my point of view (which is anyway invalid because I am Slovak, as Monica stated above), to do such “small” thing as creating a new state and changing borders in Europe and even more doing it unilaterally, it is really bad to do it with representing less than 50% of population.. there is no wonder that there is resistance to such acting..
• Pavur Pezev
Imir Vlad, and why Slovakia separated from Chekhoslovakia?
• Catalin Campeanu
I’m sure that russian propaganda is pretty efficient. Just reading some comments around here. This is exactly what they want, a divided Europe, made by tens of tiny impotent states like catalonia would be.
• Imir Vlad
Pavur : Eslovaquia not separated from Checoslovaquia.. There was no referendum and there was no unilateral way.. Majority of Checos and Eslovacos were against separation (my family included, I was only child back then) and decision was taken mutually by Czech and Slovak politicians in federal parliament without asking people for opinion. And yes, most shitty politicians back then, were nationalist ones, which used same hate narrative like now many indepe Catalans, showed same closed minds, and were ignoring or insulting other Slovaks which were not thinking the same way.
12. Catalin
When we should all try to be more united than ever, facing all those economic and political challenges we listen to all traitors payed by Moscow. I wonder, wtf all those separatists believe? That they will live hapily ever after as in Catalonia? Retards!
13. Montse Rat M. Escrig
In my opinion, whatever happens with the elections today, the problem will not be solved at all. Only a referendum could help
• Stoil Zlatarov
Yeah, kinda funny how European leftists are scared of the “fascist” conservatives that aren’t even in power, while the real fascists are in the European parliament and the governing parties of the dominant EU countries.
• Sabin Popescu
Stoil Zlatarov you might have to read again what fascism really means
14. Jokera Jokerov
Is Spain a direct democracy like switzerland or a representative democracy like the rest of the EU? Is Catalunya a representative democracy? Then it is for the Parliament to decide and for the people to approve. The majority in Parliament in Barcelona is for independence. They should vote it and there should be a referendum of dis/aproval.
After days of ill-tempered rhetoric, the central government said it regretted last Sunday s injuries and suggested Catalonia should hold a regional election to settle the crisis.
Given Catalonia is not a colony, post-Franco Spain has not committed gross human rights violations in the region, and Catalonia enjoys political inclusion at every level of government in Spain, it fails to meet the three circumstances of International Law which could have given them independence.
17. jthk
It appears that Spain can only settle the Catalonia independence issue by giving up democratic election everywhere! Do the Spanish or Catalonia people prefer settling this way? If not, stop tearing the country apart.
• jthk
democracy needs to play according to law, particularly the supreme law, according to which, a country is built, Constitution. If people do not respect even their constitution, the country either does disintegrate or there will be war to protect the country being disintegrated. Territorial sovereignty cannot be compromised. According to the principle of democracy, Catalonia’s independence needs a referendum of the whole Spain, which is all Spanish people, not just the Catalonia region. If Catalonia’s illegal referendum can ever be justified, all local ethnic groups of the Catalonia region can also use a referendum to get independence from Catalonia.
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More debates from this series – Catalonia View all | http://www.debatingeurope.eu/2017/12/14/will-catalan-elections-settle-independence-issue/ | robots: classic
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Spain PM Calls New Catalan Secession Plans 'Authoritarian'
• Associated Press
FILE - Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy.
Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy on Wednesday described as "authoritarian delirium" plans by the ruling parties in the northeastern Catalonia region to declare independence from Spain within 48 hours of a promised referendum Oct. 1, if voters say "yes."
Rajoy told a business meeting that Spaniards and Catalans could rest assured that the "confrontational' gestures of the pro-independence parties will never win over the democratic state.
He was speaking a day after Catalonia's governing parties presented details of a proposed law covering the planned referendum. The law says if the "yes" vote wins, independence will be declared within two days regardless of the vote's turnout percentage.
Spain has pledged there will be no referendum because it violates the country's constitution.
Also Wednesday, the Constitutional Court formally ruled that the Catalan government could not use part of its 2017 budget to finance the referendum, following a legal challenge by the Spanish government.
Catalonia and Spain have been at loggerheads for years because of the regional government's plans to hold a secession vote. The government has challenged in the Constitutional Court nearly every measure taken by the Catalan government and has succeeded in blocking most. In addition, prosecutors have opened legal proceedings against several former and current Catalan officials over the issue.
In the promised referendum, Catalans would be asked to answer yes or no to a single question: "Do you want Catalonia to become an independent state in the form of a republic?"
Polls consistently show the 7.5 million Catalans are evenly divided on independence, but a majority supports holding a referendum.
The region has failed to win the backing of any major country or international body to hold the vote without Spain's approval.
Catalonia, whose capital is Barcelona, represents a fifth of Spain's GDP. | https://www.voanews.com/a/spain-pm-calls-new-catalan-secession-plans-authoritarian/3929680.html | robots: classic
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} | 529 | Before Sunday's elections in Catalonia, Artur Mas, president of the region's parliament, promised a referendum on independence for one of Spain's most important regions if he won re-election.
But after the election, Mas has a more difficult task because his center-right Convergence and Union coalition lost 12 of its 62 seats, a strong setback for a party that was hoping to gain a simple majority in the 135-seat legislative body.
The Catalan Republican Left party was the big winner in the elections, winning 21 seats, according to the Catalonia elections web site, which reported 98% of the votes had been counted.
The Catalan Republican Left party also backs independence, and the two parties could form a majority in parliament on the independence issue.
They, however, differ on most other issues, especially economic policy.
Voters in Catalonia, the most powerful economically of Spain's 17 regions, heeded the call that these would be historic elections, even if independence wasn't on the ballot Sunday. They voted during a deep economic crisis in the eurozone countries, especially in Spain and in Catalonia. Voter turnout was the highest in 24 years for Catalan elections, officials said.
The Spanish government in Madrid vows to block any self-determination referendum, arguing that the constitution does not permit a region alone to decide its independence.
Last September 11, an estimated 1.5 million people -- 20% of Catalonia's population -- filled the streets of Barcelona, the Catalan capital and Spain's second-largest city, demanding independence.
Soon after, Mas called snap regional elections, two years early. His government already has enacted deep spending cuts trying to balance the regional books and has asked Madrid for $6 billion in emergency credit to pay its bills.
"The crisis has made many people in Catalonia desperate," said Gonzalo Bernardos, a University of Barcelona economist. "They see a dark future. Then hope springs, that with Catalan independence, things will be better."
Catalonia has its own flag and language -- Catalan -- and various analysts say the economic crisis has brought long-simmering nationalist sentiment to the forefront.
Catalans complain of cultural repression and economic sleights by Madrid dating back centuries.
With just 16% of Spain's population, Catalonia produces 19% of the nation's wealth.
Catalonia argues that it sends far more in taxes to Madrid than it gets back in central government spending, and that Catalan taxes help support poorer Spanish regions.
The regions administer key public services such as health and education, and in Catalonia's case, also the police and prisons.
In addition to Mas' party, three other major parties will be closely watched as potential power brokers in the new parliament.
The Catalan Republican Left doubled its bloc, as it held just 10 seats before the election.
The Catalan branches of Spain's ruling conservative Popular Party -- which opposes independence -- gained one seat, for a total 19 in the new parliament.
The main opposition Spanish Socialist Party, which urges a federalist system for the regions, will be the biggest loser, dropping eight seats to 20 representatives.
A survey earlier this month by the Catalan government's polling center showed 57% of Catalans would vote for independence, a 6% increase from last June and a 14% increase from a year and a half ago. | http://www.clickondetroit.com/news/Spain-s-Catalonia-region-holds-elections/-/1719418/17540540/-/wv642r/-/index.html | robots: classic
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Breaking News
Catalonia Lawmakers Approve New Independence Effort
FILE - F.C Barcelona supporters wave Estelada or pro-independence flags. Catalonian lawmakers are due to vote on a measure to begin a secession process on Monday.
Lawmakers in Spain's northeastern Catalonia region approved a measure Monday for a renewed effort to seek independence.
A majority in the regional parliament backed the plan to launch a roadmap put forth by the Together for Yes coalition and leftist CUP party, which together control 72 of 135 seats. They hope the process will lead to secession within 18 months.
Spain's Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy promised last month to use "all political and legal means" to stop an independence push, including taking the matter to the country's Constitutional Court. He called desires for Catalonia to break away "an act of provocation."
Catalonia is an autonomous region of 7.5 million people that accounts for about 20 percent of Spain's economic output.
The independence movement there is more than a century old, but gained momentum several years ago with Spain's economic crisis. A year ago, the region held a referendum on independence that the government dismissed as invalid. About 80 percent of those who voted supported independence. | https://www.voanews.com/a/catalonia-lawmakers-to-vote-on-renewed-independence-effort/3049626.html | robots: classic
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REUTERS/Albert Gea
Today’s vote by the legislature of the Spanish region of Catalonia to formally petition Spain’s government to authorize a referendum on Catalonian independence is a reminder that Europe will face a challenge this year for which it seems unready. Even though Spain has firmly opposed the referendum, the Catalonians are sure to press ahead. This fall, both Catalonia and Scotland are likely to hold referenda on whether to become independent states. Europe is treating the issue of independence as an internal matter for Spain and the United Kingdom – a mistake that risks cracking the continent’s delicate unity.
Scotland will hold its vote with the consent of the United Kingdom. The two governments are negotiating over how to manage the political and economic uncertainty and strain resulting from the referendum itself, and the possibility of an independent Scotland.
Catalonia’s regional administration last month announced a November date for its referendum, which the Spanish government of Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy immediately vowed to block. Yet Catalonia continues to move toward a unilateral declaration of independence. The separatist movement has sustained its momentum since it organized a massive demonstration in Barcelona in 2012 that led the region’s parliament, days later, to approve a resolution affirming Catalonia’s right to declare independence.
It will be Europe, in the end, that decides whether Catalonia will be an independent state. The continent's phobia of self-determination and its lack of any coherent approach to newly independent states leaves it ill-prepared to make this decision, which will strain the very foundation of Europe.
Spain and Catalonia are locked in a legal debate over Catalonia's right to hold a referendum and declare independence. While Catalonian regional premier Athur Mas has listed legal arguments that permit a referendum, Prime Minister Rajoy vows to use the Spanish courts to block what he considers an unconstitutional vote. For Europe, this domestic legal debate is largely irrelevant. If Catalonians choose independence, they will seek international recognition as an independent state based on the will of the people, not on provisions of the Spanish constitution.
International law neither permits nor prohibits the holding of referenda by aspiring states. Under international law, a state must have a territory with a population subject to the control of a government – criteria that Catalonia will meet. It also must be sovereign, meaning that other states must recognize it as independent. This is how the Catalonian issue will be owned by the other European states.
For two decades, Europe has avoided developing a common, or even coherent, policy on recognition. Many in Europe still believe Germany ignited the war in Yugoslavia by its premature recognition of Croatia in January 1991. The European Union's failure to deal with Northern Cyprus has created a half-member EU state where all Cypriots are EU citizens, but only half the country is governed by EU laws and regulations. Kosovo is in international limbo. It is recognized by 103 countries, excluding five EU member states, and maintains stabilization and integration agreements with the EU. It is a member of the World Bank and IMF, but not the United Nations.
When Catalonia asks for recognition, Europe will be ill-prepared to answer. This is dangerous.
Europe as a whole is unlikely to deny recognition to Catalonia. That would create a frozen conflict in the core of Europe that will drain political capital and economic resources of an economically fragile Spain. In many European states, non-recognition would be perceived as anti-democratic. It will be extremely difficult to justify, given that more than two dozen states have achieved recognition in the past twenty years, and that Scotland is likely to join that list.
Europe as a whole also is unlikely to recognize Catalonia as independent and admit it to the European Union. That move would encourage further referenda in Belgium, Cyprus, Slovakia, Romania, and possibly Italy.
Europe likely will fail to develop a common approach, with some states recognizing Catalonia, and others denying recognition. The international community then will follow the pattern. In this case, Europe will suffer both consequences, creating a frozen conflict in Spain and prompting additional referenda on independence. It also will create a "state" with the euro as its currency, and 7 million people who could wind up retaining their European Union citizenship, while living outside the European Union.
Dr. Paul R. Williams is the Rebecca I. Grazier Professor of Law and International Relations at American University and the co-founder and President of the Public International Law & Policy Group. He has published articles on the international law and policy ramifications of state secession.
Roushani Mansoor is a former Fulbright-Clinton Fellow to Bangladesh and a current Law Fellow at the Public International Law & Policy Group | http://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/how-the-voters-of-catalonia-may-change-europe | robots: classic
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} | 1,656 | The issue of European integration has played an important role in the debate over Catalan independence. Francesc Trillas writes that an independent Catalonia would have competing motivations in the sense that closer European integration would potentially undermine its independence, but stepping back from European integration would have a damaging effect on its ability to trade with other European states. He argues that pushing for a federal Spain within a federal Europe would offer Catalonia the best solution.
The costs and benefits of secession for a relatively rich region like Catalonia cannot be disentangled from the the issue of European federalism. By such federalism, I mean democratic (and not technocratic) common decisions applied to a selection of key policies for countries in the Eurozone, along the lines of the proposal for a budget commission by Thomas Piketty. That would imply the de facto elimination of national borders on these issues.
Credit: Ivan Milinaric (CC-BY-SA-3.0)
An article by the economist Rodriguez Mora and co-authors illustrates the ‘border effect’ in international trade. If Catalonia were to secede and a new border was created, exchange with the rest of Spain would decline to a level similar to that between Portugal and Spain. The article calculates that the cost of this decline in trade would reach 9 per cent of GDP, which is more than the fiscal deficit that Catalonia would save relative to the rest of Spain. The authors also find that the border effect is in general substantial between pairs of European countries, even in the context of the single market and the currency union.
Critics have said that the reduction in trade between Catalonia and the rest of Spain would take time, and even in the long run it is hard to imagine that Spaniards would lose the ability to interact with Catalans (who speak Spanish and do not have any personal reason not to trade with Spaniards), and that any decline would be compensated for by increased trade with other (presumably European) countries.
But trade is not something that just happens without institutional pre-conditions. If the gradual reduction in trade with the rest of Spain is compensated for by an increase in trade with the rest of the EU, it would mean (unless one thinks that trade does not need supporting mechanisms) that relations with the rest of the EU would have to include institutions that facilitate the volume of trade that Catalonia has built with Spain over centuries.
Within Spain, these institutions have included a common language, taxes, currency, army, movement, soccer league, TV channels, large firms, songs, jokes, friendships and cultural projects. With Europe, it does not need to be the exact same mechanisms, but some common institutions beyond the existing ones (and beyond the Champions League) would be necessary. It seems reasonable to expect that the EU would provide a starting platform for it. It is plausible to think that Catalonia can free ride on some institutions and enjoy their benefits without being a member of the EU, although some of the benefits are difficult to enjoy without being a Member State (financial support programmes, antitrust policy, banking credit). It seems more likely that, for enjoying the trading benefits of a more integrated market, Catalonia would be asked to contribute to its costs, assuming that all other Member States accepted the new country after secession.
But then, if all these institutions and a more integrated European market are established, it will presumably also include the rest of Spain (for simplicity, let’s just call it ‘Spain’). To be stable and acceptable for workers and regions whose income streams will be more uncertain, and to promote a balanced pattern of demand across Europe, the new market will need to be accompanied by increased interpersonal and interregional transfers. These transfers will need to be substantial, because the starting point would be, according to the World Bank’s Branko Milanovic in his book The Haves and the Have-Nots: A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Global Inequality, the difference between the richest and poorest country. In the EU this stands at a ratio of 4 to 1, compared to 2 to 1 in the US between its states, or also 2 to 1 between the autonomous communities in current Spain (see table below, in which income per capita is expressed in index numbers).
Table: Richest and poorest jurisdictions in the US, EU and Spain
Note: The table is based on income per capita. The average jurisdictions in the US, EU and Spain are given a value of 100, with the poorest and richest jurisdictions shown as index numbers relative to the other values. Catalonia is shown for ease of reference. The ratio indicated is an approximate ratio of the difference between the richest and poorest jurisdictions. Source: Branko Milanovic; Spanish Statistical Office
Since Catalonia is above the average mean income in the EU, it would be a net contributor in Europe, as it is a net contributor to the Spanish budget today. Whether having to pay more into the EU than it would get out would be equal to or less than its current net contribution to the Spanish budget is not clear. What is certain is that the total ‘elimination’ of Catalonia’s fiscal deficit would not seem plausible in a more integrated Europe.
Then why separate from Spain if only to meet it again in a more united Europe and continue on with a fiscal deficit (this time to the EU, instead of Spain)? Some say it is because of the opportunity to build better institutions. But good institutions take time to establish, not least because there are significant transaction costs in a transition period. If we cannot become like the Portuguese in a day, we will not become like the Danish overnight either. Actually, we need to work hard on this, because according to the only study that I know of on the institutional quality of government of European regions, Catalonia has the lowest quality of government of any region in Spain. Even if we do this hard work and in the end become like the Danish, because under Spain we risk becoming like Maduro’s Venezuela (if I am interpreting some secessionist rhetoric correctly), with all due respect, something else may happen.
If we join the rest of Spain in a more integrated Europe with freedom of movement, presumably many Spaniards will get fed up with their own institutions and will want to emigrate to Catalonia, which will still be geographically close, at least. We will probably still share many cultural commonalities (even more than with the Portuguese), but income per capita will be much higher because of much better institutional quality. Different income levels with a similar culture and close proximity facilitate immigration. We may end up with a population composition that makes us even more similar to Spain than at the beginning, contradicting one of the supposed benefits of independence – namely, that very different preferences for public goods can be satisfied.
But perhaps I am going too fast, and I am solving Rodrik’s trilemma in my preferred idiosyncratic way: forget the nation state, and promote democracy and economic integration. Others may prefer to keep nation states and to abandon the project of deeper EU integration, but then they should not expect to trade much more with other European countries. Instead, they would have to build an economic strategy based on something else – A hidden natural resource? Fiscal haven? Privileged relationship with an emerging superpower? Protectionist regression?
Since secession in a more integrated EU does not seem to make much sense (as more and more secessionists acknowledge, at least in private), the true costs of secession for Catalonia are the costs of favouring the wrong solutions (in my view) to Rodrik’s trilemma: either sticking to a nation state in globally integrated but deregulated markets which compromise democracy (in order to attract investments without international cooperation, taxes and regulatory standards would be constrained to be low: then the cost is inequality), or sticking to the nation state with democracy but without access to integrated markets, which may be the preferred option of a rupturist left or a populist and protectionist right (and then the cost is inefficiency).
Making the right choice for Catalonia, as I see it, with Rodrik’s trilemma in Europe, involves supporting, for efficiency and equity reasons, a rapid transition to a federal Europe within a federal Spain. More policies will need to be commonly and democratically decided in Europe to support a common fiscal policy, a banking union and mutualised debt. Other policies can remain at the level of the Member States or at a lower level, and in those Member States where there are strong and diverse national identities, these will have to be accommodated using the instruments of successful federal democracies. Federalism can combine institutional innovation and diversity with common policies, including international capital taxation that can raise funds for income and regional transfers, as well as for government infrastructure projects.
A modern democratic, as opposed to technocratic, European federalism must create the mechanisms to share sovereignty and at the same time facilitate institutional innovation and flexibility in the context of the challenges of the twenty-first century. A more integrated and cohesive Europe will then be an enormous contribution to world cooperation, able to promote peace and correct global market failures and inequalities.
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About the author
Francesc Trillas – Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB)
Francesc Trillas is an academic in the Department of Applied Economics at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, and Researcher at the Public-Private Sector Research Center at IESE and at the Institut d’Economia de Barcelona. He has published in several international journals and specialises in regulatory economics, applied microeconomics and institutional and political aspects of the economy. He is the author of the blog Real Progress.
Print Friendly, PDF & Email | https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/europpblog/2014/01/27/a-federal-spain-within-a-federal-europe-would-offer-the-best-solution-for-catalonia/?replytocom=29864 | isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2019-51
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} | 1,170 | Conference report: How to save the EU
November’s conference, which brought together 50 leading economists, political scientists and experts on the EU, discussed ways to save the EU from nationalist and populist forces. Britain had voted to leave the EU in 2016; Poland and Hungary were now led by governments who were chipping away at the rule of law and the norms of liberal democracy; and support for populist right-wing parties – and to a lesser extent, the populist left – was on the rise in both Western and Eastern Europe. These developments raise many questions. Which social groups within the EU have lost confidence in it and why? What does the backlash against liberalism across Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) mean for the Union? Is the EU the answer to globalisation or is it hampering member-states’ ability to deal with it? Can the EU help foster an inclusive European identity, allowing it both to absorb inflows of people from poorer countries and to let national and regional identities flourish? Could the euro yet become a force for closer political integration in the EU?
Most participants agreed that the backlash against the EU – or liberalism more broadly – was not solely down to poor economic performance. Though unemployment and job insecurity did contribute to support for populism, identity and immigration were at least as important. The two also interacted in complex ways, in part reinforcing each other, and were hard to disentangle empirically. Anti-EU sentiment was also as much about hostility towards elites as it was about European integration. Support for populist parties was not obviously driven by age: the young were anti-populist in some countries, such as Britain, but voted for populist parties in large numbers in others, like Italy. A unifying theme seemed to be a sense of insecurity, resentment of elites and illusions about life outside the European Union. The complexity of the EU’s machinery and laws, its recent policy failures, and the inchoate benefits of the Union also made it an easy target for populists.
There was broad consensus that the EU had the potential to be a force for good in the globalisation process, both internationally and in protecting (or at least managing) the repercussions for its citizens. But participants also agreed that the EU often fell short of that potential. Many people at the conference voiced concern that the EU was not doing enough(or was not given the mandate) to fight the negative effects of economic integration, such as the increasing concentration of benefits in certain regions, or tax competition, which citizens rightly perceived to be unfair. Some also argued there was untapped potential to integrate more closely while creating more equitable growth at the same time. On a global level, the EU did have the power to shape globalisation’s rules but was not using that power effectively.
Most participants thought the illiberal backlash in Central and Eastern Europe was of great concern, with Poland seen by many as the biggest problem, mainly because of its size. But the reason for the backlash was controversial. Some argued that economics explained at least part of it, as solid GDP growth had been faster than the growth in living standards: much capital was foreign-owned in these countries, and a sizeable chunk of profits were repatriated to Germany and elsewhere. Central and Eastern Europe’s electorates viewed their countries to be rule-takers, not rule-makers in the EU, and they deemed the single market to be biased in favour of the Western member-states. Some participants argued CEE countries needed strategies to create more high-paying jobs, to make the economy work for their citizens. The risk for Europe was not so much an exit of any of these countries, but a de facto exit from the values and rules of the EU. Some argued that treating CEE countries as second-tier member-states was poisonous, as was lecturing them. Offering Poland a seat at the top table was crucial, said one. But most important, argued many, was to show that Europe fights on the side of average citizens, for example against corruption, in order to support the pro-European, liberal sections of CEE countries. There was no consensus on whether EU funds should be made conditional on democratic principles and the rule of law.
Participants agreed that the eurozone was not about to undertake big reforms. Some argued that it was futile to pretend otherwise and may in fact help the anti-EU cause. But others countered that cautious steps towards further integration within the eurozone were possible, and desirable. The conference’s economists did not agree that re-nationalising fiscal policy was a good idea, especially the restructuring of public debt within the eurozone. While many saw the political benefits, the economics of national discretion in fiscal policy with a common monetary policy did not add up. The euro had proved to be a source of disintegration in the EU between euro-ins and euro-outs, with one economist saying that the euro could only become a source of integration if governments overcame their current zero-sum thinking on economic policy.
Populists had made migration a central issue, and many argued that migration from outside the EU was bound to increase rather than subside, with Africa being the main challenge in future decades. The debate heated up when it came to the economic benefits of migration, with some forcefully arguing that the benefits had been empirically demonstrated, and the academic debate had been won, but not the public debate. This led the conference to discuss ways to improve the debate about migration, and whether immigration from outside the EU could be integrated into a European narrative. There was consensus that being empirical about the facts was best, but politically unlikely to be of much help. But most agreed that the way in which politicians and the press framed migration was important, as the different perceptions of migration in European countries showed. Some argued that there was scope for the EU to act, such as in Africa or to better manage the influx of migrants. As one participant put it, it was not immigration per se that worried many, but the sense that it was uncontrolled and unlimited.
During and following the UK referendum on EU membership, a lot of discussions and articles have been had on the economics for or against membership. Understandably, the arguments in favour of membership have been centered exclusively on "trade related benefits and jobs" whilst those against membership on "contributions and costs". To my knowledge there has not been an all inclusive argument with both sides of the argument fully monetized and explained so that the "ordinary" citizen can have a true vue of what is at stake. The CER may take the lead on such an exercise and actively make it public. | https://cer.eu/publications/archive/report/2018/conference-report-how-save-eu | isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2021-10
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} | 1,045 | “Free Trade is Dead – Long Live Free Trade”
When Donald Trump became president of the United States of America in 2016, many feared that his straightforward and harshly announced policies might have a perceptible impact on the new world order – politically and economically. With him being a businessman, a certain “deal culture” was established in American politics. Tax cuts, immigration laws and a stubborn foreign policy are just a few examples for his style of governing. On the other hand, the People’s Republic of China emerged as one of the most influential global trading partners. With China becoming a member of the WTO in 2001, its economic strength was somehow institutionalized in global trade politics. Most notably, China’s influence on the African continent was subject to recent discussions in both media and politics, raising concerns about human rights issues in affected African communities.
Somewhere in-between, the European Union struggles to entrench its place in global trade politics. As the largest single market in the world, the EU could have a far bigger impact than it has today. This became evident when President Trump announced to apply higher tariffs on EU exports going to the US. The EU did not just seem disoriented, its reaction also showed what position the EU finds itself in.
With Brexit ahead, tensions in Eastern European countries and weak economies in Italy and Spain, the EU quite obviously has many fronts to fight on. Additionally, the EU is about to slide into an environment economists call “Japanification”. Low economic growth, accompanied by low interest rates and low inflation limit the opportunities of monetary policy to further stimulate the economy. Neither lowering interest rates (which seems almost impossible in the EU) nor Quantitative Easing show the necessary effects to boost European growth rates. In countries like Japan, such a process does not affect social cohesion and income or wealth distribution on a large scale, as wealth is already distributed much more just than it is in other “Western” economies. But countries in the EU or North America might experience another outcome. Whereas both Germany and the USA, for example, have to operate in slightly different economical systems, the extent of wealth inequality is at least partially similar. It’s therefore to be expected that a persistent state of “Japanification” might require political action to limit a further increase in social inequality.
On the political side, the European Union faces many other challenges that have emerged over the past few years. A very common term in European politics, which describes the origin of these specific circumstances, is “Multi-speed Europe”. It describes the different paces at which member states integrate themselves in the European Union. Especially with the EU’s eastward enlargement after the Cold War, it becomes obvious why this phrase matched the political situation in the early 1990s quite well. And even 30 years later, “Multi-speed Europe” could not be more up-to-date. This of course is applicable to economic development but can also be put in context to a rather normative view of the European Union. The heritage of Kaczyński’s and Orban’s politics demonstrates how Poland and Hungary were able to integrate their countries economically but at the same time heavily violate European core values. This again shows a significant flaw in today’s European politics.
The reason Chinese expansion is so broadly criticized is because Western-ruled countries fear an increasing Chinese influence in less developed parts of the world. But instead of putting a similar effort in Development Support into e.g. African countries, the EU struggles with homemade problems and is not even able to sufficiently sanction violations of its own current legislation as in Poland or Hungary. Inevitably, the question arises how the EU can strengthen its normative assertiveness both inside and outside its borders. From this point of view, every policy advice probably seems a little too naïve, but visionary thinking is exactly what the European Union needs right now.
The EU is the largest and most successful peace project of the past centuries. Those who were born in Europe over the last 70 years never experienced war and were raised in security and prosperity. But even the EU has a long and difficult story of progression. When my mom’s family came from Italy to Germany in the late 1960s, they were confronted with segregation and hatred. Now, over 50 years later, xenophobia between Germans and Italians seems to be inconceivable. But we again observe racism and exclusion – maybe not against our fellow Europeans, but against other minorities from outside of Europe. Populists in almost every country use the narrative of “us vs. them”, which fuels nationalist tendencies and is fundamentally directed against the core values of the European Union. So, the message for every whole-hearted European should be very clear: it is the duty of our generation to convince each and every citizen in Europe that the benefits of a united EU with open borders and free markets always outweighs possible disadvantages. Because if we are not able to convince citizens on the inside, we won’t be able to convince people on the outside. Nonetheless, the current situation in some Eastern European countries reasonably questions the effectiveness of these measures without a fundamental change in the structure of the European Union.
Without extended legislative competences of the EU, a more binding and comprehensive budget and the ability to effectively sanction violations of EU law, this project is almost doomed to fail. Especially when it comes to trade, strong and tight relations to countries outside of Europe could have the power to promote human rights and other European values. This could not just be the case for climate change issues, but also for development support, migration and the rule of law. For that, we need to reinvent free trade and return to the very core strengths of European trade policies. Right now, the African continent is probably the most accessible and worthwhile region where the European Union could use its influence. The recently established African Continental Free Trade Area offers many opportunities – so let’s be brave and put the European idea forward. There is so much to win and so little to lose.
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Historians still argue over the reasons why one particular geographical region managed to achieve such overwhelming military, economic and cultural power as to subordinate the rest of the planet, but the fact remains that as late as 1914, Europe dominated the world in a way no previous civilization could.
After two centuries of colonization and a century of industrial development, Europe – once known as "sunset lands" by the ancient civilizations of the Middle East – had stood on top of the world. On its eastern end was a stupendous empire that reached from Poland to the Pacific. On its western edge was a thalassocracy that boasted the sun never set on all its outposts.
This also helps explain why the wars of 1914-1918 and 1939-1945 were both global conflicts, even though they began in Europe and for European reasons.
Even today, the world feels the legacy of European power. The very concept of nation-state arose in Europe, after a series of religious wars ravaged the continent in the 1600s. Ancient democracy, philosophy, the three major denominations of Christianity (Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant), capitalism, socialism, liberalism, banking… all of these are concepts that were either originally conceived in Europe, or developed on the continent and then spread throughout the world by word, sword or gunpoint. Even after the European empires finished beating each other into rubble midway through the 20th century, the two superpowers waging a cold war for dominion over the world were European derivatives; the United States and the USSR were based on European philosophical principles – of individual liberty and class struggle, respectively.
After the demise of the Soviet Union, those who sought to establish a Pax Americana announced the "end of history" and heralded a "new world order." The past seventeen years have brought neither; quite the contrary, history is more in flux than ever, and there is not much order left in the world, thanks in no small part to the efforts of the Cold War victors.
Dangerous Notions
The European Union (EU) is one of the things that emerged from the post-Cold War flux. The 1992 Treaty of Maastricht transformed what had formerly been a trade association of European countries into an actual political entity, currently one of the largest in the world (with nearly half a billion inhabitants).
To its supporters, the EU is a crowning achievement of democracy on the continent; a monument to peace, tolerance, and the transformative power of government planning. They might be right on that last one, if not on any of the others.
Democracy is hardly a pinnacle of civilization, as it is by definition at odds with freedom. The myth of "democratic peace" is just that – a myth. "Tolerance" is turning into its very opposite, as the Union seeks to ban speech in a misguided attempt to paper over a very real conflict between the shrinking native populations (a consequence of welfare statism) and the mainly Muslim immigrants who refuse to assimilate.
Last, but not least important, is the notion that European unity is by itself a good thing. History suggests it is rather the opposite. For centuries, attempts to achieve European unification brought nothing but bitter conflict. Charlemagne’s Holy Roman Empire proved fleeting. Napoleon dreamed of a united Europe (under French leadership, of course). So did Hitler. But when competition among European powers did not lead to conflict, it led to one-upmanship in economics, philosophy, culture, art, and all the other things that eventually made Europe a global hegemon rather than, say, China – which had been united for centuries.
"Slow-motion Coup"
A few days ago, a Swedish blogger by the name of Fjordman wrote an article titled "Towards a Totalitarian Europe" for the Euroskeptic blog The Brussels Journal, arguing that:
The European Union is basically an attempt – a rather successful one so far – by the elites in European nation states to cooperate on usurping power, bypassing and eventually abolishing the democratic system, a slow-motion coup d’état. It works because the national parliaments are still there, and most people don’t see how much has changed.
Fjordman claims that the EU resembles the Soviet Union "more than just superficially," calling it "An artificial superstate run by an authoritarian bureaucracy that overrides the will of the people and imposes its ideology on the populace."
What might this ideology be? Call it welfare statism. But also "diversity" and "equality." Fjordman’s particular objection is to the wholesale importation of immigrants from Muslim lands, who not only do not assimilate, but are encouraged by the Eurocrats to assert their beliefs as part of a planned breakdown of existing national cultures. "After all," he says, "it’s easier to control people who have no distinct cultural or national identity."
Another blogger, an Englishman going by the name Archonix, warns that the EU may be peaceful now, but if history is any indicator, it will soon become aggressive. He makes a compelling parallel between Bismarck’s unification of Germany in the latter half of the 19th century and the process of European "unification," both starting with a customs union and proceeding with small steps. Germany eventually turned imperialist to channel the resentments among its inhabitants created by the powerful welfare state. Archonix fears the EU might do the same.
Danger to Itself
One could argue that the EU is already turning conquistador, re-enacting the German Drang nach Osten by annexing most of Eastern Europe and parts of the Balkans. The new member countries may be poorer, but they also have (relatively speaking) more vibrant economies, unencumbered by thousands of laws and rules and regulations that stifle entrepreneurship throughout the Union. In this respect, the EU’s eastward expansion is a better strategy than importation of immigrants to replace a dwindling working population. However, the new members soon find themselves in the same predicament, as EU laws strangle their economies and their birth rates follow that of Old Europe. Enthusiasm for the EU may then quickly turn to resentment.
It could be, then, that the EU will be much more of a danger to itself, than to its neighbors. Fjordman gloomily predicts that the "EU can only become one giant Yugoslavia, either ruled by an authoritarian oligarchy in the fashion of Tito, or fall apart into civil wars."
One would think Yugoslavia’s tragic history ought to dissuade anyone from emulating it.
All Bark, No Bite
Despite the refusal of most EU members – notably, Germany and France – to support the American Empire in Iraq, prompting derisive talk of "New" and "Old" Europe, at the present time Brussels is an ally of Washington in its hegemonic designs.
It is important to note, however, that the EU is clearly the much inferior partner in this relationship when it comes to military matters. The U.S. has, at great expense, built a military intended to dominate the globe. As the 1999 invasion of Kosovo demonstrated, the EU barely has the ability to serve as an auxiliary to American legions. NATO is less of a military juggernaut than a leash that allows Washington to dominate European military matters almost completely. That makes the European Union much less intimidating than the Soviet one. Woe to everyone if the commissars ever decide a "Blue Army" would be the best way to accomplish their ends, though.
American imperialists, such as Richard Holbrooke, openly claim that interventions in the Balkans had the purpose of reasserting American hegemony on the European continent. The EU may be comparable to the U.S. in size, and have a larger population, but it is not yet a power of its own. Given all the disturbing aspects of the EU, that is not necessarily a bad thing.
Read more by Nebojsa Malic
Author: Nebojsa Malic
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} | 3,213 | Say yes to Sunday nights
Bob Harris
Radio 2
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What lies beneath: how Europe succumbed to toxic ideology and violence
A review of Ian Kershaw and Heinrich August Winkler’s accounts of Europe’s “age of catastrophe”, 1914-49.
In the current climate of apprehension about what an influx of Muslim immigrants might mean for European values, we should remember what those have included in the past: slavery, serfdom and tyranny, as well as religious wars, violent revolution and rapacious imperialism. And the horrors of earlier centuries pale beside what Europeans did in the 20th century to their own continent and the rest of the world. The titles of two new histories sum up that miserable story, with its ethnic conflicts, industrial-scale warfare, totalitarianism and genocide: “hell”, in the case of Ian Kershaw, and “catastrophe” for Heinrich August Winkler.
Twentieth-century Europe remains such a puzzle for us all. How could a civilisation that produced Shakespeare, Beethoven and Kant, which generated the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution, or which formulated and promulgated ideas such as constitutional government and human rights, also have produced such appalling cruelties?
These two vast histories aim to explain why Europe went through such a very bad period between the start of the First World War and the end of the Second World War. Both authors try to find that difficult balance between looking at Europe as a whole and as a set of separate countries. For all that it is admirably researched, Winkler’s is the less satisfying, in part because he fails to define his terms. He talks of something called the west (which at various points seems to include the United States and Japan and at others seems to be only Europe) without ever clearly stating what he means by either definition: is it a set of ideas and values, a collection of nation states, or perhaps a typology of political, economic and social organisation? In this, the second in a projected three-volume history of the west, he starts out by saying that he will examine Europe’s “normative project”, which he defines, very briefly, as putting into effect the ideas and ideals of the American and French Revolutions. But which ones? The Rights of Man or the Terror? In any case, the “normative project” largely vanishes in what is nevertheless a useful and thorough history of Europe. If you want to know about the politics of Luxembourg as well as those of bigger states you will find that here.
Kershaw inevitably goes over much of the same ground but provides the more sustained analysis. In his view, several forces came together in the 20th century to produce a toxic brew of suspicion and hatred among Europe’s people. A new kind of nationalism emerged, driven by the assumption that nations are based on not only shared ethnicity, but blood – inhabitants of another nation were often described as being another “race”. Given the mix of peoples in Europe, demands for territory often led to nations claiming lands inhabited by those of other, supposedly lesser “races”. Class conflict often overlapped with ethnic conflict, so that, for example, Slavic peasants and Polish landowners found even more reason to hate each other. The long crisis of capitalism was undermining the legitimacy of the existing regimes, some of them weak enough to begin with. And caught up in the midst were Europe’s Jews, the unjustified focus for ethnic and class hatreds, blamed for the problems created by capitalism.
Both writers take some pains to look at ideas (fascism, communism, liberalism) or trends, from economic growth to changes in the position of women, that transcended borders. They also point out that Europe contained very different levels of development that were not necessarily coterminous with national borders. Such measures as literacy, standards of living or urbanisation were generally higher in the western parts of Europe. In terms of constitutional and democratic government, the east lagged behind. And while the likes of France and Britain had long since taken diverse peoples and instilled in them a strong sense of shared nationhood (though Britain failed with the Irish, who persisted in seeing themselves as a separate people), the old empires of Russia and Austria-Hungary had failed to do so before the First World War. Indeed, the gradual introduction of representative institutions and a broader franchise in ethnically diverse areas led to an unedifying search for spoils. After 1918 the dominant elites in the successor states often lacked the will to respect their own substantial ethnic minorities. Political leaders all too frequently used demagogic and ethnic appeals to their masses to keep themselves in power.
While there are clearly continuities between the worlds before and after the First World War, that prolonged and costly conflict served to shatter much of the old order and to speed the introduction of certain ideas, attitudes and practices. As Kershaw rightly says of 1914, armies with values belonging to the 19th century or earlier found themselves fighting a 20th-century war as Europe’s organised, industrialised mass societies hurled themselves against each other. In its course, European nations threw away the lives and talents of millions of their men and exhausted their resources. The French coined a new term: total war. For this was not like the wars of the previous century, fought for clear and limited aims, but rather a struggle between peoples for dominance and survival. In the course of the war, racial and national stereotyping entered the public discourse. For Germans it was the barbaric Asiatics; for the French and the British, the brutal Huns. Conflict broadened to include civilians: men, women, children were all part of the war effort. And in the mixed regions of the east and southern Europe and the Ottoman empire the first ethnic cleansings and genocides occurred, though they were not yet called by these names.
Towards the end of the war the US president Woodrow Wilson’s public support for self-determination, inspired by noble sentiments about the rights of peoples to govern themselves, spurred demands in the heart of Europe for ethnically based nations to be established in defined territories. New nations, which might have worked and traded with each other, too often fell out over competing claims to the same pieces of land. And because ethnic nationalisms are generally intolerant of multiple and overlapping identities, those who refused (or were perceived to refuse) to accept a single identity became useful scapegoats. Older traditions of anti-Semitism were now reinforced by the pseudo-sciences of racism and social Darwinism. The pre-war pogroms against Jews expanded with renewed vigour into the war and the postwar years. In Russia’s revolutionary civil war, for instance, up to 60,000 Jews were killed in the Ukraine.
The war made violence normal as a way of settling disputes and carrying out politics. Fighting on a large scale carried on for several years after 1918. In the Russian civil war, which finally ended in 1922, some seven million people died of various causes. In many countries, Italy and Germany among them, politics often took the form of violent street theatre, with opposing factions beating and killing each other. Mussolini rode to power in Italy in 1922 partly because his Fascists intimidated and cowed their opponents, and partly because conservative elites hoped that he could restore order. In Germany, adherents of the right committed 352 political murders between 1919 and 1922. And war retained its glamour and fascination. Despite what we might think, given the popularity of anti-war literature such as All Quiet on the Western Front (1929), many veterans joined paramilitary organisations after the First World War ended, 400,000 of them signing up for the German Freikorps, which fought in the Baltic and along Germany’s eastern borders.
The war also left large numbers of Europeans deracinated: what Winkler describes as “personal shock”. What had seemed solid – whether empires, regimes, their position in society, even their pensions and savings – vanished overnight. Not surprisingly, Oswald Spengler’s deeply pessimistic The Decline of the West (published in German between 1918 and 1922 and in English in 1926), which posited that European civilisation was reaching its end, was very influential and sold thousands of copies, especially in Germany. Many Europeans retreated from engagement in the compromise-heavy sphere of democratic politics because it seemed to provide few solutions in the present and little hope for the future. Outsiders, such as the self-serving Italian poet Gabriele d’Annunzio, who attacked conventional society and expressed nothing but contempt for elected politicians, were dangerously attractive because they somehow sounded more “authentic”. As we look, today, at the antics of Donald Trump and Nigel Farage, that seems uncomfortably familiar.
Europe presented unpromising soil for the new democracies in Poland and Yugoslavia, or older, shaky ones in Italy or Spain. The widespread adoption of proportional representation only led to further political fragmentation and made it increasingly difficult to form stable coalitions. While democracy struggled in parts of Europe, its enemies mobilised, often using its own institutions against it. Challenged by new forces from below, the old elites, especially in eastern and southern Europe, drifted into counter-revolution and threw their support behind conservative parties advocating authoritarian governments. On the left, the new communist parties, modelled on Bolshevik lines, appeared to present a credible alternative both to authoritarianism and to “bourgeois” democracy. Under the strict rule of the Communist International, itself a tool of Soviet policy by the late 1920s, communists across Europe obeyed orders to attack and disrupt democracy. In the streets of Germany communists and Nazis sometimes fought together to destroy the Weimar Republic.
On the right, fascism in all its varieties was equally appealing to those who had given up on democracy. Across Europe, fascist leaders attacked what they saw as an outmoded and corrupt system, promising national renewal and a bright and bustling future. Here is how Mussolini described fascism in his 1932 article for the Enciclopedia Italiana: “The Fascist state, the synthesis and unity of all values, interprets, develops and gives strength to the whole life of the people.” It is hard today to understand how even intellectuals could take such vacuous rubbish seriously as a coherent doctrine but many did. When Winston Churchill visited Italy in 1927, he wrote approvingly, “this country gives the impression of discipline, order, good will, smiling faces”. Although the impetus behind fascism differed from that behind Soviet-style communism – one was nationalist and racist, the other promised a classless utopia – in method and style both were totalitarian, another new word that had to be coined to describe the 20th century. Unlike older types of authoritarianism (of which there were still many examples), totalitarian regimes, whether in the Soviet Union or in Nazi Germany, sought to possess the souls and innermost thoughts of their subjects. Both types of totalitarianism used modern media and propaganda to mobilise and sway the masses; both had cults of the all-wise, omni-competent leader; both dealt with any dissent by means of intimidation, imprisonment or murder; and both needed enemies, internal or external, to justify their existence.
The First World War helped to create the conditions that made Europe’s descent into the second war and barbarism possible – yet it did not have to end like that. “But we do dance on volcanoes and sometimes the fires below subside,” said Gustav Stresemann, the German statesman. By the mid-1920s there were grounds to hope that he was right. The world had recovered, certainly in economic terms, from the war. Although the United States had failed to join the new League of Nations, it did not disengage itself entirely from Europe. American observers came to League meetings and American diplomats and bankers took the lead in trying to negotiate a more workable set of reparations demands for Germany, first in the Dawes Plan of 1924 and then the Young of 1929. Under Stresemann’s wise leadership, briefly as chancellor and then as foreign minister, Germany became an international player again, settling its outstanding border disputes with its neighbours in the east, joining the League, and working reasonably amicably with its former enemies.
In 1928 Germany, France and the United States signed the Kellogg-Briand Pact, a solemn agreement to renounce war as an instrument of national policy. Ultimately, 63 nations, including Britain, Italy, Japan and the Soviet Union, added their signatures. Three years later Japan invaded Manchuria; in October 1935 Italy invaded Ethiopia; five months later Hitler marched his troops into the Rhineland, which had been demilitarised under the Treaty of Versailles; and in 1939 Europe was at war again. What went wrong can be summed up in two words: “depression” and “Germany”. Without the collapse of much of the world’s economy and the consequent misery and mass unemployment, democracy and capitalism would not have been seen as bankrupt, failed systems. The extremes of fascism and communism would never have gained the traction they did. If the Weimar Republic had managed to survive beyond its first decade it might have struck deeper roots gradually in Germany.
For both Kershaw and Winkler, what happened in Germany was of critical importance to the fate of Europe, given that country’s location at the heart of the continent, its large population, strong economy and powerful military traditions. The Depression had a disastrous impact on an already polarised and resentful nation. The Weimar Republic was tolerated but not loved, even by many of its own supporters. Key elites, whether the military, the civil service or business, had never accepted it.
Weimar also bore the burden of having signed the Treaty of Versailles. Germans had never really absorbed Germany’s military defeat in 1918, a refusal to recognise reality which was endorsed enthusiastically by the High Command, with its irresponsible talk of German forces having been “stabbed in the back” by defeatists at home. As a result, in Germany, the treaty’s terms were widely seen as illegitimate and punitive, a national humiliation. Hitler and the Nazis offered simple solutions for the country’s complex economic and political problems. They promised a prosperous and dynamic nation, restored to its rightful dominance of Europe. Still, Hitler would never have got into power without the folly and blindness of those who should have known better – from the conservatives around the ageing President Hindenburg to the socialists who, at a vital stage, withdrew their support from the last workable coalition of democratic parties.
Not surprisingly, given that both are primarily historians of Germany, Kershaw and Winkler are at their best analysing the Nazi seizure of power and the steps by which Hitler moved inexorably towards war. Their accounts are less satisfactory when it comes to other players such as Britain and France and, later, the United States. It is hard to disagree with the conclusion, however, that Hitler was not to be appeased, no matter how far the democracies were prepared to go. His vision was of a Germany dominating Europe, if not the world, and of the expansion of the German race into territories that were to be cleared of their inhabitants through expulsion, starvation or murder. Europe as a whole was to be cleansed of Jews. For Hitler, genocide was not a by-product of the war but an integral part. And as both accounts make clear, he found many willing accomplices across Europe.
If Europe had been badly shaken by the First World War, it was all but destroyed by the Second. By 1945 millions of its people were dead or barely surviving. The great European empires were crumbling fast, and European nations lay at the mercy of the two new superpowers – the United States and the Soviet Union. In eastern Europe the Soviet Union was building its own empire. Yet within four years, Europe, especially the western part, had started to recover; more than that, the foundations for what turned out to be an enduring peace had been laid. Kershaw rightly describes it as “astonishing”, although his account of how it happened is regrettably brief.
We face the danger today of forgetting what Europe did to itself in the 20th century and how that came about. The passage of time has made us complacent and we assure ourselves that we would never make the same mistakes as our forebears did decades ago. Yet not all Europe’s demons have been killed for ever. Intolerant nationalisms are growing again. Let us hope that the fulminations of, say, the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, against the dangers to European society from “outsiders” – whether gypsies or Syrians – are passing froth on the political scene and not signs of something deeper and more sinister happening below the surface.
To Hell and Back: Europe, 1914-1949 by Ian Kershaw is published by Allen Lane (593pp, £30). The Age of Catastrophe: A History of the West 1914–1945 by Heinrich August Winkler, translated
by Stewart Spencer, is published by Yale University Press (998pp, £35). Margaret MacMillan is Professor of International History at the University of Oxford and Warden of St Antony’s College. Her books include “The War that Ended Peace” (Profile)
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} | 611 | In many countries the dominant image of nationalism is one of aggression and militarism, quite the opposite of a principled belief in national self-determination. The aggressive face of nationalism became apparent in the late nineteenth century as European powers indulged in a “scramble for Africa” in the name of national glory and their “place in the sun”. The imperialism of the late nineteenth century differed from earlier periods of colonial expansion in that it was supported by a climate of popular nationalism: national prestige was increasingly linked to the possession of an empire and each colonial victory was greeted by demonstrations of public approval.
In Britain, a new word, jingoism, was coined to describe this mood of public enthusiasm for aggressive nationalism or imperial expansion. In the early twentieth century, the growing rivalry of European powers divided the continent into two armed camps, the Triple Entente, comprising Britain, France, and Russia, and the Triple Alliance, containing Germany, Austria, and Italy. When world war eventually broke out in August 1914, after a prolonged arms race and a succession of international crises, it provoked public rejoicing in all major cities of Europe. Aggressive and expansionist nationalism reached its high point in the inter-war period when the authoritarian or fascist regimes of Japan, Italy and Germany embarked upon policies of imperial expansion and world domination eventually leading to war in 1939.
What distinguished this form of nationalism from earlier liberal nationalism was its chauvinism, a belief in superiority or dominance, a term derived from the name of Nicolas Chauvin, a French soldier who had been fanatically devoted to Napoleon. Nations were not thought to be equal in their right to national self-determination. Rather, some nations were thought to possess characteristics or qualities which made them superior to others. Such ideas were clearly evident in European and American imperialism, which was justified by an ideology of racial and cultural superiority. In nineteenth century Europe, it was widely believed that the ‘white’ peoples of Europe and America were intellectually and morally superior to the ‘black’, ‘brown’, ‘yellow’, and ‘Indian’ peoples of Africa, Asia, and the colonies.
Indeed, Europeans portrayed imperialism as a moral duty; colonial peoples were the white man’s burden”. Imperialism supposedly brought the benefits of civilization and in particular Christianity to the less fortunate and less sophisticated peoples of the world.
More particular forms of national chauvinism have developed in Russia and Germany. In Russia, this took the form of pan-Slavism, sometimes called Slavophile nationalism, particularly strong in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Russians are Slavs, enjoying linguistic and cultural links with other Slav peples in Eastern and South-Eastern Europe. Pan-Slavism reflects the goal of Slavic unity, which the Russians believed to be their historic mission. In the years before 1914, such ideas brought Russia into deepening conflict with Austro-Hungary for control over the Balkans. The chauvinistic character of pan-Slavism was derived from the belief that the Russians were the natural leaders of the Slavic people, and that Slavs were culturally and spiritually superior to the peoples of Central or Western Europe. It was anti-Western and anti-liberal.
Germany’s nationalist chauvinism was born out of the experience of defeat in the Napoleonic Wars. Writers like Fichte and Jahn reacted strongly against France and the ideals of its Revolution, emphasizing instead the uniqueness of German culture and its language, and the racial purity of its people. After unification in 1871, German nationalism developed a pronounced chauvinistic character with the emergence of pressure groups like the pan-German League and the Navy League, which campaigned for closer ties with German-speaking Austria, and for a German Empire, her “place under the sun”.
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Nationalism is a concept of identity which members of a particular government, nation, society, or territory may collectively feel. Nationalists strive to create or sustain a nation based on various notions of political legitimacy. Nationalist ideologies often trace their development from the Romantic theory of "cultural identity" and/or the Liberalist argument that political legitimacy is derived from the consent of a region's population.
Nationalism is a frequently misunderstood term. Nationalism does not necessarily imply that one nation is better than another, simply that groups of similar people should be governed by the same government, independent of different groups. Jingoism is a more extreme ideology that emphasizes the superiority of one nation over another.
See also: patriotism
Table of contents
1 Evolution of Nationalism
2 Forms of Nationalism
3 Nationalist theorists
4 Historical nationalism
5 Ethnic nationalist conflicts
6 See also
7 External links
Evolution of Nationalism
The nation-state was born in Europe with the Treaty of Westphalia (1648). Nationalism was still an elite phenomenon for a couple of centuries after that, but during the 19th century in Europe it spread widely and became popularized. Nationalism has dominated European and even global politics ever since. Much of 19th century European politics can be seen as a struggle between newer nationalist movements and old autocratic regimes. In some cases nationalism took a liberal anti-monarchical face whereas in other cases nationalist movements were co-opted by conservative monarchical regimes. Gradually through that century the old multi-national states such as the Austro-Hungarian Empire began to lose their grip, and various localized states were absorbed into larger national entities, most notably Germany and Italy.
By the end of the 19th century, nationalistic ideas had began to spread into Asia. In India, nationalism began to encourage calls for the end of British rule. In China, nationalism created a justification for the Chinese state that was at odds with the idea of the universal empire. In Japan, nationalism combined with Japanese exceptionalism.
The First World War marked the final destruction of several multinational states (Ottoman Empire, Austro-Hungarian Empire, and to some extent Russia). The Versailles Treaty was marked by an attempt to recognize the principle of nationalism, as most of Europe was divided into nation states in an attempt to keep the peace. However, several multinational states and empires survived. The 20th century has also been marked by the slow assertion of nationalism around the world with the destruction of European colonial Empiress, the Soviet Union, and various other smaller multinational states.
At the same time, particularly in the latter half of the century, anti-nationalistic trends have taken place, notably often driven by elites. The European Union is now transferring power from the national level to both local and continental bodies. Trade agreements, such as NAFTA and the GATT, and the increasing internationalization of trade markets are also weakening the sovereignty of the nation state.
However, nationalism continues to assert itself in opposition to those trends. Globalization is violently opposed in street demonstrations (see ATTAC), nationalistic parties continue to do well in elections, and the most people continue to have a strong sense of attachment to their nationality.
Forms of Nationalism
Civic nationalism lies within the traditions of rationalism and liberalism. It is the theory behind constitutional democracies such as the United States.
Giuseppe Mazzini (Italy), Jules Michelet (France), Johann Gottlieb Fichte (Germany), Roman Dmowski (Poland).
Islam is fiercely opposed to any notion of Nationalism, Tribalism, Racism, or any other categorization of people not based on one's beliefs. However, Islamist groups can be considered as racist and nationalist (and are therefore by some not recognized as truly Islamic).
In some cases there has been a reaction against nationalism. An example was the perception in pre-World War I, European socialist movements that nationalism was being used to prevent workers uniting against capitalism. Another example is in present day Germany, Israel and Ireland where there are people who are not comfortable with any nationalistic, patriotic, or even cultural symbols, because these have become associated (and permanently discredited in their view) with violent nationalism (see self-hatred).
Nationalist theorists
Benedict Anderson has stated, "only face-to-face contact can sustain community: nations are in some sense an illusion." [1] (see also [1]).
Historical nationalism
Historical events in which nationalism played an essential role:
Ethnic nationalist conflicts
Ethnic nationalist organizations
(Not including governments and formal armies)
Nationalism and patriotism
Patriotism and
chauvinism are nowadays often based in nationalism, but can for instance also come from a feeling of affiliation with an imperial dynasty.
Nationalism and language
Some theorists believe that nationalism became pronounced in the 19th century for the simple reason that language became more important as unifier due to increased literacy. With increasing numbers of people reading newspapers, books, pamphlets, etc... which were increasingly widely available and read since the spread of the printing press, it became possible for the first time to develop a broader cultural attachment that went beyond the local community. At the same time, differences in language solidified, breaking down old dialects, and excluding those from completely different language groups.
Even the U.S. have a long tradition of discrimination for other languages than english. Prominent examples are the german language which was nearly extinct during WWI. Also french and italian have nearly disappeared from U.S. everydays life.
On the other hand only the availability of an easy to learn language made integration of such different cultural and ethnic groups as they were found in the U.S. under a common identity possible. Whether a similar integration can be reached some day in Europe is still highly controversial.
Nationalism and racism
Although nationalism does not necessarily imply a belief in one's own superiority over others, excesses of nationalism have not infrequently led to racist variants of the theory (see Jingoism).
Around the beginning of the 20th century in many countries all over the world a tendency existed to mix nationalism with racism. One of the clearest examples of racist nationalism was embodied in the Nazi movement in Germany with the resulting Holocaust.
However there are other examples of racism that could have been motivated through nationalism, including ethnic cleansings during the Yugoslav secession war in the 1990s, the removal of Germans from the Wolga Republic during the 1940s, the repressions against blacks in the United States during the 1930s, the extermination of the Armenians in the Osmanic Empire in 1915, terror bombing and gas attacks by the British army in Iraq in the 1920s and 1930s, killing of the Boers in british concentration camps at the end of the 19th century, and others.
What makes nationalism so attractive?
The reason why nationalism has maintained its appeal over the centuries might be that belonging to a culturally, economically or politically strong nation makes you feel better regardless of your own contribution to this strength.
Nationalism and pride
Exceeding or violated pride or in the worst case both together can be the most potent driving forces for the rise of nationalism. In Germany the soil for nationalism was prepared by a sequence of a period with exceeding pride followed by a period of defeat and devastation. Whereas during the "Wilhelminian" era exceeding pride has been risen by the German government, the period after WWI was determined by violated pride due to defeat and the conditions of the Versailles treaty. In conjunction with the resulting economic devastation due to hyperinflation (1922, 1923, and 1929), this lead to the rise of Nazism and in the last consequence to WWII.
See also
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} | 5,635 | Thursday, February 25, 2016
Derb’s Canceled Williams College Speach—”The National Question: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity In the 21st Century”
An interesting article from about another speaker canceled at a university. This follows this post about subsidies that illegal immigrants received. Remember, “Amnesty” means ANY non-enforcement of existing immigration laws! This follows this comment and this post about how to Report Illegal Immigrants! Also, you can read two very interesting books HERE.
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Williams College doesn't know what they're missing.Williams College doesn't know what they're missing.
Derb’s Canceled Williams College Hate Address—”The National Question: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity In the 21st Century”
I had already, at that point, prepared an address. Feeling that it would be a shame to waste my efforts, and loth to pass up an opportunity to spread some hatred in the world, I asked the editors at if I might post my address here, suitably formatted as an article and decorated with hyperlinks. The editors very kindly agreed. (REMEMBER, TAX-DEDUCTIBLE DONATIONS TO VDARE.COM CAN BE EARMARKED FOR ME!)
Here then, for connoisseurs of “hate speech,” is the address I would have given at Williams.]
Introduction. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for inviting me to speak here today.
My name is John Derbyshire. I am a freelance writer. My principal outlet nowadays is the online web magazine (which is why it such a worthy cause), though I do occasional reviews for print publications. hosts my weekly podcast, Radio Derb. mainly concerns itself with what we call the National Question, which we approach from a conservative position.
What is the National Question, and how does one approach it from a conservative position? Let me take those in turn.
9780684866697_l[1]The National Question. What is the National Question? I have a handy answer to that here: a book written in 2004 by the late Professor Samuel Huntington of Harvard. Title of the book: Who Are We?—The Challenges to America’s National Identity. That is the National Question: Who are we?
The answer is of course that we are Americans. But what does that mean? That’s the National Question re-phrased: What does it mean to be an American?
The conservative approach. How about a conservative approach to the National Question? What does that mean?
Let me come at my answer indirectly by stating the un-conservative approach.
This un-conservative approach says: We, Americans, are a proposition nation. That is to say, we are a nation by virtue of our agreement on a set of propositions about the place of individuals in society, the relationship of the individual to government, and the proper scope of governmental powers.
It’s rather easy to mock this concept of a proposition nation. Suppose I were to trek up into the highlands of Ethiopia, get myself invited into the hut of some illiterate Amhara goatherd, and explain our founding documents to him; and suppose he were to respond with enthusiastic agreement. Did he thereby instantly become an American?
Conversely, here is a U.S. citizen every one of whose forebears arrived here before the Revolution, and whose male forebears fought with distinction in our country’s wars. He strongly disagrees with the principles of the Founders, and would have preferred we become a Christian theocracy. Should he be stripped of his citizenship?
Well, it’s easy to make fun. The proposition nation is not actually a completely absurd concept. It is not what the Founders intended, though; and, as the wisest of them would have told you, it ignores important features of our human nature in its social context. Both those features—contradicting the Founders and ignoring human nature—betray its un-conservative character.
So there is an answer, or the beginnings of one, to the question: What is a conservative approach to this topic? A conservative approach is one that rejects the merely propositional definition of Who We Are, or at least considers it inadequate.
We have in fact waded some way here into waters that get very deep indeed. What is a nation?
Let me work my way round the back of that by proceeding to the next few words in the title of my talk.
Race, ethnicity, identity. The three nouns “race,” “ethnicity,” and “identity” name three concepts that overlap considerably; whose main difference in fact is not so much in meaning as in provenance—where they come from.
The word “race” comes from biology; the word “ethnicity” comes from sociology; the word “identity” comes from psychology. What they all have in common is the notion of an individual belonging to a group.
In the matter of race, most individuals actually do belong to an actual group that can be objectively defined.
Race is a feature of the natural world. Members of any sexually-reproducing species mate predominantly with nearby individuals. Thus, if the species is widely distributed, localized and mostly-inbred groups develop over time, isolated from other groups. Each group has a distinctive menu of genetic variations, shaped by founder effect, genetic drift, and natural selection. These localized varieties are races.
Ethnicity describes the social behavior of individuals who perceive themselves as belonging to a group.
Identity is the interior view of that: the group membership as felt and understood by an individual.
Ethnicity as perceived kinship. Ethnicity does not of course describe just any kind of group. Most of us belong to several groups. You may belong to a church, a basketball team, a bridge club, the Republican Party, and the Royal Antediluvian Order of Buffaloes. None of those is an ethny.
A good thumbnail definition of ethnicity is perceived kinship. The sociologist Pierre van den Berghe, in his 1981 book The Ethnic Phenomenon describes ethnic sentiments as, quote, “extended forms of nepotism—the propensity to favor kin over nonkin.”
That’s the “kinship” side of my thumbnail definition. The other side is the word “perceived.” People belong to an ethny when they believe they do. That’s why the word “ethny” belongs to sociology, not to biology. To quote Prof. van den Berghe again , quote:
Descent … is the central feature of ethnicity. Yet, it is clear that, in many cases, the common descent ascribed to an ethny is fictive. In fact, in most cases it is at least partly fictive.
Let me give an example. This is from a different author, also a professor, but this time of political science: Walker Connor. I’ve taken it from his 1993 book Ethnonationalism. He is speaking about the American Revolution and the Declaration of Independence. Quote:
The political elite of the period did not believe that they were leading an ethnically heterogeneous people. Despite the presence of settlers of Dutch, French, German, Irish, Scottish, and Welsh extraction—as well as the presence of native Americans and peoples from Africa (the latter accounted for one of every five persons at the time)—the prevalent elite-held and mass-held self-perception of the American people was that of an ethnically homogeneous people of English descent.
Connor proceeds to give many examples taken from the words of our Founders. The Declaration, for instance, speaks of “our British brethren,” and grumbles that: “They … have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity.”
The wealth of mankind. The United States is by no means alone in having had to invent a partly fictive ethnicity for itself. As nations go, in fact, this has been rather the rule than the exception. One of the leaders of the Risorgimento, the movement for Italian unity in the middle 19th century, famously said: “Having made Italy, we must now make Italians.”
Likewise, modern Greeks boast themselves the descendants—the kin—of Homer, Pericles, and Aristotle. In fact Greece was massively invaded by Slavs in the Middle Ages, and modern Greeks have a large Slavic component in their ancestry. If you point this out to a Greek patriot, he’ll sock you on the jaw.
220px-Britons_coverAnd come to think of it, you can even take that ethnic identifier “British” that I just quoted the authors of the Declaration having used. As Princeton historian Linda Colley showed in her 1992 book Britons, British ethnicity was rather new at the time of the Declaration, a product of the wars with France in the earlier 18th century.
To this day, it has not altogether “taken.” For the English and Scots, at least, the older national loyalties—which, after all, went back several centuries—persist. When making out envelopes for the Christmas cards I send home to relatives over there, under the name of the city I write ENGLAND. It would never occur to me to write BRITAIN; let alone THE UNITED KINGDOM, an even more recent creation.
(The lady who described the intimate side of her marriage as, “I close my eyes, open my legs, and think of England” may not actually have existed; but the legend would likely never have gained currency at all if she had been quoted as saying “… of Britain.”)
Citizens in many nations nurse these subnational loyalties—ethnicities. They don’t invalidate the concept of a nation-state, any more than the fictive element in ethnic loyalties invalidates the emotional power of the ethny.
A human society must be administered under agreed rules. Its members need a common language in which to discuss their affairs. Laws must be written and approved by agreed procedures. Armies must be raised for the common defense.
Localized populations have, over many generations, come to common understandings, different from one population to another, about these arrangements. Each population, by long fellowship, cherishes customary traditions and observances. These are our nations.
Attempts to manage these things on a supra-national scale have, in the modern age, always failed at last. We see the European Union failing before our eyes, right now. Before that we saw the Soviet Union fail.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who was a citizen of that latter supranational entity expressed a great truth. He expressed it in religious language, but the underlying fact about human sociality is independent of one’s spiritual outlook. Quote:
The disappearance of nations would impoverish us no less than if all peoples were made alike, with one character, one face. Nations are the wealth of mankind, they are its generalized personalities: the smallest of them has its own peculiar colors, and embodies a particular facet of God’s design.
Longing for meaningful community. Homo sapiens is a social animal. We long to bond with other people, at many levels. We enlist the emotions aroused by blood ties rather carelessly, sometimes unscrupulously, to aid that bonding.
I have mentioned Prof. Huntington’s book Who Are We? Here is a quote from that book.
People are not likely to find in political principles the deep emotional content and meaning provided by kith and kin, blood and belonging, culture and nationality. These attachments may have little or no basis in fact but they do satisfy a deep human longing for meaningful community.
Note please that second sentence: “These attachments may have little or no basis in fact.” We live by myths and fictions. I don’t say that flippantly: it is an important sociological truth.
It is also of course a psych-ological truth. If ethnicity generally has some fictive component, identity may be entirely fictive. The name Rachel Dolezal mean anything?
The present situation: shaping forces. So how is this all playing out in the 21st century?
Today’s world has been shaped by two big clusters of events in the last century.
The first cluster consists of the two world wars and the Cold War. At the heart of this cluster was a flow and a counter-flow of ideas about human society. The flow was Marxist-Leninist universalism, “the proletariat has no country.” The counter-flow was despotic ethnonationalism, most prominent in Italy, Japan, and Germany in the second quarter of the century.
That was the first cluster. The second cluster you could file under the heading “Rise of the Third World.”
There was a political rise across the third quarter of the century, as former colonial possessions became independent and took up self-government.
There was also a demographic rise, in many cases a very spectacular one. Here’s one of my favorite illustrations of that.
In 1922 the British Isles had a population of 47.31 million. The territory called British West Africa, for contrast, had a population of 22.48 million. So the British Isles had over twice the population of British West Africa 94 years ago.
Once again:
• In 1922, the British Isles had over twice the population of British West Africa.
• In 2016, British West Africa has over three times the population of the British Isles.
This happened very quickly as history goes. Ninety-four years ago, my father was a young adult, a war veteran and a failed businessman. If demography is destiny, the shape of our destiny has been changing very fast these past few decades.
Universalism, ethnonationalism. These two clusters I’ve identified—one, the world wars and Cold War; two, the rise of the Third World—worked together in complex ways.
What, for example, brought about the end of colonialism?
Well, in Japan’s case it was simply defeat in WW2. For the European powers, it was in part a response to the Cold War.
Later Marxist-Leninism appealed directly to the colonized peoples. In many cases—Vietnam, for example, and the Portuguese colonies in Africa—it armed their insurgent groups.
There was a feeling on our side of the Cold War that we needed a universalist appeal of our own.
The phrase “of our own” needs some qualifying. Much of the Western intelligentsia was sympathetic to Marxist-Leninism, so the universalism came naturally to them. “The intelligentsia has no country!” … as it were.
Universalism was widespread beyond the intelligentsia, though. Seek out old copies of Reader’s Digest from around 1960. Yearning for the Brotherhood of Man long predated the arrivals of Marx and Lenin.
There is a pleasant symmetry here. If anti-national universalism found a ready market in the West, ethnonationalism had plenty of customers on the other side. The official Soviet name for WW2 was “the Great Patriotic War (Велика Отечественная Война).”
In Asia, where ethnonationalism is stronger, the Communists were even more frank. Mao Tse-tung referred to the Chinese Communist Party not as the Vanguard of the Proletariat but as, quote, “the vanguard of the Chinese nation and the Chinese people.” Ho Chi Minh argued against the division of Vietnam thus, quote: “We have the same ancestors, we are of the same family.” The press in communist North Korea frequently scolds South Korea for allowing mixed marriages, which, say the Norks, dilute the purity of the Korean race.
Note how, in all these ethnic appeals, the speakers harness those human emotions related to kinship. “We are brothers and sisters,” they say. “This is our fatherland [or motherland; or in Chinese, ancestor-land (祖國).]”
Hitler’s revenge. These paradoxes aside, the despotic ethnonationalism of the Axis powers in WW2 was widely understood, at any rate by governing and academic elites in the postwar West, to have delegitimized ethnonationalism altogether.
The logical fallacy is plain:
• Since despotic ethnonationalism generated such cruelty and destruction, ethnonationalism is an evil force.
The second thing does not follow from the first. Absolute monarchy has a fairly long rap sheet, but that is not an argument against monarchy. Constitutional Monarchy has proved one of the more benign forms of government.
Logic is not a major determinant in human affairs, though, nor even much in evidence. Those generalized, partly fictionalized emotions of ethnic kinship that had been normal and socially healthful components of national identity before fascism came up, were now seen as shameful, the very concept of the nation-state as illegitimate.
My colleague Editor Peter Brimelow calls this “Hitler’s revenge.”
Universalism in America: Civil Rights. Universalism as thus shaped by the world wars and Cold War was at work in the two great revolutionary upheavals of the U.S.A. in the 1960s: the Civil Rights movement and the 1965 Immigration Act. Both arose during the deepest depths of the Cold War. That is not a coincidence.
The Civil Rights movement was of course much more than a Cold War phenomenon, but the Cold War was a factor.
For example: In the later Soviet Union there was a strain of cynical underground humor aimed against the system. Its productions were known as “Radio Armenia jokes.” Here is a Radio Armenia joke I recall from my college days in the early 1960s:
Question from a listener to Radio Armenia: “Tell, me, Comrades, is it true that an engineer in America earns four times as much as one in the U.S.S.R.?”
Radio Armenia’s reply: “In America they lynch Negroes!”
Part of the desire among white Americans to get right with blacks came from awareness of being the target of that sort of critique: not only from the Soviets, but also from Europeans.
American elites have always been susceptible to the “cultural cringe” vis-à-vis Europeans; and midcentury Europeans, as soon as they had shaken off the dust of their colonies—in some cases, before—were striking poses of lofty moral superiority to the gap-toothed hillbillies of North America.
Universalism in America: Immigration. Similarly with the 1965 Immigration Act.
After some order had been brought to the U.S. immigration system in the early 1920s, permanent settlement was granted in limited numbers and based on national origin, with preference for settlers from north and west Europe.
This was grounded in a common-sense approach to ethnonationalism. If subnational ethnies became too numerous and strong, it was believed, the core of American nationhood, what Prof. Huntington called our “Anglo-Protestant culture,” would be threatened. This belief was perfectly rational.
By the early 1960s, however, with universalism in the ascendant, selection of immigrants by national origin was being seen, at any rate by key sections in our elites, as shamefully racist, a sort of border-guard Jim Crow. The 1965 Act was a response to this perception.
There has been much discussion about the motives of those who gave us the Immigration Act. Edward Kennedy, the floor manager for the Act in the Senate, famously promised that:
In fact, levels of legal immigration have been over a million a year since 1989; and the ethnic mix of 1960—89 percent white, ten percent black, one percent other—is a fading memory.
What accounts for the huge discrepancy between declared intent and actual consequences of the 1965 Act? Malicious dishonesty, or blank stupidity?
There are cogent arguments on both sides. I am personally inclined to the view stated by Prof. Huntington, that there was a deliberate intent on the part of our elites to move the governance of our country from a national to an imperial model.
Let me quote the relevant passage from Prof. Huntington’s book. It is rather long, I’m afraid, but I believe it strikes to the heart of the matter. Quote:
In the past, imperial and colonial governments provided resources to minority groups and encouraged people to identify with them, so as to enhance the government’s ability to divide and rule. The governments of nation-states, in contrast, attempted to promote the unity of their people, the development of national consciousness, the suppression of subnational regional and ethnic loyalties, the universal use of the national language, and the allocation of benefits to those who conform to the national norm. Until the late twentieth century, American political and governmental leaders acted similarly. Then in the 1960s and 1970s they began to promote measures consciously designed to weaken America’s cultural and creedal identity and to strengthen racial, ethnic, cultural, and other subnational identities. These efforts by a nation’s leaders to deconstruct the nation they governed were, quite possibly, without precedent in human history.
I should say there is also a line of thought that applies a Marxist analysis to these changes. In the Western world these post-WW2 decades saw the opening of a great new age of consumerism. Business was humming; and whole new types of business came up, especially in the services sector, that were outside the entrenched protections of labor union power.
Why not bring in willing workers from abroad who would accept lower wages than natives? Sure, they would incur social costs—housing, roads, energy, schooling, policing, healthcare, native unemployment—but government expenditures could take care of that. Privatize profits, socialize costs!
You can see the appeal to Capital. A school of economists came up to assure us that, yes, mass immigration would make us all richer.
Curiously, the fastest-developing nations of that era were the “tigers” of East Asia: Japan, South Korea, Taiwan. These nations held firm to their ethnic nationalism and shunned mass immigration; but they got rich anyway.
Nowadays of course they are having their comeuppance. Japanese people today are huddled under threadbare blankets as icy winds blow through their disintegrating houses. They subsist on tree bark, insects, and the flesh of their family pets. So, at any rate, I am given to understand by economists.
Universalism triumphant. By the late 1980s, antinational universalism was triumphant in the West. Immigrants from all over the world were pouring into our countries: not just the U.S.A. but Britain, France, Germany, Australia, …
One of the crowning achievements of this peak universalism was the European Union. A Marxist analysis can be applied here, too; but there is no doubt that the EU came up at least in part as a reaction against the despotic ethnonationalism that had brought such horrors to the continent in the 1940s.
Away with all ethnonationalism, then! There will be no more Spaniards and Dutchmen and Frenchmen and such men, only Europeans!
So barriers came down all over Europe. The Third World poured into the First World.
Then two things happened: one suddenly, one gradually.
Nations make a comeback. The first thing that happened was the end of the Cold War in 1991.
I assume I am speaking to an audience of Millennials here, persons with no direct recollection of the Cold War. To you people—and I don’t mean to be patronizing, I’m sure some of you know about this: but it can’t be said often enough—to you people, just let me say: the Cold War was a very big deal.
Here’s one data point at random. Time: about fifteen years ago, before 9/11. Place: the Manhattan town house of a very senior figure, an elder statesman, in the American conservative movement. Dramatis personæ: ten or a dozen conservative writers and policy intellectuals ranging in age from the thirties to the seventies, seated around the elder statesman’s dinner table.
We were discussing the state of the world. The discussion lapsed for a minute or two. Then one of the older persons present said, with what I recall as a perfectly genuine-sounding sigh of nostalgia: “How I miss the Cold War!”
Two or three others of the same generation murmured agreement. “Oh, yes!” One of the younger members of the company laughed, a bit nervously—the way you laugh when you’re not sure if you should laugh. The others just looked baffled.
Well, the Cold War ended, and policy intellectuals bent their attention to prognostications about the shape of things to come. What would the post-Cold War world look like?
endhistory Think-tanker Francis Fukuyama was first off the starting blocks. In fact he jumped the gun: his landmark essay “The End of History” was published in 1989, when the Soviet Union was still intact, though plainly tottering. Fukuyama foresaw a world in which Western-style liberal democracy would triumph everywhere.
It quickly became apparent that in defiance of Dr Fukuyama, History intended to go on for a while longer. The first Gulf War and more especially the violent break-up of what had once been Yugoslavia showed that ethnonational passions had by no means been extinguished by decades of Marxist-Leninist universalism.
The liberation of Eastern Europe likewise. Here is a story I heard from one of the participants.
After the Soviet troops withdrew from Hungary following the end of the Cold War, there was a political faction in the new Hungarian government clamoring for war against Romania. The Treaty of Trianon in 1920 had stripped Hungary of much of its territory, for example giving Transylvania to Romania, and Hungarian patriots had been seething about it ever since. (Some of them still are.) “Here’s our chance to get back Transylvania!” they clamored.
The U.S. ambassador had to talk them down off the ledge. If Hungary attacked Romania, he told them, they could kiss goodbye their chances of joining the EU. The Hungarians very much wanted to join the EU for economic reasons, so they came off the ledge.
That was Europe after the Cold War.
I should add, by the way, that the years after the Cold War ended were a Golden Age of geopolitical speculation. Francis Fukuyama kicked it off, but many fine minds followed. Prof. Huntington was one of them: his 1993 essay, later a book,The Clash of Civilizations is still well worth reading. So is Benjamin Schwarz’s 1995 essay The Diversity Myth in the May 1995 issue of The Atlantic, which ties together American and European developments. So are many others: it was, as I said, a Golden Age for geopolitical policy eggheads.
The resurgence of ethnonationalism was in any case too obvious to ignore. Francis Fukuyama’s End of History thesis became what Wall Street calls a distressed security. One wag, I forget who, proclaimed “the end of the End of History.”
The collapse of universalism. I said that two things happened at the end of the twentieth century: one suddenly, one gradually. The end of the Cold War was the sudden event. The gradual one—it is in fact still under way—was the collapse of universalism.
Let’s just go back to the 1950s and 1960s, when the old colonial empires of Europe and Japan had fallen or were in process of being dismantled. What had once been colonies were emerging as independent nations under self-government. What were the expectations for these new nations?
Again, you have to see this situation in the context of the Cold War, with much jostling for favors, East versus West. Overall, though, for persons of a universalist mindset, there were good reasons to hope.
These ex-colonies had experienced First World-grade government. They’d seen how it was done. Many of their elites had studied in Western universities.
Human beings are a very imitative species. Since human beings everywhere have common hopes, desires, and abilities, why should not Africa, Asia, Oceania, the Caribbean, and the Middle East have nifty little parliamentary democracies up and running in no time?
A few of them did. A few more, especially in Asia, slipped into autocracy then came out at the other end after a decade or three into properly constitutional government.
Others, especially in Africa and the Islamic world, fell under the control of gangster-despots. Still others got some semblance of rational government, but were plagued by corruption, crime, poor human capital, and demographic pressure.
The result in these latter cases—Africa and Islamia—has been despair.
A young Third Worlder of fifty years ago—a citizen of newly- or recently-independent Nigeria, Pakistan, or Algeria, for example—could reasonably hope that his nation would develop into a comfortable welfare democracy like those of the First World; that his children and grandchildren, and he himself in his old age, could live in security and prosperity, as Australians and Japanese and Norwegians do.
Young Nigerians, Pakistanis, and Algerians no longer think like that. The hope proved an illusion. All over the Third World today, young people understand that their only hope for a decent, secure life is to get themselves into a First World country by any means possible.
Revealed preference. Fortifying the pull of First World living standards is technology: the comparative ease of modern travel, and the worldwide communications revolution, bringing pictures of those living standards into Third World hovels.
Another pull factor is what systems analysts call “the installed base”: communities of one’s fellow nationals or ethnics already settled in the First World by half a century of generous immigration policies.
And then there’s the push factor of demography. To repeat my earlier illustration:
Hundreds of millions of Third Worlders see no hope in their own countries. This is why you see boatloads of them crossing the Mediterranean, scaling the border fences of Spain’s African territories, crowding into the “Jungle” camp at Calais.
I’m sorry to say that when I see pictures of those boatloads, the phrase that comes into my mind is one from economics: “revealed preference.” The idea here is that if you want to know what people truly desire and believe, watching what they do is a much surer guide than listening to what they say.
The revealed preference of those boat people is to live in a First World country. Their hope—an entirely reasonable one—is to improve their lives thereby.
The fear of many First Worlders is that the boat people, if they settle in sufficient numbers, will reduce the host nations, or significant enclaves within them, to the wretched condition of the nations they’re fleeing. This fear is also entirely reasonable.
Despair, American-style. As in the world at large, so within the U.S.A. Fifty years ago—I was there, I was active, I remember it—it was assumed by almost everyone that with legalized segregation struck down, black Americans would soon rise and merge into the uniform American population as most other ethnies had done, and race would no longer be a significant social issue.
That hasn’t happened. Smart, capable, and well-socialized blacks—the “talented tenth”—have indeed merged as promised, but a huge black underclass remains, exhibiting spectacular levels of crime and social dysfunction. The underclass is proportionally much larger, and the social pathologies more intense, than is the case with any other race.
Revealed preference is in play here, too. Fifty years ago there was a faction among black Civil Rights activists who argued that blacks could never be happy or fulfilled in white society. Stokely Carmichael settled in Guinea; Maya Angelou lived in Ghana for a while.
You never see that now. Can you imagine Al Sharpton going to live in Guinea, or Ghana, or Haiti? What would he do there? To be sure, Ta-Nehisi Coates, the current darling of gentry white liberals, has left America. He has gone to live in … France.
Sharpton or Coates would starve to death in a black society. They are, in the plain ecological sense, parasites on their non-black fellow citizens.
The revealed preference of blacks everywhere today is to live in white societies, an implicit admission that they can’t create pleasant societies of their own and are dependent on other races for a decent living standard.
The orthodox explanation for black failure, at both the national and subnational level, is that it is the fault of whites. The peculiar success of East Asians at both these levels, in spite of past white colonialism and discrimination, suggests that this orthodox explanation may need work.
Looking forward. How may we expect nationality, race, and ethnicity to play out in years to come?
One thing we may reasonably expect is better understanding. A human society is the vector sum of many human personalities, past and present. Everything that we can quantify about the human personality—intelligence, extraversion, neuroticism, aggressiveness, and so on—is heritable to some degree, typically at around the fifty percent level.
This suggests that the human personality, and the societies it forms, are shaped to some degree by human genetics, the only known mechanism of heredity. It would therefore not be very surprising to learn that the different menus of genetic variation that characterize different races might tend to result in different societies.
At present we can’t do much more than speculate about these matters, but the fog is clearing fast. Almost every week I read something new out of the human sciences bearing on these topics. As one of Shakespeare’s characters says: The future comes apace. Or as Charles Murray likes to say: There’s a locomotive coming down the tracks.
Supposing this is right, how will this technology be made available? Who will be the decision-makers? Individual citizens, exercising their own volition under constitutionally-protected liberties? Or overbearing governments with grand plans of social engineering?
That will depend on which nation, which one of Solzhenitsyn’s “generalized personalities,” you find yourself living in.
Thank you, ladies and gentlemen.
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} | 856 | We need to reinvent Western identities
These are very interesting comments. I think many societies decline because of a loss of identity. Or they have conflicting identities, which in England may be traced back to the Norman invasion as you suggest.
In South Africa, we have always had a conflict between the indigenous white or Afrikaner identity and the colonial British one. When there was a referendum on becoming a Republic in 1960, the white electorate voted narrowly in favour. Natal province, although politically conservative, voted 76% against the Republic as they wanted to remain under the British queen as titular head of state.
Eventually the vast majority of whites had a strong South African identity. But a small, liberal/leftist minority identified more with Britain and especially the values of the British Labour Party. This was true of the academics and the journalists who were all trained at the universities. Despite being a minority, they had powerful institutions on their side, such as the English-language press and the four very liberal universities: Wits, Cape Town, Rhodes and Natal. The British churches too, were on their side, such as the Anglicans and the Methodists; in South Africa they more or less espoused the Marxist so-called “theology of liberation”.
Finance came from abroad: from Britain, Sweden and Norway. Together with the intense propaganda campaign orchestrated in the world media in the 1980s and betrayed by FW de Klerk who tricked them into thinking he would make only certain concessions but not surrender completely, the SA whites finally capitulated.
What those European patriotic parties have in their favour, is that they are drawing on the strong national identity of some European nations. Those identities have not yet been divided although the multiculturalists are trying their best by referring to Muslims and Africans as “New Swedes”, “New Germans”, etc.
Jared Taylor in his book on “White Identity” also makes the point that whites in the USA will have to adopt a strong identity, just like the other races of blacks, Hispanics and Asians. But together with such a racial identity, I think white Americans must also celebrate their cultural and historical heritage.
One of the lessons of history is that a people without an identity will not resist. That is also why liberals and socialists fear nationalism. The former French Socialist president, François Mitterand, said: “Le nationalisme, c’est la guerre”, or nationalism is war or means war. That is not true, but without some form of patriotic feeling people will not resist oppression, invasion or dispossession by others.
A line must be drawn between Americans and the hyphenated pseudo-Americans. By calling themselves “African Americans”, blacks are actually doing you a favour. They have no idea what “African” actually means but they must be encouraged in pursuing a distinct identity to yours.
A lot of people here refer to the West and Western culture that is decidedly under threat. Pat Buchanan, Samuel Huntington and others have written about that. So have Pim Fortuyn and Martin Bosma of the Dutch Freedom Party and other European authors.
I think we must work on a renewal of our Western/European identity as a kind of “metadiscourse” uniting us all, but then also focus on what makes us local, tribal, members of families and geographical groups. The states in America have wonderful histories that are still recollected, but could be embraced even more, like Europeans also rediscover their ancient roots in the pricipalities, duchies, and so on.
The pressure is on all of us to reinvent ourselves, while reaffirming our roots and ancient heritage.
One thought on “We need to reinvent Western identities
1. Jacob Mouw
Western writes will have to write top selling populist stories like Da Vinci Code – or unlike DVC if one were to take religion and American catholics in consideration, in order to influence mass identity.
Currently a very hot topic in the economic-oriented USA is the rise of China. The SA – Angola – Cuban war story is relevant, as it determinded who would become the next superpower, either Afrikaner-Southern-Africa, or Communist China.
Written as such, such a little e-book in English could become popular, as it relates directly to the perceived existing economic threat to the USA from autocratic China, which become a superpower thanks to the SA-Angolan-Cuban war, which outcome simultaneously led to the demise of the nuclear United States of Southern Africa under Afrikaner autocracy.
Thus pointing to the o so obvious mode of future survival of Westerners in the USA, namely autocracy. Lekker controvercial but obviously true to make it sell.
Somebody has got to do it, and I will eventually if now one else does.
The Western USA now needs a type of white Putin, and not a Democrat.
We Dan, can stir an evolution in the USA – they won’t and can’t do it themselves, because those good people have no deep culture and do not know what an opposing state or culture is.
I think we can do it without mentioning the name of an American who lost his life in this political game of life and death, which we so enjoy.
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Fjordman: Review of Christopher Caldwell’s “Reflections on the Revolution in Europe”
Fjordman’s latest essay, a review of Christopher Caldwell’s Reflections on the Revolution in Europe, has been published at Jihad Watch. Some excerpts are below:
This is a review of Christopher Caldwell’s 2009 book Reflections on the Revolution in Europe. Let me first start with the positive: Mr. Caldwell is not a bad man. He sees through the rhetoric of Tariq Ramadan, for instance, which makes him superior to the majority of Western journalists, although that is admittedly not difficult to achieve given the terrible quality of Western media these days. The problem is that the ground he covers in his book has already been covered by others, for example Daniel Pipes in his posts or Bruce Bawer in While Europe Slept. This is, in other words, not a pioneering work, and while Caldwell may be better than the bulk of journalists on some issues he is nevertheless not good enough.
Although he does indicate that importing Muslims from, say, Somalia or the Yemen may not work out like previous waves of immigration he doesn’t say anything substantial about whether North Americans or Europeans should therefore halt Muslim immigration. As Claire Berlinski wrote in a review, “Caldwell’s book raises many such questions. It does not answer them. The strength of this book is not in its original reporting, of which there is little, or the solutions it offers, because there are none. What it offers instead is unusual lucidity and comprehensiveness; a reader unfamiliar with the debate would be, upon finishing it, well-informed.”
On the other hand, for a reader who is already familiar with these subjects he adds little that is new. Even when he briefly touches upon important subjects he soon moves on to others, leaving an informed reader feeling unsatisfied. Christopher Caldwell points out that the European Union was created in Western Europe under an American political umbrella during the Cold War and that “The EU, although neither Americans nor Europeans are fond of admitting it, is the institutional expression of the Americanization of Europe.” That could have made for an interesting discussion, yet he does not cover the subject in sufficient detail.
- - - - - - - - -
He also asks “whether you can have the same Europe with different people. The answer is no.” But again, he quickly moves on to other topics. In my view, the question is whether you can have the same of any culture with totally different peoples, and the likely answer to that is no. Nobody in their right mind would ever claim that you could exchange the entire population of South Korea with Somalis and that this would be OK as long as the Somalis “preserved Korean culture,” as if they could or would do so. Yet this totally absurd claim is exactly what the media keep repeating when it comes to Iraqis in Sweden, Pakistanis in Britain, Turks in Germany and other immigrant groups in white majority Western nations.
Caldwell states in his book that “Being tough on Muslim foreigners and nice to Muslim citizens will comfort Europeans only to the extent that they maintain the idea that immigration is something temporary and reversible. It no longer is. Europeans can only hope that newcomers, especially Muslim newcomers, will assimilate peaceably.”
Read the rest at Jihad Watch.
Michael Servetus said...
It is inexplicable why a nation, race, civilization of people would allow themselves to be overun and overcome if they could easily prevent it, unless have something planned by which they see themselves as being untouched by any negative consequence of this action. Yet I don't see how that could workout for the long term.
These people don't love their own people or culture and this is unnatural, it is counter to evolutionary ideas of struggle, it is suicidal, a death wish. It that case we would have to say something very dangerous has infected these people's minds that could bring all down with them.
What animal in the Darwinian scheme of things would bring in or allow in other animals to take over and not defend against such things, bring in other animal that are stronger,tougher,fiercer,bigger and predatory-- while training its own kids to be weak, effeminate, gay, scared, wimpy, intimidated in mind and body.
Free Hal said...
I agree with Fjordman on Christopher Caldwell’s “Reflections on the Revolution in Europe”: Caldwell doesn't mention Eurabia by name or by substance; he poses abstract questions like "whether you can have the same Europe with different people", answers "No", but fails to spell out what this means or to hint that there might be a solution; he says that “Europeans can only hope that newcomers, especially Muslim newcomers, will assimilate peaceably", but doesn't say what the chances of this are or what to do if they can't.
Caldwell's book is another that leads you through the issues, but little more.
This isn't a question of intellect, but courage. There are 3 levels of courage that a Euro-Islam writer needs in order to be any good:
1. Admit the problem, and that there’s anything serious about it. Most writers won’t, dominated by the liberal-left establishment and paymasters (Karen Armstrong, Timothy Garton Ash). Such writers are part of the problem and not worth reading.
2. Face up to the implications of the problem. E.g. what happens if European muslim population growth continues for another 20, 20, 40 years? Or if Sharia districts ("communities") continue to grow and harden? Most writers, including Caldwell, but also Walter Laqueur, Melanie Phillips, Douglas Murray, or Bruce Thornton, don't face up to this. You can't avoid the impression that they instinctively understand what the implications are but fight shy of spelling them out. Maybe it is their publishers who are fighting shy. The notable exceptions are the "alarmists" Mark Steyn and Fjordman.
3. Put forward a realistic solution. Writers who fail on 1 and 2 above drivel tediously about "tone", "firmness" and "confidence in our institutions". But so far, I have seen no-one face up to a realistic solution (apart possibly from El-Ingles, although I personally disagree with his). Mark Steyn outlines an inexorable demographic effect, and then fails to suggest a solution to it in America Alone. Pusillanimous publishers again? Or maybe he thinks Europe's a done Turkey so let's get on with it, but at other times he says that Europe's survival is essential to America's. So I think he believes the options are too horrible to advocate any of them. But even Fjordman, who appears to suffer no publisher restrictions, fails to put forward a specific solution. Apart from, possibly, formalised separation until a solution is agreed on. For example his essay "Surviving the Coming Crash" was heavy on the trends he has already described so well, but thin on advice for surviving, let alone any way to reverse the trends.
I don’t blame Fjordman and other writers for their reticence: any possible solution is almost certain to be unthinkable to most people, and will only reap more vilification.
But this is very worrying, especially if, as Wilders says, we are at five-to-midnight. It is one more indication that the situation is beyond saving, and that we have to find ways to rebuild rather than rescue.
Best wishes,
Sean O'Brian said...
This is an essential point and it is important to understand how this Americanisation of Europe impacts specifically on the Islamisation issue.
For instance when American conservatives, in discussing responses to Islamisation, hint or say outright that contemporary Europeans are naturally Nazi-like (Ralph Peters of the New York Post is the chief exponent of this view) as sometimes happens in discussions, whom do they resemble? The Dutch government, of course.
On this core issue, large chunks of mainstream American conservatism are nigh indistinguishable from European leftism. That is because they are both expressions of the same political culture--Americanism (for lack of a better word). This is why, in Europe, if you move "barely a centimeter to the right" (in the words of Chechar), you fall out of the boat completely.
Also, because the political culture in America began as a repudiation of European systems (and that repudiation has increased over time as the de-Europeanisation of America through non-white immigration has forced conservatives to rely on Constitutional nominalism as a substitution for the historic America) its grafting onto Europe has had a corrosive effect on the old continent.
One positive effect of the Caldwell book may be to confer some respectability on immigration restrictionist movements, although that is small beer at this stage.
Anonymous said...
The political culture that is ruling America isn't really homegrown, but the American conservatives aren't really conservative. As I wrote on my blog, you can't describe WSJ's deWinter as a conservative writer, despite the fact that the WSJ poses as a conservative publication. Both conservatives and liberals accept the idea that discrimination is the biggest sin and that we are all equal. By accepting these two ideas, you can't find a solution to any of our current problems. The only solution can come out from repudiating both of these ideas. A century ago, it would have been unthinkable that we will accept this sort of immigration. Now it is unthinkable that we will repudiate the ruling paradigm I described before, which prevents us from acting. We must make the unthinkable, thinkable, the impossible, possible. What was impossible merely fifty years ago, it's unquestionable today and we must make what is impossible today, the unquestionable of tomorrow.
As long as we don't do above, there is no solution besides accepting the ultimatum and surrendering to Islam. But if we do, we will be able to reverse all the damaging effects did by our immigration policies in the last 50 years and reverse the effects that they created. I'm unsure if others think along the same lines, but there aren't solutions, there is only one solution - physical separation from the Muslim and non-European world. So there is only one solution - reversing the immigration and sending our immigrants home. Sadly, I don't believe that this will be done or thought about, until the first country will desintegrate due to the effects created by immigration. If that country will be France, Britain or other European country is yet to be seen.
And yes, we will have to rebuild, not rescue. The whole system is based on a false set of assumptions and it needs to collapse in order to build a new one. So the financial crisis is more than welcome in this regard.
You might say that my views, that sending the immigrants home(including their children) is unacceptable. To me, being body scanned because of them is unacceptable. It's unacceptable to me, who I have European descent and whose ancestors fought to preserve this land as it is, to fear being robbed, raped or murdered by an immigrant. It's unacceptable to pay taxes so that these people get handouts so that they reproduce, while I'm worked to death to afford giving a proper life to a single child. It is unacceptable to see my people and culture be gutted by immigrants and self-serving leftist politicians. And as more people will find these unacceptable, the more people will find my solution acceptable.
EscapeVelocity said...
American Conservativism is different from European Conservatism in that it isnt a communitarian proposition based on an ethnicity or a shared cultural expression. As the nation states of Europe are largely formed out of a common peoples, with a common culture.
This is why the European right is inherently "Nazi-like" in that they are Nationalists, but also collectivists, communitarians, socialists.
What it means to be an American is much different than what it means to be a Dane or Swedish.
This is why the European countries, freshly ethnically cleansed to a great degree post WW2 moved to a more collectivist/socialist government form. French National Socialism as a prime example, or Norweigan/Swedish. The homogeneity of the Scandanavian countries in particular were well served by a large welfare statist model, because everyone was part of the same culture and thus extended family. People that sought to abuse the Welfare State could be pressured informally from within their community to conform to standards of behavior. However when you bring in other groups/cultures who wish to game the system, then you no longer have the informal authority to pressure them into conforming to social norms, lest you be a racist imperialist xenophobe.
That means that the system has to change to be less welfare statist and more an American style system, so that economics and well being enforces social norms via self assimilation. (This has diminished in the US post 60s New Leftism.) In order to prosper, you didnt act like an arse at work, lest your find yourself out of work as a malcontent and disturber of the peace, having negative consequences on production/business.
If you wish to keep your massive welfare states then you must remain homogenous. However the massive welfare state (along with the decline in God belief), produced a decline in feritility rates, and thus the welfare state becomes unsustainable...which is compensated for by increased immigration.
Choices have to be made.
However Islam is a espeically troubling problem, on top of all of this. Its a supremacist and hostile ideology, who seeks to impose its culture upon others, via in institution of Sharish Law.
What a tangled web we weave.
I think that blaming America is not productive at all.
The American way is a way forward, however in Europeans hearts they may long for the simpler days of more homogenaic societies.
However, it must be said that Europe long lectured the US as racists and ill treaters of minorities. This moral snobbery and naivete has led them to their own folly. That isnt America's fault.
We both suffer from the Western Left. Blaming America is not helpful.
Hope that makes sense...
EscapeVelocity said...
Youve missed some nuance there.
One being with respect to the government and law treating its citizens. And the other with respect to immigration.
It is the Left which has promoted the idea that we be indiscriminate in who we let immigrate to our country. Or in otherwords to oppose open borders is to be a racist. It was Leftists who pushed the idea of changing immigration law in the 60s to promote immigration from third world countries.
So it isnt the ideal that government treat it citizens equally with regards to the law, and promotion of equal opportunity economically that is the problem. The problem stems from the promotion of indiscriminate AND mass immigration, and equality of opportunity, combined with the welfare state.....then to top it off promotion of multiculturalism (which is really not as it claims but celebration of other cultures to the exclusion of the the majority culture). These combine to create colonization, not immigration of those who wish to and will be forced economically to assimilate to the majority culture.
Try for a little more nuance....instead of going for the sledge hammer.
EscapeVelocity said...
Our culture wars center around Christian ethics, morality, and traditions. And not on ethnicity. And we are notorious for our cultural battles with the Left.
Unfortunately much of Europe has lost their strong Christian heritage, from which to defend their culture, and all they are left with is Ethnicity and Race to rally around, which is a much much weaker position....and sets you up for the Neo Nazi charge.
But you are correct that American Conservatives are Leftists, Protestant Christians and Classical Liberals. They just arent Marxist derived Leftists. American Conservatives arent Rightwing nuts. They are Leftwing radicals. Protestant Christian, Libertarians, Classical Liberals.
However they are Conservative in the sense that they defend the systems that they set up, which are under attack by the Marxist Left.
They are the very essence of Burkean Conservatives.
Anonymous said...
Escape Velocity, you are wrong about American conservatism. You should read what the founding fathers wrote about who the American people are and what America was until after WW2 or so. The US, just like Europe, was never intended to be a country based on an idea where people whoever they are can move if they adhere to a certain set of ideas.
And the welfare state didn't favour the Scandinavian countries, it undermined them, like it does everywhere. Sure, it is a lot easier to implement where there are homogenous societies because there is no perceived out group leeching, but that doesn't mean that it helps that society.
A nation that doesn't discriminate and forces people to conform to social norms doesn't exist. Liberals actually have it right here - there's no such thing as Swedish, European or whatever people if that people can't discriminate against outsiders.
Also, you are wrong to think that the welfare state is helped by immigration. There was a study that immigrants take more in welfare than pay in taxes, which shows that they actually undermine the system.
Europeans lectured Americans on their treatment of minorities because the European political groups are the same as the liberal political group in the US. Same founding principles to which conservatives later adhered to.
You fail to understand that the idea that it is racist to discriminate against types of immigrants stems from the same idea and it is congruent to the idea that discrimination is bad and that forced integration is good. The 1965 Immigration Act was the natural continuation of the 1964 Civil Rights Act(which by the way, is unconstitutional, like most of the things passed under the interstate commerce clause of the US Constitution).
Obviously the government should treat its citizens equally in regards to the law. That's the whole point of law. lol. But the government has no business in promoting equal opportunity in the sense of forcing business to employ certain people or to do business with certain people. That's the same principle that leads to the rationale behind indiscriminate immigration and it's actually a normal progression from it.
You also have to realize that discrimination is what leads to people having an incentive to assimilate to the majority culture. And you have a sort of naive way of looking at culture - the culture isn't built around an ethnicity because it is the manifestation of that ethnicity.
My point was that American conservatives aren't conservatives. They're conservatives in name only and they accept the founding principles of social liberalism and cultural Marxism. This is why they don't really seem to have a problem with what the leftists did in the 1960s. Also, classical liberalism(which is basically libertarianism) has nothing to do with liberalism or leftism. They also don't defend the system that they set up, I don't see them wanting to repeal all the legislation that is unconstitutional and so many things that would actually be conservative.
Formerly Arch said...
Actually the welfare state worked quite well in Sweden for quite a long time because it was essentially a mass mobilisation from an agrarian society to an industrial one. Statism of that sort should be seen in terms of very temporary "war-footing" style economics. Useful if you want to enact a big change...
And it continued to work passably well as long as Sweden maintained her borders and as long as there was a generation around that still remembered the tie to the land.
You see welfare statism is an ideology, when it comes down to it. Theonly way to maintain a pure ideology is to prevent it from being influenced by the outside world, whether it's social statism or libertarianism - if you allow people in who don't believe in your chosen ideology they will undermine it by their presence. Obviously it's not a universal rule. Statism can only ever be a temporary state by its nature, whereas a libertarian society operating within a strongly defended border or an impenetrable natural border can survive indefinitely.
Anyway, that's by the by...
You're mixing up equality of opportunity with equality of outcome. Equality of opportunity simply doesn't require government intervention. It doesn't require the government to mandate that people not be allowed to choose who they employ - or who they work for. All of those things are promoted by the idea of equality of outcome. Opportunity exists for those that seek it and we all have that opportunity, so long as we are all given the same rights and treatment before the law.
Anonymous said...
Graham, I'm not mixing the two. EV did because he said the government should seek to promote equal opportunity, so I chose his definition of it.
Sweden would have been better off without it. I'm really too lazy to debate economics right now. The welfare state is actually an even bigger problem when you try to industrialize a country, which requires capital accumulation. But as I said, this conversation will be had another time.
Sean O'Brian said...
I think Leon de Winter is Dutch but that only underscores the original point. A Dutch establishment voice can ghost for the American conservative POV. In any case the WSJ is now owned by NewsCorp which means Prince Alwaled bin Talal has a finger in the pie. The Saudi influence on the WSJ is less subtle than it is Fox News, though the former was always an open borders advocate.
Both [American] conservatives and liberals accept the idea that discrimination is the biggest sin and that we are all equal.
Right, just like in the Dutch Constitution: "All persons in the Netherlands shall be treated equally in equal circumstances. Discrimination on the grounds of religion, belief, political opinion, race or sex or on other grounds whatsoever shall not be permitted."
The BNP and Le Pen's crowd aqrguably fit this description. But others like UKIP, VB, PVV do not. The latter are nationalist-libertarian - not nationalist-socialist - parties. They would be broadly in tune with the non-liberal wing of the GOP.
However Peters et al. are not simply making this fine distinction, they're saying that the European mob are salivating to murder innocents. What American leftists think of all white people, American conservatives (of the Peters variety) think of all white people bar themselves. The latter view is simply leftism with an exemption made for one sub-group of whites. It is leftism -1.
George W. Bush and John McCain have called their own supporters racist for being immigration restrictionists on several occasions. If you've voted for either of them then you've affirmed that worldview. On the single issue of mass/illegal/Muslim immigration a large chunk of the GOP (the top cats) are an open-borders, 'anti-racist' crowd. Which is no different from European leftism, by which I include Menshevik 'conservative' parties like the English Tories.
Anyway this idea only came to Europe from America in the 1960's, in the wake of the US Civil Rights movement. I agree this false belief that the White American majority were to blame for the shortcoming of minorities contributed to the folly of Europeans allowing immigration--but this folly has an origin (where it is still the dominant belief).
The Tower of Babel was a way forward and look what happened to that!
EscapeVelocity said...
There is much support in the US among conservatives for the PPV and UKIP. I wish them both great success and hope they become the dominant party in their prospective countries.
I even hope that some of the other so called far Right, Nationalist parties increase their representation to force the center Right to grow some balls.
EscapeVelocity said...
Boy are you ill informed.
Anonymous said...
EV, look at the GOP and tell me the differences in between them and liberals, except abortion. They're both state interventionsts in the economy, pro immigration, they don't think a certain group of people is the people that founded America and see the US as a proposition nation. They're both politically correct and operate under the narratives imposed by PC. Hell, look at Palin and her support for Title IX or her belief that the state should help children with problem, which are liberal, not conservative beliefs and both the GOP to an extent and the tea party movement embraced her. They just repeat the old cliches, but look at what they're actually saying and what they're doing. Where are the conservatives who support the right of assembly, which also means excluding people? They have the same liberal worldview. Where are the conservatives who admit racial differences and cultural differences that are evident? Nowhere. Where are the anti-feminist conservatives? The anti-civil rights act of 1964 and immigration act of 1965 conservatives? I'm really curious on what I am ill informed. Educate me if you're so well informed.
There's a reason why conservatives always lose the moral high ground against liberals - it's the same with Islam and radicals. Both liberals and the Islamic radicals want to practice both true liberalism and Islam, while the GOP and the moderates are just toned down versions of the real deals, but still operating under the same principles.
EscapeVelocity said...
Conservatives and the GOP arent the same thing. That being said their is a ton of difference between the GOP and the Dems and Left.
Furthermore, it is difficult to do some of the things that you are suggesting, given the system. Just look at the Dems and the Left who couldnt push through their Health Care Nationalisation with a supermajority of Dems in the Senate.
PC is definately a problem, but this is being enforced in Corporations, outside the government, this is a cultural battle being waged by the Left with special interests, lawfare, etc.
The key is to organize. Identity politics needs to be adopted by groups that have been excluded, however the GOP should maintain color blindness and equality before the law. The push for Supreme Court nominations should be on originalists and strict constructionists like Clarence Thomas.
A bit of nuance wouldnt hurt you.
I agree Title 9 is an abomination. This could be fought more effectively if pressure groups existed that push for men's rights. Whites, Christians, males, European ethnicities, should all be pushing into the identity politics arena, because they are getting hammered by not playing what has become the zeitgeist and thus are assured to be the losers, discriminated against and treated unfairly.
The Left is the problem...they are the ones pushing their ideologies and furthermore are hostile to certain groups while claiming universaility...which is patently false. They are are anti white, anti Western, anti Conservative, anti white Euro Christian culture, and so on and so forth.
Quit your bitching and get busy. We need to organize and create alternate institutions, because our democratic institutions have been marched through by the Left. Dont throw your hands up and say there is no use. That kind of defeatiism will surely lead to defeat.
We have Alito and Roberts on the Court now, and Kennedy is a waffler, but one more and we can really start to turn back the 60s New Left zeitgeist.
Anonymous said...
I agree with rebelliousvanilla's critique of American conservatism. As an ex-conservative, and now a white nationalist, I find much at fault with the "American Right" in terms of its obsession with enriching big business, harping about culture while ignoring the key role that ethnicity plays in the preservation of culture, extreme individualism, and belief in the invade the world, invite the world mindset.
The Left is wicked, but the Right is no better. If we are interested in saving our people, we will need to look at different systems amd ideas and try to find what works best, and ultimately reject the Left/Right spectrum. Race survival wasn't really an issue for the French revolutionaries and aristocrats who started the Left/Right spectrum. It's outdated and needs to be tossed in the dustbin of history.
Michael Servetus said...
I have to disagree with some of the sentiments and ideas expressed here while simultaneously agreeing and sympathetic. I think it would be sufficient to defend and protect against the sorts of rot we see by defining values and enforcing them, race then is superfluous and not the issue.
its not that I wish to avoid truth where it is found ,no I simply know honorable souls of different races. You know there is another variable beside race that is particular to western civilization and that is Christianity. Also remember blacks and Asians didn't invent, marxism, socialism, nazism, leftism, wacko environmentalism, gay rights and gay marriage confusion. That was your fellow white's and it is commonly your white children who are buying it and moving it forward. There will always develop a psychological underclass by nature. To me the solution was moral courage, strength. The white race is rotting itself it is no one else's fault.
Bringing in other races or atagonistic hostile cultures is just plain stupid and potentially deadly in the long term and that is another story. It defies common sense and even other races, cultures, and lower life forms know that. So whose fault is that? In short it is the white race but I say it is really a mental or psychological race issue. Do white people really have an advantage? I don't know but it would seem they have lost it, just like the Greeks. As is evidenced by their action. I don't go for that sort of analysis or interpretive scheme in full though. Again I think the virtues of character and mind that are timeless and can be cultivated through a love for wisdom and God, make whoever practices them great and successful.
As strange and offensive as it may seem, consider that Muslims in some degraded form aim for this with blurry vision and the successful race or civilization for a time has now become a slave to lower passions, making their slavery manifest in the physical now to people who were once thght to be lesser. There maybe some here who need to stop dwelling in the past and face a newly defined reality
Anonymous said...
Andreas, I agree with you fully that much of the problems facing our race is self-inflicted. I reject the blame-the-Jews paradigm promoted by Stormfront and other "WNs". But at an ethnonationalist, I see it as my duty to help my people as much as I can, and that includes holding them to task for their failings and trying to find better solutions. And just because whites have forsaken their ancestors and embraced hedonism, marxism, and race suicide does not mean I should just abandon them to the wolves.
I've seen some conservatives proclaim that we whites deserve to be replaced by nonwhites because of our moral shortcomings. I find that immoral and illogical, but it seems to many conservatives, culture and religion are all that matters, and if whites "fail" Western Civilization, some idealized, abstract concept, then someone else must take up the banner. I don't see that being the case; I believe the cherished "West" is a product of the white race, and if the white race goes, so does the West. I don't see Muslim and African colonists in Europe becoming the new West, despite civic nationalists hoping that such a case will happen.
Michael Servetus said...
What I am saying is you don't have to go back to a ignorant form of racism or to Darwinism to stand up for yourself, simply defend to the death what is precious, not white skin. If you love white skin and what you see as its associated characteristics, defined as a genetic code then so be it, there nothing wrong with being happy proud and truthful about what you think.
As for me, I don't think that's it, I don't see western civilization as the product of skin color but more nuanced.
Anonymous said...
Who said anything about skin color? Japanese are whitish in skin color but does not make them members of the white race. Race is much more than mere physical appearance; it's also shared genetic heritage and kinship. I'm not a white nationalist because I like white skin; it's because I am white; I am descended from white ethnic groups and my culture and background are shaped by traditions that go back to the continent of Europe.
Michael Servetus said...
I understand. I didn't mean to keep it sound so superficial. So if a white man sharing the same genetic code seeks to beat you rob you and murder you and a stranger from another genetic code sees this and has compassion on you and helps you and dies in the struggle and you survive, who is more a brother, kin, family, friend?
There are links and bonds and sentiments and precious morals greater and stronger than the strongest physical connection.
Anonymous said...
For the record, my beliefs do not come from "ignorant racism" or Darwinism. I'm a skeptic when it comes to macro-evolution, but open-minded, and I bear no ill will towards other races and peoples. I don't like harping about IQ differences because it can often lead to supremacist chest-beating which I find counter-productive. I believe that all races have developed traits that suit their environment. Blacks have developed both physical characteristics and a corresponding culture that works for them; they wouldn't be alive if it wasn't the case. Likewise, we whites have developed both physical characteristics and a corresponding culture that suits our needs. Fjordman has been exploring such concepts in many of his articles.
And I have a question for all of you nuanced civic nationalists. Where did the West come from? Did it come from Africa? From China? Some like to cite Christianity as the source of the West, but that is problematic as much of our traditions and cultural customs come from pagan Greeks, Romans, Celts, Germans, etc. Some Christians like to make it seem like with the acceptance of Christianity came an erasing of the previous culture, but that is not the case. Otherwise, we would have adopted a Semitic culture which we obviously did not. We took the Semitic religion and made it work for us Europeans, much like how the Japanese are willing to take in foreign ideas and incorporate into their own national framework. I believe Christianity is part of our heritage, but I do not find it sufficient to cite it as the only thing that defines the West. There are Christian churches outside of Europe that don't identify with the West, such as the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, so clearly the West must be something besides Christianity.
Others like to cite values. But where did those values come from? Did those values come from Africa, China, Persia or the Aztec Empire?
Anonymous said...
Andreas, in response to your last post, of course people from other races are noble. I do not deny that. I don't see how that invalidates ethnonationalism.
Michael Servetus said...
Agent Cham,
I did not mean that you were going back to such form of racism and you have demonstrated the opposite and I respect your search and awareness of truths. I wrote that before you ever replied and I meant it only as making a distinction between a honest and truthful form of racism that acknowledges real difference and ignorant form that is not based in truth but in hate for no reason.
Anonymous said...
Well thank you Andreas for the kind words. :)
I know that white nationalism has a bad reputation (deserved too) because of all the neo-Nazi trash and hatemongers who call themselves WN. It's why I avoided white nationalism for the longest time because of that association. But I've come to realize that a new path needs to made; as you said, something that recognizes racial differences and doesn't turn to hate.
Michael Servetus said...
I don't think we can or have to invalidate ethnonationalism. But I think it limits justice,truth in their best sense, not in the perverse leftist meaning.
Because ethnonatiomalism I think must be based in preference and will, regardless of any other truth. For as you stated you can acknowledge that there will be honorable individuals of all races and individuals who think like you or I and I would be natural for people of likemind to want to enjoy fellowship together, but ideas of ethnonationalosm would place a wall in the middle of that, not caring much about that but preferring to keep things separate. Again I think that might be fine, although there might be other bad things associated with that path that are not immediately apparent.
Anonymous said...
See I don't see ethnonationalism as some sort of wall between myself and good people of other races/ethnic groups. Just because an ethnostate would restrict citizenship to members of an ethnic group doesn't mean it would be closed to global communications, tourism, visiting, etc. In this age of the Internet it's even more imperative that we find a way to balance ethnic thinking with interaction with the outside world. I will admit that it's a challenge, but finding a balance is essential in any aspect of life.
Michael Servetus said...
It should certainly not be the governments right to force people to live unequally yoked together and at first it might seem like a racial issue solved by ethnonationalism but I think there is a better way which would greatly alleviate the problem and that is by moral, cultural or belief discrimination. We may not all need o be racially one but we do need to be one then in some compensatory way. This would simply be accomplished by acknowledging and discriminating against unamerican ideas.
Anonymous said...
Well Andreas, I wish you luck in your quest for values-based nationalism. Perhaps you can find a way to make it work. I'll be impressed.
Michael Servetus said...
Well your idea does sound balanced and fair enough, I just think it can be accoplished nearly as well by a different type of discrimination-- that of ideas.
Anonymous said...
Well then, may the best nationalism win! ;)
Michael Servetus said...
Maybe we can pitch the idea as a reality tv show.
Anonymous said...
Lol, it would be better than all the current trash on tv. :P
Anonymous said...
EV, it's funny, but you actually agree with me about conservatives. When I was using conservatives not being conservatives, I was using it to describe the mainstream conservativism not being conservative at all. I also didn't advocate the US government to discriminate against blacks, for example, it should just get out of the anti-racism, anti-discrimination business and let people employ and do business, live near and go to school with who they want. As a conservative, you have to be against it, because the government has no constitutional authority to do it(ignoring all the other things).
PC isn't enforced in corporations because corporations like it. It's there because as a corporation, if you have an employee with a poster of a scantily clad woman, you can get sued by a feminist. Or sued for having unPC views. Also, the thing isn't about men or women rights or whatever rights, the problem is actually the stupidity of over legislating rights, that aren't really rights.
Andreas, as things are, a man not sharing my genetic code has a by far(more than 10 times) odd of raping me. Obviously, you judge individuals by their actions as individuals and groups by the trends that are in those groups. Like this, my father could rape me while I share half of his genetic makeup, while an African Muslim could help me get away from it. Does it mean that all fathers are bad and African Muslims are good? Because this is the progression of what you wrote applied to groups.
Anonymous said...
I don't think Andreas was going there. Rather he was saying that because there are good people in every ethnic group, we should base our identity on values that promote that goodness, and associate with like-minded people regardless of ethnic background. He would accept your father if he was good and the African Muslim into his identity. It's an individualist framework that's common within the modern American Right.
Btw, I'm John McNeill from Mangan's Place. Nice seeing you again. :)
Michael Servetus said...
Rebel Vanilla,
I think we all agree not all cultures or beliefs are compatible or equal and Muslims have a belief system when sincerely followed that creates tension and hostility. I think there is a good basis to deny anyone from a Muslim country admittance into our respective country.
I do believe in looking at individuals and I also see that groups take on different dynamics and it is important to look at and honestly assessed group trends.
I am not completely sure of myself that values morals are enough of a glue, I think I would add culture and language and would not diminish heritage. When values are confused and a people are decadent then racial identity may be the last refuge and most primal bond.
But it seems like it's too late in America, the traitors have already done the damage and the patriots are in lose lose situation . We have a parallel culture being incubated as we speak. Early Americans faced similar issues but they were not afraid or ashamed to deal with it early on and mercilessly cut it off with a view to the future, but I don't know if it could be done again without tremendous sacrifice and bloodshed. By that I mean, outlaws and Indians when viewed as competing cultures. It does show that it can be done and how. But that is hard to imagine since most people don't feel so threatened right now, especially politicians.
Anonymous said...
Andreas, people don't feel so threatened today because they're busy planning their retirements and vacations. Also, white people don't see themselves as a group and try to stick for the welfare of that group, considering that's 'racist'. Hell, the desire to live is racist in and of itself. And as you know, racism is the biggest sins of humanity, so it's fairly normal that people don't feel threatened now.
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} | 4,854 | Revenge!: “What’s Left?” December 2020
Nothing inspires forgiveness quite like revenge.
—Scott Adams
Personal recollections
On Death and Dying by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
, TV series by Kem Nunn and Alexandra Cunningham
“Exploring the complexities of forgiveness” by Yerachmiel Gorelik
“Why Forgiveness is Overrated” by Erica Manfred
“Why Forgiveness is Overrated” by Hannah Braime
“Why Forgiveness is Overrated” by Tim Hoffman
“When Buddha Refused To Forgive” by Sri Sri Ravi Shankar
“Forgiveness Is Not Buddhist” by Ken McLeod
Buy my book, 1% Free, here.
And we’re itching for that fight.
Western Civilization and Its Discontents: “What’s Left?” December 2015, MRR #391
Mistah Kurtz—he dead…
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, 1902
Jean Raspail, author of The Camp of Saints, 1972
Jared Taylor, “An Open Letter to Cuckservatives,” American Renaissance, July 2015
Let’s take two people: Bill Maher and Gavin McInnes. Both are writers, actors, political commentators, media personalities, and comedians of a sort. That’s what they do for a living however, and there the similarities end. These two individuals couldn’t be more different when it comes to what they believe.
Bill Maher calls himself a liberal, albeit one with a libertarian streak, an advocate of decriminalizing if not legalizing most “soft” drugs and prostitution, a pro-choice, pro-feminist, gay-friendly atheist who is anti-racist and against US military interventionism abroad. Gavin McInnes considers himself a conservative with libertarian tendencies, an opponent of legalizing “adult vices” like drugs and prostitution, a pro-life, anti-feminist Catholic with assorted issues about the usual suspects—gays, trans-folk, blacks, illegal immigrants—who likes his wars necessary and just. Funny thing is, despite these obvious political disagreements, Maher and McInnes both agree on a political tenet so fundamental as to constitute a common worldview, the need to defend Western civilization.
Catch Maher’s tirades on Real Time with Bill Maher, or McInnes’s rants on Red Eye and TheRebelMedia, and they sound remarkably alike. Muslims suck. Liberals are brain-dead or self-hating idiots and need to wake up. The West is ashamed or oblivious and needs to cultivate some brass. We’re at war. We need to defend Western civilization, the West, our way of life from those goddamned Mooslims!
This umbrella sentiment—defend Western civilization—held by mainstream left-right-and-center, as well as certain elements on the fringes, relies upon volatile, highly emotional symbols. The Muslim hordes are once again at the gates of Vienna and Poitiers, symbolically speaking. And, there is a search for the next 9/11 to wake us all up. 11/M—the Madrid train bombings of 3/11/05—was the next 9/11, and 7/7—the London bombings of 7/7/05—was the next 9/11. Now, the Paris shootings of 1/8/15 (and 11/13/15) have been equated with 9/11, and the hope was that the events in Paris would act as a rallying point around which the West could marshal its resolve.
A reporter once asked Gandhi: “What do you think about Western civilization?” Gandhi replied: “I think it would be a good idea.” So while I broach the subject in this column, I can only scratch its surface. Consider for instance just the distinctions between Maher and McInnes among the myriad “defenders of the West.” For McInnes, Islamic culture is backward, violent, inbred, not civilized, requiring a culture war or a religious war to protect “our entire civilization.” For Maher, all religion is a bad idea, but Islam is the mother lode of bad ideas, necessitating a war against them by those holding liberal Western values and ideas to preserve “our way of life.” But what the hell is “Western civilization” anyway?
If we use strict political categories and define Western civilization as that aggregate of liberal democratic nation-states that purport to be based on and supportive of Western (e.g., Enlightenment) values, this is entirely ephemeral. Liberal democracies often become authoritarian or totalitarian regimes with alarming consequences (Italy in the 1920s, Germany in the 1930s, Czechoslovakia in the 1940s), and those nations touted as “the Switzerland of X” (Uruguay in South America, Uganda or Rwanda in Africa, Singapore in Asia) are anything but upon closer examination. Maher and McInnes are proud citizens of liberal Western-style democracies even as they consider liberal democracy the Achilles heel of those countries. And despite their professed libertarianism, when push comes to shove, Maher and McInnes often advocate very illiberal, undemocratic means such as racial profiling to combat the perceived threat of Islamic extremism.
If we defer to what we learned in our primary and secondary education, Western civilization is based on some combination of our Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian traditions. Right off the bat, atheists like Maher would take issue with any form of religion counting positively toward the heritage of the West. For the classic liberalism that Maher claims, the Enlightenment legacy of reason, science, and skepticism constitute the best of what the West has to offer. For McInnes, he accepts the whole vague social/cultural package defined as Western civilization, having converted from atheism to Catholicism and from anarchism to conservatism. Certain white power types would take offense at inclusion of the Jews in any affirmative evaluation of the West, since the Jews and Judaism are evil incarnate. This leads the ultra-right to efforts to redefine Christianity without its Judaic core, as in Christian Identity, or to abandon Christianity altogether for some amalgam of European paganism or out-and-out atheism. As for the Greco-Roman part of the equation, and again aside from the Enlightenment emphasis on these roots as the classical West’s cultural and philosophical beginnings, there are many contenders for more-European-than-thou sources. The Celts and Germanic peoples—the latter a part of some mythic Aryan race—to pan-Slavism and Eurasianism—which seeks to shift the focus of European civilization from west to east, and to a Greater Russian geopolitical dominance that rejects Western European values—are all contenders for the origins of Western Civilization.
So, which values are real, true Western values? Is Western civilization at its core pagan Celto-Germanic tribalism, or Talmudic Judaism, or Greek city-states, or Roman imperialism, or crusading Medieval Christianity, or Enlightenment modernism, or Slavic orthodoxies, or Russian Mongol corporatism? Aside from broad and banal generalizations, can anything uniquely Western be discerned in the music, literature, dance, painting, and architecture subsumed under the label Western culture? Can Western and Eastern be convincingly separated? Are the rule of law, secularism, science, and technology what distinguishes Western civilization? Can any combination of the above stand for the whole, or must we be satisfied with an undifferentiated, cumulative understanding of Western civilization? Or is Western civilization like pornography, something that cannot be clearly defined, but we know it when we see it?
If the political is ephemeral and the social/cultural is vague, the biological seems to offer certainty. Western civilization is the product of white people, and white people are the source of all that is good in the world. Hence the current popularity of DNA ancestry analysis that attempts to associate certain DNA markers with geographic locations as when, for instance, the distribution of the maternal haplogroup H is correlated overwhelmingly with the European subcontinent. From there it’s a small step to equate such analyses with a genetic causation for ersatz races and their behaviors, bringing us back to the “scientific” racism and eugenics of two centuries prior. Maher clearly detests and denounces such racialized definitions of Western civilization and resists taking this step. But McInnes shamelessly flirts with them. According to McInnes, sub-Saharan Africa had no written languages before white people arrived. Our advanced technologies were all invented by white people, and our material superiority is all due to the hard work of white people. “I love being white and I think it’s something to be very proud of. […] I don’t want our culture diluted. We need to close the borders now and let everyone assimilate to a Western, white, English-speaking way of life.” (NYT, 9/28/03) McInnes even denies that black people had much to do with creating rock and roll, he’s so dead set on affirming that “white is right.”
When he’s not playing the contrarian, McInnes is responding in part to increased anger and frustration on the ultra-right as white racists feel increasingly besieged. The issue here is power. When white people held uncontested social power, white racists gloried in being white supremacists, fully backing the superiority and domination of white people over all others. When that power was challenged in the slightest degree and Enlightenment values such as equality threatened to emerge, white racists became the voice of the “embattled white minority” and fancied themselves white nationalists seeking to secede as a separate white nation. Countering the biological explanation for Western civilization does not merely require invoking the statistical truism that correlation is not causation, that the correlation of genetic factors with geographic location is not the cause of a so-called race’s achievements and failures. What also is required is countering a logical fallacy that confuses the repeatability and predictability of hard science with the lack of either in history.
That the past 10,000 years of human history and 2 million years of human evolution have led us to a world where capitalism, the nation state, white supremacy and patriarchy reign supreme tells us only so much. We cannot repeat history over and over, like a scientific experiment, to see whether or not we get the same results. Science depends on predicting future experimental results from successful past experimental results. But despite some historians seeing patterns in history, any ability to predict the future based on a study of the past has remained elusive. A particularly virulent configuration of wealth and power won the game we call history this time around, but since we can’t ever play the game again there’s no way to know whether that win was a fluke due to luck or a certainty due to merit.
Marx committed this fallacy himself in seeking to formulate a scientific socialism based on historical materialism. But there you go, another dead white European male whose ideas and the movements he inspired are very much a part of Western civilization. Again, whatever the fuck that means. Maybe the only way to make sense of Western civilization nowadays is how Joseph Conrad did it by counterposing Europe to The Other, in his case Africa, as a “foil to Europe, a place of negations at once remote and vaguely familiar in comparison with which Europe’s own state of spiritual grace will be manifest” as Chinua Achebe once commented.
Maher, McInnes and other defenders of the West against radical Islam consistently contend that what Islam needs today is its own Reformation or Enlightenment. Seriously? Consider that from 1517 (the start of the Protestant Reformation) to roughly 1650 (an arbitrary start for the Enlightenment) between 10 and 30 million people perished across Europe in various conflicts related to the clash between Protestantism and Catholicism. In less than 150 years, on a subcontinent of roughly 4 million square miles and 70-80 million people, something like 20 million people died in Reformation, Counterreformation, the Thirty Years War, indeed scores of major wars and upheavals. This doesn’t include the “New World” that Europe was exploring, conquering and colonizing at the time. The period in Europe from the Reformation to the Enlightenment was truly a slaughterhouse, yet a comparable social transformation is being urged onto the Islamic world as a great idea.
Or maybe, perversely, it’s already happening. Perhaps Islam is undergoing it’s equivalent of the Reformation and Enlightenment right now. But to soberly compare 16th/17th century Christian fratricide to the modern Middle East—to the sectarian, ethnic, national and class conflicts engulfing vast swaths of a region with some 7 million square miles and half a billion people for the past 2 to 3 decades—we need to realize that we’re are all in for some nasty shit. The exponential expansion in firepower from Medieval Europe to the Middle East today alone should give us pause.
Our brave defenders of Western civilization have a hard time seeing what’s under their noses, much less the future.
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} | 5,764 | ISIS is the Islamic “Reformation”
On August 10th 1566 an enraged crowd of Huguenots burst into the Chapel of St. Lawrence in Steenvorde France and proceeded to destroy with hammers and picks any ecclesiastical art that they came across. They toppled statues of Mary and the saints, destroyed crucifixes, smashed stain glassed windows, and defaced tombs. It was not an isolated incident, indeed it triggered a wave of iconoclastic fury that radiated north from France into the Low Countries, with cathedrals, churches, monasteries, and hospitals all targeted for destruction.
One witness wrote: “They tore the curtains, dashed in pieces the carved work of brass and stone, brake the altars, … [they] burned and rent not only all kind of Church books, but, moreover, destroyed whole libraries of books…”
Inspired by the theology of Calvin and Zwingli who taught a literal interpretation of the Decalogue’s prohibition on graven images, the enraged crowd targeted all art which they saw as blasphemous and contrary to their new order. In short they wished to erase all vestiges of the past.
For one versed in early modern European history the events of this past week in Mosul seem eerily familiar. On February 26th the Guardian reported that “Islamic State militants ransacked Mosul’s central museum, destroying priceless artefacts that are thousands of years old, in the group’s latest rampage…”
As is the case in the Guardian‘s coverage, the story is often accompanied by Islamic State video showing black-clad, bearded extremists taking power tools to ancient Assyrian and Akkadian statues. We watch in horror as ancient statues of massive winged bulls have their faces erased by jack-hammers and we see statues being toppled over. According to the Guardian, an ISIS representative declares that, “These statues and idols, these artifacts, if God has ordered its removal, they became worthless to us even if they are worth billions of dollars.” Another article in the Guardian reported that the Islamic State has bragged about the burning of over 100,000 books – some going back thousands of years – in Mosul’s central library.
Which is why there’s such irony in articles like Raza Rumi’s “Islam Needs Reformation from Within” in the Huffington Post, or books like Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now. These are far from isolated examples; indeed it has become a truism in our political discourse that Islam “needs a reformation.” But if historical parallels are at all useful, it indeed seems that a reformation is precisely what we are getting right now. Our political pundits, as inheritors of a triumphalist Anglo-American Protestant historiography, often embrace a fallacy that conflates the tremendously complicated reformation (and I am using this word to mean both the various Protestant reformations as well as the Catholic Counter-Reformation) with the likewise tremendously complicated Enlightenment.
But while reformation may signal modernity – and this is important in the context of any discussion about the Islamic State – it doesn’t always signal progress, liberalism, or democracy. It’s often presented as a given that the existence of modern democracy, capitalism, and science grow purely out of the reformation, but John Calvin was not Thomas Jefferson (arguably Thomas Jefferson wasn’t even Thomas Jefferson). It’s a reductionist understanding of history, and it becomes dangerous when misapplied to current events.
Our educations have tended to gloss over the brutal violence of the sixteenth and seventeenth-centuries that was perpetrated by both Catholics and Protestants. Millions of Europeans were killed on a scale unimaginable during the medieval era (even though our common parlance has us believe that that the Middle Ages were a particularly brutal period). From the French wars of religion, to the English civil wars, to the Thirty Years’ War (where possibly 30% of German civilians perished) the arrival of modernity signaled terror and horror in many corners.
How we use words like “medieval,” “reformation,” and “modern” must be exact if we’re to make any sense out of what the Islamic State is, and how we are to defeat it. Graeme Wood’s controversial Atlantic cover essay “What ISIS Really Wants” has opened discussion in the press about what language we use to describe the Islamic State. It may be politically expedient to deny that the Islamic State is Islamic (and of course the majority of the world’s Muslims find it reprehensible) but it’s also to commit the “No True Scotsmen Fallacy.”
Where Wood’s analysis falters is when he claims that there is a “dishonest campaign to deny the Islamic State’s medieval religious nature.” The fact is that when other pundits declare a need for an Islamic reformation that is exactly what the Islamic State is delivering. Far from medieval they’re eminently modern, they are simply an example of the worst grotesqueries that modernity has to offer.
And they’re not early modern as my previous historical examples have it, they’re as modern as we are. They may wish to return to their own fantasy version of an ancient past (and Wood even notes that ISIS recruitment videos utilize scenes of medieval warfare skillfully edited from contemporary movies) but no group, liberal or reactionary, can escape their own time period. To designate them as “medieval” is to merely engage in an outmoded school of historical critique that has more to do with our own constructed pasts and our own prejudices than it does reality.
The modern world has never been devoid of religion and the presence of religion does not mean we are in the medieval. We are not fighting a medieval army for the simple reason that it is not the middle ages. It is to buy into that old “war of civilizations” idea that eliminates complex historical contingencies in favor of a narrative every bit as mythic as what the Islamic State believes about itself. Indeed it is a formidable and evil army, but it is a modern army. The Islamic State, as Haroon Moghul notes in Salon, was born out of the catastrophic US invasion of Iraq. From the debris of that incredible mistake they have taken the technology of modernity and the rhetoric of the Hollywood action film to claim they’re building a caliphate.
The crowd at Steenvorde and the subsequent fury of destruction they unleashed was not an isolated incident. Explosions of image destruction started in the 1530s and included cities like Basel, Augsburg, Copenhagen, Munster, Geneva, and Zurich.
In Britain it was state policy under Henry VIII with his dissolution of the monasteries. The Worcester Priory which had a respectable library of 600 books was reduced to only six, while an abbey in Yorkshire with 646 books was reduced to three. The Henrician Reformation resulted in an unfathomable destruction of England’s medieval culture every bit comparable to what may have been lost this week in Mosul.
And this isn’t just an issue of cultural vandalism. Indeed, the religious wars of early modern Europe were marked by barbarity as fervent as that occurring now in the Iraqi and Syrian deserts. We associate the Islamic State with decapitation and defenestration, but this sort of violence marked the sixteenth and seventeenth century every bit as much.
Historian Marc Lilla has argued in his book The Stillborn God that contemporary secularism emerged not out of the reformation but rather in response to the new and horrific violence that modern religion had unleashed on Europe. He claims that the modern western political order, far from being an intellectually inevitable result of ideological currents of the time, was actually a pragmatic necessity when religious violence had made Europe ungovernable.
In other words, reformation didn’t produce liberalism, liberalism was the cure for reformation. Once you familiarize yourself with the brutality on all denominational sides, from the Peasant’s Rebellion, to the Siege at Munster, to the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, to the Thirty Years’ War, to the Spanish occupation of the Netherlands, to Cromwell’s brutal invasion of Ireland, it becomes hard to see the word “reformation” as a simple and positive force.
If Lilla’s thesis is correct, then the reformation led to political liberalism and the Enlightenment only because the ground was so bloody and the populace so exhausted they had expended their lust for war – a peace built on a pile of bones. So, when wishing for a reformation in Islam it behooves us to understand what it is that we are wishing for.
• GregAbdul
“it has become a truism that Islam needs a reformation”??? You need to find a new wife…. a prettier one….is that a “truism”???
There is no Islamic reformation coming. Da’esh is not a reformation. Da’esh is a group of criminals living on the borders of Syria and Iraq. We are two billion. How many is Da’esh? There is this white thing you guys do. You find a non white threat and you blow the hell out of it and expend unbelievable amounts of energy making one group of rouges and misfits after another look like the army of Armageddon.
I understand the author’s point. Reformations can be messy and extremely complicated. But what I constantly fail to understand is why is it that people who have zero real world contact with Muslims, constantly go on and on about Muslims as if they know all about us, when in reality, if you talk to our leaders and scholars like Suhaib Webb or Zaid Shakir or Muhammad Mendes or Mohamed Magid or Ingrid Mattson, not a single one will tell you there is anything like or near “a reformation” going in within our community.
There are people who make a living, who are outside of the Muslim community in America…well you pick it…OUTSIDE…who go on and on about Muslims. Please give us a voice and if Mr. Simon really really wants to write about Muslims, he should come ask us. There is no reformation going on here. None on the horizon. Da’esh is a criminal enterprise that will be ended in short order. It is insulting to call them a religious movement.
Please accept us as we are.
• GregAbdul
in America, blacks have been mistreated by white Christians and not lived in an equal state for 500 years. Is the KKK the white American Christian reformation? If not, then why are a bunch of Arab renegades given so much type and attention and blown up, while we ignore chronic and endemic white American prejudice and the Christian Knights of the Klan and how they have helped reinforce the Christian bigotry that is deeply embedded into the fabric of America? This is a racist double standard and I only wish you would stop. The KKK and Da’esh are pretty much the same….so please let’s get the article up about how the KKK are a key influence in American Christianity.
• Rmj
Wahhabism is a much closer parallel to the disruption in thought and theology prompted by the Reformation, and a much clearer antecedent to ISIS. If you want to understand ISIS as comparable to the Christian Reformation, you need to put it in the historical context of the violence fomented by the Reformation which outlasted the lifetimes of both Calvin and Zwingli, as ISIS comes 3 centuries after Wahhabism began.
ISIS is less new and disruptive than it is a product of currents in Islam and in the politics of the “Middle East” (not to mention the sheer chaos visited on the region by the West, a chaos with its own deep historical roots; the invasion of Iraq was just the latest in a long line of such disruptions of order in the name of order). To this day you can find Protestant denominations (MO Synod Lutherans come to mind) who still officially denounce the “Whore of Babylon” (by which they mean the Roman Catholics) long after the rest of Christianity has embraced ecumenism among Christians and even with non-Christians. There are individual Protestants who still repeat slanders against Catholics that date back 500 years. Do such things condemn all Christians? Or prove Christianity still needs a “reformation”?
Just as with European Christianity, Islamic history is complex and multi-national, and it didn’t all begin yesterday or even the day before. Yet another article with no real sense of historical context is yet another disappointment.
• Mark juergensmeyer
This essay makes an interesting point. I made a similar point in an article in the Islamic Monthly, saying that ISIS is more akin to Arab Spring than to al Qaeda since it taps into a mass antiauthoritarian popularism that can have a viciously destructive side.
• DKeane123
“Is the KKK the white American Christian reformation?” – It certainly could be. I’m not sure a literal biblical interpretation was the centerpiece of their “philosophy” – but certainl passages from the Bible sure did help bolster their legitimacy.
“the Christian Knights of the Klan and how they have helped reinforce the Christian bigotry” – The KKK numbered in the millions back in the 1920’s and now may be in the couple of thousands. And while bigotry still exists, there is much less of it than there used to be. I don’t think it is fair to compare the current wide ranging crimes of ISIS with the past crimes of a diminishing organization with almost no current relevancy.
I’ve seen you comment here a number of times, and RD lays significant criticism at a number of religious “actors”, but you only show up when they have a critique of Islam or how people act in the name of it. Its is an odd sensitivity that you don’t see with Hindus, Buddhists, or even most Christians.
• GregAbdul
I am a Muslim, so that is my turf to defend. I am not an expert on Hinduism to say when someone has misspoke about their faith. What’s not fair is to take a renegade group of Arabs and call them a major religious force. The hype is racist. The KKK has left an enduring mark on white American culture. In the good old South, blacks are still stuck in poverty, getting sicker faster and dying faster than white people. Yet you have a the white racist GOP openly fighting to keep medicine and doctors away from the poor and disproportionately black. What’s not fair is that the racist bastion we call the Old South has not changed, yet you shake in your boots looking across at the other side of the world at a renegade group who lives between two countries in turmoil and the MSM keeps hollering about how they are coming to get us any day now…and debating how this is tied to Islam. Fair is we talk about the KKK’s religion, who it is related to their religion and how their racism has remained 50 years after MLK. I defend Muslims….almost exclusively from white Christian bigotry (the atheists are late to the hate game). Fifty years after all the blood and marches and riots….whites sure do love to look down on anyone not white Christian. THAT’S what not fair.
• Janfrans Zuidema
Ed Simon doesn’t mention the iconoclasm of Muhammad during the occupation of Mecca (that still goes on). Muhammad destroyed religious artifacts of other religious groups and now ISIS does the same. Could there be a connection?
• DKeane123
“whites sure do love to look down on anyone not white Christian. THAT’S what not fair.”
This is an interesting statement. While I have no issue with people with a different skin color (meet my wife), I do have a problem with ideas that are damaging to human wellness. So regardless of how you look, I would find you objectionable if you thought that homosexuals didn’t deserve equal rights (as an example). But you have now called every last white person a bigot just because of their skin color. This racist statement is odd from someone playing the oppressed card in every comment on this site.
• GregAbdul
I have not called “every last white person a bigot.” That is running from what I have said. White American racism is a cancer that is alive well and thriving 50 years after Martin Luther King. That does not mean every single white person in the world is racist. It does mean that people like you use the gay thing as a ruse. Here you are running to fight for gay people, when most whites still have NOT accepted blacks as equals in America. No one says it, but I dare say, the easiest way to spot white racism is simply party affiliation. The GOP is now the white racist party. No one I know of is on a soap box fighting gays. In fact, the very fight you cite is the perfect example of special rights. Instead of saying, “anyone can marry any way they see fit,” you say gays only should have the right to marry. I am not obsessed with other people’s bedroom behavior. Nice if they don’t do it in the street. After that, I try not to use my imagination. We have the bigots and then we have the white deniers. Please don’t you be either.
• DKeane123
I disagree – that is exactly what you said with: “whites sure do love to look down on anyone not white Christian.”
You know nothing about me and who I happen to “fight for” – stop making unfounded assumptions.
Yes – I would agree the GOP is an issue. But it appears that your larger point is that until racism is no longer an issue in the US (I would state that it is a larger human issue, not just specific to America), that no American citizen, that isn’t Muslim, should comment on ISIS and their religious zealotry? Smacks a bit of censorship.
• GregAbdul
ruse, red herring, straw man, more white hype and overstatement to make my statement false, when I said no such thing. Dude we are writing on the internet. Quote me. If I say “whites” that does not mean “all whites.” I never said all whites. I said and I say WHITES. Your hype and exaggeration is a white dodge. By the way, you can marry a black person as dark as night and still be a bigot. A bigot can have times of good treatment and the most progressive white person can have bigoted moments. Blacks and any color can be prejudiced, but it is many white Westerners who for hundreds of years have persecuted minorities of color. Instead of fake argument and denial, why don’t you get on board…get on the peace train. Right now Obama is our conductor. Just tell me you like Obama and that settles it with me…or you can start telling me how he’s a non Christian anti-Christ……
• DKeane123
Never said I married a black person – and again, you make assumptions about my politics.
What do you think the chances are that you have unfounded prejudices?
• GregAbdul
you are ducking. I am not an Arab….in our conversation, your matching me would be “all blacks are lazy…” You won’t say it because it shows white prejudice. Good for you. Now I am Muslim…to assume my religion needs fixing and you are not Muslim is more white prejudice. Whites are the ones who go around invading and occupying countries and who still fight tooth and nail to make sure blacks do not live in a state of equality in America. Whites are a special group when it comes to oppressing anyone not white and Christian in America. Now that does not mean every single white person. Many whites voted for Obama. LBL fought for and signed the Civil Right’s laws. I depend on good whites. There are cheap no good litmus tests and then there are good ones. if I go around in the night and practice serial murder, then I can say I am a big fan of the right to life can I? Now if you wish, we can sit here and play 50 questions with you continously trying to dodge and hide what you really feel or you can be honest and “Make It Plain.” You with us or ain’t ya’????
• DKeane123
I didn’t say you were an Arab.
• Aravis Tarkheena
It is true that the Reformation did not lead directly to liberal democracy, but it was an essential, necessary precursor to it. The rejection of ecclesiastical authority and of corporatism, the emphasis on individual conscience and the individual’s capacity to interpret the Bible, and the overall conception of the relative sovereignty and dignity of the individual that followed, were all essential ingredients in the emergence of liberal democracy. Had Western Europe remained wholly Catholic, without the Reformation, it is exceedingly unlikely that liberal democracy ever would have emerged.
• GregAbdul
Mr. DK, I don’t mean to be rude. What I said exactly is, when we go on and on about Da’esh and gay rights, we are ducking the evil right here in America. It’s like the 60s never stopped. Instead of the Viet Cong, we have Da’esh and we shake in our boots and talk about how they are trying to take over the world. The Viet Cong actually won. Now we are their allies. Chickenhawk W overthrew Saddam and Obama openly said Assad has to go. This has created the instability in which the Da’esh survive. In other words, it’s not religion that has created them. They are really a creation of failed US policy hawks. Obama talks about how the ruler of another country has to go, but then sits on his hands and says he won’t commit fighting forces. Common sense says, if you are not willing to remove a present head of state in another country, you don’t go around publicly saying he should be removed from office. It’s the biggest mistake he’s made. Right here in America, the racist whites of the south are fighting to keep medicine away from poor people. We have kids not getting a fair chance and trapped in failing underfunded schools, women being told what birth control their bosses will allow them to take and a roll back of the gains of the Civil Right’s movement….you know, the one led by the black preacher named Martin Luther King? The racist GOP is doing way more damage than Da’esh. They are doing their damage under a religious banner. Why the lack of analysis of how American Christians are backing the greedy white man’s party? You really think a band of renegades living on the borders of two countries we made unstable is more relevant than America’s 20% child poverty rate?
• DKeane123
You didn’t answer my question.
• GregAbdul
the only question I saw was me asking you about Obama….yes…..all you have to do is like him and then yes, we can move on to the rest who are not Obamabots.
• Duck
According to your logic that would make ISIS a relatively new movement that is simply going through birth pains but Arab culture has been around since the beginning of time, and fighting within themselves the entire time. ISIS is the result of a lack of ‘strong’ Arab leadership; children playing with guns. Only children destroy ancient irreplaceable artifacts in the 21st century, so denying their very own and ancient culture; a further sign of barbarism. ISIS says they are defending Islam when in fact they are a political movement who use religious rhetoric to mislead their own people. The Arabs have a right to an Islamic State, if indeed that’s what the majority want, but ISIS is not content with that. At its core they are an attack against the freedoms we enjoy in the West. We must not lose sight of this.
• ISIS is the Islamic ‘Reformation’.
I think there’s actually a lot of merit to this comparison. With their fixation on literalism, predestination, extreme duality, radical Salafists resemble no one so much as extreme Calvinists.
I’ve come to the conclusion that the tragedy of Islam is that it’s never produced its equivalent to Aquinas and the Scholastics (particularly their naturalism). It’s odd to think that Islamic thinkers like Avicenna and Averroes are more respected among Catholics than Muslims.
• Peter` Card
The Reformation began as an intellectual struggle within the Catholic church. Luther was a contemporary megastar within the church, an avante-guard theologian, until he crossed the line from confronting corruption and challenging orthodoxy to defying the authority of the institution and denying its role as sole guarrantee of salvation, eventually substituting personal faith for spritual submission to the hierarchical priesthood. His contemporary protestant reformers followed similar trajectories. Luther himself thought that the key blow struck against the power of the Catholic church was the translation of the bible into the languages of the common people, making it directly accessible. In many ways, the Islamic world was way ahead of the game. Widespread literacy in Arabic meant that the Koran had always been directly accessible to them.
Back in the 21st century, the wide-spectrum arseholes destroying ancient monuments in the Middle East, decapitating aid workers for our bemusement, abusing the the defenceless, have as much to do with the Reformation as nose-picking has to do with brain surgery.
• Judith Maxfield
Rambling on: What did I just read? There are two things i’m getting from this article and mostly the responses. In reading the article, I must admit it got a bit hazy for me between what was in present time and what was past in regard to some main points. The subject matter is difficult. Will try again. Now, to the responses. This is all text language, (not “texting”). I’m interested in how language is used and how difficult it is to be utterly clear in one’s intent. What does this have to do with with the subject matter here? Looks like everything. So maybe reformation depends on whose reformation you’re talking about. I guess in the end of this, the responses became more interesting to me. I get accused (not here) of generalizing my ideas. To me, you’ve got to start somewhere, and then get on with it. So thanks everyone of confirming the diversity of language as culture we’re really living.
P.S. Being in the visual arts, I do really grieve when the arts are destroyed because they are seen as dangerous. Its personal for me. I do believe when this happens, not only the past is lost, but the story it told is lost as the lesson for the future. That is the second underlying point of this article. (OK, generalizing again).
• GregAbdul
hmmm….I don’t think much of Aquinas. Is there an official scale somewhere that says Muslim scholars are more or less than your idols? I think your comparisons are highly subjective and totally TOTALLY LACK MERIT.
• A subjective comparison in an internet comment thread?
Say it isn’t so!!!
• jfigdor
Yeah. Pretending that the KKK wasn’t Christian isn’t helpful. The KKK was KKKristian, and ISIS is Islamic (that said, Obama might be right that it is smart for him and US diplomats to avoid calling it Islamic).
• Arbuthnaught
Ad Fontes!
This was a watch word of the Protestant Reformation. It meant to return to the original sources (to the original fountains) of the bible and not the encrustations and corruptions that had accumulated over the centuries..
In the context of Islam, ISIS is exactly using Ad Fontes. ISIS is doing exactly what the prophet did. Murder, plunder, enslave your enemies, steal their wives etc.
In Christianity, Ad Fontes mean returning to the example of Christ and the Apostles. Not cutting off the heads of your enemies
• Why are Bush and Cheney, the people who put these people in the position they are in, not on trial in The Hague?
• CitizenWhy
Iconoclasm is an age-old tendency in the Middle East. Its push is most familiar to westerners in the Iconoclasm battles among Christians.
• CitizenWhy
Beacuse their strategy worked and is working. Their goal was not military victory but perpetual chaos in the Middle East. Why? … 1. Chaos would attract Islamic terrorists all over the world to the Middle East instead of having them active in the West … 2. A grim reminder/threat to Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States not to abandon the petrodollar (more important than the actual oil) … 3. A reminder to the Arab Muslim countries, and some others, that they cannot be safe from rebels unless dependent on the USA … 4. Domestically, in the USA, to make the media b]narrative all about war and not about the domestic problems and the endless foreign intrigues caused by the Republicans, and to make it easier to gut the non-military portions of the US budget … 5. To reinforce the loyalty to the Republican party of religious conservatives in the USA. … 6. To mak ethe Europeans afraid of the US and submissive to its leadership.
• CitizenWhy
The Reformation was not uniformly iconoclastic. The Reformation was not all calvinist. And the Calvinists were not all Iconoclasts. But yes, once you see something as blasphemous then you must take action against it, sometimes justifying violence against persons or, more often, property. The concept of blasphemy is not compatible with modern society.
• Nick
Many of those who advocated a return to the example of Christ and the Apostles, were also pretty comfortable with the idea of executing their enemies:
– e.g. the Lutheran and Reformed Protestant treatment of Anabaptists and other radicals like Servetus. Calvin explicitly argued – at length – that the execution of Servetus was consistent with Scripture and, ironically, advocated the decapitation of Servetus because it was a more merciful punishment than burning (which I suppose it was).
• Interesting article, but the analogy is all wrong. The images destroyed by the Reformation were those of the exploiting and oppressive powerful Church that held both secular and religious authority. ISIS is destroying images of long past civilizations and peoples.
• Obviously you have not studied the Islamic philosophers and poets who equal the best that Catholicism could ever offer such as Aquinas. Rumi outclasses Aquinas by far.
• First of all, I don’t think so.
Second of all, it’s a bit fatuous to look at these things in isolation anyway. Rumi may be of esoteric interest to a small cross-section of academics, but Aquinas inspired a movement (Scholasticism) that profoundly influenced Western culture and intellectual development.
Indeed, his influence is felt to this very day.
• Rumi is the most well known poet-philosopher in the world today, and his influence far outstrips that of Aquinas. Rumi is the best selling poet in the United States today.
• Spuddie
It’s not the lack of Aquinas like scholars in service of religion and state entanglement which is the problem. It is a lack of voices against the religion/state combination. Not enough John Locke’s, William Paine’s or even David Hume’s. We don’t need Islamic reformation. We need a middle east age of enlightenment. Religion only behaves well when it has no other choices. In america it involved an enforced separation from the apparatus of political power.
• doc
Amen. For a tolerant society to endure, intolerance must be discouraged (disallowed). The price of freedom is not blood, the price of freedom is tolerance.
• GeniusPhx
bush signed to end the war in iraq. all obama had to do was get a status of forces agreement signed to keep un in the game. he couldnt do that.
• GeniusPhx
It makes christians feel good to believe they are right about everything and any killing they have done is justified. But they have done their share of ‘convert or die’ whether in the 30 yrs war, the crusades, the religious war in early america or the slaughter of american indians for rejecting christianity. Before reformation the bible was never taken as literal and different sects had some harmony between them. Its a good thing our founders didnt believe any of it, they didnt believe in the miracles or the divinity of jesus. They just played along enough to create a secular godless constitution so the rest of us wouldn’t have to kill over a govt established religion.
• Arbuthnaught
Junk history from first to last. The point is that the crusades were carried out by the illiterate, probably with only one in a thousand barely able to read and without an accurate bible between them. Hardly “Christian” in any sense of the word. JEFFERSON might not have believed in the miracles etc. but Jefferson was not the archetype of all the founders and held a minority view. The plain intent of the establishment clause then and it should be now, was no establishment of a national church like the Church of England in the US. That is what everyone thought until Hugo Black came along in 1947 with Everson V. Board of Education, a case also full of junk history.
• Arbuthnaught
Well said. Another point is that the iconography of the pre-reformation catholic church was considered by the reformers as objects of superstition, veneration or worship and competing with the worship due only to the one true God.
• GeniusPhx
you forget the amendments had to be ratified separate from the constitution by at least 9 colonies. it was not a minority view. at least 9 colonies had established religions at the time, the 1st didn’t touch the states (they didnt have the votes). But the everson decision was based on the 1st, the 14th amendments combined for the first time, as well as a study of the intent of the founders, mostly deists. a good book for the truth about the founders faiths is written by a christian, Stewart Mathew, called ‘nature’s god’. I’m sure its not what you were taught.
• Arbuthnaught
Not forgetting anything. Not mostly Deists. Mostly orthodox. Deism was a minority view even among the elites. Event those then classified as Deists would today be considered very religious. Everson never should have been decided. We would all be better of if the court would have simply said that what happens at a local school is no concern of the federal government period. Black did use bad history. The last state church was not abolished until 1835. When Jefferson was president he was also superintendent of the DC schools. In that position he insisted the bible, not the Jefferson version, be used as a text book in the schools. The first congress, composed of those instrumental in adopting the bill of rights knew what it meant and their actions, votes and laws passed indicate that they could do all things short of establishing a national church. That was the plain meaning then, and it should be the plain meaning now unless changed by amendment.
• GeniusPhx
it was changed by the 14th amendment.
• Arbuthnaught
I reject that notion. While everyone should be treated equally and fairly, the left has used the 14th ammendment to rewrite the constitution in ways never contemplated by the framers or even the originators of the 14th ammendment. Re Everson, the federal government should stay out of all k-12 because it has no constitutional role in that area. Lacking standing, Everson, never should have even been in the federal courts. If there are issues of religion to be litigated in the public schools, would it be so bad to have to litigate under state constitutions, many of which are more liberal that the federal constitution? | http://religiondispatches.org/isis-is-the-islamic-reformation/ | robots: classic
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Happy Thursday from Jose Chameleone
Years later, and this song still cranks. I'd put it up there with Michael Jackson's "Off The Wall" as one of the greatest pop songs of all time. It has the same joyful and infectious feel of Jackson's best work.
March 31, 2017
Tradition and Change in the Encounter Between Islam and Secularism
One interesting aspect of the modern struggle for freedom for Muslims to practice their faith in the USA and Europe is how that struggle changes all the parties involved, in unexpected ways. Americans can fret about 'creeping sharia', Europeans can rail about secularism, and even ban the headscarf in the EU, but they can't keep more and more Europeans and Americans from converting to Islam, and indeed it seems, the more they rail, the more attractive Islam seems to free-thinking Europeans and Amricans, who wish to discover the religion for themselves. In other words, the kind of exclusionary hardcore secularism promoted by many Europeans and American atheists is precisely the kind of ideology more likely to drive people towards committed religious belief as a countercultural move (especially when they see the connection between Islam and the Black Freedom Movement in the US). And if anything the struggles over Islam expose how secular atheism can be just as much an exclusionary, hateful and doctrinal ideology as what these same atheists imagine Islam to be. Secular atheists of the left will try desperately to argue that the secular right in Europe and the US is not the 'true' secularism, but the fact is that secularism itself is being reshaped by struggles around Islam, and will continue to evolve in unexpected ways as a result of this encounter. On the other hand, traditionalist Sunni Muslims seeking the freedom to practice their faith in an American context can rail against liberalism and secularism all they want, but they will have to tolerate Ahmadis, Shias and other Muslim religious dissidents who would be persecuted and killed with nary a peep about human rights in majority Muslim countries (countries they often travel to because that is supposedly where the faith is the 'purest'). They will have to share religious space along LGBT communities who are politically mobilized in ways unfamiliar to those immigrating from majority Muslim countries. They will have to reckon with the close association between Islam and hip-hop in the US, while the scholars they learn from regard music as haram. Most importantly, they also have to share space with atheists, who are, along with Muslims, the least popular religious group in America. In advocating for religious space in America and Europe, using secular principles, Sunni Muslims are already beginning to shift, fudge or simply reject the faith's basic attitudes toward atheists, who the Quran condemns in the strongest possible terms. No doubt there will be a considerable amount of double think around this shift, but it is happening and it is already changing the practice of American Muslims I know (Europe I am much less familiar with). As much as this horrifies the likes of certain Muslim bloggers and preachers, Islam itself is being reshaped around its struggles with liberalism and secularism, and will continue to evolve in unexpected ways as a result of this encounter. What I personally take from this: Don't let anyone tell you that a civilizational clash is occurring, or that either Islam or the West has a superior moral code. Study civilizations and beliefs from the perspective of insiders, but don't assume the insider's beliefs are always valid. Don't let anyone convince you that secularism or Christian values or civilization or Islam "must be defended." Don't let anyone tell you not following a particular Abrahamic book means you have no metaphysical or moral foundation. Defense of abstractions, whether they be books or ideologies, can be necessary. But these same defenses can also quickly turn into a willingness to sacrifice others for the sake of your book or your ideology. There is an African proverb, "when two elephants fight, the grass gets crushed". Today's violent struggles are manmade fights for geo-political and worldly power that have brought untold horror to "the grass" (the people). At this point it is of little utility which elephant crushed whom. Some of us need a more limited focus on local principles of reciprocity and treatment of our neighbor. Some of us need education on what Islam is and what Muslims believe. Some of us need to remember that black Muslims were in America before most white Christians or atheists. Some of us need to stop assuming that a man with a beard and a thobe hates women and gays, or that a woman with a hijab was forced to put it on. Some of us need to be as outraged by violence in Mosul as we are about violence in Paris. Some of us need to stop implying that liberal Muslims are insincere goons and toadies. Some of us need to stop believing that all unbelief is just ingratitude. Some of us need to learn more about our own beliefs, and acknowledge both the good and the bad in them. Some of us need to look within at ourselves and our own civilization before we criticize. Some of us need to remember our debts to atheist freedom fighters like A. Phillip Randolph and W.E.B. Dubois before carping about the evils of atheism. #dailyrant #rantover
February 14, 2017
Hope and Pessimism
Hope and pessimism are dialetically related, twins of the same womb of human frailty, and counteracting medicines for the human soul. In an ideal society they exist in a tenuous balance. I have come to the conclusion that the modern America I live in is addicted to an idea of hope without pessimism. We want to believe that it is already possible to do whatever we want, whenever we want, without constraint. This is the hope of fools, blind to history, the hope of addicts and hedonists blind to the limits of pleasure, the hope of utopians blind to tragedy. It is the hope of settlers blind to others in the landscape, seeing in that land only reflections of their dreams and nightmares. They thus interpret the land, and its peoples resistance to settler attempts to impose those dreams, as willful evil or primitive savagery. Similarly, they interpret the failure of these dreams as a personal moral failing, rather than a permanent feature of existence. Hope thus unconstrained by its opposite naturally devolves into amnesia, fantasy, and a desperate drive to feel and appear happy. It manifests itself in more extreme versions as a morbid fear of death. It looks anxiously to the future when all human limits will be removed, while manifesting a contempt for the past and an inability to remain present. I do not mean to condemn hope outright. Without it we perish, for it enables visionaries to dream of better tomorrows. But the way it manifests itself in American political discourse is as an unbearable and unsustainable naivete, a belief that one can have progress without sacrifice, patriotism without tragedy, and prosperity without end. On the right, it manifests itself as the manifest destiny of white christian america, the alleged culmination of history and humanity. All others are considered savages, primitives, expendables, terrorists. White prosperity comes to be seen as the ultimate moral good, and anything that threatens it induces a series of moral panics. On the left it bubbles up as the idea that we are all progressing easily and naturally towards a liberal ideal, and that all we need do is tinker with a few things and wear a few safety pins to get there. The left's fetishism of King as a prophet of this liberal progress ignores King's own well-developed sense of struggle, tragedy and pessimism. In conclusion, I would like to see Less false hope and More hopeful pessimism.
February 4, 2017
American History X
Part of the difficulty of having real political conversations in the United States is that many of us learned our own history so poorly. For all those looking to know more about American history, I would suggest starting with Howard Zinn. A People's History of the United States. Here I've written a brief primer, from Reconstruction to Trump: After the Civil War, the first genuine democratic experiment in this nation's history began in the South, with blacks and whites holding office on an equal basis, combined with an attempt to make amends for slavery and to institutionalize (make permanent) equality under the law. This era was called Reconstruction. This progressive era was brought to an end by southern whites angry over how 'politically correct' abolitionists had run all over their right to own slaves. Northern whites were mad that the government was spending too much time helping the ex-slaves, and not enough time on them. While northern whites looked the other way, southern whites violently 'took back their region' in a movement known as Redemption. They helped sweep Andrew Johnson into office with promises to clean up the 'corruption' allegedly caused by northern 'carpetbaggers' in league with southern blacks. Andrew Johnson later became the first American president to be impeached. 'Redemption' was made possible because at the time whites in the United States were weary of the 'Negro problem' and put 'national unity' ahead of human rights of the vulnerable. After Brown v. Board, in 1954, a new democratic experiment began, culminating in the overturning of 'separate but equal' and the institutionalizing of protections of the right to vote, especially for blacks in the South. This progressive era was brought to an end by southern whites angry over how 'politically correct' civil rights activists had run all over their right to have segregated schools and other institutions. Northern whites were mad that the government was spending too much time helping blacks (the Great Society, Head Start, etc), and not being 'firm' enough with black protestors, who many whites believed were agents of chaos, crime and Communism. Southern whites and disaffected northern whites helped Richard Nixon into office, in a 'backlash' against the establishment candidate, liberal Hubert Humphrey. Nixon later resigned rather than face inevitable impeachment. The 1968 backlash was made possible because at the time whites in the United States were weary of the 'Negro problem' and put 'national unity' ahead of human rights of the most vulnerable. After Barack Obama's election in 2008, a new era in our democracy began. For the first time in our country's long and sordid history, a person of color held the highest office. A new era seemed imminent. No more would racial dog whistles be able to win elections. While Obama's election was nowhere near as momentous in its legal implications as the first two movements, it did help spark a national conversation on race, and under his presidency a new wave of activism emerged against police violence. This (relatively) progressive era was brought to an end a few days ago, by (mostly) whites angry over how 'politically correct' liberals had ignored their concerns and their pain. Northern whites especially were mad that Hillary had done nothing to address decaying conditions of white working class life in de-industrialized towns across the Midwest, and she was seen as catering to BLM activists while ignoring their economic concerns. Fueled by the rise of a new alt-right (all white) media sphere , whites helped Donald Trump into office, in a backlash against the establishment candidate, liberal Hillary Clinton, who ran a tepid campaign marred by allegations of corruption. Some have predicted a Trump impeachment, because he enters office with a hitherto unprecedented number of outstanding legal cases. This 'whitelash' was made possible because many whites were tired of the 'black lives matter' problem and felt the dual pressure of economic stagnation and declining demographic significance, and put 'national unity' ahead of human rights of the most vulnerable. Others, while not explicitly motivated by racism, ignored or overlooked Trump's history of racist dog whistles against our current president, including an eight year history of suggesting that Obama was a Muslim born outside the US who didn't love America. #election2016 #Americanhistory
Religion, Monotheism, and Ancestral Tradition
Religions that shift veneration away from accomplished and wise ancestors to more abstract, anti-iconic notions of divinity are most successful in times of social crisis, when elders fail in their duties and the collective wisdom of past ancestors seems unable to address the complexity of interpersonal conflict, ecological crisis or the breakdown of political order. In such moments the idea of calling on a force/idea that transcends local ancestral wisdom (a High God) becomes more and more powerful. Originally the High God and the Ancestral traditions could coexist in mutual harmony. But social crisis has tended historically to weaken the ancestral tradition and strengthen the High God tradition (who is seen as above it). This is at least part of the explanation why the original Egyptian religion was weakened over time and eventually abandoned. The reasons for this gradual shift are something I am still studying. Historically, the vulnerability of ancestral transmission as a form of active wisdom, has been replaced by the idea of wisdom as coming in the form of 'revelation' from a High God. An exclusivist 'High God' paradigm has become the new 'norm' of religious practice, condemning the older tradition of ancestral transmission as paganism, shirk, idolatry, kufr, superstition, etc, and projecting itself as ancient and unchanging and true, over against the false idolatry of the ancestral tradition. When believers in the exclusivist High God tradition complain about the anti-iconoclasm of the Wahhabis, they are really complaining about the epistemology at the very core of their own professed tradition, taken to its logical extreme. My own opinion is that the healthiest belief systems have to make room for both communication with ancestral traditions, broadly conceived (an open question is: what does it mean to communicate with ancestors in 2016, when those links were severed in past generations?), and the High God tradition as a form of transcendent 'outside' knowledge. The old ways are not always the best ways, nor are the new ways necessarily an improvement on the past.
The Meaning of White Nationalism as a Reaction Against Economic Marginalization
Remember, If there is one thing worse than national division post-Trump, it is a false national unity imposed by the dominant. America is....a complex political space. It is at once an independent democratic republic and a white settler colony, both a slaveocracy...and the land of the free. It is land that was stolen/taken from one group, and made into the manifest destiny of another group. White America is that sector of the electorate identifying as white and with the historical experience of 'whiteness'. This historical experience is its common currency, not genes or phenotype or even skin color. It is the historical experience of believing oneself immune from the humbling imposed by history, of being uniquely chosen by God, of being the 'best'. Of believing itself deserving of owning land and people. Of itself as refined, civilized, cultured, etc. White Americans are not the first group to believe this about themselves. But they (we, I am a part) define this attitude in America today. At its worst this attitude is the ultimate form of Satanic pride and hubris. Though White America is not a monolith, for good or for evil, it does have a history regularly marked by violent exclusion and fear of the non-white other. It is that history which must be confronted today more urgently than ever before. In spite of what Lincoln said and Obama recently quoted, don't underestimate the worse angels of America's nature. The worst elements have historically dominated American history. Brief interims of hope don't change that. As the dominant demographic of the American electorate, white America still has the overwhelming power to determine cultural norms and political futures. As we saw in this recent election, this power is especially dangerous right now, because we are living in a time where that once overwhelming dominance has decreased, at the same time that a unified front to defeat climate change is more necessary than ever, and the challenges of living in a global world are ratcheting up in intensity. There is nothing like the anger of a group who honestly believes its hard earned gains are being threatened and eroded by other races, religions and demographic groups. There is an old saying (often attributed to Malcolm X), "when white America catches a cold, black America gets pneumonia". The meaning of the statement is that when economic and social indicators get worse for whites, they will get catastrophically worse for blacks. But today white America has a cold, and believes it is pneumonia. We are now living through a period where the one time privilege of being white is being gradually eroded. The brutal reality is that the global economy will sacrifice any and all but the super rich as its victims. White nationalism taps into those grievances, offering whiteness (a form of cultural nationalism) as the answer. The work of internal community anti-racism/dismantling white supremacy is a form of spiritual work our community must undertake, and it is key to addressing the appeal of white nationalism and white supremacy. It is a form of acknowledging and confronting, but not validating white supremacist perspectives both overt and covert that exist around us. These perspectives (a form of false consciousness) are found among family members, coworkers, and church members. The goal is to help to cultivate patience, fortitude, forbearance, and compassion among our fellow whites who believe they have pneumonia when its only a cold. Many of them are very fragile when it comes to these issues and that fragility has to be respected, but not validated. They and we as a community have to learn how to live as non-supremacists in our everyday interactions and viewpoints.
Human Rights in America and the Muslim Ban
To understand the concept of "illegal immigration", used to justify this administration's recent #MuslimBan, it may be helpful to revisit the history of slavery in the United States. 1776-1863 "Slaves should only be able to get their freedom legally" 2017 "Immigrants should only be able to get their citizenship legally" Lesson some of y'all Christians need to learn: Legality is a relative concept. Human rights are not. Legality comes from man-made states. Human rights come from an eternal God. I'm not going to look down on any person seeking to get citizenship in the united states of america, when citizenship in a state is the only mechanism for accessing human rights. Some of you advocating deportation of immigrants need to think about this. You wouldn't dare claim now that the freedom of an enslaved human being in the USA was dependent on them getting freedom legally, yet you have the gall to act like you have the moral high ground when it comes to immigration because of "legality." Would you have turned in a fugitive slave in 19th century America because they were seeking to get their human rights through illegal means? If the answer is no, then why would you insist on this legality when it comes to refugees seeking citizenship in 2017? People have a right to use whatever means necessary to access their basic human rights. Setting up fortress-like enclaves based on fictions of manmade legality, in the middle of the largest migration crisis in world history, is like gluttonous feasting in a glass house while surrounded by famine victims.
Conservatism, Conservatives and White Supremacy
Zionism, Anti-Semitism, Nationalism and Civil Rights
I find it remarkable that we've reached a point in history where elements of White House leadership are basically anti-Semites or linked to anti-Semites, yet are praised by Israeli leadership because they give more money to the Israelis to build walls and buy guns and "fight terror." The implications of this apparent contradiction are consistent with the views of Bannon and other's ethno-nationalists in Trump's administration. What is ethno-nationalism? Ethno-nationalism basically believes that each ethnicity or race needs their own nation. This belief is a big part of the underlying worldview of Trump and other right wing populists. The message? : "The other" is raping, murdering and taking "our" jobs. This country belongs to "us" and we're taking it back. In the olden days international socialists correctly called this "the socialism of fools." The policy that proceeds from this thinking is as follows: Bannon, Miller and his crew will deride Jewish accomplishments for human rights and civil liberties in the US, while encouraging the racist fortress mentality of right wing Israeli leadership. Lest you think this tendency unique to Israel and its diaspora, the current leadership will also racistly denigrate Muslims as non-Americans while courting the authoritarian leadership of Muslim countries. Contrary to some people in my circles, I do believe Zionism was originally a movement with a deep moral core, as many diasporic movements for nationhood are. But ironically the success of becoming a nation has damaged the moral authority of Zionism, because it had to displace a whole other people in the process of fulfilling its destiny. Israel today, in my opinion, is little better than any other state that discriminates on the basis of ethnicity and religion. "But Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East," you say. The US is a democracy too, but that hasn't stopped it being a state based on the once explicit, now implicit dominance of a single group. Democracies can develop a kind of autocracy of the majority, just as pernicious as dictatorship or theocracy. The struggle for universal civic rights, that is, the struggle for governments to transcend the tyranny of BOTH majority and minority, is the most significant unfinished struggle of the modern era, encompassing everything from the Haitian, French and American Revolutions, to the civil rights movement, African decolonization and the fight against fascism. To see the current administration walking that struggle back ought to be deeply concerning for those who have seen where this has led in the past. Hannah Arendt is rolling over in her grave.
November 22, 2016
Yasir Qadhi on slavery in Islam
Some thoughts on this thoughtful presentation from probably the most prominent Muslim traditionalist in America. I very much respect his attempts to engage this serious and important issue. Here are some points where I agree and where I disagree:
1. I appreciate how he tries to contextualize slavery, the terms for it, and the meaning of it in the context of different times. This is an important first step.
2. He is right that slavery (broadly understood) was a universal practice across many cultures globally.
3. He is incorrect that Islam was the first belief system to create rules about slavery. Not sure how he could claim this. He later claims that many other cultures had no 'rules' about slavery. Also incorrect.
4. He is also slightly in error about the 'legitimate' source of slaves in Islam. I think that is probably because he's focused on deriving notions of 'legitimacy' from text, rather than from actual practice. That is a long side debate which I will not take up here.
5. The virtues of manumission are frequently mentioned in the books of law. The interpretation we give to this practice, however, is KEY. See point 7.
6. I find the argument that, because there is no specific law legislating FOR slavery, therefore Muslims don't need it and can preserve the tradition intact...interesting. I'm not fully convinced, mainly because I don't think Qadhi has fully faced the historical and epistemological difficulties of this position.
7. I'm glad to see he raises this past disagreement among the ulama. But he studiously avoids the colonial context of abolition (I am sure he is aware of it, as he has spoken out on the impact of colonialism on Muslims before). This silence is curious. If Qadhi is a traditionalist, and he follows the pious ancestors, then what right does he have to call abolition 'more humane' than previous practices? How can he avoid that abolition was almost always and everywhere forced on Muslim countries by colonial invaders? Finally, we should ask ourselves, how does Qadhi know the INTENTION (his word) of Allah apart from The Quran and the actual practice of the early community? The companions took female captives as slaves or sex slaves (there are plenty of documented instances of this in the hadith tradition). By most accounts, even the Prophet practiced this. Isn't Qadhi saying that the generation of Muslims now who have gotten rid of slavery know better than the early Salaf and the Prophet did, since the later generations were the one to fulfill what he claims is the internal logic of the tradition? I would like to know more about how Qadhi would square this with his veneration for the early companions, and the Prophet himself.
8. I have said it once, and I will say it again: The abolitionist hermeneutic is a modernist hermeneutic. And once you have accepted a modernist 'logic' of history where you believe (as Qadhi seems to here, though implicitly) that history has moved progressively towards abolishing a practice that the early companions openly practiced without sanction, then you have rendered most articulations of traditionalism anachronistic. Progressive history makes a lot of traditionalists nervous, because it undermines their absolutist claims to an 'ethical ground'. Keep this in mind whenever traditionalists accuse liberals of undermining the basis of a 'traditional' Islamic ethics. More often than not the 'tradition' they practice is as modern and anachronistic as anything Muslim progressives have yet dreamed of.
9. I say all of this, not to beat a tired old dead horse, but because I think there is a lot of misunderstanding and emotional polemics on both sides of this issue. We need more clear sighted analysis. I think Qadhi himself might benefit from a serious engagement with scholars working on the links between slavery and law, both in Atlantic and Indian Ocean contexts.
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} | 1,920 | Islam in America: Salve for Strained Race Relations
–Malcolm X
The political ascendency of Donald J. Trump represents a stunning reversal in American race politics. Whereas during the Barack Obama presidency, some dared to postulate the notion of a “post-racial” America, little could they have imagined the blowback that awaited the country’s first biracial president. Although proponents of post-racial philosophy saw Obama’s election as proof positive of racism’s demise, the 2016 presidential election ushered in an individual who flipped the proverbial script: Trump talked of Mexicans as rapists, instituted a travel ban aimed at Middle Eastern Muslims, and has fomented deep divisions against immigrants and Black protesters in the NFL, not to mention the less-than-enthusiastic response to the Hurricane Maria disaster in Puerto Rico. Coupled with unabashed sympathy toward Nazism and white supremacy, it is an understatement to say that Trump’s election represents political backlash – as true as this may be, more is at stake. Today, emboldened acts of racism and xenophobia are the order of the day, which have single-handedly put the notion of post-racial to rest.
This radical shift in race dynamics makes Malcolm X’s words more relevant now than perhaps ever. As his statement suggests, Malcolm believed that Islam had answers to a problem that plagued and consumed his very existence. From his early childhood, the problem would manifest savagely, with his family being persecuted by ‘Whites’ and his father likely killed by Klansmen, and his mother being stripped of her children by the state, and later committed to a state mental institution. From Malcolm’s view, ‘Whites’ were the basis of his woes, including his incarceration, where he would become attracted to the Nation of Islam and the notion of black divinity.
It may seem obvious that the Nation of Islam’s race-war-rhetoric spoke to Malcolm X’s lived experiences of being black in America. As a counter-discourse to white oppression, the Nation’s ideas and language gave him tools to fight racism at a time when there were few. After his release from prison, his next incarnation was as a critical mouthpiece for this organization, exhausting all energies on exposing not only the White Man’s racism, but also how Blacks were racist against themselves. Over time he would disavow the White Devil-Black God theology that he preached for many years.
The change reflected the influence of Sunni Islam in his life, which taught that piety, not race or color, was the true mark of superiority. Although the Nation articulated a vision of religion that put him on a path to separation, his second incarnation as a Muslim would lead him to embrace all Muslims, regardless of skin color.
Malcolm X’s story is a lesson in how religion can exert opposing forces in society. In his case, as a prisoner, doctrine was a force that afforded him a means to separate himself from Whites. Later, the influence of Sunni thinking proved a reconciliatory force in his life. Whereas his ministry under the Nation was racially incendiary and extremist, after gravitating toward Sunni Islam, he began to reimagine Islam’s role, not as entrenching racial divides, but as a way to unite and transcend race itself.
The idea that Islamic ideology positively impacts American race-relations may strike some as counter-intuitive. However, a cursory glance at Islamic teachings reveals deep commitments to principles that challenge racist ideology. For converts, the movement away from the Nation of Islam to Sunni Islam often is mirrored by movement away from a racial theology to a tradition that eschews racial superiority.
Islamic Ideas—A Natural Foil for Racism
Teachings in Islam overtly reject division and hierarchy based on race or skin color. Passages in the Quran and Hadith offer critical insights into Islamic teachings in this area. From the very beginning, Islam was conceived on the general notion that humans are equal, as one notable passage proclaims, “O people, We have created you male and female and made you into nations and tribes that you may know one another. Verily, the most noble of you to Allah is the most righteous of you. Verily, Allah is knowing and aware” (Surat al-Hujurat 49:13). “Among His signs is the creation of the heavens and the earth and the diversity of your languages and your colors. Verily, in that are signs for people with knowledge (Surat al-Rum 30:22).” From this perspective, different skin colors and languages are a sign of creative power, all of which are divine in Allah’s creation as described in Hadith: “Verily, Allah Almighty created Adam from a handful which He took from the earth, so the children of Adam come in accordance with the earth. Some come with red skin, white skin, or black skin, and whatever is in between: thin, thick, dirty, and clean.” (Sunan al-Tirmidhī 2955).
From the tradition’s perspective, the Prophet Muhammad is portrayed as one who aimed to break down barriers that divided people into tribe, clan, and caste. He characterized such affiliations as subservient to one’s identity as a Muslim: “O people, your Lord is one and your father Adam is one. There is no favor of an Arab over a foreigner, nor a foreigner over an Arab, and neither white skin over black skin, nor black skin over white skin, except by righteousness. Have I not delivered the message?” (Musnad Aḥmad 22978)
For African-Americans in particular, Islamic history shows this vision play out in the Prophet Muhammad’s selection of Bilal ibn Rabah as the tradition’s first muezzin, or leader in the call to prayer. Bilal was one of the Prophet’s closest companions, born of African descent and born into slavery, his personal selection by the Prophet offered absolute proof that one is to be judged by piety as a Muslim, not by one’s skin color or birth status. Bilal’s influence on Islamic tradition is uncontested, and he is particularly venerated by African muezzins. In his book, Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race, Edward Wilmot Blyden emphasized the point in 1874 when he wrote, “even Alexander the Great is in Asia an unknown personage by the side of this honoured Negro.”
These examples suggest that piety is more critical for Muslims than skin color. Such foundational statements about human equality are likely a factor in the global spread of Islam and its growing popularity. In America, prisons have played an important role in the spread of Islam; like Malcolm X, many prisoners first come into contact with Islamic ideas while incarcerated, some of whom will walk the same path as he to racial redemption.
Reimagining Race: Lessons from the Prison Context
Prisons occupy a unique place in the annals of American Islam and history. In pop culture, films, TV, books, and music, the prisoner-turned-Muslim is a classical American story. Much of the influence of Islam in prison is due to outreach efforts of African-American organizations. The early groups include the Nation of Islam and Moorish Science Temple, which have concentrated proselytizing efforts behind bars, as has the later Five Percenter movement. These and other African American groups have been historically labeled “Black Muslims,” and they are a powerful force for tapping into the black mind. Whereas these movements may stray from ancient Islamic beliefs and practices, their scathing critique and commentary on American racism remain an ongoing attraction for generations of prisoners.
Today, Islam holds even greater prominence in prison, which coincides with the mass incarceration of African Americans and Latinos inside American jails and prisons. In the last few decades, the prison population has reached world-leading peaks, and simultaneously, has provided a massive captive audience for the message of Islam. Consequently, correctional institutions are hubs of religious activity and prisoners are increasingly interested in Islam, as one Pew survey of chaplains described, the majority of prisoners who seek a new faith turn to Islam.
Prisoners all over the country are taking their first step on a path that ultimately leads to a more racially moderate worldview. Offenders from all persuasions: adults and juveniles, gang members and ex-members, violent and nonviolent are being introduced to interpretations of Islam that speak to their racial experiences. This is the message Malcolm X heard when he needed it most, and it sent him on a journey that made him revise some of his mostly deeply held racial convictions. His narrative has left behind a blueprint for future generations of converts to follow. Like him, many Blacks who have experienced self-loathing and self-hatred have been allured by the notion of Black divinity. Ultimately, race-based theology is rejected as is the blanket condemnation of Whites or any other racial group.
Prospects for Healing Racial Divides
Whereas American culture is replete with examples of how religion creates racial divides, there is also something to say about how Islamic influences help to mend them. This point is neither hyperbolic nor hypothetical, but a phenomenon that has been bolstered by the post-1960s influx of immigrants from Muslim countries, which has brought large numbers of Muslims from South Asian, Middle Eastern, and African countries. Today, the majority of Muslims in the United States is composed largely of individuals from these countries, which collectively now outnumber African American Muslims. Even among African Americans, Sunni Islam is the most widely practiced denomination, which means that the predominant Islamic norm in America rejects racial superiority.
Malcolm X’s life exemplifies a transition from radical segregationist to being willing to work with people from all stripes. Whereas during his years in the Nation, his separatist views helped garner the title “most dangerous man in America,” he would later revise some of his core beliefs which helped him to recognize Islam as a solution to American racism. As his story tells, he cleared a path for himself out of the racist trappings that once was the only thing that made sense to him. Like him, many today continue to abandon the notion that race is central to the Muslim faith. Accordingly, Islamic ideas continue to have a hand in tempering racial animosity at the individual, group, and institutional levels.
Of course, this essay is not intended to whitewash race relations in America and pretend that racism among Muslims does not exist. Clearly there is lots to be desired about race relations within Muslim communities in the United States, which remain relatively stratified by race and class. The point is to highlight how Islamic teachings on race counteract racial extremism.
The essay would also be remiss not to recognize that among converts, both African American and Latino, Islam is particularly attractive due to the cultural legacies of Islam in Africa and Spain. For such converts, these cultural ties make conversion less of apostasy and more the reclaiming of one’s cultural heritage. Islam connects these groups to a spiritual history that acts as gateway to greater self-esteem and cultural pride.
Just as religion can foment racial extremism, religion can also catalyze new beliefs about race. Malcolm X’s autobiography illustrates the point after he returned from Mecca he sought to continue advancing African-American rights, but was prepared to work with people of all races. In that same work, he lamented that when he was once asked by a white college student what she could do to help his cause, his reply was “nothing.” Wishing he had that one to do over, the point was simple: his racial consciousness had evolved from that episode, and under his new thinking he would have given a much different answer. This change in consciousness exemplifies how Islamic ideas positively impact American culture. | https://www.themaydan.com/2018/11/islam-america-salve-strained-race-relations/ | isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2019-47
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} | 1,121 | “THERE HAS NEVER BEEN an America without Muslims.” That is how Amir Hussain’s book starts. And in those first words, Hussain sets the terms of his account of the Islam–America relationship: Muslim Americans are not to be reduced to outsiders or defined as newcomers. While dominant US political and cultural discourse represents Muslims as immigrants who have just landed — nervously eyeing the host country, surreptitiously unpacking their stuff and their issues, concealing their primordial immigrant loyalties, generally looking shifty and suspect — Hussain emphasizes that Muslims are far more than the foreign cause of the latest security policy. A focus on the present and the recent past is shortsighted — not just because it fails to represent Muslim-American identity, but because it does not do justice to the cultural breadth and vibrancy of the United States. The implicit goal of this book is clearly to combat the otherization of Muslims, their exclusion from the American story and national self-conception. Much of this process of invisibilizing occurs in the cultural and intellectual sphere.
It is with Muhammad Ali, the most famous and the most beloved Muslim in the United States, that Hussain starts his extended contemplation of Muslim Americans. The Muslim-American boxer is both the launch pad and the pivot of Hussain’s argument. Ali destroyed the foundations of the imaginary Islam–America “problem”: that Muslim Americans are new, foreign, and hostile to the United States. An absolute focus on the political implications of Muslim Americans aids their marginalization, and a total reliance on the real or imagined security-related implications of Muslims facilitates the quest to externalize them. But to marginalize and externalize Muslim Americans entails actively erasing Muslims’ cultural, musical, and athletic contributions — aspects of US identity that are frequently privileged as quintessentially American. Hussain recenters America as a cultural reality, citing American cultural luminaries who happen to be Muslim, “to show that the fabric of America is woven, in part, with Muslim thread.”
Hussain disrupts the conversation on Muslim Americans in another way too — by widening the lens. A focus merely on the Muslim immigrant populations of the last 60 years or so erases the bulk of American Muslim history, including slavery and its aftermath. Therefore, instead of accepting the commonly used timelines of 20th-century immigration, Hussain explicitly interrogates the moment we start tracing the history of America and Muslim America. Along with slave narratives such as those of Yarrow Mamout, Job ben Solomon, and Abdul Rahman Ibrahima Sori, Hussain juxtaposes past with present to underscore the Muslim threads in the American tapestry: Congressman Keith Ellison is sworn in on Jefferson’s copy of the Qur’an, and an 18th-century slave ship, discovered during the construction of the Ground Zero memorial, bears witness to the violence that lies at the foundations of the nation. He also makes intriguing and unexpected connections such as the fact that the scholar, journalist, diplomat, and American convert to Islam Alexander Russell Webb was known to Mark Twain. Nor is any history of Islam in the United States complete without the Nation of Islam; to describe NOI teachings as “racist” does not do justice to its role within systemic white supremacy, nor does it address the issues of power and privilege that the NOI movement worked to address.
Hussain chronicles the growth of the Muslim community in North America in the context of immigration, higher education, and organization building. He is clearly passionate about American music and lovingly traces Muslim involvement in various musical genres, especially rap and hip-hop. He recounts the work of Ahmet Ertegun, president and co-founder of Atlantic Records and chairman of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, who was also great-grandson of a Sufi leader, and who recorded the greats of rhythm and blues and soul. Hussain highlights the heterogeneity of Muslim praxis, demolishing the religious essentialism that posits that only a scrupulously observant Muslim can be a Muslim, demanding that the same rule of “lapsed” or nominal religious identity be employed for Muslims as it is for Jews and Catholics. The lifestyles of Muhammad Ali, Mike Tyson, and Ahmet Ertegun bear witness to the diversity within the Muslim-American community.
Hussain’s passionate reflection on sports spotlights Muslim Americans’ contributions to the critical politics of race and religion, examining the work and role of such luminaries as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf (formerly Chris Jackson), Hakeem Olajuwon, and Ibtihaj Muhammad. The religious practice of the brothers Husain and Hamza Abdullah became a matter of public discussion when Husain Abdullah prostrated himself during a game. Moreover, Muhammad Ali’s famous words as conscientious objector to the Vietnam War — “no Viet Cong ever called me Ni**er” — became timeless historic commentary on the relationship between domestic structural racism and the global militaristic adventures of the United States.
Muslims and the Making of America is a highly accessible and readable book, more of a profound and well-crafted popular read than an academic one. This is a book that does not pull you into polemics or theoretical frameworks. It does not demand a serious commitment or a preexisting philosophical approach or attitude toward or about Islam. As he states in an interview at the New Books Network, Hussain crafted the book without the usual “scholarly apparatus” as a deliberate strategy to reach a wider readership than a traditional academic book could. A tenured professor who has published scholarly works, Hussain can afford to write such a book. It is a collection of profiles, portraits, events, and moments that are highlights of the Muslim-American journey. It would serve well for undergraduate college and advanced high school courses. Any person wishing to get a picture, not a comprehensive overview, of Islam’s cultural role in the United States can read this short book. It is not for the well-informed academic who wishes to catch up on the latest scholarship in Islamic Studies. It is not a description of Islam the religion, nor does it concern itself with the role of Islam internationally. Its focus is Muslim America. Yet I would happily recommend this book for most of my non-Muslim colleagues who do not specialize in Religion or American Studies.
It makes sense that a veteran academic in Islamic studies would engage in this genial and warm conversation. Hussain’s prose is personable, gentle, and melodious yet passionately dedicated to a dream of a complexly inclusive United States. The author’s American loyalties — patriotism, one might call it, except the word is tainted by jingoism and militarism — are characterized by affectionate criticality, but nothing that might upset sensitive “patriotic” readers. This is not far-Left discourse. While still offering flashes of necessary faultfinding, it is solidly middle of the road. It is a timely, contemporary exercise in bridge building.
Shabana Mir is the author of Muslim American Women on Campus: Undergraduate Social Life and Identity; she teaches at American Islamic College, Chicago. | https://v2.lareviewofbooks.org/article/never-america-without-muslims | isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2019-39
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Central Asia news
Adeeb Khalid: To speak of “Islam” as a homogenous phenomenon is analogous to speaking of “Christianity” as a single whole
05.03.2011 19:07 msk
Adeeb Khalid
Religious life Central Asia
Adeeb Khalid is Jane and Raphael Bernstein Professor of Asian Studies and History at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, USA. A historian of modern Central Asia, he is the author of two books, The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform: Jadidism in Central Asia (University of California Press, 1998), and Islam after Communism: Religion and Politics in Central Asia (University of California Press, 2007). He has lived and studied in Uzbekistan, Russia, Turkey, and Pakistan, and travelled al over Central Asia.
How do we explain the political motivations of Muslims? Today when so much of the news concerns conflicts based in and around Muslim societies, the temptation is great to simply see all the causes of those conflicts and all motivations of the actors involved as emanating from Islam itself. The motivations of Muslims are then seen as simply internally defined having no connection with the world that they are part of. Then we can safely proceed to the conclusion that all Muslims are alike because they all take their inspiration from the same scriptures, and they all represent a danger to “us.” This is the path taken by Mikhail Kalishevskii in his recent article on this site, and this is the argument of many commentators from the right (and not just the right) in Europe and North America.
Simplification has its virtues, but does it help us understand a reality that is much more complex than such arguments make it seem? Can the actions of Muslims really understood only with reference to their religion? Can the most extreme expressions be taken as proof of the basic essence of global community? I raised some of these questions in my recent book, Islam after Communism: Religion and Politics in Central Asia (University of California Press, 2007), and present some of my arguments below.
* * *
Talking about Islam is impossible without reference to the public debate over Islam that has raged since September 11, 2001. The marketplace is full of books about Islam, and the periodical press and the electronic media too have contributed their share to this debate. All shades of opinion are represented in this new literature, from somber academic tomes to sensationalist bestsellers, and everything in between. For many, the answer is straightforward. Islam as a religion is innately political, intolerant, oppressive of women, and inimical to “the West” and its values. Moreover, it is a religion that determines all aspects of its believers’ lives in a way that Christianity and Judaism do not. The political and social behavior of Muslims can be discerned from a reading of the scriptures of Islam, which are beyond the realm of human intervention or interpretation. The most extreme forms of militancy justified in the name of Islam — al-Qaeda or Hamas — are thus the true and logical manifestations of Islam. Such judgments are passed from all points of the political and cultural spectrum: the left, the secular right, the religious right, Muslims critical of their tradition, Hindu fundamentalists, friends of Israel, and Serbian nationalists all find this vision of a homogenous, hostile Islam compelling.
More sympathetic or apologetic authors, Muslims and non-Muslims, argue instead that Islam is “really” a religion of peace that has been hijacked or corrupted or perverted by “incorrect” interpretations of the militants. They seek often to posit the “real” Islam, one which is the opposite of the commonly held stereotypes, a religion that is tolerant, spiritual, and moderate. A step forward might have been the distinction, often made in public discourse since September 11, 2001, between “good” or “moderate” Islam on the one hand, and its “bad” or “extremist” counterparts on the other. Islam has two faces, one tolerant and spiritual, the other intolerant and violent. Not all Muslims are alike — there are “good” Muslims and “bad.” The problem with this binary vision is that all too often, the yardstick for measuring moderation is agreement with U.S. geopolitical goals. Muslims who agree with U.S. foreign policy goals are “good” and “tolerant”; those who do not are not. Thus, for years Saudi Arabia was routinely touted as a “moderate” Islamic state, while other, more secular states in the Muslim world end up in the “extremist” camp simply because they disagree with the foreign policy goals of the United States. Since this distinction has been invoked repeatedly to wage war on Muslim populations, its utility as a way of understanding the world is gravely limited.
Islam after Communism: Religion and Politics in Central Asia
«Islam after Communism: Religion and Politics in Central Asia» (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).
The apologetic and “two faces” arguments share a fundamental problem with the views of Islam espoused by its most hostile critics: they all take for granted that there is a “real” Islam out there about which such generalizations may be made. The apologetic and “two faces” arguments also locate the sources of Islam in the same places — its scriptures — and also assume that the political behavior of Muslims emerges directly from them.
These may be called essentialist arguments, in that they derive their explanation from the purported existence of a certain essence of Islam that is immune to historical change and that exists beyond the realm of society and human intervention. (Essences can be found in anything — race, culture, religion — and, as we shall see, they need not be negative.) No matter where Muslims live or what they do, the most important thing about them is that they are Muslims and that they act as such. Essentialist arguments are attractive for their simplicity, for they allow the public to make sense of a world it does not know very well. While critics have argued that many Western authors have long held essentialist views of Islam and Muslims, essentialist arguments are enjoying a boom these days. With the end of the Cold War, questions of ideology or of economic conflict have receded from the public arena, and “culture,” in all its manifestations, has come to provide explanation for all conflict, struggle, and inequality. Over the last decade, this form of cultural essentialism has been given academic cachet by two thinkers with immense influence among policy makers and the media.
The Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington claims that future conflict on the planet will take place on the lines not of ideology or national interest, but of “civilizations.” He discerns a number of discrete “civilizations” that are defined broadly by essentialized cultural features. “Islam” is one of the civilizations, and the one that, according to Huntington, most likely to get into conflict with “the West.” The proof of the existence of civilizations is in history, but the history in the book is remarkably thin. The book and its thesis have been routinely invoked since September 11, and indeed the current U.S. paperback edition of the book features a rather crude depiction of this conflict in the form the green banner of Islam battling with the U.S. flag (which presumably signifies all of “the West”). All Muslims, apparently the “good” and the “bad” both, are fated by virtue of belonging to their civilization to act in a particular way, all of it hostile to the West.
Much of Huntington’s argument about Islam comes from the work of the British-born Orientalist Bernard Lewis, who taught for many years at Princeton, and who since September 11 has become a one-man industry producing essentialist analysis of Islam and the Middle East. In 1990, the year after the Cold War ended, Lewis argued in a cover story for The Atlantic Monthly that conflict on the Middle East was part of a much broader phenomenon: “It should now be clear that we are facing a model and a movement far transcending the level of issues and policies and the governments that pursue them. This is no less than a clash of civilizations — the perhaps irrational but surely historic reaction of an ancient rival against our Judeo-Christian heritage, our secular present, and the worldwide importance of both.” At issue are not policies, but a reaction — a rage — to civilizational difference. Muslim rage is rooted in Islam itself: “In the classical Islamic view, to which many Muslims are beginning to return, the world and mankind are divided into two: the House of Islam, where the Muslim law and faith prevail, and the rest, known as the House of Unbelief or the House of War, which it is the duty of Muslims ultimately to bring to Islam.” The “classical Islamic view,” and not interests and aspirations, determines how Muslims act in the world. Lewis also blurs the distinction between “Islamic radicals” and Muslims at large, implying that all Muslims, regardless of where or who they are, face the same compulsions: “What is truly evil and unacceptable is the domination of infidels over true believers. For true believers to rule over misbelievers is proper and natural …. But for misbelievers to rule over true believers is blasphemous and unnatural, since it leads to the corruption of religion and morality in society, and to the flouting or even abrogation of God’s law. This may help us to understand the current troubles in such diverse places as Ethiopian Eritrea, Indian Kashmir, Chinese Sinkiang, and Yugoslav Kosovo, in all of which Muslim populations are ruled by non-Muslim governments.” The fact that Eritrea, Xinjiang, and Kosovo were all purely nationalist struggles in which “Islamic radicals” played no part matters little to Lewis’s argument. Islam for Lewis is immutable and impervious to change brought about by history or society. The Muslim compulsion to act according to Islam is contrasted to “our secular present,” as if religious motivations are entirely absent in the conduct of affairs in the West. One might also note that such essentialist arguments are much loved by today’s Islamic extremists, who proceed from the assertion of total incompatibility between Islam and the West. Osama bin Laden and Bernard Lewis completely agree on this point.
Essentialist arguments serve to efface history. In them, civilizations become like billiards balls bouncing off each other on a table, acting and reacting, but remaining indivisible wholes all the while. Moreover, all of the behavior of a civilization is internally generated, a product of each civilization’s unique (and again, unchanging) characteristics. Essentialist arguments thus serve to hide the political or international contexts of the various phenomena they seek to explain. In the case of Islam, all explanation (and responsibility) for the political behavior of Muslims has to be sought in “Islam” itself, with the broader context of Muslims’ involvement with Europe and the United States studiously avoided. The denial of interconnections between civilizations is also necessary to create a positive image of the West, as the storehouse of the best achievements of humanity. The West comes to be identified only with lofty ideas such as freedom, democracy, human rights, and free markets; other achievements, such as colonialism, slavery, the near extinction of the indigenous populations of three continents, the industrialization of warfare, or the Holocaust, are never invoked. The “West” is just as clearly essentialized an idea as “Islam” — it too is self-contained and internally homogenous — but here the essence is entirely positive.
* * *
Like all religions, Islam is internally diverse. Individuals and groups can take vastly different, even opposing positions from within the framework of a given religious tradition. Over the centuries, Christians have used the Bible to argue for the waging of war against non-Christians and the persecution of Jews living amidst Christians; American slavery, apartheid, and Jim Crow were all legitimated on the basis of scriptural injunctions. Yet, Christians have also used the Bible to fight against slavery, to preach tolerance, and to fight for social justice and civil rights. The same scriptures that yield the doctrine of the poverty of Christ can be made to produce the gospel of wealth. These mutually opposed positions have all been explicitly and self-consciously Christian. Muslims too can and do debate among themselves and take mutually opposed positions derived from the same sources of religious authority.
To speak of “Islam” as a homogenous phenomenon is analogous to speaking of “Christianity” as a single whole that includes Catholics and Orthodox, Protestants and Copts, and countless other sects, including such marginal ones as the Mormons, the Scientologists, and Jehovah’s Witnesses. Of course, we never do so, because we intuitively recognize that the label loses all meaning when forced on to such a diverse group. We seldom have such qualms, however, when it comes to Islam, even though the label “Islam” covers just as wide a spectrum of geographic, cultural, and sectarian diversity as the label “Christianity.” If anything, it is even more internally diverse than Christianity, which crystallized around an institutionalized Church from the very beginning. In Islam, such an institution never developed. There is no religious hierarchy and no single individual qualified to pass final judgment on questions of belief or practice. Within thirty years of the death of the Prophet, the Muslim community had split on matters of doctrine. Since then, there have been multiple and simultaneous sources of authority among Muslims. Authority is located not in church councils and such, but in individuals who derive their legitimacy from their learning, piety, lineage, and reputation among peers. This gives Islam a slightly anarchic quality: authoritative opinions (fatwa) of one expert or one group can be countered with equally authoritative opinions, derived from the same sources, of another group, or one set of practices devotional practices held dear by one group can be denounced as impermissible by another. In more extreme cases, such conflict of opinion can turn into a “war of fatwas,” fought out, in the modern age, in the press or in cyberspace. (If Islam were held in a more positive light in the West today, this diversity would be described as a “free market of ideas”!) To speak of Islam as a homogeneous entity ignores this fundamental dynamic of its tradition.
This pluralism extends to the most basic level of belief. The major sectarian divide in Islam, between Sunnis and Shi‘is, goes back to the very origins of Islam. The two doctrines evolved in parallel, and therefore it is incorrect to see in them an orthodox/heterodox divide. All Muslims share a number of key reference points (the oneness of God, loyalty to the Prophet and his progeny, the need to prepare for the Hereafter, to take a few examples), but they have been played upon in different ways by different sects and movements. Nor do the two sects exhaust the diversity, for they both have many branches and various theological and legal schools within them, while many modern ideological groups straddle the divide between the two sects.
* * *
If Islam is not homogenous, it is also not self-contained or discrete. Muslims have always interacted with their neighbors. Islamic civilization was never coextensive with Islam as a religion, but was a hybrid, multicultural venture in which Christians, Jews, and Hindus participated as central actors. If the Western tradition can now be called “Judaeo-Christian” (which both underestimates the extent to which the civilization of the West has historically been identified with Christianity alone and dispenses entirely with non-European Jews), then surely Islamic civilization was at least Judaeo-Islamic, if not worthy of an even more complicated label. This interaction has been particularly sustained in the last 200 years, when it has taken many forms. The notions of progress, the nation, and the will of the people, new means of organizing society and state power, and new means of communication all have transformed how Muslims think about Islam and the world of which they are a part. Similarly, Islamic political and religious movements today take place in an international geopolitical context in which Western powers are active agents. Whether Islamic movements react to Western military or political involvement in the Muslim world, or are, at times, even actively encouraged by the West, they are never entirely innocent of the West. “What went wrong?,” asks Bernard Lewis of the Middle East, and proceeds to give an answer that explains everything through Islam and makes no reference to the intense intertwining of the history of the Muslim world with that of the West. It is a very flimsy understanding of current realities that invokes obscure texts a millennium old but ignores the political context of today.
The classical tradition of Islam, as a matter of fact, is of singularly little help in understanding the actions of Muslims today, which have been shaped by in profound way by ideas, technologies, and modes of organization common to the modern age. Muslims relate to Islam itself is shaped by modern ways of relating to religious authority which distances Muslims from the classical tradition. The crucial concept to grasp here is that of modernity, which refers to the emergence of new understandings of the world (a hankering for certainty and classification, the disenchantment with the supernatural, and the rise of the authority of science) and new forms of organization (the modern state and its many attributes), communication (the advent of print and, more recently, of electronic media) and socialization that have transformed the world, beginning with Europe in the early modern period. Modernity wreaks havoc with the established order of things, but it does not have a fixed trajectory. It is thus different from the concept of modernization, which assumes an end-driven scheme of historical change in which certain economic changes (“development”) lead to similar social and cultural transformations (secularization, the rise of democracy, the equalization of gender roles, and so forth).
The Muslim world has not been immune to modernity. Over the last century or so, new forms of power and new epistemologies have redefined how many Muslims relate to Islam. The introduction of print and mass public education have given ever larger numbers of Muslims access to the sources of Islam, which has in turn undermined older patterns of learning and put to question the authority of the traditional guardians of Islam. Increasingly, Islamic debates have turned more and more back to the Qur’an and hadith. Scholars have called this the process of the “objectification” of Islam, in which Islam can be extracted from custom, tradition, and interpretation, and reinvented as a stand-alone object composed of certain original sources. To a certain extent, there has been a “protestantization” of Islam, in which “classical” understandings of Islam have often given way to new formulations.
This objectification of Islam has produced varied results. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, an influential current of opinion called Muslim modernism argued for the complete compatibility of Islam and modernity. Progress was inevitable and desirable, and fully consonant with Islam. Indeed, for the modernists, Islam demanded progress of its followers. Muslim modernists argued for the reform of education and of family life, for changing the position of women, for new notions of public health and hygiene, and much besides — in effect, they wanted Islam and Muslims to modernize. Islam itself, they thought, was in a poor way: Muslims had allowed it to be encrusted with all sorts of alien influences. The modernists placed much of the blame for the situation on traditional elites, such as the ulama and Sufi sheikhs, who had caused the corruption of the faith. A generation later, different groups in society, faced with rather different problems but informed by the same understanding of an objectified Islam, came up with a very different argument. The modernists, they argued, had succeeded only in imitating the West and taking Islam on the path to corruption. The solution was not to make Islam accord with the dictates of the modern age, but rather to make the modern world fit the demands of Islam. In other words, modernity had to be Islamized. Muslims could succeed in this world or the next only by reinventing modernity on truly Islamic principles. We will call this movement Islamism.
Islamism is modern in that it presupposes the objectification of Islam, for only once Islam is separated from custom, tradition, and indeed history, can it become a stand-alone object that can in turn be “applied” to the practice of politics. In effect, Islam becomes a political ideology, in which all political goals and actions are to be derived from certain abstract notions embodied in the “true” scriptural sources of Islam. In 1929, Hasan al-Banna (1906-1949), an Egyptian schoolteacher, founded the Society of Muslim Brothers in Egypt (the organization soon spread to several other Arab countries). The Muslim Brothers were self-consciously a modern political party that would engage in political action for the conquest of power in order to Islamize law and the state. Another major thinker of political Islam was Sayyid Abu’l Ala Maududi (1903-1979), who established the Jama‘at e Islami (Islamic Party) in north India in 1941. Although he opposed the creation of a separate state for the Muslims of India (on the principle that such a state would be a secular state, and thus no better than an independent India), he nevertheless moved to Pakistan when that country was established in 1947, and from his base in Lahore, presided over a political party that acquired a vocal presence all over South Asia and, later, in the South Asian diaspora. For both al Banna and Maududi, the goal of politics was not simply the prosperity and strength of Muslims (as most modernists and nationalists had articulated it), but the utter transformation of the individual and of society along principles to be extracted from the authentic sources of Islam.
Three seemingly disparate currents of modernity come together in the movements of al-Banna (and his more illustrious successor, Sayyid Qutb) and Maududi. First, there is a radical transformation in their understanding of religious authority, which they share with evangelical fundamentalists in the United States. For Islamists, religious authority resides in texts, which they see as transparent vessels of meaning available to readers without the help of interpretation. They thus disavow the authority of the interpretive tradition through which Islam has evolved in the world. Second, Islamist politics is part of a much broader search for cultural authenticity that has appealed to many different groups (religious, cultural, ethnic, racial) for its promise to restore purity and dignity in world made by colonialism and the oppression of others. In the present case, Islamists seek to reject all sorts of “encrustations” on an authentic tradition they seek to “resurrect.” Finally, the political goals of Islamist movements owe a great deal, in their formulation, to modern revolutionary ideologies, and to Marxism-Leninism in particular. Islamists tended to be rabidly anti-Communist in their stance because Communism was a rival ideology, one based on universal principles, and hostile to all religions to boot. That should not blind us, however, to the fascination Marxism-Leninism exercised over the Islamists and the model it provided for successful political action. The Russian revolution was, after all, the most successful revolt against the bourgeois world order the early twentieth century, and the resulting Soviet regime trumpeted its anticolonial credentials loudly. For al-Banna and Maududi, the organizational structure of the Communist Party held the key to its success, and both patterned their parties closely on the Communist model. Maududi’s Jama‘at e Islami saw itself, in Leninist fashion, as a vanguard party of committed revolutionaries, membership in whose ranks was to be carefully controlled. The ranks of member, candidate member, and supporter, and the establishment of a youth wing for work among students — these were all patterns borrowed directly from the Communist Party. The revolution for which they worked was, of course, to be an Islamic one.
For both, the goal was not just the overthrow of established “un-Islamic” regimes, but the inner transformation of individuals. This too is a modern conceit, shared by many ideologies of the modern world. In other ways too, the Islamist way of posing the question bears all the marks of the contemporary world. The struggle to remake the world through anticolonial struggle, concerns with social justice, the fascination with revolution, and an insistence of seeing politics as the primary space of action are all concerns of modern radical politics worldwide, and their appropriation by Islamists gives us some clue to the appeal of their message in the Muslim world. That appeal was not always huge. The middle decades of the twentieth century were dominated by secular nationalism in much of the Muslim world, and Islamist parties appealed only to tiny minorities. The political space for Islamism was opened up by a number of interrelated factors. The nationalist regimes failed to deliver on their promises (partly because of corruption, but largely because of global structural problems beyond their control); the 1967 defeat at the hands of Israel put the claims of secular nationalism under renewed scrutiny, especially in Arab lands. Ever larger numbers of citizens felt a more “authentic,” more moral response was needed for the crisis posed by Israel. Indeed, the conflict with Israel (whose establishment came at the expense of Arab aspirations and against the wishes of the majority of the population on the ground) has driven politics in much of the Muslim world for the last several decades. Since 1967, as the conflict has taken on religious overtones on all sides, it has provided a major boost to the fortunes of Islamist parties. Finally, we might note that the global defeat of the left and the collapse of the Soviet Union removed other alternatives for formulating an opposition to the discredited status quo.
If Islamism is modern, so are the Islamists. Both al Banna and Maududi were men of the twentieth century with little formal training in the tradition of Islamic learning. Both al-Banna and Qutb were schoolteachers; Maududi came from a learned family, but he did not attend a madrasa. He entered public life instead through journalism instead, and managed to live off his writing for much of his life. Engineers and doctors figure prominently in Islamist parties everywhere. Print and the public sphere have allowed Islamists to circumvent the entire tradition of Islamic learning. However, as parvenus, they lack the feel for the flexibility of the tradition, and take more absolutist positions than do traditional ulama. Because they see the original texts as the transparent vessels of meaning for all time, Islamists tend to denounce interpretation as evil in itself.
The Muslim Brothers and the Jamaat e Islami do not exhaust the spectrum of modern Islamic movements. The Islamic revolution in Iran belongs to a different trajectory yet again. Ayatollah Khomeini, the leader of the revolution, was not a lay intellectual, but a high ranking member of the Shi‘i establishment with impeccable scholarly credentials, which he used to articulate his theory of the “rule of the jurist” (vilayat-i faqih). Yet, that theory is strikingly modern, without precedent in the Shi‘i tradition. Indeed, it owed a considerable debt to the work of lay Islamist intellectuals such as Jalal Al-e Ahmad (1923-1969) and Ali Shariati (1933-1977) who had combined Islamic arguments with Western critiques of modernity. Equally at home with Marx, Sartre, and Fanon, Al-e Ahmad and Shariati articulated an “Islamic” critique of modernity that was a product of Iran’s century long encounter with the West and modernity—and as such, modern to the core. It is no surprise then that the Islamic revolution resulted in the creation of an Islamic republic, complete with a constitution, separation of institutional powers, and the principle of electoral representation. Islamic movements in Turkey or Malaysia present yet other varieties of contemporary Muslim politics.
* * *
The militant groups that make the headlines today — al-Qaeda, Hamas, the many outfits in Pakistan, or the IMU — belong to a different strand of radicalism, that can be called jihadist. They have little or no political program beyond the conquest of power and the subsequent imposition of the shari‘a as the law of the land. They interpret jihad in a purely military sense, and unlike the Islamists, have no interest in the transformation of society beyond policing norms of behavior.
The genealogy of jihadist Islam is shorter still, going no further back than the 1980s, to the final drama of the Cold War, the extremely bloody proxy war in Afghanistan. Far from being the “natural” product of a coherent, self-contained civilization, “jihadist” Islam emerged in the hurly burly of the contemporary world, its birth made possible by various regimes, Muslim and non-Muslim, who each for reasons of their own, fostered the development of a peculiar blend of militancy, religious radicalism, and social conservatism that was new in the history of the Muslim world. Since “jihadist” Islam is the main declared enemy in the “war of terrorism,” and because its specter haunts the incumbent regimes in Central Asia today, its origins are well worth closer attention.
The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, ostensibly to help an indigenous revolutionary regime fight counterrevolution, provoked a “civil” war that transformed a great deal beyond Afghanistan. The Soviet move threatened many actors, both global and regional. For the United States, the Soviet invasion, coming on the heels of the revolution in Iran, had the potential to destabilize the American position in the Middle East and its access to the region’s oil. The conservative monarchies of the Arab world, led by Saudi Arabia, felt directly threatened by both the Iranian revolution and the Soviet advance, as did the military regime in Pakistan, which had long had uneasy relations with Afghanistan, common faith notwithstanding. The three sides came together to back the Afghan resistance. The resistance was conceptualized as a jihad against Soviet atheists, and did a great deal to heighten the profile of Islamic militancy in the region. The resistance fighters, known as the mujahidin (“those who undertake jihad”) were lionized in the West as “freedom fighters.” (Ronald Reagan, welcoming several mujahidin leaders to the White House, compared them to the founding fathers of the United States). The mujahidin were not a homogeneous group, but all of them had a strong dislike for the socialists and their largely progressive social agenda, which emphasized women’s rights to education and employment, the redistribution of wealth, and making public education free and mandatory.
The United States supported an Islamic opposition to the Soviet invasion out of doctrinal principles long held sacred. Throughout the Cold War, conventional wisdom in the West saw Islam as an antidote to Communism, and thus as a strategic asset to be cultivated by the West. The Soviets’ hostility to religion would, it was hoped, make them unpopular in Muslim countries, and also keep local socialists at bay. US government agencies spent considerable effort drawing attention to Soviet hostility to religion. The problem was that many Muslims did not see socialism and Islam to be so starkly opposed. Indeed, throughout the twentieth century, a substantial current of opinion in Muslim societies held that Islam’s message was one of social justice and that socialism was inherent in Islam itself. It was only the more extremist and inflexible versions of Islam that could effectively counter Communism. The need to counter Communism with Islam thus drew the US close to the most conservative regimes in the Muslim world, whose wariness of the Soviets coincided with an implacable hostility to social or political change at home, and who used an appeal Islam to crush secular leftist opposition at home. (This was, broadly speaking, the pattern among friends of the United States in the Muslim world, especially Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, and, to a certain extent, even Turkey in the 1980s). American goals for the proxy war were modest in the beginning: they amounted largely to “killing as many Communists as possible” and making sure the Soviets paid for their misadventure. Quickly, however, it came to take center spot in the Reagan administration’s resolve to “use all means necessary” to win the Cold War. For the Saudis, who provided matching funds to the effort, the Afghan war as an opportunity to channel Islamic activism away from themselves and their patrons, the Americans. For Pakistan’s military, which had taken power in 1977, the war was a godsend, for it made it the recipient of massive military aid from the United States and financial aid from Arab monarchies. The last act of the Cold War was an American-sponsored jihad against Soviet atheism.
Political violence motivated by Islam was new then, and mostly confined to militant offshoots of the Iranian revolution. It was in the war in Afghanistan that political violence aimed at “unbelievers” was turned into a full blown form of action. Saudi money did not only arm the mujahidin, it also opened a network of schools for the sons of the refugees that poured into Pakistan. These schools purveyed a message of unbending and often bloodthirsty struggle against enemies of Islam. The war also attracted enthusiasts from all over the Muslim world, who congregated in Peshawar to fight the good fight for Islam. Al-Qaeda was to emerge from the ranks of these warriors, whose ranks included one Osama bin Laden. The Afghan war also militarized Islamic movements across the Muslim world and did much to produce the Islamist militancy that exists today. With the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989, and the Soviet collapse two and a half years later, the U.S. lost all interest in Afghanistan, but the jihadist militancy that it had created (as well as the narcotics-based economy on which it was based) continued to thrive. The jihadist groups did not have to wait long before the first U.S. war in Iraq in 1991 provided them another target for their rage. Mahmood Mamdani quite correctly calls al-Qaeda and the events of September 11 the “unfinished business of the Cold War.”
Clearly, the Afghan jihad cannot be explained without mentioning non-Islamic actors and geopolitical motivations that have nothing to do with Islam. History, we find, is not irrelevant after all to explaining the political behavior of Muslims. Indeed, it is the very explanation. And if history matters, then we need to pay attention to the actual, concrete historical experiences of actual, concrete Muslim societies. The Muslim societies of Central Asia experienced the twentieth century in a radically different way than Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia or Pakistan, and any attempt to understand Islam has to take into account their experience.
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} | 1,906 | “Bringing the world into focus
through the lens of Scripture”
Islam: A Threat to World Security Part 3
Issachar Report:
From the War Department (now the Department of Defense) archives comes a 64-year-old military intelligence review titled “Islam: a Threat to World Stability” that inadvertently provides incredible insight into the challenges faced by Christians in today’s world. The intelligence estimate was presented verbatim in Parts 1 and 2 of this series. Part 3 updates and summarizes the intelligence estimate with the corresponding facts and figures for today.
The Muslim World Then and Now
Massive changes have occurred between the Muslim world of 1946 and the Muslim world of today. The Muslim world still sprawls around half of the earth (see Figure 1), and its center straddles extremely rich oil reserves. States once marked by poverty, ignorance and stagnation have grown wealthy on oil. A middle class has developed, although the rich and poor are still far apart.
Muslims reside on all inhabited continents, with more than 60% of the global Muslim population in Asia and about 20% in the Middle East and North Africa. Fifty of the 232 countries have majority Muslim populations. Ten to thirteen percent (154 million to 200 million) of Muslims are Shia Muslims and 87-90% are Sunni Muslims. Most Shias (between 68% and 80%) live in just four countries: Iran, Pakistan, India and Iraq. One-fifth of the world’s Muslims (317 million) live in countries where Islam is not the majority religion. Over 75 percent of these live in five countries: India, Ethiopia, China, Russia and Tanzania.
The Growth of Islam
Since 1946, the world Muslim population has increased by 400 percent, from 313 million (14% of 2.17 billion worldwide) to 1.543 billion (23% of the 2009 population of 6.8 billion). The African Muslim population has grown from 40 million in 1946 to 432 million in 2009. Contrast this growth with 287% in the Middle East, 333% in Turkey and 397% in Iran. The fastest expansion of Islam has been in Africa.
Interestingly, Christianity is now also centered in Africa. Christianity has experienced a “meteoric rise” in Asia and Africa and a decline in Europe and the Americas.2 Figure 2 shows the profound southern shift in its geographical center of gravity of Christianity from inception projected through the end of the twenty-first century. Projected trends place Islam and Christianity on a collision course in Africa and India. If the trends continue, will the geographic proximity result in greater conflict or dialogue?
The Context of the 1946 Analysis
Intelligence Review No. 1 of 14 February 1946 noted, “If the Moslem states were strong and stable, their behavior would be more predictable. They are, however, weak and torn by internal stresses; furthermore, their peoples are insufficiently educated to appraise propaganda… Two basic urges meet head on in this area, and conflict is inherent in this collision of interests….The first of these urges originates within the Moslems’ own sphere. The Moslems remember the power with which once they not only ruled their own domains but also overpowered half of Europe… The Moslems intend, by any means possible, to regain political independence and to reap the profits of their own resources…The other fundamental urge originates externally. The world’s great and near-great powers covet the economic riches of the Moslem area and …the strategic locations of some of the domains.”
These two urges have played themselves out during the past 64 years in some surprising ways, which are discussed under the headings Islamism 1.0, Islamism 1.5, and Islamism 2.0.
Islamism 1.0. Spreading Islam by Violence
Historically, Islam has largely spread through conquest. The Arabic word jihad has a number of meanings: Islamic law recognizes two states of jihad against non-Muslims: 1) “Defensive jihad” occurs when non-Muslims invade in or near a Muslim country. Jihad is an obligation to repel non-Muslims. 2) “Offensive jihad” defines the communal obligation of proselytizing Islam until the entire world is subject to the rule of Islam, as this is Allah’s will. Had the Prophet not spread his religion by force, Islam would not exist.
The transnational nature of terrorism is especially appropriate for Islamists because Islam itself does not include a concept of nationhood. Loyalty to the umma (the community of Muslims) transcends all other loyalties: indeed, no other loyalties are allowable. As noted in the 1946 study, Western policies based upon an assumption of Muslim nationalism have been doomed from the outset by the West’s inability to perceive the totalitarian nature of Islam.
In summary, Islamism 1.0 “… attacks those perceived as obstructing its goal of a society ruled by a global caliphate and totally regulated by the Shariah (Islamic law).”4 Tactics encompass unlimited brutality, ranging from Koran-endorsed violence to totalitarian rule to genocide to terror. The Islamist’s pursuit of weapons of mass destruction must be taken seriously because they have repeatedly demonstrated they have no respect for human life or limitations of any kind.
However, their violence through terrorism, revolution, coup d’état and civil war are seldom effective in implementing Islamic rule by themselves.
Before examining Islamism 2.0, this article will examine combined hard and soft means currently used in non-Muslim majority countries to undermine established structures (referred to as “Islamism 1.5”).
Islamism 1.5. Spreading Islam “Peacefully” in non-Muslim Countries
Islam can also be spread through so-called “peaceful” means, notably through the four D’s”: Demographics, Dhimmitude, Dominance, and Demonization. This “peaceful” spread of Islam is aided by political correctness foisted upon Western nations by secular humanists through multiculturalism, replacement of Judeo-Christian traditions with legislated morality (e.g., hate crimes legislation and the fairness doctrine) and moral relativism.
Islamism 1.5 involves softening the kafir (non-Muslims) through public relations, lawsuits, political correctness, encroachment of shariah law and other Muslim devices (e.g., shariah-compliant financial instruments), and other legal means in concert with threats or selective violence as needed.
Muslims have become adept at forming public opinion. Working with their non-Muslim enablers, apologists and other “useful idiots,” they can win elections such as in Algeria (1992), Bangladesh (2001), Turkey (2002), Iraq (2005) and Gaza (2005). Once in power, they can move towards shariah law or otherwise impose their Islamism, as Hamas did in Gaza by forcing out Fatah in 1997, as Erdoan has been doing in shifting Turkey from their Western alignment toward the Islamic states, and as the United Kingdom has done in establishing separate shariah courts for Muslims in Britain.
Over the past three or so decades, the Muslim nations have learned to channel the economic and political power that their near monopoly status of world oil brings. Rather than conquer Western countries by force of arms as part of a defensive jihad,5 jihadists recognize that the nature of democratic societies is open to conquest through the offensive jihad of the Da’wa, the call to proselytize until the world is under Islam.6
Islamism 2.0. Working the System
The last decade has seen a major change in the strategic balance of the world, as the center of power shifts from the At-lantic to Asia due to the weakening of the United States and Europe and the growth of China and India. Not only are the natural resources of the Muslim world still in demand, but their geography enables them to capitalize upon the power shift.
In “Islamism 2.0,” Dr. Daniel Pipes writes, “Terrorism does physical damage and kills and intimidates, but it rarely over-turns the existing order…(I)f Ayatollah Khomeini, Osama bin Laden, and Major Nidal Hasan represent Islamism 1.0, (then) Recep Tayyip Erdoan (the prime minister of Turkey), Tariq Ramadan (a Swiss intellectual), and U.S. Representative[s Andre Carson (D-IN) and] Keith Ellison (D-MN) represent Is-lamism 2.0. The former kill more people but the latter pose a greater threat to Western civilization.”
The issue is Islam itself. The 1946 War Department study overlooked the true nature of Islam, which does not recognize political or geographical boundaries but only sharp division between Islamic and non-Islamic “houses”: “Dar alIslam” (The House of Islam) and “Dar alHarb” (The House of War).7
Another Islamism 2.0 phenomenon used by Islamist organizations to further their objectives is the promotion and exportation of shariah-compliant finance, now commonly referred to as SCF. This “Stealth Jihad” is being conducted against every non-Muslim country.
Popularization of Islam and Muslim Culture
Due to both progressive and Muslim influences, recent decades have seen an explosion of information about Islam and Muslim culture in popular Western media and education. Most European and U.S. school curricula include study of Is-lam and Muslim history.
The processes of globalization have created new media and made widely varied content available to Muslims throughout the world, influencing how they see themselves as part of a wider global community of Muslim believers (umma).
As the older sectors of the Muslim media develop, Muslims embrace new transnational technologies and means of disseminating information. Google searches for “Islam” and “Muslim” respectively found 109 million and 57 million web pages. The Internet provides a rich resource to construct Muslim identities and ideologies. The Internet is a key tool in Arab missionary work and is a major factor in conversions.8
The 64-year-old military intelligence review from defense archives entitled “Islam: a Threat to World Stability” is a remarkably useful starting point for reviewing the recent history of Islam. Since 1946, much of the Muslim world has been transformed by resource wealth from poverty and stagnation into vibrant, wealthy nations that try to overreach economically just as wealthy Western nations do.
However, Muslim nations without an abundance of petroleum or mineral wealth remain trapped in poverty, and turmoil, as do some with wealth.
While an educated and skilled Muslim middle class has developed, many individuals in the Islamic world remain trapped in poverty and others are desperate to find better opportunities for themselves and their families. This has led to an exodus to non-Muslim countries under a cloak of respectability (or illegal migration) and the development of a new Muslim diaspora.
Unemployment of young Muslims is a major worldwide problem in both Muslim and non-Muslim countries. Under-employment, restlessness and a frustrated sense of entitlement make fertile recruiting grounds for extremist organizations. Muslim extremists are resident in all continents, and there is a developing trend in Western nations of “home-grown” Muslim terrorists.
America and non-Muslim nations have been attacked by Islamist extremism for years, but until recently, it has not been clear specifically by whom or precisely for what. We can now discern three distinct strategies:
1) Islamism 1.0 attempts to spread Islam by violence through conventional warfare—with or without weapons of mass destruction—or through unconventional means like terror-ism or insurgency.
2) Islamism 1.5 attempts to spread Islam “peacefully” within specific non-Muslim countries, using tools provided by their apologists, enablers and co-collaborators within the Liberal-Muslim Axis, such as political correctness and “partial” implementation of Islamic law in the non-Muslim state.
3) Islamism 2.0 is far more insidious. Its adherents operate transnationally to achieve the same goals, relying upon the cravenness, greed and avarice of Western politicians, government agencies, academics and businesspeople to facilitate the implementation of practices based upon shariah law.
Western nations are in a fight to the death with Islamism, a totalitarian political ideology that, like Nazism or Communism before it, is determined to destroy freedom and the people who love it. The goal is to establish shariah not merely as the supreme law of the land, but as the supreme law of the world.
Alas, most people in non-Muslim nations not under direct personal threat do not perceive the threat. However, the authors of the War Department military intelligence review certainly were aware and provided a warning.
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The Third Wave Part I
by Wallace Edward Brand
1st part of 3
The First Wave was begun by Muhammed and went on for over half a millennium. It created an Islamic Empire that extended from Arabia through a large part of Africa, much of Central Asia, east into Iran. The Second Wave, begun in the 14th century by a warlord, Osman Bey, known as the Ottoman, threatened to overwhelm all of Europe. The Muslims were halted in the 17th Century at the gates of Vienna. The Ottoman Empire was still vast and it continued to own all of the Middle East until the first World War, when the area was divided up -- 99% going to the Muslims, 1% to the Jews. In this essay, we discuss the Third Wave of Islamic aggression, which is still in its early stages.
"In the eyes of a fanatical and resolute minority of Muslims, the third wave of attack on Europe has clearly begun. We should not delude ourselves as to what it is and what it means. This time it is taking different forms -- two in particular, terror and migration." This is what we have been told by Bernard Lewis, the doyen of Middle East historians.[1] The United States is an additional target of this third wave; here the jihad employs terror, migration and stealth.[2] The facts are set forth below. They show that our ally Israel is the US's first line of defense in our common struggle to protect Western Civilization from a new period of Dark Ages.
The cause of the current wave of terrorism, according to the political left and the political right
Efraim Karsh, Professor and head of Mediterranean Studies at King's College London tells us[3] that "The 9/11 attacks have inspired two diametrically opposed interpretations regarding their "root causes". These can be referred to as the "What is past is prologue camp" and the "Blame America first camp", sometimes also referred to as the "chickens coming home to roost" camp by Reverend Jeremiah Wright, former mentor of President Obama. By and large the right has accepted the "past is prologue" explanation and the left, the "chickens coming home to roost."
Defining the 'Past is Prologue' camp
Karsh characterizes it this way:
According to the political right, the attacks were the latest salvo in the millenarian "clash of civilizations" between the worlds of Islam and Christendom, a violent backlash by a deeply frustrated civilization reluctant to come to terms with its long-standing decline. "For many centuries Islam was the greatest civilization on earth -- the richest, the most powerful, the most creative in every significant field of human endeavor" wrote a prominent exponent of this view. "And then everything changed, and Muslims, instead of invading and dominating Christendom, were invaded and dominated by Christian powers. The resulting frustration and anger at what seemed to them a reversal of both natural and divine law have been growing for centuries, and have reached a climax in our own time." [4] This climax was seeded by the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt by Hassan al Banna in 1928 and nurtured by Sayeed Qutb Sheik Abdullah Azzam and and in Jamaat-e-Islamia in Pakistan and Indonesia by Maulana Maududi, and by other philosophers of this view including Ayatollah Ruholleh Khomeini in Iran. It came to fruition with the financing from OPEC petrodollars starting in 1970, but earlier in Palestine. Al-Qaeda is but one of the many offshoots of the Muslim Brotherhood around the world. [5]
The 'Blame-America-First' camp — "chickens coming home to roost".
Karsh explains this view this way:
"Not so, argues a vast cohort of academics, journalists, writers, and retired diplomats. It is our fault. The attacks were a misguided, if not wholly inexplicable, response to America's arrogant and self-serving foreign policy by a fringe extremist group, whose violent interpretation of Islam has little to do with the actual spirit and teachings of the religion. Not only does Islam specifically forbid the massacre of innocent civilians but the evocation as a jihad in the context of 9/11 makes a travesty of this concept, which means first and foremost an inner quest for personal self improvement and not a holy war as is widely believed."
"Muslims have never nurtured dreams of world conquest," runs a typical argument in this vein. "They had no designs on Europe, even though Europeans imagined that they did. Once Muslim rule had been established in Spain, it was recognized that the empire could not expand indefinitely" [6]
"In al Qaeda's statements directed at European or American audiences, Islamists maintain that the terrorism they direct against the West is merely reciprocal treatment for decades of Western and Israeli oppression. Yet in writings directed to their fellow Muslims, this animus is presented, not as a reaction to military or political provocation, but as a product of religious obligation" no matter what changes the US makes in its foreign policy. [7]
This suggests that Bin Laden's attribution is taqqiyya (dissimulation) to advance the cause of Islam, as is permitted and even required by the Koran.
Previous Islamic Empires, Previous Islamic Jihads
There were actually two Islamic Empires, the result of the first two waves of jihad or "holy war". These are chronicled in Karsh's book, Islamic Imperialism, a history.[8] You can find the details of these waves of aggression in a recent book, The Legacy of Jihad,[9] written by a Rhode Island physician and author of many commentaries on Islam. Dr. Bostom tells you how Islam expanded and what happened to non-muslims in conquered areas.
You will find that Islamic jihad is a grisly campaign against non-Muslims to satisfy Mohammed's goal -- forcing the "one true faith" on the entire world or to collect tribute in the form of a poll tax, jizya, from monotheists who would not accept Islam. But if they pay jizya, they are treated as second class citizens called "dhimmis". Islam, as practiced in the 7th through the 19th century was a faith bent upon the conquest and subjugation of non-Muslims.
Subjugated monotheists, "People of the Book" such as Christians or Jews, were given three choices, 1. convert to Islam, or 2. accept second class citizenship, pay a discriminatory tax and sometimes accept demeaning obligations, or 3. die. Polytheistic peoples were offered only the last choice.
In Legacy of Jihad Bostom describes how at the very outset of Islam, the Jewish Qurayzah tribe was purported to have aided the forces of Muhammad's enemies and how they were subsequently isolated and besieged. After their surrender some six to nine hundred Jewish men were beheaded in front of Muhammad and their decapitated bodies buried in trenches. The young Jewish males, women, and children were sold into slavery and their property and land were confiscated.
Throughout the first and second waves of jihad, non-Muslims were discriminated against, made slaves, raped and then converted to Islam or became second class citizens. There was no converting back. Apostasy resulted in death.
In an insatiable thirst for slaves and women for harems (places of sexual slavery) Islam declared Jihads deep into Africa and Europe, depopulating Eastern Europe and the coast of Africa. Jihad campaigns over 1300 years against non-Muslims were characterized by massacre, enslavement, and pillage. You are confronted with how such military conquests have subdued millions of indigenous peoples and expropriated vast expanses of land.
One reviewer of Bostom's history said: Islam needs to be understood for what it is by head-in-the-sand westerners and, besides analysis and understanding, western civilization certainly needs to identify a lasting cure for this violent, self-absorbed, hate-filled, psychotic plague before more damage is done.
Death, murder, rape plunder and misery were the lot of infidels who were on the receiving end of jihad. Muslim conquests were not the peaceful transitions of willing converts but conquest by the sword. Modern day Jihad is not an isolated incident, but a tradition going back 1300 years.
Mawlana Maududi, in his monograph, Jihad in Islam, [10] has written in unequivocal terms that the sole objective of Islam is to overthrow any un-Islamic political system anywhere in the world and replace it by an Islamic system with Shar'ia law. To do so, Muslims (belonging to the Party of Allah) must use physical force whenever necessary to quickly attain this objective and keep the application of force forever.
The religion of Islam spread poverty, war, slavery, tyranny, illiteracy and backwardness through brutal military force, and brought slavery and marginalization for non-Muslims to all regions that this totalitarian religion conquered. [12]
Are the terror attacks we are now seeing a "Third Wave"?
The First Wave
The first wave commenced in the time of Muhammad in the 7th Century and lasted until about the 13th Century. Military colonies were established in the 9th Century and the rate of expansion slowed. From the Arabian Peninsula, the first Islamic Empire extended west and included large areas of Northern Africa (the Maghreb) and southern Spain. To the east it included Iran, and large parts of Central Asia. The decline of this first Islamic empire is described in detail by Efraim Karsh[13]. The invasion of the Mongols caused the collapse of the first Islamic Empire; it was already in decline and therefore easy prey. The Mongol invaders drove Turkish tribes to Anatolia. These Islamic Turkish tribes that were fleeing the Mongols settled in what is now Turkey. The Mongols looted and murdered, but couldn't govern. They soon fell into decline.
Wallace Edward Brand is a retired lawyer living in Virginia.
Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
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} | 7,387 | The Roots of Muslim Rage
The Rise of the House of Unbelief
For a long time now there has been a rising tide of rebellion against this Western paramountcy, and a desire to reassert Muslim values and restore Muslim greatness. The Muslim has suffered successive stages of defeat. The first was his loss of domination in the world, to the advancing power of Russia and the West. The second was the undermining of his authority in his own country, through an invasion of foreign ideas and laws and ways of life and sometimes even foreign rulers or settlers, and the enfranchisement of native non-Muslim elements. The third—the last straw—was the challenge to his mastery in his own house, from emancipated women and rebellious children. It was too much to endure, and the outbreak of rage against these alien, infidel, and incomprehensible forces that had subverted his dominance, disrupted his society, and finally violated the sanctuary of his home was inevitable. It was also natural that this rage should be directed primarily against the millennial enemy and should draw its strength from ancient beliefs and loyalties.
Europe and her daughters? The phrase may seem odd to Americans, whose national myths, since the beginning of their nationhood and even earlier, have usually defined their very identity in opposition to Europe, as something new and radically different from the old European ways. This is not, however, the way that others have seen it; not often in Europe, and hardly ever elsewhere.
Though people of other races and cultures participated, for the most part involuntarily, in the discovery and creation of the Americas, this was, and in the eyes of the rest of the world long remained, a European enterprise, in which Europeans predominated and dominated and to which Europeans gave their languages, their religions, and much of their way of life.
For a very long time voluntary immigration to America was almost exclusively European. There were indeed some who came from the Muslim lands in the Middle East and North Africa, but few were Muslims; most were members of the Christian and to a lesser extent the Jewish minorities in those countries. Their departure for America, and their subsequent presence in America, must have strengthened rather than lessened the European image of America in Muslim eyes.
In the lands of Islam remarkably little was known about America. At first the voyages of discovery aroused some interest; the only surviving copy of Columbus's own map of America is a Turkish translation and adaptation, still preserved in the Topkapi Palace Museum, in Istanbul. A sixteenth-century Turkish geographer's account of the discovery of the New World, titled The History of Western India, was one of the first books printed in Turkey. But thereafter interest seems to have waned, and not much is said about America in Turkish, Arabic, or other Muslim languages until a relatively late date. A Moroccan ambassador who was in Spain at the time wrote what must surely be the first Arabic account of the American Revolution. The Sultan of Morocco signed a treaty of peace and friendship with the United States in 1787, and thereafter the new republic had a number of dealings, some friendly, some hostile, most commercial, with other Muslim states. These seem to have had little impact on either side. The American Revolution and the American republic to which it gave birth long remained unnoticed and unknown. Even the small but growing American presence in Muslim lands in the nineteenth century—merchants, consuls, missionaries, and teachers—aroused little or no curiosity, and is almost unmentioned in the Muslim literature and newspapers of the time.
The Second World War, the oil industry, and postwar developments brought many Americans to the Islamic lands; increasing numbers of Muslims also came to America, first as students, then as teachers or businessmen or other visitors, and eventually as immigrants. Cinema and later television brought the American way of life, or at any rate a certain version of it, before countless millions to whom the very name of America had previously been meaningless or unknown. A wide range of American products, particularly in the immediate postwar years, when European competition was virtually eliminated and Japanese competition had not yet arisen, reached into the remotest markets of the Muslim world, winning new customers and, perhaps more important, creating new tastes and ambitions. For some, America represented freedom and justice and opportunity. For many more, it represented wealth and power and success, at a time when these qualities were not regarded as sins or crimes.
And then came the great change, when the leaders of a widespread and widening religious revival sought out and identified their enemies as the enemies of God, and gave them "a local habitation and a name" in the Western Hemisphere. Suddenly, or so it seemed, America had become the archenemy, the incarnation of evil, the diabolic opponent of all that is good, and specifically, for Muslims, of Islam. Why?
Some Familiar Accusations
Among the components in the mood of anti-Westernism, and more especially of anti-Americanism, were certain intellectual influences coming from Europe. One of these was from Germany, where a negative view of America formed part of a school of thought by no means limited to the Nazis but including writers as diverse as Rainer Maria Rilke, Ernst Junger, and Martin Heidegger. In this perception, America was the ultimate example of civilization without culture: rich and comfortable, materially advanced but soulless and artificial; assembled or at best constructed, not grown; mechanical, not organic; technologically complex but lacking the spirituality and vitality of the rooted, human, national cultures of the Germans and other "authentic" peoples. German philosophy, and particularly the philosophy of education, enjoyed a considerable vogue among Arab and some other Muslim intellectuals in the thirties and early forties, and this philosophic anti-Americanism was part of the message.
After the collapse of the Third Reich and the temporary ending of German influence, another philosophy, even more anti-American, took its place—the Soviet version of Marxism, with a denunciation of Western capitalism and of America as its most advanced and dangerous embodiment. And when Soviet influence began to fade, there was yet another to take its place, or at least to supplement its working—the new mystique of Third Worldism, emanating from Western Europe, particularly France, and later also from the United States, and drawing at times on both these earlier philosophies. This mystique was helped by the universal human tendency to invent a golden age in the past, and the specifically European propensity to locate it elsewhere. A new variant of the old golden-age myth placed it in the Third World, where the innocence of the non-Western Adam and Eve was ruined by the Western serpent. This view took as axiomatic the goodness and purity of the East and the wickedness of the West, expanding in an exponential curve of evil from Western Europe to the United States. These ideas, too, fell on fertile ground, and won widespread support.
But though these imported philosophies helped to provide intellectual expression for anti-Westernism and anti-Americanism, they did not cause it, and certainly they do not explain the widespread anti-Westernism that made so many in the Middle East and elsewhere in the Islamic world receptive to such ideas.
It must surely be clear that what won support for such totally diverse doctrines was not Nazi race theory, which can have had little appeal for Arabs, or Soviet atheistic communism, which can have had little appeal for Muslims, but rather their common anti-Westernism. Nazism and communism were the main forces opposed to the West, both as a way of life and as a power in the world, and as such they could count on at least the sympathy if not the support of those who saw in the West their principal enemy.
But why the hostility in the first place? If we turn from the general to the specific, there is no lack of individual policies and actions, pursued and taken by individual Western governments, that have aroused the passionate anger of Middle Eastern and other Islamic peoples. Yet all too often, when these policies are abandoned and the problems resolved, there is only a local and temporary alleviation. The French have left Algeria, the British have left Egypt, the Western oil companies have left their oil wells, the westernizing Shah has left Iran—yet the generalized resentment of the fundamentalists and other extremists against the West and its friends remains and grows and is not appeased.
The cause most frequently adduced for anti-American feeling among Muslims today is American support for Israel. This support is certainly a factor of importance, increasing with nearness and involvement. But here again there are some oddities, difficult to explain in terms of a single, simple cause. In the early days of the foundation of Israel, while the United States maintained a certain distance, the Soviet Union granted immediate de jure recognition and support, and arms sent from a Soviet satellite, Czechoslovakia, saved the infant state of Israel from defeat and death in its first weeks of life. Yet there seems to have been no great ill will toward the Soviets for these policies, and no corresponding good will toward the United States. In 1956 it was the United States that intervened, forcefully and decisively, to secure the withdrawal of Israeli, British, and French forces from Egypt—yet in the late fifties and sixties it was to the Soviets, not America, that the rulers of Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and other states turned for arms; it was with the Soviet bloc that they formed bonds of solidarity at the United Nations and in the world generally. More recently, the rulers of the Islamic Republic of Iran have offered the most principled and uncompromising denunciation of Israel and Zionism. Yet even these leaders, before as well as after the death of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, when they decided for reasons of their own to enter into a dialogue of sorts, found it easier to talk to Jerusalem than to Washington. At the same time, Western hostages in Lebanon, many of them devoted to Arab causes and some of them converts to Islam, are seen and treated by their captors as limbs of the Great Satan.
Another explanation, more often heard from Muslim dissidents, attributes anti-American feeling to American support for hated regimes, seen as reactionary by radicals, as impious by conservatives, as corrupt and tyrannical by both. This accusation has some plausibility, and could help to explain why an essentially inner-directed, often anti-nationalist movement should turn against a foreign power. But it does not suffice, especially since support for such regimes has been limited both in extent and—as the Shah discovered—in effectiveness.
This revulsion against America, more generally against the West, is by no means limited to the Muslim world; nor have Muslims, with the exception of the Iranian mullahs and their disciples elsewhere, experienced and exhibited the more virulent forms of this feeling. The mood of disillusionment and hostility has affected many other parts of the world, and has even reached some elements in the United States. It is from these last, speaking for themselves and claiming to speak for the oppressed peoples of the Third World, that the most widely publicized explanations—and justifications—of this rejection of Western civilization and its values have of late been heard.
The accusations are familiar. We of the West are accused of sexism, racism, and imperialism, institutionalized in patriarchy and slavery, tyranny and exploitation. To these charges, and to others as heinous, we have no option but to plead guilty—not as Americans, nor yet as Westerners, but simply as human beings, as members of the human race. In none of these sins are we the only sinners, and in some of them we are very far from being the worst. The treatment of women in the Western world, and more generally in Christendom, has always been unequal and often oppressive, but even at its worst it was rather better than the rule of polygamy and concubinage that has otherwise been the almost universal lot of womankind on this planet.
Is racism, then, the main grievance? Certainly the word figures prominently in publicity addressed to Western, Eastern European, and some Third World audiences. It figures less prominently in what is written and published for home consumption, and has become a generalized and meaningless term of abuse—rather like "fascism," which is nowadays imputed to opponents even by spokesmen for one-party, nationalist dictatorships of various complexions and shirt colors.
Is imperialism, then, the grievance? Some Western powers, and in a sense Western civilization as a whole, have certainly been guilty of imperialism, but are we really to believe that in the expansion of Western Europe there was a quality of moral delinquency lacking in such earlier, relatively innocent expansions as those of the Arabs or the Mongols or the Ottomans, or in more recent expansions such as that which brought the rulers of Muscovy to the Baltic, the Black Sea, the Caspian, the Hindu Kush, and the Pacific Ocean? In having practiced sexism, racism, and imperialism, the West was merely following the common practice of mankind through the millennia of recorded history. Where it is distinct from all other civilizations is in having recognized, named, and tried, not entirely without success, to remedy these historic diseases. And that is surely a matter for congratulation, not condemnation. We do not hold Western medical science in general, or Dr. Parkinson and Dr. Alzheimer in particular, responsible for the diseases they diagnosed and to which they gave their names.
Of all these offenses the one that is most widely, frequently, and vehemently denounced is undoubtedly imperialism—sometimes just Western, sometimes Eastern (that is, Soviet) and Western alike. But the way this term is used in the literature of Islamic fundamentalists often suggests that it may not carry quite the same meaning for them as for its Western critics. In many of these writings the term "imperialist" is given a distinctly religious significance, being used in association, and sometimes interchangeably, with "missionary," and denoting a form of attack that includes the Crusades as well as the modern colonial empires. One also sometimes gets the impression that the offense of imperialism is not—as for Western critics—the domination by one people over another but rather the allocation of roles in this relationship. What is truly evil and unacceptable is the domination of infidels over true believers. For true believers to rule misbelievers is proper and natural, since this provides for the maintenance of the holy law, and gives the misbelievers both the opportunity and the incentive to embrace the true faith. But for misbelievers to rule over true believers is blasphemous and unnatural, since it leads to the corruption of religion and morality in society, and to the flouting or even the abrogation of God's law. This may help us to understand the current troubles in such diverse places as Ethiopian Eritrea, Indian Kashmir, Chinese Sinkiang, and Yugoslav Kossovo, in all of which Muslim populations are ruled by non-Muslim governments. It may also explain why spokesmen for the new Muslim minorities in Western Europe demand for Islam a degree of legal protection which those countries no longer give to Christianity and have never given to Judaism. Nor, of course, did the governments of the countries of origin of these Muslim spokesmen ever accord such protection to religions other than their own. In their perception, there is no contradiction in these attitudes. The true faith, based on God's final revelation, must be protected from insult and abuse; other faiths, being either false or incomplete, have no right to any such protection.
There are other difficulties in the way of accepting imperialism as an explanation of Muslim hostility, even if we define imperialism narrowly and specifically, as the invasion and domination of Muslim countries by non-Muslims. If the hostility is directed against imperialism in that sense, why has it been so much stronger against Western Europe, which has relinquished all its Muslim possessions and dependencies, than against Russia, which still rules, with no light hand, over many millions of reluctant Muslim subjects and over ancient Muslim cities and countries? And why should it include the United States, which, apart from a brief interlude in the Muslim-minority area of the Philippines, has never ruled any Muslim population? The last surviving European empire with Muslim subjects, that of the Soviet Union, far from being the target of criticism and attack, has been almost exempt. Even the most recent repressions of Muslim revolts in the southern and central Asian republics of the USSR incurred no more than relatively mild words of expostulation, coupled with a disclaimer of any desire to interfere in what are quaintly called the "internal affairs" of the USSR and a request for the preservation of order and tranquillity on the frontier.
One reason for this somewhat surprising restraint is to be found in the nature of events in Soviet Azerbaijan. Islam is obviously an important and potentially a growing element in the Azerbaijani sense of identity, but it is not at present a dominant element, and the Azerbaijani movement has more in common with the liberal patriotism of Europe than with Islamic fundamentalism. Such a movement would not arouse the sympathy of the rulers of the Islamic Republic. It might even alarm them, since a genuinely democratic national state run by the people of Soviet Azerbaijan would exercise a powerful attraction on their kinsmen immediately to the south, in Iranian Azerbaijan.
Another reason for this relative lack of concern for the 50 million or more Muslims under Soviet rule may be a calculation of risk and advantage. The Soviet Union is near, along the northern frontiers of Turkey, Iran, and Afghanistan; America and even Western Europe are far away. More to the point, it has not hitherto been the practice of the Soviets to quell disturbances with water cannon and rubber bullets, with TV cameras in attendance, or to release arrested persons on bail and allow them access to domestic and foreign media. The Soviets do not interview their harshest critics on prime time, or tempt them with teaching, lecturing, and writing engagements. On the contrary, their ways of indicating displeasure with criticism can often be quite disagreeable.
But fear of reprisals, though no doubt important, is not the only or perhaps even the principal reason for the relatively minor place assigned to the Soviet Union, as compared with the West, in the demonology of fundamentalism. After all, the great social and intellectual and economic changes that have transformed most of the Islamic world, and given rise to such commonly denounced Western evils as consumerism and secularism, emerged from the West, not from the Soviet Union. No one could accuse the Soviets of consumerism; their materialism is philosophic—to be precise, dialectical—and has little or nothing to do in practice with providing the good things of life. Such provision represents another kind of materialism, often designated by its opponents as crass. It is associated with the capitalist West and not with the communist East, which has practiced, or at least imposed on its subjects, a degree of austerity that would impress a Sufi saint.
Nor were the Soviets, until very recently, vulnerable to charges of secularism, the other great fundamentalist accusation against the West. Though atheist, they were not godless, and had in fact created an elaborate state apparatus to impose the worship of their gods—an apparatus with its own orthodoxy, a hierarchy to define and enforce it, and an armed inquisition to detect and extirpate heresy. The separation of religion from the state does not mean the establishment of irreligion by the state, still less the forcible imposition of an anti-religious philosophy. Soviet secularism, like Soviet consumerism, holds no temptation for the Muslim masses, and is losing what appeal it had for Muslim intellectuals. More than ever before it is Western capitalism and democracy that provide an authentic and attractive alternative to traditional ways of thought and life. Fundamentalist leaders are not mistaken in seeing in Western civilization the greatest challenge to the way of life that they wish to retain or restore for their people.
A Clash of Civilizations
The origins of secularism in the west may be found in two circumstances—in early Christian teachings and, still more, experience, which created two institutions, Church and State; and in later Christian conflicts, which drove the two apart. Muslims, too, had their religious disagreements, but there was nothing remotely approaching the ferocity of the Christian struggles between Protestants and Catholics, which devastated Christian Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and finally drove Christians in desperation to evolve a doctrine of the separation of religion from the state. Only by depriving religious institutions of coercive power, it seemed, could Christendom restrain the murderous intolerance and persecution that Christians had visited on followers of other religions and, most of all, on those who professed other forms of their own.
Muslims experienced no such need and evolved no such doctrine. There was no need for secularism in Islam, and even its pluralism was very different from that of the pagan Roman Empire, so vividly described by Edward Gibbon when he remarked that "the various modes of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by the people, as equally true; by the philosopher, as equally false; and by the magistrate, as equally useful." Islam was never prepared, either in theory or in practice, to accord full equality to those who held other beliefs and practiced other forms of worship. It did, however, accord to the holders of partial truth a degree of practical as well as theoretical tolerance rarely paralleled in the Christian world until the West adopted a measure of secularism in the late-seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
At first the Muslim response to Western civilization was one of admiration and emulation—an immense respect for the achievements of the West, and a desire to imitate and adopt them. This desire arose from a keen and growing awareness of the weakness, poverty, and backwardness of the Islamic world as compared with the advancing West. The disparity first became apparent on the battlefield but soon spread to other areas of human activity. Muslim writers observed and described the wealth and power of the West, its science and technology, its manufactures, and its forms of government. For a time the secret of Western success was seen to lie in two achievements: economic advancement and especially industry; political institutions and especially freedom. Several generations of reformers and modernizers tried to adapt these and introduce them to their own countries, in the hope that they would thereby be able to achieve equality with the West and perhaps restore their lost superiority.
In our own time this mood of admiration and emulation has, among many Muslims, given way to one of hostility and rejection. In part this mood is surely due to a feeling of humiliation—a growing awareness, among the heirs of an old, proud, and long dominant civilization, of having been overtaken, overborne, and overwhelmed by those whom they regarded as their inferiors. In part this mood is due to events in the Western world itself. One factor of major importance was certainly the impact of two great suicidal wars, in which Western civilization tore itself apart, bringing untold destruction to its own and other peoples, and in which the belligerents conducted an immense propaganda effort, in the Islamic world and elsewhere, to discredit and undermine each other. The message they brought found many listeners, who were all the more ready to respond in that their own experience of Western ways was not happy. The introduction of Western commercial, financial, and industrial methods did indeed bring great wealth, but it accrued to transplanted Westerners and members of Westernized minorities, and to only a few among the mainstream Muslim population. In time these few became more numerous, but they remained isolated from the masses, differing from them even in their dress and style of life. Inevitably they were seen as agents of and collaborators with what was once again regarded as a hostile world. Even the political institutions that had come from the West were discredited, being judged not by their Western originals but by their local imitations, installed by enthusiastic Muslim reformers. These, operating in a situation beyond their control, using imported and inappropriate methods that they did not fully understand, were unable to cope with the rapidly developing crises and were one by one overthrown. For vast numbers of Middle Easterners, Western-style economic methods brought poverty, Western-style political institutions brought tyranny, even Western-style warfare brought defeat. It is hardly surprising that so many were willing to listen to voices telling them that the old Islamic ways were best and that their only salvation was to throw aside the pagan innovations of the reformers and return to the True Path that God had prescribed for his people.
Ultimately, the struggle of the fundamentalists is against two enemies, secularism and modernism. The war against secularism is conscious and explicit, and there is by now a whole literature denouncing secularism as an evil neo-pagan force in the modern world and attributing it variously to the Jews, the West, and the United States. The war against modernity is for the most part neither conscious nor explicit, and is directed against the whole process of change that has taken place in the Islamic world in the past century or more and has transformed the political, economic, social, and even cultural structures of Muslim countries. Islamic fundamentalism has given an aim and a form to the otherwise aimless and formless resentment and anger of the Muslim masses at the forces that have devalued their traditional values and loyalties and, in the final analysis, robbed them of their beliefs, their aspirations, their dignity, and to an increasing extent even their livelihood.
The instinct of the masses is not false in locating the ultimate source of these cataclysmic changes in the West and in attributing the disruption of their old way of life to the impact of Western domination, Western influence, or Western precept and example. And since the United States is the legitimate heir of European civilization and the recognized and unchallenged leader of the West, the United States has inherited the resulting grievances and become the focus for the pent-up hate and anger. Two examples may suffice. In November of 1979 an angry mob attacked and burned the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan. The stated cause of the crowd's anger was the seizure of the Great Mosque in Mecca by a group of Muslim dissidents—an event in which there was no American involvement whatsoever. Almost ten years later, in February of 1989, again in Islamabad, the USIS center was attacked by angry crowds, this time to protest the publication of Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses. Rushdie is a British citizen of Indian birth, and his book had been published five months previously in England. But what provoked the mob's anger, and also the Ayatollah Khomeini's subsequent pronouncement of a death sentence on the author, was the publication of the book in the United States.
Not all the ideas imported from the West by Western intruders or native Westernizers have been rejected. Some have been accepted by even the most radical Islamic fundamentalists, usually without acknowledgment of source, and suffering a sea change into something rarely rich but often strange. One such was political freedom, with the associated notions and practices of representation, election, and constitutional government. Even the Islamic Republic of Iran has a written constitution and an elected assembly, as well as a kind of episcopate, for none of which is there any prescription in Islamic teaching or any precedent in the Islamic past. All these institutions are clearly adapted from Western models. Muslim states have also retained many of the cultural and social customs of the West and the symbols that express them, such as the form and style of male (and to a much lesser extent female) clothing, notably in the military. The use of Western-invented guns and tanks and planes is a military necessity, but the continued use of fitted tunics and peaked caps is a cultural choice. From constitutions to Coca-Cola, from tanks and television to T-shirts, the symbols and artifacts, and through them the ideas, of the West have retained—even strengthened—their appeal.
The movement nowadays called fundamentalism is not the only Islamic tradition. There are others, more tolerant, more open, that helped to inspire the great achievements of Islamic civilization in the past, and we may hope that these other traditions will in time prevail. But before this issue is decided there will be a hard struggle, in which we of the West can do little or nothing. Even the attempt might do harm, for these are issues that Muslims must decide among themselves. And in the meantime we must take great care on all sides to avoid the danger of a new era of religious wars, arising from the exacerbation of differences and the revival of ancient prejudices.
To this end we must strive to achieve a better appreciation of other religious and political cultures, through the study of their history, their literature, and their achievements. At the same time, we may hope that they will try to achieve a better understanding of ours, and especially that they will understand and respect, even if they do not choose to adopt for themselves, our Western perception of the proper relationship between religion and politics. To describe this perception I shall end as I began, with a quotation from an American President, this time not the justly celebrated Thomas Jefferson but the somewhat unjustly neglected John Tyler, who, in a letter dated July 10, 1843, gave eloquent and indeed prophetic expression to the principle of religious freedom:
The body may be oppressed and manacled and yet survive; but if the mind of man be fettered, its energies and faculties perish, and what remains is of the earth, earthly. Mind should be free as the light or as the air.
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} | 3,638 | Bombing Without Moonlight: The Origins of Suicidal Terrorism
Bombing Without Moonlight: The Origins of Suicidal Terrorism - Part I
by Abdal-Hakim Murad
1. Amnesia
Attention deficit disorder seems to flourish under conditions of late modernity. The past becomes itself more quickly. Memories, individual as well as collective, tend to be recycled and consulted only by the old. For everyone else, there are only current affairs, reaching back a few months at most. Orwell, of course, predicted this, in his dystopic prophecy that may have been only premature; but today it seems to be cemented by postmodernism (Deleuze), and also by physicists, who are now proclaiming an almost Asharite scepticism about claims for the real duration of particles.
This is a condition that has an ancestry in the stirrings of the modernity which it represents. Hume anticipated it in his stunning insistence on the non-continuity of the human self: we are ёnothing but a collection of perceptions which succeed each other with inconceivable rapidity and are in perpetual flux and movement; or so he thought.[1] Modern fiction may still explore or reaffirm identities (Peter Carey) and thus define human dignity as the honourable disposition of at least some aspects of an accumulated heritage. But this is giving way to the atomistic, playful, postmodern storytelling of, say, Elliot Perlman, which defines dignity - where it does so at all - in terms of freedom from all stories, even while lamenting the superficial tenor of the result. It is against the backdrop of this culture that the scientists, now far beyond Ataturk’s ґScience is the Truest Guide in Life, raise the stakes with their occasionalism, and, for the neurologists, the increasing denial of the autonomy of the human will - a new predestinarianism that makes us always the consequence of genes and the present, not the remembered past.[2]
Our public conversations, then, seem to be the children of a marriage of convenience between two principles, neither of them religious or even particularly humanistic. The elitist mystical trope of the moment being all that is, significantly misappropriated by some New Age discourses, has become the condition of us all, albeit with the absence of God. Journalism thus becomes the privileged discourse to whose canons the public intellectual must conform, if he or she is to become a credible guide. More striking still is the observed fact that amidst our current crisis of wisdom it also seems to provide the language in which the public discussion of faith is carried on. Thus Catholicism becomes the humiliated cardinal of Boston, not St Augustine. Its morality is taken to be that which visibly clashes with the caprice of characters in Home and Away, not a severe but ultimately liberating cultivation of the virtues rooted in centuries of experience and example. Judaism, in its turn, becomes the latest land-grab of a settler rabbi, not a millennial enterprise of faith and promise. Of course, our new occasionalism does invoke the past. But it does so with reference either to scriptures, stripped of their normative exegetical armature, or to those events which remain in the consciousness of a citizenry raised on enlightenment battles with obscurantism. So again, we recall Galileo, not Eckhart; we recall the interesting hatreds of the Inquisition, not the charity of St Vincent de Paul. Otherwise, our culture is religiously amnesiac. Winston Churchill, near the end of his life, began to read the Bible. ґThis book is very well-written, he said. ґWhy was it not brought to my attention before?
It is in this frankly primitive condition that we seek to discuss religious acts which, against all the predictions of our grandparents, claim to interrupt the progress of history towards a world in which there will be no continuity at all. To our perplexity, history, despite Fukuyama, does not seem to have ended. Humans do not always act for the economic or erotic now; Tamino still seeks his Sarastro. A residue of real human diversity persists. For the human soul is not yet, as Coleridge wrote,
Seraphically free,
From taint of personality.[3]
This failed ultimacy, this sense that we, the Papageni, have to dust down the armour of an earlier generation of moral absolutes, when history was still running, when the victory of the corporations and of Hollywood was not yet assured, accounts for the maladroit condition of the worldҒs current argument about terrorism. The most active in seizing the moment, as they elbow impatiently past the fin de sicle multiculturalists and postmodernists, are the oddly-named American neoconservatives, who invoke Leo Strauss and roll up their sleeves to defend Washington against Oriental warriors who would defy the dialectics of history and seek to postpone the apotheosis of Anglo-Saxon consumer society, which they see as the climax of a billion years of evolution.[4] But despite such ideologised adversions to the longue dure, secularism seems to have little to offer that is not short-termist and reactive, and determined to reduce the globe to a set of variations on itself.
Traditionalists, who should be more helpful, seem paralysed. Much of the fury and hurt that currently abounds in the Christian and the Muslim worlds reveals a sense that the timetable which God has approved for history has been perverted. Christendom is not a virgin in this respect; in fact, it was first, with scholastic and Byzantine broadsides against Christian sin as invitation to Saracenic chastisement (Bernard, Gregory Palamas). Then it was the turn of Islam, when, from the seventeenth century on the illusion of the Muslims as materially and militarily God’s chosen people was dealt a series of shocking blows. Now it is, once again, the turn of Christendom (if the term be still allowed), which is currently wondering why history has not yet experienced closure, why a former rival should still be showing signs of life, either as the result of a misdiagnosis, or as a zombie-like revenant bearing only a superficial resemblance to his medieval seriousness. Certainly, the American president and his frequently evangelical team see themselves in these terms. Architects of a society which, Disney-like, appropriates the past only to emphasise the glory of the present, these zealots appeal to a prophecy-religion in which the Book of Revelation is the key to history. For them, too, the promised closure is imminent, and its frustration by the Other an outrage.
You know, I turn back to your ancient prophets in the Old Testament and the signs foretelling Armageddon and I find myself wondering if were the generation that is going to see that come about. I donҒt know if youve noted any of these prophecies lately, but, believe me, they certainly describe the times weҒre going through.[5]
The protagonists of the current conflict, then, are unusual in their confidence that history has not ended, although millennialism seems to hover in the background on both sides, helped along by the frequently Palestinian scenery. The triumph of the West, or the resurgence of an Islam interpreted by bestselling Pentecostal authors as a chastisement and a demonic challenge, signals the end of a growing worry about the religious meaninglessness of late modernity. Tragically, however, neither protagonist seems validly linked to the remnants of established religion, or shows any sign of awareness of how to connect with history. Fundamentalist disjuncture is placing us in a kind of metahistorical parenthesis, an end-time excitement in which, as for St Paul, old rules are irrelevant, and Christ and Antichrist are the only significant gladiators on the stage. Fundamentalists, as well as mystics, can insist that the moment is all that is real.
2. Sunna Contra Gentiles
In such a world of pseudo-religious reaction against the postmodern erosion of identity, it follows that if you are not with us,ђ you are with the devil. Or, when this has to be reformulated for the benefit of the blue-collar godless, you are a cheese-eating surrender monkeyђ. Where religion exists to supply an identity, the world is Augustinian, if not quite Manichean. The West’s ancient trope of itself as a free space, perhaps a white space, holding out against Persian or Semitic intruders, is being coupled powerfully, but hardly for the first time, with Pauline and patristic understandings of the New Israel as unique vessel of truth and salvation, threatened in the discharge of its redemptive project by the Oriental, Semitic, Ishmaelitic other. In the West, at least, the religious resources for this dualism are abundant and easily abused. Take Daniel Goldhagen, for instance, who in his most recent book suggests that the xenophobia of the Christian Bible is qualitatively greater than that of any other scripture. New Bibles, he urges, must be printed with many corrections to what he describes as this founding text of a lethal Western self-centredness.[6] Semites of several kinds would be well-advised to beware a culture raised on such a foundation.
It is remarkable that both sides, in constructing themselves against a wicked, fundamentalist rival, mobilise the ancient trope of antisemitism. The Self needs its dark Other, preferably nearby or within. That Other has standard features: in the case of Christian antisemitism it is that it stands for Letter rather than Spirit, for blind obedience rather than freedom, for an discreet but intense transnational solidarity in place of Fatherland and Church. It is sexually aberrant (hence the Nazi polemic against Freud). It hides its women (who should, instead, join the SS, or practice nacktkultur). It imposes archaic and unscientific taboos: diet, purity, circumcision. Such are the categories in which an almost dualistic West historically defines its relationship to its nearest and most irritating Other.[7]
Antisemitism is, in Richard Harries’ words, a ‘light sleeper’. But part of its strength is that it is not asleep at all; and never has been. As Christendom seeks its identity, the Dark Other today is now more usually Ishmael. Torched mosques, terrified asylum-seekers, bullied schoolchildren, and, we may not unreasonably add, a journalistic discourse of the type that is now being labelled Islamophobicђ, are less new than they seem. They represent a vicarious antisemitism. Islamic law is immutableђ is a chorus in the new Horst Wessel song. Circumcision is barbaric.ђ Their divorce laws are medieval and anti-woman.ђ They keep to themselves and donђt integrate. Such is the battle-cry of the resurgent Western right: Pim Fortuin, Jean-Marie Le Pen, Jorg Haider, Filip de Winter. It has become startlingly popular, though always volatile at the polls. Thus is the old antisemitic metabolism of Europe and its American progeny being reinvigorated by the encounter with Ishmael. Again, history has started up again, and again our amnesiac culture ignores the vast cogwheels, deep beneath the surface, which move it.
On the other side, now, crossing the Mediterranean, or the Timor Sea, we generally find not a bloc of sincere fundamentalist regimes, but an archipelago of dictatorships, Oriental despots after the letter, which are in almost every case answerable not to their own electorates - for they recognise none - but to a distant desk in the State Department.[8] These are the neo-mamluks, ex-soldiers and condottieri of a system that penalises ethics. Ranged against them we observe the puritans, iconoclasts with El Greco eyes, whose claim it is to detest the modernity of the regimes. Such puritans, led by the memory of Sayyid Qutb, have no illusions about the nature of secular rule. They see clearly that the regimes are more modern than those of the West, because more frank in their conviction that science plus commerce does not equal ethics. Where the Western journalistic eye sees retardation, the Islamist sees modernity. Hitler and Stalin were more modern than Churchill and Roosevelt, more scientific, more programmatic, more distant from the past. The future is theirs, and it is neither ChristҒs millennial reign nor the triumph of small-town America. It is Alphaville.
The Islamist, then, is not the caricature of the envious, uncomprehending Third Worlder. Typically he has spent much of his life in the West, and is capable of offering an empirical analysis, or at least a diagnosis. Sayyid Qutb, in his writing on what he calls the deformed birth of the American man,ђ sees Americans as advanced infants; advanced because of their technology, but puerile in their ignorance of earlier stages of human development.[9] There is something of Teilhard de Chardin in his account, which inverts Tocqueville to identify an American idiot-savant mania for possession. Technology made America possible, and ultimately, America need claim nothing else. Linked to Christian fundamentalism, it is an enemy of every other story; and unlike the East, it will not remain in its place. It must send out General Custer to subdue all remnants of earlier phases of human consciousness rooted in nature, spirituality or art. Its client regimes are therefore its natural, not opportunistic, adjuncts in its programme to subdue the world. They are not a transitional phase, they are the end-game.
Antisemitism forms part of this vision too, certainly. But since, as Goldhagen confirms, this is an essentially Christian phenomenon, to be healed by correcting the views of the Evangelists, in an Islamic context which lacks a letter-spirit dichotomy it seems a hazier resource for identity construction. Qutb was influenced by the Vichy theorist Alexis Carrel (1873-1944), through his odd, vitalist tract LHomme, cet inconnu, which remains an ultimate, though unacknowledged, source text for much modern Islamism.[10] No medieval Muslim thinker of any note wrote a book against Judaism, although homilies against Christianity were quite common. If medieval Islam had a dark Other, it was more likely to be Zoroastrianism than Judaism, which, in Samuel GoiteinҒs phrase by which he summed up his magisterial work A Mediterranean Society, enjoyed a close and symbioticђ relationship with Islam.[11] But todays Qutbian Islamist purges midrashic material from Koranic commentary, and studies the Tsarist forgery The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, and, even, Mein Kampf. Nothing can be discovered, it seems, in the Islamic libraries, so that this importation into an ostensively nativist and xenophobic milieu becomes inescapable - the fundamentalistҒs familiar appeal to necessity.
As he surveys the wreckage of Istanbul synagogues and Masonic lodges, the journalist, as ibn al-waqt, is oblivious to the happier past of Semitic conviviality in the Ottoman Sephardic lands. And perhaps he is right, perhaps, under our conditions, the past is another religion. But the paradox has become so burning, and so murderous, that we cannot let it pass unremarked. The Islamic world, instructed to host Israel, was historically the least inhospitable site for the diaspora. The currently almost ubiquitous myth of a desperate sibling rivalry between Isaac and Ishmael is nonsensical to historians.
Here, at the dark heart of Islams extremist fringe, we find what may be the beginnings of a solution. No nativist reaction can long survive proof of its own exogenous nature. And no less than its Christian analogues, Islamic ghuluww, at least in its currently terroristic forms, betrays a European etiology. It borrows its spiritual, as well as its material, armament from Western modernity. This, we may guess, marks it out for anachronism in a context where intransigence is xenophobic.[12]
This is an unpopular diagnosis; but one which is gaining ground. It cannot be without significance that outside observers, when not blinded by a xenophobic need to view terrorism as Islamically authentic, have sometimes intuited this well. Here, for instance, is the verdict of John Gray, in his book Al-Qaeda and What it Means to be Modern:
No cliche is more stupefying than that which describes Al-Qaida as a throwback to medieval times. It is a by-product of globalisation. Its most distinctive feature - projecting a privatised form of organised violence worldwide - was impossible in the past. Equally, the belief that a new world can be hastened by spectacular acts of destruction is nowhere found in medieval times. Al-QaidaҒs closest precursors are the revolutionary anarchists of late nineteenth-century Europe.[13]
And Slavoj Zizek, a still more significant observer, is convinced that what we are witnessing is not Jihad versus MacWorldђ the standard leftist formulation - but rather MacWorld versus MacJihad.[14]
This implies that if ghuluww has a future, it will be because modernity has a future, not because it has roots in Islamic tradition. That tradition, indeed, it rules out of order, as it dismisses the juridical, theological and mystical intricacies of medieval Islam as so much dead wood. The solution, then, which the world is seeking, and which it is the primary responsibility of the Islamic world, not the West to provide, must be a counter-reformation, driven by our best and most cosmopolitan heritage of spirit and law.
A point of departure, here, and a useful retort to essentialist reductions of Islam to Islamism, is the fact that orthodoxy still flies the flag in almost all seminaries. The reformers are, at least institutionally, in the Rhonnda chapels, not the cathedrals. Perhaps the most striking fact about regulation Sunni Islam over the past fifty years has been its insistence that religion֒s general response to modernity must not take the form of an armed struggle. There have been local exceptions to this rule, as in the reactive wars against Serbian irredentism in Bosnia, and Soviet intrusion into Afghanistan. But a doctrine of generic jihad against the West has been conspicuous by its absence.[15]
It is not immediately clear how we gloss this. In the nineteenth century Sunni Islam frequently elected to resist European colonial rule by force, giving rise to the figure of the Mad Mullah who formed part of the imperial imagination, in the fiction of John Buchan, or Tolstoys Hajji Murad. In the twentieth century, however, the traditional pragmatism of Sunnism seemed to generate an ulema ethos that was certainly not quietist, but had nothing in common with Qutbian Islamism either. Hence the Deobandi movement in India, and its Tablighi offshoot, supported the Congress party, and generally opposed Partition. Arab religious leaders sometimes resorted to force, as with the Naqshbandi shaykh Izz al-Din al-Qassam in mandate Palestine; but the independence movements were overwhelmingly directed by secular modernists. The ancient universities, al-Qarawiyyin, al-Zaytuna, al-Azhar and the rest, regarded the modern period as a mandate for doctrinal retrenchment and the piecemeal ijtihad-based reassessment of aspects of Islamic law. In other words, mainstream IslamҒs response to the startling novelty of a modernity that was forced on its societies at the point of an imperial or postcolonial bayonet was self-scrutinising and cautious, not militant.
Traditional wisdom and the texts, of course, were the reason for this. Sunnism, as inscribed by the great Seljuk theorists, had put its trust in prudence, pragmatism, and a strategy of negotiation with the sultan. So in British India, the Hanafi consensus decided that the Raj formed part of dar al-islam. In Russia, Shihab al-Din Marjani took the same view with regard the empire of the Tsars. But for Qutb, all this was paradigmatic of the error of classical Sunni thought. Islam was to be prophetic, and hence a liberation theology, challenging structures as well as souls, not by preaching and praying alone, but by agitation and revolution. Given his education and sitz im leben in the golden age of anti-colonialism, probably nothing could have extricated Qutb from his critique of what he saw as Sunni indifferentism, rooted, he suspected, in Ashari deontology and a presumed Sufi fatalism. The prophetic is not meant to be accommodating; it fails, or it succeeds triumphantly. The normative political thinkers, Mawardi, Nizam al-Mulk, Ghazali, Katib чelebi, and their modern advocates, had to be jettisoned. Technological empires had made the world anew, and, if it was to cope with an increasingly bizarre and offensive Other, Islamic thought had to be reformed in the direction of an increasingly unconditional insurrectionism.
Qutbs resurrection of Ibn Taymiya, via Rashid Rida, became paradigmatic. In the fourteenth century this angry Damascene had attacked ulema who acquiesced in the rule of the nominally Muslim Mongols. Loyalty could be to a righteous imam alone. Rida and others had taken pains to dissociate this from the Kharijite slogan ґNo rule other than GodsҒ, for an unpleasant odour hung about the name of Kharijism. But de facto, the hard wing of Hanbalite Islam seemed vulnerable to a Kharijite reading. Prototypical al-Qaida supporters wrote to condemn the Syrian neo-Hanbali scholar Nasir al-Din al-Albani, when he released a series of taped sermons entitled Min Manhaj al-Khawarij, From the Method of the Kharijitesђ, in the early 1990s.[16] Often the word used by less radical puritans in Saudi Arabia for those engaged in terrorism is, precisely, Kharijiteђ.
What everyone agrees, however, is that al-Qaida is far, far removed from medieval Sunnism. For some, it is Kharijite; for others, an illicit Westernisation of Islam. As Carl Brown puts it, it cannot be stressed too often just how much Qutbђs hardline interpretation departs from the main current of Islamic political thought throughout the centuries.[17] For Brown, Qutbism is kharijism redux; but we would add, with Gray, that it is a Westernised kharijism. Like all identity movements, it ends with only a very arguable kind of authenticity.
The convergence between a malfunctioning Hanbalism and modern revolutionary vanguardism may owe its strength not to a shared potential for an instantiated xenophobia, although this will attract many party cadres; instead, I suspect, it relates to deeper structures of relationality with the world and its worldliness. The new Islamic zealotry is angry with the Islamic past, as Ibn Taymiya was. For Ibn Taymiya, the ulema had not adequately polarised light and dark. In the case of the mystics, they had disastrously confused them. There is something of the Augustine in Ibn Taymiya: a concrete understanding of a God who is radically apart from creation, or, in patristic terms, alienated from it, and a consequently high view of scripture that challenges Ashґarite and Maturidi confidences in the direct intelligibility of God in the world, and revives essentially dualistic readings of the Fall narrative. It may be that Ibn T | http://theamericanmuslim.org/tam.php/features/articles/bombing_without_moonlight_the_origins_of_suicidal_terrorism_part_i | robots: classic
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Published on: July 3, 2012
The Koran and Historical Scholarship
The Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) was founded in 1880 as an association of Biblical scholars with a Protestant theological commitment. Since then it has developed into the largest professional association concerned with Biblical and related studies; it is now strongly committed to a theologically neutral methodology of modern historical scholarship. The SBL has just received a grant of $140,000 from the Henry Luce Foundation for a three-year consultation, which is to plan for a professional association of Koranic studies. [Note: The announcement uses throughout the spelling Qur’an/Qur’anic, which is a closer transliteration of the Arabic original. Since this blog is a most unlikely candidate for the planned organization, I use here the more conventional English spelling.]
John Kutsko, a professor of Biblical studies at Emory University and executive director of the SBL, will head this initiative. The announcement pointed to the unprecedented interest in Islam both in Western academia and in the broader public, which makes the establishment of the planned organization very timely. Kutsko emphasized that the SBL will not direct or determine the agenda of the consultation (or, by implication, of the organization to result from it); its role is to be that of facilitator. I have no doubt that this is a sincere intention. However, it is fair to assume that what the aim here is modern scholarship, though presumably traditional Islamic scholars may be part of the conversation. I don’t think that what the SBL or the Luce Foundation wants to support is, say, the methodology of a fundamentalist madrassah in Pakistan. In its self-description the SBL says that it is “devoted to the critical investigation of the Bible”. A co-director of the consultation says that it would, among other things, seek to approach the Koran in the context in which the text arose, “as an historical, literary and religious text.” “Critical”, “context”, “historical” – these are words, used in connection with the Koran, that could get you killed in many parts of the Muslim world. But let me leave aside for the moment the question of the likelihood that such an approach could get a hearing among traditional Muslims. Rather I will ask a different question: Given the core affirmations of Islamic faith, is this approach religiously plausible for believing Muslims? It goes without saying that only Muslims can decide what they can or cannot believe; a non-Muslim can be a historian of Islam, he cannot be an Islamic theologian. However, a sympathetic outsider can ask a question that does not presuppose belief: Are there intellectual resources for such an approach within the Muslim tradition?
A short answer to this question is yes. This answer, though, needs to be explicated. [I have touched on this issue in a post some time ago, though in a rather different connection – the prospects of the Arab Spring. Since I do not assume that the readers of this post have been reading every previous one, I will risk repeating myself on a few points.]
Muslim faith affirms that the verses of the Koran were dictated, in Arabic, by the angel Jibril (a synonym for the Biblical Gabriel) to the Prophet Muhammad, who was commanded to recite them (Qur’an means “recitation”). This revelation to Muhammad took place over a period of over twenty years, beginning about 610 CE. The transmission was at first by word of mouth – in cultures where there are few books and few people who are literate, the skill of learning texts by heart is carefully cultivated and oral transmission can be highly accurate.
Soon after Muhammad’s death Abu Bakr, the first Caliph, ordered the verses to be collected in one book. Most modern historians agree with the traditional Muslim assumption that the present text of the Koran is an essentially intact transmission of what the Prophet recited. Revisions of the text have been minor.
One of the important topics taken up in early Islamic thought was whether the Koran is created or eternal – that is, whether its verses came into being as God addressed the Prophet through the agency of the angel, or whether it had existed (presumably in the Arabic language) in all eternity, even before the creation of the world. I think it is correct to say that the majority view, both in earlier times and today, has come down on the eternity side. In that understanding the Koran is given a status different from what even the most fundamentalist Christians would ascribe to the Bible. Indeed, the debates over the status of the Koran resemble the Christological debates in the early church: It is perhaps only a slight exaggeration to say that the majority view of the Koran gives the latter a place in Islam similar to the one of Christ in Christianity. Needless to say, there is here a degree of inerrancy ascribed to the Koran which makes it exceedingly difficult to relativize any part of it by interpretations in terms of historical context. This may seem like a very remote theoretical issue, far removed from the practical political issues of the Muslim world today. It is not: As soon as one looks at different parts of the Koran in terms of the different historical contexts in which they arose, a focus of interpretation will be the differences between the chapters deriving, respectively, from the Mecca and the Medina periods in the life of the Prophet. These were very different circumstances. In Mecca Muhammad stood as a beleaguered figure in opposition to the local establishment, in danger of his life – the danger which led to his flight to Medina. In Medina Muhammad became an effective head of state and a successful military commander. Traditional Islamic scholars have always recognized the differences between Mecca and Medina passages, but this did not deter many of them from ascribing to both an eternal status, and equal authority in all questions. This has a very important practical consequence: For very understandable reasons, the harsher and more intolerant passages mostly originated during the Medina period, when Muhammad was under strong political and military pressures that had been absent in Mecca. What follows is simply this: Modern historical scholarship can make a potential contribution to the liberalization of Muslim politics.
There is another view in Islamic thought, which denied the eternity of the Koran and thereby facilitated a much more liberal method of interpretation. It was best represented by the so-called Mutazilite school, which flourished in Iraq between the 8th and 10th centuries CE. The Mutazilites asserted that the fundamental Islamic doctrine of the absolute oneness of God forbade the notion that the Koran was co-eternal with God, since such a notion would introduce “division” (a much condemned heresy) into the divine unity. If it is part of creation, then, the Koran can be open to rational inquiry. Mutazilite philosophy was emphatically Islamic and did not deny the revelatory character of the Koran, but in approaching the sacred text it sought a balance between revelation and reason. Of course this did not lead to the methodology exhibited at the annual meetings of the Society of Biblical Literature. But it opened up an avenue for less literal interpretation or ijtihad (the Arabic word means “effort”), first allowed if a particular passage seems to deviate from the central message of the Koran – for example, if mention is made of “the hand of God”, where the Koran affirms the non-corporeal nature of God – the passage may then be interpreted allegorically, as referring to actions by God. This may at first look like a very modest step, but it has led to much larger steps. Possibly the largest has been taken in the Sufi tradition of Muslim mysticism, where allegory is often used to interpret the Koran.
The history of ijtihad is long and complicated, and cannot concern us here. Suffice it to say that this concept, in its Mutazilite meaning, is very frequently cited by contemporary thinkers aiming for an aggiornamento that would reconcile Islam with pluralism, democracy and modern thought. It seems to me that there are lessons for Muslims in the ways by which Jewish and Christian thinkers have sought a balance between revelation and reason in their approach to the Scriptures (both before and since the coming of modern historical scholarship). To say this is not to claim some sort of intellectual superiority that Muslims would rightly resent. It is rather to draw consequences from two obvious facts – that, at any rate within the three Abrahamic faiths, the problems of revelation versus reason are necessarily similar – and that the challenge of modern historical scholarship was first encountered by Christian theologians. Islamic ijtihad may benefit from “the advantage of coming late” – there is already a record of mistakes to avoid.
One similar problem is how to differentiate between the central message of the faith, which cannot be compromised without abandoning the faith altogether, and less central elements that are subject to negotiation (with other faiths, with reason, and last not least with doubts in one’s own mind). Luther made this differentiation in a radical manner: The central message of the Gospel is the coming of redemption in Jesus Christ – the Bible, in both Old and New Testament, is God’s Word insofar as it testifies to that cosmic event – and it should be interpreted accordingly. This approach, for example, allowed Luther to consider throwing out the Epistle of James from the canon of the New Testament (in the end he didn’t, because his instinct in such matters was conservative). Needless to say, this is a theological criterion of Biblical exegesis, very different from the scientific criteria of modern critical analysis. Yet the theological criterion opened up intellectual space for the latter: Even believing scholars could apply the scalpel of critical analysis to their own sacred texts, with confidence that they would not lose their faith as a result. It is no accident that modern historical study of the Bible first flourished in Lutheran theological faculties in Germany.
An analogy occurs to me here. I have recently had a number of conversations with Evangelicals about the difference between their understanding of the Bible and that of more liberal Lutherans: They are prone to say that the Bible is the Word of God; a more Lutheran formulation would be that the Bible contains the Word of God. The two sentences may seem to be very similar. They are not similar at all. The latter formulation precludes any idea of inerrancy, and opens up a bevy of liberalizing ijtihad.
I should end on a note of caution. The fact that there are intellectual resources for a neo-Mutazilite approach to the Koran does not mean that such an approach could have wide appeal in the Muslim world. The approach is mostly favored by intellectuals, who have little if any popular support. In any case, history is not an ongoing academic seminar. Ideas, if picked up by political interests, can be historically potent. (Actually, the Lutheran Reformation is a good example of this.) But the future course of the vast Muslim world will be determined by economic, political and military developments far removed from the debates of scholars.
show comments
• PapayaSF
Anyone interested in this topic should read Did Muhammad Exist? by Robert Spencer.
• Les Hardie
Why would modern historians agree that the Koran is an accurate transcription of what Mohammed said? He spoke many times and at different places. His listeners were illiterate, so much, if not all, of what he said was never written down. Thus what he said was left to the vagaries of human memory and time. Who were these listeners; how well did they listen, how well did they remember? Abu Bakr sent agents out to scour the land to find people who claimed to have heard the Prophet many years in the past. Why should we assume they were truthful in claiming they had heard him, or if they had, that they now remembered anything accurately? If President Cleveland had sought out people who claimed to have heard Lincoln’s Cooper ‘s Union speech, we would not think that anyone could give an accurate oral transcription of that long -passed event. Why should we do so with those who claimed to remember exactly what Mohammed had said twenty years before? Berger says that in oral societies people develop skill in memorizing texts and oral transmission can be very accurate. This may be true but is beside the point. The people Abu Bakr talked to had not memorized a text— there was no text until he put it together! These interlocutors simply stated what they remembered of a one-time speech many years ago. There is no reason to believe any of it was accurate. Given the near impossibility of any human remembering a speech in any detail, why should we not assume that most, if not all of the Koran was made up after Mohammed’s death, and none of it accurately transcribes what he ever said?
• anon
The Quran is NOT poetry—but it has a poetic rhythm and an internal harmony that facilitates in memorization. Even today Muslims memorize the Quran cover to cover without error. Contests are held for children who memorize the Quran!
During the time of the Prophet, the Quran was memorized by the whole community. This wasn’t just speech—it was a message from God.—the seriousness of that is very different.
• doc feelgood
Assuming that this Jibril or Gabriel, this celestial messenger is still existing in realms of the metaphysical Invisible and watching the progress of mankind, than why is he not inspiring new Moses, Muhammad and Jesus of our days?
It is pretty “amazing” that divine power in its incommensurate intelligence and wisdom is historically so discrete and greedy in its care of humanity for the sake of improving it and that we just must “rely” on old sources which seem so obsolete in responding to the needs of a global, postindustrial world.
• Perry Robinson
Was Paul Tillich a Christian theologian?
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• Guy Fox
Koranic scholarship is the best investment the West can make in undermining extremist Muslim religion. Just as the German theologians rocked Protestant Christianity, I predict the Koran will fare far worse from these critical methodologies. Once these findings are published on the internet, it will take years to seep into their minds, but will hasten the end of a protracted and bloody battle with Islam. This is far better than any bomb in winning this war.
• Carl Palmateer
There are few assumptions here that may not be justified. Check out:
• WigWag
“Why would modern historians agree that the Koran is an accurate transcription of what Mohammed said?…Given the near impossibility of any human remembering a speech in any detail, why should we not assume that most, if not all of the Koran was made up after Mohammed’s death, and none of it accurately transcribes what he ever said?” (Les Hardie @ July 3, 2012 at 9:20 pm)
Why would modern historians conclude that the Gospels represent anything but a wildly inaccurate depiction of the life of Jesus; after all they were written many decades after his death?
We know at least that Mohammed was an actual historical figure. Can we be sure about that when it comes to Jesus? Has even a single extra biblical reference to Jesus ever been discovered?
What about the Torah stories? Haven’t modern day investigators determined with reasonable certainty that the feats attributed to Joshua never happened? Isn’t there significant skepticism on the part of scholars about the entire Exodus story?
It is beyond the capability of science to determine the whether or not a deity (or deities) exist. It is entirely within the capability of science to critically examine the cogency of human myths.
We should not be surprised that the devout find this troubling; of course it produces cognitive dissonance. In the West even the devout have made their peace with the Enlightenment. One of the great unexamined stories in the United States (at least if it has been examined I don’t know about it) is how conservative Christians have embraced Enlightenment values. They may not want their children taught evolution in the public schools and they may oppose abortion, but for the most part they have embraced religious diversity, pluralism and tolerance. Ironically, in 21st Century America intolerance is more likely to be found amongst secular leftists.
The major clash between the Islamic and Western world has its roots in the fierce desire of many Islamists to fervently resist the inundation of Islamic societies with Enlightenment values. In the Jewish world we see the same thing with the small but loud ultraorthodox community.
It is self-evident to all but those who desire to avert their eyes that much of the contents of both the Bible and Koran is little more than myth. Some of this myth has a basis in historical fact while other parts are even more fanciful.
• Howard Kainz
References to the existence of Jesus are found among Roman historians like Tacitus and Suetonius and the Jewish historian Josephus. No such extra-Islamic references by historians are found to Muhammad.
• Jerome
“We know at least that Mohammed was an actual historical figure.”
We know no such thing. There is no physical evidence at all for that idea. In particular, no coins, no inscriptions, and no mention of Mohammed by contemporary authors whose cities were being conquered by his supposed followers. It’s as if the Poles never heard of Hitler.
• C. Philips
Unlike for Jesus, very few people seem to have actually seriously examined the evidence for the existence of Mohammed. What some who did actually found is described in “Did Muhammad Exist?” by Robert Spencer. Before assuming that “We know at least that Mohammed was an actual historical figure”, I would suggest going back to the sources cited in this book to see what they have to say (not necessarily the book itself, which is not research and is aimed at a popular audience).
• WigWag
“References to the existence of Jesus are found among Roman historians like Tacitus and Suetonius and the Jewish historian Josephus. No such extra-Islamic references by historians are found to Muhammad.” (Howard Kainz @ July 5, 2012 at 11:29 am)
Both Tacitus and Suetonius were born significantly after the death of Jesus; neither of them could provide anything but hearsay evidence that he actually lived. If Jesus is a real historical figure (as I believe he was) neither of them could provide any contemporaneous evidence about what he said. As far as the Josephius reference, not only do scholars believe that the passage was edited by later Christians, the passage in question referring to Jesus was written at least half a century after Jesus died.
It is simply illogical to conclude that the Bible more accurately captures the language of Jesus than the Koran captures the language of Mohammed.
• Nancy D.
With all due respect, how exactly does one create a theologically neutral methodology and not end up with creating God in our own image, which for Christians would be anti God and thus anti Christ.
Without a final authority, there can be no cohesiveness of belief. Without a cohesiveness of belief, there can be no cohesiveness of Faith.
It seems to me, that a theologically neutral methodology could only compromise The Word of God, thus exposing The Anti-Christ, who, through the sin of pride, has been with us since The Beginning. At the end of The Day,
Christ would not Found His Church, and not ensure The Word of God remained consistent.
• lord garth
In addition to the meccan vs medinan dichotomy, it would also be useful to divide the Koran into the ‘plain meaning’ verses (the Koran describes itself as ‘clear’ several dozen times but many verses are anything but clear) and those verses that require a scholar’s insight. Similarly, it would be important to divide the Koran into verses that praise Mohammud or mohammud’s example or that provide direction to Mohammud and those verses that are more general. Similarly, it would be useful to divide those verses which repeat or modify biblical or talmudic or early christian thought and those that sanctify 7th century arabic culture
• IcePilot
Excellent article, interesting discussion.
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• Jim.
A discussion of the Mutazilite school would be incomplete without a mention of al-Mihna…
In the 8th century, rationalist investigators of the Koran (inspired by the works of the Greeks that would later result in the European Renaissance) tortured and executed theologians who disagreed with their “new” take on Islam.
Muslims have the same view of rationalist investigation of the Koran as Enlightenment scholars (and their descendants) have of the Spanish Inquisition, with equal justification.
So, what are the chances that Islam will embrace “modernization” of the Koran? About the same chance that Western secularists will forgive the Catholic Church for the Spanish Inquisition, on the grounds that “it happened a long time ago”.
• davidr
Wishful thinking, at best, as Peter Berger acknowledges in his cautionary last paragraph. Harking back to the Mutazilites or invoking Sufi traditions as possible sources for a Muslim reformation is delusional. Sunni and Shi’ite theologians and scholars will have none of it, and are otherwise preoccupied with one another’s throats.
• Kris
Jim@16: Cute.
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• Wayne Lusvardi
What is intriguing about Dr. Berger’s column about historical criticism and the Koran is that instead of such scholarship undermining Islamic extremism it might lead to blowback or exploitation by those who want to use religious extremism for political purposes.
There is evidence that this is what happened in Iran after the fall of the Shah. Radical Islam was used as a way to take over the country by many whose motivation was not Islamic.
Dr. Berger ends his discussion with the comment that the Muslim world will be influenced more by economic and social upheavals in the future more than any historical scholarship of the Koran likely only to be read by a few intellectuals.
I believe it is the economist David S. Goldman who has pointed out that Iran is dying of demographic imbalance brought about by a negative population replacement rate due to secularization from birth control (not Islamization).
And Egypt’s recent political upheavals are due to the Chinese bidding up the world price of grain in order to feed cattle for their appetite for more protein in their diets. This has priced Egyptian peasants out of the market.
Neither of these two recent trends have been affected by Western scholarship of the Koran.
As to the above comments about whether Jesus existed, Jesus had a brother (James) and a family. James ended up as one of the leaders of the Jesus Movement based in Jerusalem while Paul led the Christ Movement mostly in urbanizing Asia Minor. There are Biblical references for James and Jesus’ family including his other brothers.
In the end, however, one must believe based on faith more than on evidence. As Dr. Berger has pointed out elsewhere, a believer will always end up disappointed by an alleged inerrant scripture, the infallibility of tradition or Papal edicts, and even the manipulation of religious experiences with modern day methods such as Scientology and other so-called cults. The secular equivalent is anomie in the face of the limits, failures and political manipulations of science.
I don’t know whether I would rather be a Muslim who discovered the Koran was contrived or a scientist who at the end of their career became disillusioned at finding that global warming was a fraud.
• R.C.
Well, the Koran IS contrived.
There is no, or very very little, evidence for the existence of Mohammed as a real person with even half of the biographical details required to keep Islam’s idea of him intact.
The various “historical Jesus” approaches keeps producing chimerae incompatible with the available evidence, because the testimony about Jesus of Nazareth is so early and abundant. But a critical approach to the biography, if any, of Mohammed, and to the process of the compilation of the Koran as a mashup of corrupted Judaism, Nestorian Christian, and Arab tribal traditions is likely to debunk the Koran in a more profound and unchallengable way because of how very problematic the text really is, and the lack of hard data to support an orthodox Muslim view.
This outcome is much to be desired, as we have already seen in the examples provided by “liberal Judaism” and “liberal Christianity.” In each of those cases we saw the conversion of a transcendent and supernaturalistic faith into a largely moralistic one guided more by the prevailing attitudes of the intellectual elite in the surrounding culture than by evangelical zeal and genuine expectation of the miraculous.
The result of this transmogrification is predictable: Weak cultural affinity for the religion by the third or fourth generation, coupled with practical atheism and a rapid drop in rates of reproduction.
Now, in the case of Judaism, the events of the Exodus and the lifetimes of David and Solomon and the major prophets are safely remote and thus cannot be entirely debunked. This provides a window for the perpetuation of a severe but largely self-regulating orthodoxy which is always too small to form a Nazi- or Caliphate-style conquest movement.
Likewise the early evidence for Jesus and the writing of the early fathers of Christianity (having secondhand reports of the apostles and, therefore, third-hand reports of Jesus) allow a Christian orthodoxy to continue in history even while its numbers are kept beneath conquest-threshold by the erosion caused by secular culture and the liberal Christianity result of Biblical criticism.
(I grant that there is a marked difference between Christianity and Islam in the level of “conquest mentality” due to the marked difference between Jesus’ career and teachings and that of the Shaka-Zulu-like Mohammed. We can say of Christians, in a way we cannot honestly say of Muslims, that to the degree they are oppressors, they are bad Christians. But, men are men, and history shows us that even followers of an almost-pacifistic and radically forgiving faith can become domineering and oppressive, in sufficient numbers and an atmosphere of doctrinal triumphalism. How much more so the followers of Islam?)
So, with Judaism and Christianity, the secular debunking of a religious text through scholarly research of it based on secular premises did not drive a religion out of existence but helped restrain it towards a non-dangerous path.
But Islam and its writings are far less well-documented, from a secular academic viewpoint, than are Christianity and its New Testament writings. And, they are of sufficiently recent provenance that they lack the excuse of antiquity which, in the case of Moses and Elijah, might cover a multitude of developed legends.
Moreover, the Koran often alters key details in the sacred stories of the other two monotheisms in ways that are blatantly self-serving, but which are far less multiply-attested (and, therefore, plausible) than the original forms of those stories. It is easy to see that when the Koran airbrushes the life and crucifixion of Jesus, it does so because the better-documented versions tend to falsify the Koran’s theology, or ideology of conquest, or eschatology, or Arab tribal identity. But it is also easy to see that the Koran comes much later, of much more dubious provenance, and thus lacks even the doubtful authority of one of the 3rd century gnostic gospels.
In short: There is far less for a Muslim to hang his hat on, if he is to be intellectually honest about the origins of his faith (and thus willing to subject it to rigorous testing) and simultaneously maintain the elements in it which provide a foundation for violence against others.
This is a good thing. Of the three, Islam is the biggest potential source for religious violence. That is intrinsic to its book and its founder in a way utterly not present in Christianity, or in any contemporary form of Judaism. So it is a good thing that the faith most naturally predisposed to violence should also be the faith with the least semblance of a leg to stand on, veracity-wise. It is uniquely exposed to the liberalizing effects of the critical method.
Once that liberalizing process is well underway and well publicized in all the major media of the modern world — a matter of 100 years or so, I’m sorry to say, but the sooner begun, the better — then we’ll all have less to fear from violent religious impulses.
NOTE: A counterargument against what I’ve presented here would be: Because a Muslim can’t accept the conclusions of historical criticism without ceasing entirely to be a Muslim, the critical trend will be rejected entirely by Islam and Islam will never liberalize.
This sounds like a worrisome reversal of the argument, but it is the result of an either/or, all-or-nothing fallacy. It is perfectly true that an Iranian Ayatollah isn’t about to see a presentation on the utter insupportability of their view of the Koran and become a Dawkins Disciple the following day.
But that is not the way the liberalizing trend happens. It happens on the margins: Sometimes it is a person who already has serious doubts who becomes entirely secular. More often than that, a hardcore extremist rejects 99% of the secular critical conclusions but accepts 1% of them because he finds in doing so some helpful new perspectives on his sacred text and a fig leaf’s worth of intellectual honesty. Then he finds his children accept 10% of the secular critical conclusions, and he can’t complain entirely because he accepts 1%. And of his grandchildren, some will revert to fundamentalism, but others will become avowed secularists, and others liberal reformers, and others will profess agnosticism and impatience with the whole subject.
There is thus no reason to expect that the ability of Koranic Criticism to EVENTUALLY disembowel Islam will cause Koranic Criticism to be entirely rejected by all Muslims AT THE OUTSET. That is not the way the thing works.
• antiwar2008
China is a civilization state and it is not secular state in the Western conception. Chinese civilization doesn’t believe in one God and yet it will rule the world and beat Western civilization. The big question is “Why is the West still pre-occupied with securalizing Islam and Islamic civilization, when China couldn’t care less about Islam and Islamic civilization as a “threat” and instead accepts that it is a different civilization altogether from that of China?” My point is that the article has no value vis-a-vis the competition of Western civilization with China. All the commentators here are barking at the wrong tree. I say learn from China in how it treats Islam and Muslims instead of fomenting hatred of the Other, i.e. Muslims and their faith. Muslims and Chinese civilization accept that Others will be different from them why can’t the West?
• jsmith9999
According to Jewish and Christian theology, as far as that goes, it is wrong to worship an Angel. If it is wrong to worship an Angel because an Angel is not God and it’s wrong to worship idols because idols are not God than to set the Quran as co-existent with God or to execute those who would hold the Quran below God looks an awful lot like the same thing.
Idol worship.
• jsmith9999
The article was a scholarly investigation of the beliefs present in Islam having nothing to do with anything you mentioned.
Given individuals such as yourself, your claim is highly dubious.
• Kris
Post title: “The Koran and Historical Scholarship”
antiwar2008@24: “the article has no value vis-a-vis the competition of Western civilization with China”
You don’t say!
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• Siddiqi
I would like to appreciate the scholarship ofthe author and style of the article.However I would disagree from the last sentence of the article that”the future course of the vast Muslim world will be determined by economic, political and military developments far removed from the debates of scholars”. The modern Muslim scholarship is best reperesented in the works of Dr. Fazlur Rahman and Dr. Tariq Ramazan specially in the book of the later mentioned namely “Radical Reform; Islamic Ethics and Libration”. I hope that current crises of religious authority and legitimacy in the vast Muslim world would lead to new thinking and create an intelluctual activeism that may fundamentally change the paradigm of religious understanding in Islam.
• Andrew Allison
Surely it’s clear that the three great Abrahamic religions are branches of the same tree, and that they all suffer from the same oral history problem?
The fundamental difference between them today is their respect for women; there’s a, persuasive to me, school of thought that Islam lost its way when, contrary to the teachings of the Prophet, women were relegated to second-class citizenry.
• srp
The peculiar thing about doctrines of scriptural authenticity is that they lead into an existential trap. If one were to receive a visitation from an apparently supernatural being commanding one to take various morally fraught actions, the first questions one should ask is “Is this being good or evil? Are its prescriptions good or evil?” Otherwise you could end following a devil figure.
The least convincing testimony of a being’s goodness is that being’s own assertion. An evil being of course will say “I am the one true god whom you should love, follow, and obey.” (Nor can the power of the entity tell us that its commands are good rather than evil, as Kant pointed out–moral autonomy is inescapable for humans.)
When we want to decide if another person is trustworthy, we don’t ask him point blank and expect a useful answer. We look at his actions in the past and at the testimony of trusted third parties. It follows that the more one believes something is an actual quotation from the deity, the less one should trust it as a guide to action and belief. If I say that I am the essence of moral wisdom and you should follow my teachings because I am good, it’s one thing; if the staff of the American Enterprise Institute said this about me, you’d rationally take more notice (though you’d probably want to check the purity of their water supply).
So the more you believe the Koran is the word of a supernatural entity, the less you should trust any of its commands to worship it and love it, as well as its claims to have done good and wonderful things. There’s a reason why we don’t rely solely on applicants’ resumes and prefer to test them and check their references.
• ari
since al-jazeara does documentaries about chinese communist family planners aborting the second and third infants of devout christians and muslims in the uighur autonomous region, I would really much rather not copy chinese policies vis a vis “the other.”
Bultmann, a lutheran theologian, made his case a century or so ago. other theologians have checked and re-checked his assertions. some agree- I can hear their sermons on sunday. Others disagree, with documentation, with his founding premises. I see these in bookstores and in documentaries.
I tend to think they make a better case for an early writing of the gospels. As one put it, we are farther away from 9/11, than the gospels are from Calvary. Would you think that your statements of having seen airplanes flying into buildings would be considered third-hand and non-sensical, centuries hence? That if you saw it on TV, obviously it is from a nightmare show. Or, say, that we know of airplanes in World War 2- they couldn’t hit St Paul’s Cathedral in London, ergo, planes flying into a skyscraper(such a mythically evocative word) in the year of Skywalker being a popular devotion(going to see a movie in a movie palace) is obviously some hash-up of primitive emotional states.
Neo- Pagan writers take delight in pointing out the ‘other religion’ common-places that are mentioned in the Bible, rather like if we heard ” it’s the real thing”- and we know that the phrase talks about Coca Cola. Since the ‘other religion’ phrases pretty consistently say that Jesus is lord over those communities, too. Jesus uses the ‘if a grain of wheat falls on the ground…” to Greek travellers. Well, Greek travellers would likely have been devotees of the Eleusinian Mysteries. What we know is that they had some ritual about grains of wheat falling on the ground, and claims of healing–which Jesus also mentions in this phrases. There are Egyptian claims- can’t think of them off the top of my head- and Scythian claims. Pretty much everyone he ran into, he used their devotional language to insist he was the seen face of God. I don’t hear this much from church, but I do hear it from practicing pagans. They seem pretty sure who Jesus is, they just aren’t interested in worshipping that way.
And, golly, it seems like everyone in history who runs into Muslims finds their religion loathesome. Animists, Mongolian hordes, Christians, Hindus- nobody likes these guys. I wonder if they end up about like zoroastrians- still around, all five of them. If they haven’t oil, or slaves, what do they have?
In Texas, there were tribes of fierce cannibals. As soon as possible, they were exterminated and driven off into the marshes or deserts, by other Indians. I expect that violent, arrogant, and inept incestuous pedophiles will suffer the same fate, as soon as their oil runs out.
• Ehsan Butt
“But the future course of the vast Muslim world will be determined by economic, political and military developments far removed from the debates of scholars.” False!
The whole story of the origin of Islam, its successful fight against Makkan capitalist elite who tried their best to keep the status quo and traditions continue, growth of a new civilization that made the past a forgotten age of ignorance shows the most important thing are not physical resources but rationality, enlightenment and people sincere for reformation however few they may be in the beginning. The American Revolution is also a similar example that sooner or later economic, political and military mights surrender to rationality and enlightenment if people continue their resolve with sincerity for reformation.
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The following article from Gary Leupp, associate professor of History and Adjunct Associate Professor of Comparative Religion, Tufts University, Medford, MA, U.S. It appeared on the Counterpunch web site. It is an article looking at some of the basics of Islam and challenging some misconceptions as well as comparing some aspects to Christianity. It is quite a passioned article, so beware! The original location of this article can be found at
Challenging Ignorance on Islam: a Ten-Point Primer for Americans
By Gary Leupp
Counterpunch, July 24, 2002
We should invade [Muslim] countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.
Columnist Ann Coulter, National Review Online, Sept. 13, 2001
Just turn [the sheriff] loose and have him arrest every Muslim that crosses the state line.
Rep. C. Saxby Chambliss (R-GA), chairman of the House Subcommittee on Terrorism and Homeland security and Senate candidate, to Georgia law officers, November 2001
Islam is a religion in which God requires you to send your son to die for him. Christianity is a faith where God sent his Son to die for you.
Attorney General John Ashcroft, interview on Cal Thomas radio, November 2001
(Islam) is a very evil and wicked religion wicked, violent and not of the same god (as Christianity).
Rev. Franklin Graham, head of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, November 2001.
Islam is Evil,Christ is King.
Allegedly written in marker by law enforcement agents on a Muslim prayer calendar in the home of a Muslim being investigated by police in Dearborn, Michigan, July 2002.
People with power and influence in the U.S. have been saying some very stupid things about Islam and about Muslims since September 11. Some of it is rooted in conscious malice, and ethnic prejudice that spills over into religious bigotry. But some is rooted in sheer historical and geographical ignorance. This is a country, after all, in which only a small minority of high school students can readily locate Afghanistan on the map, or are aware that Iranians and Pakistanis are not Arabs. As an educator, in Asian Studies, at a fairly elite university, I am painfully aware of this ignorance. But I realize it serves a purpose. It is highly useful to a power structure that banks on knee-jerk popular support whenever it embarks on a new military venture, at some far-off venue, on false pretexts immediately discernable to the better educated, but lost on the general public. The generally malleable mainstream press takes care of the rest.
I don't mean to suggest that the academic cognosenti, as a "class,"habitually counter this ignorance and protest the imperialist interventions that Washington routinely undertakes. Some of them may indeed support the venture, cynically asserting that the advertised pretext fulfills some sort of valid function, regardless of the lies and distortions that surround it. (I think of the depiction in the media of the "Rambouillet Accords" concerning Yugoslavia in 1999 as "the will of the international community," when one Contact Group member, Russia, rejected the U.S.-dictated plan for Kosovo outright, and several European states only signed on after their arms were twisted nearly out of their sockets. I think of the calculated, extreme exaggeration of the number of Kosovar victims of Serbian forces as the bombing of Yugoslavia began. The lies surrounding that bombing were obvious to anyone studying the situation, but even some rather progressive academics were all for "Operation Allied Force.") American academe is---unfortunately--- whatever its right-wing critics may contend, not particularly left or anti-imperialist. In any case, such ignorance is not just a national embarrassment; it's really dangerous. Raw material for a made-in-USA version of fascism.
To understand the contemporary world, we all need to know something about Islam-beyond the inane contribution of the Attorney General cited above. So I have prepared this little primer on Islam for Americans (suitable for ages 13 and above, so appropriate for high school use), dealing not with its theology so much as its general character as an important force in the world, presently encountering unprecedented, unprincipled attack from various quarters. (Oh, and by the way, I'm not a Muslim, but what those on the Christian right revile as a "secular humanist.")
1. Islam has been around for approximately 1400 years. Established on the west coast of Arabia 900 years before European settlement in America, and spreading rapidly throughout Southwest Asia and North Africa soon thereafter, it was not designed as an anti-U.S. movement!
The basic teachings or requirements of Islam are not difficult to grasp. They constitute the "Five Pillars of Islam": (1) profession that there is no God but God ("Allah," in Arabic), and his Prophet (the last of the prophets, the "seal of the prophets") is Muhammad; (2) daily prayer; (3) fasting during the month of Ramadan; (4) charity; and (5) the pilgrimage to Mecca. Whatever you may think of this package, it's not terribly threatening to the non-Muslim.
2. Islam's teachings are contained in a fairly compact book, the Qur'an, which Muslims believe was dictated to the Prophet Muhammad by the archangel Gabriel. They believe of it precisely what Jews and Christians believe of their scriptures: that is, it's the Word of God. This book, like the Bible, demands belief in monotheism; refers to Adam, Noah, Abraham, Jesus, etc. (far more space is given to Mary, mother of Jesus, in the Qur'an than in the New Testament); has a substantial legalistic component reminiscent of the Old Testament Book of Leviticus, and poetic content as beautifully uplifting as the Book of Psalms. For religious and secular scholars alike, it is absolutely clear that Islam stems from the Judeo-Christian tradition. Indeed, we should think in terms of the "Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition."
(Some fundamentalist Christians, of course, see Islam as the work of Satan, and medieval Christians in Europe saw it as a heresy rather than as "paganism. The point is---for better or worse---Muslims have a whole lot more in common with the dominant religious trends in the U.S. than do, say, Buddhists or Hindus.)
3. Muslims are about 20% of the world's population; Christians, about 30%. (The U.S. Muslim population is estimated between 5 and 8 million; U.S. Jews between 5 and 6 million). The global Jewish population is statistically quite small, so one can say the Judeo-Christian-Islamic population is roughly half the world's total.The consequences of a protracted religious war, pitting Christians and Jews against Muslims, are highly unpleasant to consider.
4. The Qur'an depicts Jews and Christians as "People of the Book," meaning that they have their own scriptures bestowed upon them by God (Allah is simply the Arabic world for God, related to the Hebrew Elohim; we should see it as analogous to the German word Gott, the French Dieu, or the Spanish Dios. It's not the personal name of a deity within a pantheon, like Thor, Aphrodite or Siva.)
Muslim scripture counsels respect for these communities, and indeed, in the history of Islam, within Islamic societies Jews and Christians have fared FAR better than non-Christians in Christendom. Muslims ruled all or part of Spain from around 800 to the late 15th century, when Columbus' great patrons, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella "drove the Moors (Muslims) out of Spain," forced everybody to embrace Catholic Christianity (or be killed), and promoted the exquisite Christian tortures of the Inquisition. Under Muslim rule, Christian and Jewish communities generally flourished from Spain to Iraq. On the other hand, until recent times, Christian intolerance prevailed throughout Europe.
5. The Qu'ran does NOT call upon Muslims to KILL all non-Muslims.It calls for the destruction of "infidels," meaning principally Arabs who, during the time of Muhammad, practiced idolatry and polytheism. Again: this is a seventh-century book, produced in a specific historical context! It, and the Muslim religion, should be studied and understood objectively, dispassionately. Islam emerged very quickly, and within decades united under its banner-the banner of monotheism---the various tribes of Arabia. Its violent rejection of idolatry, however offensive to the modern, secular, humanist mind, is hardly unique. It can be compared to the ferocious suppression in Christian Europe of paganism (often associated with witchcraft).
And for perspective, while the Qu'ran does call for the extermination of "infidels," the Old Testament is replete with its own exhortations to genocide. According to the Biblical narrative (of dubious historicity, but believed by hundreds of millions), the Hebrews under Joshua's leadership, invading Canaan from Egypt, killed twelve thousand "men and women together" in the town of Ai-because God wanted them to (Joshua 8:25). The Hebrews put all the people of Hazor to the sword (they "wiped them all out; they did not leave one living soul." Judges 11:14). The poetics of hatred are as conspicuous in the Bible as in the Qu'ran. A personal favorite of mine, from Psalm 137, refers to the Babylonians: "A blessing on him who takes and dashes your babies against the rock!" Such references are characteristic of Judeo-Christian-Islamic literature, and are best examined in historical perspective.
6. Islamic "fundamentalism" is not a species apart from other fundamentalisms, including the Christian, Jewish, and Hindu varieties. They are all anti-modern, anti-science, anti-intellectual, rarely harmless and potentially (if not necessarily) fascistic. They demand belief in received dogma, inscribed in texts, rather than open-ended scientific inquiry. They either legitimate the existing order, or call for a return to a past social order in which class and gender relations were properly sorted out in line with the Divine Will.
Some (including non-religious people in or from Muslim countries) criticize Islam (appropriately, in my view) for what they consider backward and reactionary features. This is not the place to deal with such criticisms, nor am I the right person to do it. I will merely observe what many others have observed: Christendom underwent the Enlightenment-an evolution towards secularism, rationalism, and scientific thought in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries-which the Islamic world, in general, has not yet experienced. To become "modern" (more specifically, to become capitalist), the West had to become more ideologically tolerant (i.e., less religious), and allow a freer market in ideas than had been possible when the Church monopolized learning. If mullahs monopolize education in much of the Muslim world, they serve a function identical with that of Europe's medieval Catholic clergy.
But our own Enlightenment is not irreversible. Top U.S. officials reject the theory of evolution in favor of the ludicrous "theory" of "creationism," and seek to criminalize abortion on the grounds that a fetus is a human being created by God. Recent changes in U.S. law (allowing the use of vouchers to support religious schools at taxpayer's expense), and the failure of the courts to prosecute behavior which plainly violates the constitutional separation of church and state, demonstrate that medieval thinking and fundamentalism retain a strong hold in sections of U.S. society, and are well represented in the Bush administration. The American people are, I submit, far more threatened by Christian fundamentalism than its Islamic counterpart. And for a Pentecostalist Christian like John Ashcroft, who believes every word of the Bible literally, to inveigh against Islam (as he has) is (to use the English proverb) the "pot calling the kettle black."
7. Islamic fundamentalism (or what some, including CNN Moneyline's Lou Dobbs calls "Islamism," meaning a specifically political Islam) has NOT, historically, posed a great threat to Western interests (by which I mean corporate, oil, and geopolitical interests) but rather been exploited to SERVE those interests.Remember Lawrence of Arabia? What was his objective other than to forge a British alliance with the Hashemites, who would certainly qualify as "Islamists" by Lou Dobb's standards, during World War I? Later, the British boosted the Saudi royal family (patrons of the Wahhabi school of Islam, usually described as among the most conservative, embraced by Osama bin Laden as well as the Saudis in general) into power. The U.S. inherited Saudi Arabia as a client state after World War II, and we all know how well U.S. oil companies have done there ever since. (Aramco alone, prior to its nationalization in the mid-1980s, yielded some $ 3 trillion from the Arabian reserves.)
The U.S. helped create, recruit, and finance the fundamentalist Mujahadeen, including some 30,000 young volunteers who came from throughout the Muslim world to fight "godless Communism" in Afghanistan in the 1980s. The U.S. encouraged them to view their war as a jihad (in the sense of a "Holy War," a meaning the term usually does NOT carry), and put many in contact with young Osama bin Laden, then an ally. The Reagan administration was in love with fundamentalist Islam, so long as it served its purposes.
The California-based company Unocal was cordially negotiating right up to Sept. 11 with Afghanistan's Taliban for an oil pipeline through Afghan territory, State Department official and oilman Zalmay Khalilzad was arguing up through 1998 that the Taliban were friendly, potential business partners who did "not practice the anti-U.S. style of fundamentalism practiced in Iran."
8. Muslims of the world have many thoroughly LEGITIMATE reasons to resent U.S. policy. Nearly absolute support for the settler state of Israel in its relationship with the indigenous Palestinian people. Imposition of brutal sanctions on Iraq, contrary to logic and morality. Maintenance of bases throughout the Persian Gulf, in defiance of local sensibilities and interests. Support for brutal regimes, including that of the Shah of Iran and that of Indonesia's Suharto (who unquestionably has more blood on his hands than even that arch-villain and former U.S. buddy Saddam Hussein).
9. Muslims typically DO NOT hate the U.S. as an abstract concept, reject U.S. culture in toto, or seek the destruction of American civilization. Many are, indeed, uncomfortable with some aspects of American behavior, as are most people in the world, from Central America to Japan. But a Zogby International poll, released June 11 of this year, shows that in nine Muslim countries, including Bangladesh and Malaysia, the most admired foreign country is the U.S.
10. Muslims and Jews in Palestine/Israel have NOT always hated one another, and the current Middle East conflict does NOT go back many centuries. Rather, it began with the influx of foreign Jews into the region after World War I, which became a flood as a result of the Holocaust, and with international support resulted in the formation of Israel as a specifically Jewish state in 1948. Jewish settlement and terrorism (well-documented by the Jewish Israeli historian Ilan Pappe) resulted in the displacement of 750,000 Palestinian Arabs (including both Christians and Muslims). The Arab-Israeli conflict is not, fundamentally, about Islam, or a clash between Islam and other faiths, but about this-worldly land grabbing, settlement, dispossession and oppression that has enraged the Muslim world, as it should enrage any thinking, moral human being. Unfortunately, fundamentalist Christians in this country tend to depict this history of injustice as the fulfillment of Biblical prophecy, and they will brook no dissent when it comes to the Zionist cause that they have embraced as their own. ("God gave them the land, so don't bother me with historical details. End of discussion.") Hard to imagine a delusion more injurious to world peace and to the cause of justice.
Finally: In understanding Islam, Americans should give some thought to one of the pivotal episodes in world history, the Crusades, or Wars of the Cross, that ripped up the Holy Land between 1096 and 1291. During these two centuries, European Christians seeking to "win back for Christendom" territory that had fallen to the Muslim Turks-territory that had been ruled by Muslims since the early seventh century anyway, on terms generally agreeable to Jews and Christians as well as Muslims-committed unspeakable atrocities. In July 1099 Jerusalem was conquered, the Roman Catholic soldiers massacring all the Muslim and Jewish inhabitants, including women and children. Nor was the Crusaders' zeal exhausted upon non-Christians; frustrated at lack of success in Palestine in 1204, they instead sacked Constantinople (modern Istanbul), then the center of Eastern Orthodoxy. In comparison, the behavior of the Muslim armies was chivalrous, the twelfth-century Kurdish leader Saladin in particular winning high praise from Christians and Muslims alike for his humanity.
The Islamic world remembers the Crusades; George Bush, like many Americans, is clueless about them. Hence his amazingly dim-witted reference to the "War on Terrorism" as a "Crusade" last September 16-a statement that produced immediate, widespread outrage in the Muslim world. No offense intended, no doubt. But such ignorance, in action, in a world where religious prejudice generates idiotic action from Belfast, to the Balkans, to Gujarat, to the Moluccas, is perilous ignorance indeed.
Gary Leupp is an an associate professor, Department of History, Tufts University and coordinator, Asian Studies Program. He can be reached at: [email protected]
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This page could be put in the society section, the history section, the political section or the mental health section, but I put it here in the religion section because of the dominance of religious intolerance.
Slightly more than 50% of hate crimes were racially motivated so we could classify this as a social problem, but the fact is white churches passed out sheets to KKK members and both the KKK and the white supremacists quote the Bible to justify their actions.
One of the main complaints of Islamic fundamentalists is western decadence and political involvement in the Middle East, so Islamic terrorism could be considered a social or political issue.
But this tension can be traced back to the crusades or earlier, which were a religious conflict.
In A.R. Schaffer's paper "Justification for war?" he says,
"While religion and politics do not often mix, politics often uses the "just war" theology of Augustine and Aquinas as a basis for their justification of their declarations of war."
We see that in Pizarro's conquest of the Incas below.
In the 1967 supreme court decision banning laws against interracial marriage, chief justice Earl Warren's opinion states "The present statutory scheme dates from the adoption of the Racial Integrity Act of 1924, passed during the period of extreme nativism which followed the end of the First World War."
Following World War I nativist's (anti-immigration) in the twenties focused thier attention on Catholics, Jews, and southeastern Europeans and realigned their beliefs behind racial and religious nativism.[5]. The term fundamentalism was born at this time.
I think we all have a "hate gene", however it is expressed more strongly in some than in others or the "tolerance gene" overrides it in others.
This is a psychological or biological issue out of my scope, but I do have a theory on the fundamentalist page.
Ten years ago I was soliciting contributions for a mission trip to Honduras at work when a Hindu co-worker asked "Why do Christians think there religion is better than others". I couldn't answer.
The next year was on an outing in Tibet and shared a tent with a Jewish man who meditated twice a day. We were discussing Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity and he said, "If one of these religions turns out to be right we are all in a lot of trouble."
The recent death of Steve Jobs who was attracted to Buddhism, the purchase of a house down the street from my church for Muslim religious use, and the islamophobic rhetoric of some Tea Party friends started me on creating this page.
About ten years ago I joined a men's Bible study to increase my understanding of Christianity and the Bible. Although the main focus was the study of scripture, I left after seven or eight years because of regular introduction of right wing political views (anti climate change, anti-environment, anti-gay, the value of thrift in dealing with money with no mention of one of the dominant themes in the new testament, that is using your money to help the less fortunate), with interpretation of the Bible to "prove" them.
It exemplified the "Echo Chamber Effect", where like minded people take a claim and reinforce each other in amplifying it resulting in an exaggerated or otherwise distorted version.
This was in the north east not the bible belt.
I still have doubts (see doubt in Why Christianity) about religion in general but am sticking by my religion (why is another story), however I have no desire belittle someone else's religion.
Whether it be the resurrection of the body, reincarnation, or God's revelations to Muhammed, most religions require some leaps of faith.
So, who am I to say two thirds of the people in the world are wrong or misguided.
Tolerance - Respect for other religions:
In Mich Albom's book "Have a Little Faith", he asks one of the two main characters, his old Rabi, how he can be so open minded (regarding discussions with a Hindu woman who was helping care for him). The Reb, as Albom calls him, responds,
"You should be convinced of the authenticity of what you have, but you must also be humble enough to say that we don't know everything. And since we don't know everything, we must accept that another person may believe something else."
"I'm not being original here, most religions teach us to love our neighbor."
Albom comments,
"If the only thing wrong with Moses is that he's not yours; if the only thing wrong with mosques, Lent, chanting, Mecca, Buddha, confession, or reincarnation is that they're not yours - well, maybe the problem is you."
In April 2010 the Pope asks us to pray 'that every tendency to fundamentalism and extremism may be countered by respect, tolerance, and dialogue among believers'.
American religious freedom:
We were taught in school that America was primarily settled by people seeking religious freedom.
Fundamentalist Christians are trying to convince the American public that the founding fathers intended to establish this as a Christian country. Those on the left claim that Jefferson, Washington, Franklin, Madison, and Monroe, were Deists, a popular belief in the Age of Enlightenment that an all-powerful creator did not intervene in human affairs with things like supernatural miracles and wanted a secular state.
In Founding Faith: Providence, Politics, and the Birth of Religious Freedom in America, BeliefNet.com editor in chief Steven Waldman says that all of the above views were wrong. He shows there was great diversity in the founding fathers, from Jefferson a self-diagnosed heretic, for instance, and Washington a churchgoing Anglican who was silent on points of doctrine and refrained from taking communion.
As to the question of "how did it come about that the First Amendment to the Constitution guarantee that 'Congress shall make no laws respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof', he shows that the separation of church and state did not result from the activism of secularists, but, paradoxically, from the efforts of 18th-century evangelicals.
See also "Religious wisdom of America's founding fathers" at NotAboutReligion.com.
I quote the ReligiousTolerance web site a lot in the religion section of this web site for the good statistics they have. It is produced by the Ontario Consultants on Religious Tolerance (OCRT), who's objectives are to disseminate accurate religious information and expose religious fraud, hatred and misinformation. (Their site gets over 10 million web hits per week)
They say,
"In recent decades, there have been a few largely inter-tribal mass murders and genocides. Consider Rwanda and Kenya. But most conflicts have involved inter-religion and intra-religion differences. Consider Bosnia Herzegovina, Cyprus, India, Kosovo, Northern Ireland, Philippines, Sri Lanka and other hot spots. [I'd add Sunni/Shia conflicts in Iraq and Iran and other places]. We feel that it is important to help people understand how the misuse of religion can result in profound evil, even in those countries like the U.S. and Canada that have traditionally experienced relative religious peace."
Fundamentalism appeals to religious believers who feel threatened by the encroachment of liberal values into traditionally religious spheres. They feel besieged by secular culture which they regard as immoral and godless.
This applies to both Christian fundamentalists in the U.S. and Islamic fundamentalists who feel western decadence violates the principals of most religions. At the New World Encyclopedia they say "The narrow exclusivism of fundamentalism, however, is contrary to the spirit of tolerance found in all religions."
Fundamentalism at the New World Encyclopedia
Christian Fundamentalism and Fundamentalists here
Intra vs Inter faith tolerance:
It's my belief that moderates between religions are closer together (able to get along - tolerant) than fundamentalists and moderates within a religious sect.
I know of examples of major rifts between individual Sunnis over the violence of the fundamentalists and of major rifts within a Christian Church over beliefs of things like creation-evolution, the Iraq war, ...
Fr. Fergus O'Donoghue S.J., an Irish Jesuit historian, said, "Fundamentalists feel themselves to be religiously superior to everybody else, including those whom they see as less devoted followers of their own faiths."
I know I am more comfortable discussing religion with my moderate, Islamic, Jewish, Hindu and atheist friends than with my fundamentalist Christian friends who have all the answers.
Our pastor gave a sermon just before Christmas contrasting the shepards who got instant faith when visited by angels and the Maji (Wise Men) to took several years to get to Jerusalem (Note: Those Christmas scenes showing the shepards together with the wise men at jesus birth are not historically accurate. The timing of the Maji's visit is not in the Bible.)
He pointed out that there can be a lot of animosity between members of the same church, some of whom can point to the exact time of their rebirth and getting faith and others who are on a never ending journey to define their faith. See doubt below.
Christian Persecution:
Persecution of religious groups, particularly Christians, by communist regimes (Russia, China) was common.
Persecution at OpenDoorsUSA.org says there are still hundreds of millions of Christians around the world today suffering persecution for their faith.
There have been increased instances of anti-Christian violence in Arab countries after the Iraq war and specifically after the Arab Spring uprisings in places like Egypt in 2011.
See The 50 countries where the worst Christian persecution exists.
Multiculturalism is the appreciation, acceptance or promotion of multiple cultures. It goes beyond religious tolerance to include people of different races and cultures.
For a country knows as the "melting pot" the United States has gone thru periods of discrimination against African Americans, Native Americans, Hispanics, Asian Americans and others. Some of this still exists.
See: Multiculturalism at Wikipedia
Islam and the Qur'an:
Because of all the publicity on extremist terrorism, people are most familiar with the passages on infidels in the Qur'an (see below).
However Islam is probably the most ecumenical of the three Abahamic/monotheistic1 religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam; Probably because it was the last to be established and could draw on the other two.
For example The Qur'an, 2:62 which says,
"Those who believe (in the Qur'an), and those who follow the Jewish (scriptures), and the Christians...and (all) who believe in God and the last day and work righteousness, shall have their reward with their Lord; on them shall be no fear, nor shall they grieve."
1. Muhammad was descended from Jewish patriarch, Abraham's son, Ishmael. See Muhammad on the Islam page.
As far as I am concerned the Jews, Christians and Muslims all believe in one God so he must be the same whether you call him Elohim (Hebrew), ehyeh (Ancient Hebrew), Yahweh (YHWH) (Modern Hebrew), Elaha (Aramaic), Jehovah (anglicized version of YHWH), Allah (Al-Lah) (Arabic) or God.
See Names for God and See God on the Islam page.
An infidel (literally "one without faith") is one who has no religious beliefs, or who doubts or rejects the central tenets of a particular religion - especially in reference to Christianity or Islam.
When we think of the word infidel today it brings to mind Muslim extremists term for their enemies, but infidels has been used by all groups to refer to people they are fighting.
The Quran:
Many people will say that the Quran instructs Muslims to mount a jihad and kill all Infidels.
The references in the Quran actually refer to a specific group of people in a specific time. See Jihad on the Islam page
Historical evidence:
A considerable parts of India was for several centuries controlled by the Muslim Mughal Empire, yet Hindu's were not killed in mass.
When Saladin took back Jerusalem in 1291 it is said that he allowed all christian inhabitants to leave before his people entered.
King Richard and Saladin agree on a truce, , the terms of which permitted Christians to visit Jerusalem without paying tribute and have free access to the holy places.
Contrast this with the Christian crusades below.
Christian Use of Infadel:
During the Middle Ages (A.D. c. 450-c. 1500), the Catholic Church used the term to describe Muslims (followers of Islam, the religion founded by the prophet Muhammad; c. A.D.570-632). Source: What Was An Infidel? at eNotes.
In 1095 at the Council of Clermont, Pope Urban gave a speech to rally the western Christians for a crusade to take back Jerusalem from the infadel!
When the crusaders got to Jerusalem they massacred every Muslim, Jew and even some Christian inhabitants. Contrast that with Saladin's conquest in 1291.
See: Ian's World of History
I still remember vacation bible school when I was 8 or 9 years old. The theme was the Crusades; We made swords and shields and sang
"Onward, Christian soldiers, marching as to war,
with the cross of Jesus going on before.
At the sign of triumph Satan's host doth flee;
We are not divided, all one body we,
one in hope and doctrine, one in charity."
As far as I knew we didn't have any Mosques in my neighborhood or Muslims in my school and I never learned to associate them as the enemy, however I can see some might.
New world expansion:
In 1532, Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro captured Inca emperor Atahuallpa and held him for ransom. After collecting histories largest ransom (3,000 cubic feet of gold), they executed Atahuallpa. Accounts written by Pizarro's companions went as follows,
"The prudence, fortitude, military discipline, labors, perilous navigations and battles of the Spaniards - vassals of the most invincible Emperor of the Roman Catholic Empire, our natural King and Lord will cause joy to the faithful and terror to the infidels."
"It will be to the glory of God, because they have conquered and brought to our holy Catholic Faith so vasta a number of heathens."
I don't mean to make the Muslims out to be better than the Christians, but to provide balance to some of the islamophobia that I see too often. The terrorism of fundamentalist Muslims certainly far exceeds random acts of violence by a few lone wolves like Anders Behring Breivik, envisioning himself as a Christian crusader, who in 2011 killed 77 (mainly children) in Norway as an attempt to jolt Europe into recognizing the threat of multiculturalism.
See Criticism on the Islam page for provocation on both sides.
Terrorism, Violence and Hate Crimes:
We are all familiar with Muslim terrorism, which culminated in the 9-11 attacks on the World Trade center.
Although with a few exceptions (Northern Ireland, Serbian Christian attacks on Muslims in Bosnia and Herzegovina) Christian violence has been relatively localized and small.
In 2011, Anders Behring Breivik, killed 77 envisioning himself as a Christian crusader he intended to jolt Europe into recognizing the threat of multiculturalism.
Pat Buchanan said Breivik's views "may be right".
Anti-government rhetoric like that of the Christian Patriot movement, and to some extent the Tea Party, may help to justify violence in people who are unbalanced to begin with.
I'm referring to things like:
- Jared Lee Loughner, who shot nineteen people in Tuscon, six of them fatally, during an open meeting held by U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords, a jewish democrat.
- Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, who claimed 168 lives.
Anti-gay rhetoric like that of the American Family Association, and anti-muslim rhetoric like Buchanan's above and Newt Gingrich comparing Muslims to Nazis and also push some people over the edge.
A USA Today article on hate crimes in 2007 in the U.S. showed 7,624 hate crimes by target from FBI data:
3,870 - Race
1,400 - Religion (Crimes against Muslims declined to 115 from 481 in 2001)
1,265 - Sexual orientation (Hate crimes against Gays increased 6%)
1,007 - Ethnicity/national origin
79 - Disability
Only a small fraction are reported. A 2011 Bureau of Justice Statistics report estimated there was an annual average of 195,000 reported and unreported hate crimes between 2003 and 2009. An earlier study showed the average in the 2000-2003 period was 210,000, so the number is coming down along with violent crime in general. The shrinking of the national population of 16- to 24-year-olds, who are by far the most crime-prone population cohort may have something to do with it. The study showed that 56% of the hate crimes were not reported to police.
Most of these are by a few individuals, but the Southern Poverty Law Center says the number of hate groups has grown to over 1,000 in 2010. The states with the most groups are California-68; Texas-59; Florida-49, New Jersey-47, Mississippi-40. Of course with 34 million people the per capita rate in Calif. is lower than the others. Calif. has 2 groups per million, Miss has 14 groups per million.
See Christian Violence and Anger at the fundamentalist page.
Fundamentalist Religious Groups:
Not only do Islamic hate groups like Al Qaeda (al-Qa'ida), Hezbollah, Hamas and the Taliban use the Quran to justify their violence; Hate groups in the U.S. like the KKK and White Supremacists, frequently use the Bible to justify their hate, but as far as I know they didn't call themselves a Christian group.
See Violence at the Fundamentalist page.
There are however Christian groups wich promote in-tolerance.
American Family Association (AFA) founder, Donald Wildmon and Bryan Fischer, director of issue analysis for the AFA and host of the "Focal Point" radio program on American Family Radio (AFR) have both denigrated gays, jews and President Obama.
After 9-11, evangelist, Jerry Falwell, an evangelical fundamentalist Southern Baptist pastor, said on Rev. Pat Robertson's "700 Club" that the ACLU, Abortionists, Feminists, Gays, ... helped make the world trade center attacks happen.
On the tenth anniversary of the 9-11 attacks controversial Florida pastor, Terry Jones, dubbed the day International Burn a Koran Day. He was severely criticized by religious and political leaders and eventually baked down.
See Intolerance at the Fundamentalist page.
Denomonist Rheology - Christians should control government
Racial Profiling
Siria Law
Tea Party
3. "The Future of Terrorism: Violence in the New Millennium" by Kushner, Harvey W (1998).
4. Encyclopedia of religious freedom By Catharine Cookson
5. "Strangers in the Land". Higham, John (1963). 5. The Persistence of Racism in America. Powell, Thomas (1993)
religion/tolerance.html ReligiousTolerance.org:
Separation Of Church And State In The US
Court Decisions and Recent U.S. Court Rulings On The Separation Of Church & State, Part 2 at ReligiousTolerance.org
Religion in Colonial America
Inspiration, Spirituality, Faith, Religion. - Beliefnet.com
Fundamentalism at the New World Encyclopedia
Christian Violence and Anger
Christian Patriot movement
Christian Terrorism at Wikipedia
The Pope's Intentions a blog post on fundamentalism by Fr. Fergus O'Donoghue S.J., an Irish Jesuit historian.
Teaching Tolerance at the Southern Poverty Law Center
Christian Fundamentalism and Fundamentalists here
Faith vs Reason
Return to Religion.
last updated 9 Dec 2011 | http://donsnotes.com/religion/tolerance.html | robots: classic
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Why I Call Myself an 'Atheist Muslim' by Ali A. Rizvi, Pakistani-Canadian writer, physician and musician
Ali A. Rizvi
Posted in Huffington Post, All Rights Reserved, Copyright
Posted: 05/13/2013 12:38 pm
Last week, I had an essay up on HuffPost entitled "An Atheist Muslim's Perspective on the 'Root Causes' of Islamist Jihadism and the Politics of Islamophobia."
One of the goals of the piece was to emphasize the difference between the criticism of Islam and anti-Muslim bigotry: the first targets an ideology, and the second targets human beings. This is obviously a very significant difference, yet both are frequently lumped under the unfortunate umbrella term, "Islamophobia."
I highlighted this distinction by describing myself as an "atheist Muslim," which drew the single most commonly asked question about the piece by both atheist and Muslim readers: "How can you be an atheist and a Muslim at the same time? Isn't that contradictory?"
Let me explain.
One of the central themes of the essay was that all religious people are selective in their religiosity. This cherry-picking is almost universal, and even inevitable considering the frequency with which contradictions appear in religious texts.
If this selectivity allows people to disregard some of the teachings of their faith, such as the orders to publicly execute non-virginal brides and homosexuals, or behead and mutilate disbelievers, it may not be a bad thing, for obvious reasons -- even if it appears intellectually dishonest.
I once jokingly asked a writer friend how her identification as a "feminist Muslim" was any different from someone identifying as a black white supremacist or a meat-eating vegetarian. She replied that she didn't see this designation as inherently contradictory, because she identified with a range of feminist values as well as many Islamic values. She openly admitted that she doesn't understand or agree with many of the more patriarchal verses in the Quran despite being aware of their various exegeses -- that she was able to disregard them, confident in the belief that Allah sees her as equal to her male counterparts.
I asked her if she saw that as disingenuous. "Everyone cherry-picks," she replied, with a shrug.
This kind of reconciliation and compartmentalization is made possible by a selective reading and following of religion, and is also increasingly seen among groups such as believing gay Muslims. It has long been a phenomenon with other religious groups. A majority of the world's Catholics are cafeteria Catholics (most of them ignoring their Church's positions on birth control and abortion while retaining their Catholic identities), and many Jewish atheists expressly reject Judaism while retaining its cultural elements.
So who decides how far the cherry-picking can go? If everyone cherry-picks, is it possible to do it all the way to non-belief status?
My take is that these things are subjective and relative. Fundamentalist Muslims say that women who work outside the home without their husbands' permission are not true Muslims. Some moderate Muslims say that those who eat pork or drink alcohol are not true Muslims. Violent sectarian conflicts in Iraq, Syria and Pakistan have graphically demonstrated that many strict Sunnis reject the idea that Shias are true Muslims, and vice versa.
Even the wildly popular, seemingly moderate Pakistani candidate Imran Khan recently said, disappointingly, that he does not consider the Ahmadis, a community that has suffered decades of persecution in Pakistan, to be true Muslims because they do not believe in the "finality" of the Prophet. I actually found it interesting, in light of this, that a few readers who took issue with my identification as an atheist Muslim were Ahmadis themselves.
So my first point is simply this: If the rest of you can cherry-pick, why can't I?
The second aspect revolves around the question of whether Islam a culture or a religion.
Just like Judaism is a religion that can exist independently from Jewish ethnicity or Jewish culture, Islam is a religion, and even though Muslims are ethnically and racially varied, there really is such a thing as a Muslim culture that can exist separately from Islam.
It's true that Muslims around the world are culturally heterogeneous. Pakistani Muslims, for instance, have more cultural similarities with Indian Hindus than with Arab Muslims. Arab Muslims, in turn, have more in common culturally with Arab Christians than with Indonesian Muslims.
However, some elements of Muslim culture are universal.
The festival of Eid is celebrated across all Muslim societies. The celebratory iftar (fast-breaking) feasts of Ramadan are common to all Muslims. These rituals are among several that I enjoy immensely as someone raised in a Muslim family and society.
As a songwriter, the rich musicality and poetry of the nohas recited and sung at Shia Muslim mourning rituals, with a light beating of the chest providing the rhythm, have had a strong influence on my own music. Like many singers attribute their musical education to singing in church growing up, I learned singing and music from my upbringing in a Shiite Muslim household.
Richard Dawkins has referred to himself as a "cultural Christian", with an admitted fondness for Christianity-inspired art, literature and Christmas carols. "I'm not one of those who wants to purge our society of our Christian history," he once told the BBC.
And I am not the only one who identifies this way. Another atheist Muslim blogger who writes under the name "Re-Enlightenment" also makes the case by drawing a comparison with Christians:
Would you only be prepared to grant someone a Christian identity if they successfully negotiated your questions on church attendance, the Old Testament, and attitudes to homosexuality? You probably wouldn't and you definitely shouldn't. Even if someone considered themselves Christian in a religious sense, again, would you interrogate them on their compliance with what you (religious "scholar" that you clearly are) considered to be the fundamental theological tenets of Christianity? Again, you shouldn't. I know Christians who never go to church. I know Christians who don't believe in God. I know Christians who don't hate homosexuals. I know Christians who never wear a crucifix. I know Christians who don't believe a virgin can give birth to a boy who is his own father who created the universe in six days.
...Why the different treatment for Islam?
"Certainly it's not perfect," writes Saif Rahman, another fellow secular Muslim who has posted a thought-provoking piece explaining what it means to be a "cultural" Muslim. "I would much prefer the description 'secular agnostic utilitarian rationalist reductionist humanist with cultural Muslim influences', but that won't fit on my business card."
And that sums it up. Islam is a religion, and you cannot have an atheistic Islam. But many atheists from Muslim families and Muslim communities identify with the cultural aspects of their Muslim heritage and history, as do atheists with Christian or Jewish heritage.
Progressive Muslims, particularly in the West, may want to consider coalescing around a sense of community (which celebrates commonalities) rather than belief (which varies from person to person). With so many Muslim countries that punish apostasy (leaving the Islamic faith) with death, it is strategically beneficial to allow atheists from the Muslim community to adopt the Muslim label if they so choose. It is less confrontational, helps illustrate the important contrast between a monolithic ideology and a richly diverse people, and could, with time, potentially provide closeted atheists in the Muslim community a platform to come out and speak, adding another dimension to a dynamic internal dialogue that so far seems narrowly limited to the voices of fundamentalists or progressive/liberal apologists. This is our community too. Why shouldn't we also be allowed to speak for it?
"New atheists" like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris have strong allies in many of us who identify as atheist Muslims, because their valid criticisms of Islam gain further legitimacy when supported and simultaneously voiced by those of us who have lived it, grew up in it, and actually learned about it before giving it up. This is a very powerful and much-needed reinforcement for the promising new atheist movement.
Similarly, progressive/liberal Muslims also have strong allies in atheist Muslims. Sure, our ideological differences can and should continue to be vigorously debated in universities and op-ed columns. However, these differences can be set aside from time to time to pursue our strong common purpose: opposing and eradicating the Islamist fundamentalism and terrorism that have devastated our shared community.
In closing, I leave you with a few more words from my fellow atheist Muslim, Re-Enlightenment:
Let us be clear why Christianity and Judaism, in the twenty-first century, generally lend themselves to a pick-and-mix treatment: it's because they have more or less been wrenched through a two-part grinder called 'Secularism and the Enlightenment'. That metaphor might be a violent one but what has emerged from the other end of the machine is far more peaceful and humane than what was fed in: religions which can be picked apart, consumed and discarded as an individual human sees fit. And that is what is required of Islam, urgently.
How will we know when this job is done? Well, when we meet beer-loving, pork-eating, atheist Muslims who pray exactly no times a day and in no particular direction, and we don't consider that a contradiction, that will be a good start.
I must admit, I am still not a fan of most kinds of pork. But thank God for bacon.
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Attacks on Lipstadt for references to Armenian genocide: Part 2
I just wonder why that attacks?
Prup (aka Jim Benton) said...
I am slowly beginning to be convinced that Muslims and Nazis share one trait -- don't be quoting the Godwin rule at me until you read to the end -- that unlike other religious and political movements, good or bad, that attempt to 'change reality' the Nazis and the Muslims are the only ones who have attempted to 'define reality.' And therefore they have to attack anyone who challenges their definition.
Deborah Lipstadt said...
Whoa Jim. Be careful of painting with such a broad brush. When you say "Muslims" you are accusing a lot of very different people of having one unified world view. You might want to differ with Muslim extremists or "Islamists," but to condemn everyone is to engage, it seems to me, in the same kind of thing that many people are tyring to fight.
Furthermore, I think the attacks on me were coming from Armenians who are certainly not Muslims.
But be careful of such broad generalizations.
Angry Anarchist said...
Dear Dr. Lipstadt,
I call on you to apologize for the unbased claims you made about alleged e-mails that I sent you, which in fact did not, or if you insist that such e-mails were sent by me, produce solid proof. My previous comments to you about your concern with preserving the uniqueness of the Jewish Holocaust (that does not mean that I'm accusing you of denying the Armenian Holocaust) were not attacks, but criticisms. You took it as destructive criticism, and that's your problem not mine. I call on you to look at things not just from a Jewish perspective but from a human one. Each and every Holocaust is indeed unique, but all share one thing: hatred and mass murder based on race or religion or ethnicity. As such, it is wrong to place distinctions in terminology between for example the Jewish Holocaust (capital letter) and the Armenian genocide (small letter, and not called holocaust). I would say the same to Armenians who would try to minimize other Holocausts and massacres, for example the Bosnian one and the one at Khojaly in Nagorno-Karabakh.
Prup (aka Jim Benton) said...
I'll reply to your comments on my post separately, but first, I'm confused. I can see that Turks would complain if you DID mention the Armenian genocide, and Armenians would complain if you DIDN'T. But you say you DID mention it, and yet it was Armenians complaining. Maybe I'm just missing something here.
Deborah Lipstadt said...
To Mr. Anarchist Revolution is Coming: I don't think I have anything to apologize for, so sorry I can't help you in that regard.
To Prup:
You have every right to be confused, though, as I think about it, it's probably rather fruitless to try to sort this all out.
I think some people just feel the need to attack...
Angry Anarchist said...
That's MISS, not MR.
Please see the following response. And next time please do not shift the discourse to something that I did not even argue about! And since when did I count as ArmenianS (plural)?
Prup (aka Jim Benton) said...
Now a very long post about my previous comments, and I apologize for the length, but I think the topic is important enough to merit it.
First, I DID misspeak when I said "Muslims' and "Nazis.' I should have said "Islam" and "Nazism." A belief is not the same as its believers, of course. And while I am not trying to push this comparison further than the original point I made, it is probably true that there were Nazis -- and it is certainly true that there were those who originally voted for Hitler -- who did so because they believed in German nationalism, thought Hitler would help the economy, and who were either only mildly anti-Semitic and never foresaw the Holocaust, or who weren't anti-Semitic at all, and figured that while they thought Hitler was a little nuts on the subject of Jews, he was right on other topics.
But as for Islam, I stand by my statement. And, ironically, a few months ago, had I seen someone else post a similar statement, I would have replied much as you did.
But, after some months of watching the news, reading the posts of Muslims, both 'moderate' and 'extremist,' watching the MEMRI tapes -- or reading transcripts, since i do not speak Arabic -- and reading the Qur'an, I have come to a position similar to that of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Irshad Manji, Ibn Warriq, Taslima Nasrin, and most recently Dr. Wafa Sultan. Each of them, raised Muslim, have come to believe that the problem is NOT a small (or large) group of extremists, that the problem is inherent in Islam itself. (Of the people mentioned, only Manji sees the possibility of an Islamic Reformation. The others have rejected Islam entirely.)
One problem that I believe many people have in coming to grips with this is their assumption that the "Spectrum of Belief' is similar in Islam as it is in Christianity or Judaism. In those religions, the Specturm can be described -- the numbers are meant illustratively, not literally, as
20% Fundamentalist/Literalist
20% Conservative (accepting the sacred text as God-given, but accepting that there are some errors and myths)
15% Liberal (seeing the text as predominantly man-made but expressing the idea of God the believers accept)
10% Cultural (accepting the religion as part of their culture or traditions, but more accepting the rituals as a bonding with that tradition than seeing it as 'true.' This proportion is probably higher in Judaism because of the Holocaust and Judaism's 'ethnic' component)
30% secular (claiming membership in the religion, maybe attending the 'great ceremonies' but not seeing it as part of their day to day lives -- "Christmas and Easter Christians" or "Passover and Yom Kippur Jews")
5% rejectionist (atheist/agnostic/'spiritual' but not believers in the religion)
(I must stress that these are 'theological positions, and that there are wide variations both in interpretation and in social and political positions within each group.)
But the Islamic spectrum is different, mostly because there has been no Islamic Reformation. I recall that many Muslims complained, when there was condemnation of "Islamic Fundamentalism" in the media, that this was wrong, because 'all Muslims are Fundamentalists.'
This is not true, of course. But in Islam, the 'conservative' and 'liberal' points of view are the true 'small minorities' -- though over-represented in the 'blogosphere.' I'd argue that a more accurate 'Spectrum of Belief' in Islam is the following -- and again I repeat that there are wide variations within each division.
50% Fundamentalist/Literalist
5% (at most) Conservative and Liberal combined
10% Customary/Cultural
25% Secular
10% Rejectionist
Furthermore, there are differences in the way the three religions view their 'sacred texts' which affects the way they think.
Neither Christians nor Jews see their texts as 'the final, unchangable revelation dictated by God to their prophet' as Islam does.
Few C or J see their text as a blueprint for all of life. Nor are these religions -- any more -- involved with specific polities. (Israel is a secular state, after all, and few Catholics would support the Syllabus of Errors that condemned Democracy. And while some F/L Protestants seem to confuse religion and the Republican Party, few would, if asked, accept this as a theological position.)
Another important point is that, for F/L and Conservative Christians, at least, hell is seen as 'where sinners go.' For Muslims it is -- as is repeated endlessly in the Qur'an -- 'where Unbelievers go.' It is a subtle but important difference.
For the other religions, if a member rejects the religion, it is viewed as a problem between him and God. In Islam this is only true if he 'keeps silent' about his change in beliefs. Attempting to convince others is a serious transgression. "Extremists" view it as being punishable by death, but even 'secular' Muslim governments have imprisoned writers and scholars and forced them to divorce their wives for apostasy.
(Then there is the reported case of Dr. Sulieman Brashear who, while remaining a Muslim, found through his researches that Islam had developed over time and not 'sprung full-blown' from Mohammed's forehead. His colleagues at the University of Nablus are reliably said to have settled the dispute with him by throwing him out a second-story window.)
And, sadly, the Qur'an does contain ugliness, at least in Western eyes. There is considerable misogyny in it -- it contains NO verse directed specifically at women, who are always 'they', not you -- women are ordered to be subject to their husbands and must obey them, and they ARE permitted to be beaten. (As The United Nation Population Fund (UNFP) in its State of World Population 2005 report found:
(There is misogyny in the other sacred texts, but it is softened by stories of noble, heroic women. Not in the Qur'an)
There is NO equivalent to the Qur'anic injunction:
or the command to kill the unbeliever wherever he is found.
There is also nothing like the insistence that 'unbelievers' REALLY know the 'the truth' and are simply refusing to become Muslims out of 'envy' or a wish to do evil. (Unbelievers, in the Qur'an are, by definition, evil and acting from evil motives.) Or, similarly, that the entire non-Muslim world is occupied in 'scheming' to keep Islam down.
(This paranoia, coupled with the gullibility that fundamentalism/literalism always brings, can readily spread beyond strictly religious bounds. Not only do Muslims frequently refuse to believe reports of such as 9/11 and other evil acts by Muslims -- 'no Muslim would do something like that' -- but, as an example, many Muslims are sure the Moon lnding was a Hollywood-produced hoax.
All of this combines to produce the effect I mentioned. The 'Muslim reality' is so different from that of the West. The Qur'an was NOT dictated by Allah. Mohammed was not the perfect human being. Sharia law does not work when applied. Muslim governments usually do not work well for their own people and are corrupt. Next to the West, the Muslim world IS backwards, and that is lessened only because they make use of Western technology. No modern society -- including Muslim ones -- can work without interest-charging banks. Etc.
But accepting these facts would mean challenging the tenets of their religion, which they cannot do without risking both the carefully described tortures of hell and civil punishments. All they can do are two things. One is to insist that the reason for the failures is that the people were not being Islamic ENOUGH -- the solution for the failure of Islam in political terms is MORE Islam.
And finally it is to impose their reality on the rest of the world rather than to accept the reality that causes them to doubt. And they do, violently, if necessary.
Deborah Lipstadt said...
To Miss Anarchist is Coming, I apologize for mistaking your gender.
Please note that I said nothing about deleting anything from my blog. I have deleted a number of emails attacking me on this topic.
But be that as it may, I have no desire to spend any more time in "conversation" on this matter.
Deborah Lipstadt said...
To Prup:
I have to spend some time digesting your email. Just from skimming it, I see that you seem to be making an argument voiced by others.
Thanks for taking the time to explain your point.
John said...
This is a standard operating procedure for most turkish genocide deniers that constitue a majority of the turks elite.
They aim has always been to intimidate and suppress even the mention of this subject hoping the memory will eventually fade away. In their own mind this would constitute the final victory over the infidels.
their national psyche is one of aggression and intimidation and might makes right attitude right out of the islamic middle ages.
Unfortunately peoples in the west cannot even imagine the sheer evil that the all christians i.e. greeks assyrians armenians, bulgarians etc. etc, had to endure for centuries under the turkish yoke. Sometimes I dare my friends to try to read even a few paragraphs of independent eyewitness accounts of many massacres that took place through the centuries long slavery at the hands of turks. | http://lipstadt.blogspot.com/2006/03/attacks-on-lipstadt-for-references-to_10.html | isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2019-22
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Infantilizing Muslim "rage"
Now, perhaps this behavior is not inherent in Islam, but in other aspects of the culture in which these violent people live. Ralph Peters blames the milieu of the Middle East, by which I believe he means Arab culture, as opposed to Islamic tradition:
Islamist terror is a deadly threat we have barely begun to address. Yet religion-fueled fanaticism in the Middle East shouldn't surprise us: The tradition pre-dates the Prophet's birth by thousands of years.
Terrorists just have better tools these days.
What should amaze us isn't the terrorists' strength, which has limits, but the comprehensive failure of Middle Eastern civilization. Given all the wealth that's poured into the region, its vast human resources and all of its opportunities for change, the mess the Middle East has made of itself is stunning.
Culturally, the region is utterly noncompetitive. Societies stagnate as populations seethe. To the extent it exists, development benefits the wealthy and powerful. The common people are either ignored or miserably oppressed - and not just the women.
Operation Iraqi Freedom wasn't so much an invasion as a last-minute rescue mission - an attempt to give one major Middle Eastern state a two-minutes-to-midnight chance to develop a humane, democratic government.
It may not work. But we'd better hope it does.
The Middle East's failure on every front enabled the rise of the terrorists - as well as the empowerment of other religious extremists, secular dictators and political parties willing to poison electorates with hatred.
The popular culprit for the mess is Islam. And there can be no doubt that the faith's local degeneration has been catastrophic for the region. By far the most numerous victims of "Islam Gone Wild" have been Middle Eastern Muslims.
But we can't be content with a single explanation for a civilization's failure, as powerful as the answer may appear. Yes, Islamist governments fail miserably. But so do secular Arab, Persian and Pakistani governments (whose leaders belatedly play the Islamic card).
Yes, the culture is Islamic, even in nominally secular states. But we have to ask some very politically incorrect questions that cut even deeper.
Many of the social, governmental and psychological structures at the core of Middle Eastern societies pre-date Islam. Authoritarian government; a slave-like status for women; pervasive corruption; labor viewed as an evil to be avoided; the relegation of learning to narrow castes; economies that rely on trade rather than productivity to generate wealth, even the grandiose rhetoric - all were in place long before Islam appeared.
I'm not sure that I agree with Peters. Islam "got away" too, to the Balkans and Iberia. The Balkans have been a mess since at least the fall of Byzantine empire to the Muslims. The Muslim culture in Spain produced some of the umma's greatest accomplishments, but removal to Spain did not stop Muslims from devouring Averroes, who might have been the Islamic Aquinus. Both men tried to reconcile science and faith. The Christians canonized Aquinus, Iberian Muslims banished Averroes.
If Pope Benedict apologizes, I will resent him for the rest of his reign.
UPDATE: Glenn Reynolds rounds up more links on this topic, including to this post. In particular see John Hinderaker's post, in which he reminds us that Muslim extremists have designated this pope's predecessor for assassination. Michelle Malkin also has more this morning. All Things Beautiful examines the controversy from an artist's eye view.
By Blogger Stephen, at Sat Sep 16, 10:09:00 AM:
In other words, beyond the one non-Muslim state in the region, the Middle East has made a mess of itself. But don't blame this on Islam. I'm sure the fact that the one state to flourish is a Jewish state is purely coincidental.
By Anonymous Anonymous, at Sat Sep 16, 10:09:00 AM:
The Pope made a painfully obvious point that, as you say, was demonstrated as accurate not only quickly but in the way that has become habitual with these people.
I'm tired of hearing about all the contributions made to civilization by people that presently think beheading is acceptable. I'm especially tired of hearing about the oft quoted invention of the zero! It's too easy to retort that zero is the sum of their contributions since.
As for whether the source of the problem is Islam or pre-Islam cultural institutions, it is the perpetrators themselves invoking the name of Allah and I'm willing to take them at their word.
I doubt the Pope will apologize, he appears to be a man of his convictions. Wish we had more like him.
By Anonymous Anonymous, at Sat Sep 16, 10:22:00 AM:
Actually, the Indians invented the zero. The Arabs introduced it to Europe.
By Blogger Robert, at Sat Sep 16, 10:28:00 AM:
Oswald Spengler, in "The Decline of the West", attributes the rise of the West in the first place to Roman Christianity, which escaped the "Magian" Middle East because of Paul's orientation towards Rome. Perhaps only the Jewish Diaspora enabled Judaism to escape the fate of the other Middle Eastern cultures. And the Diaspora occurred after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 AD - by the Romans!
By Anonymous John Burgess, at Sat Sep 16, 10:40:00 AM:
I realize you're painting with a broad brush. But the entire Middle East has not been utterly static. The different countries--some more than others--have promoted sciences with effect. Not all ME universities are worthless, either.
Saudi Arabia has advanced some medical technology, including the first uterine transplant (performed by a Saudi woman doctor in 2002). It is developing a center (as well as great expertise) in separation surgery for conjoined twins. It is doing basic research in addressing Lupus and a variety of congenital diseases.
Graduates of Saudi medical schools don't have problems in either getting jobs or futhering their education at other institutions. The King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals is considered a top-notch engineering school, by world standards.
Liberal arts education, though, is a disaster, with the focus having been primarily (i.e., 60% of the curriculum) theological studies. That's changing, though, due to pressures both from the top and the bottom. People don't want "Islamic dentists," they want "dentists"; they don't want "Islamic plumbers," they want efficient "plumbers". Equally, the government has to provide educations that lead to jobs, something it hasn't been doing for a long time.
I'm not attacking Benedict's statement, a quotation from the historical record. I do think it commonsensical, however, to understand that people in the Middle East--or Islamic world at large--are touchy about such statements. Many do believe that their religion is under attack. Yes, that's nonsense, but it's still the perception.
I don't think it excessively PC to take that into account. If you're working in an office with somebody who gets really upset when you criticize something they feel strongly about (say, vegetarianism or smoking or the Mets) it's just not good practice to provoke that person if one of the goals of the office is a harmonious working environment.
Sure, you can think that they're nuts, but you don't actually come out and say that to their faces, unless your point is to provoke. And yes, they may be "oversensitive" about it. But we make those sorts of accommodations daily, whether it's in the workplace or around the dining room table.
What Benedict said was grossly misunderstood, primarily because it was taken out of context, both of the moment and of his role as pontif. But he could have excercised just a little more care in his choice of quotations. While I don't doubt for a moment that he was not looking to provoke, in the end he did. That's unfortunate, for all concerned.
By Blogger TigerHawk, at Sat Sep 16, 10:50:00 AM:
John Burgess,
The pope is not in an office, where employees subsume their personal views in the interests of shared enterprise (not to mention the avoidance of liability). The pope is the leader of a church, and in that regard he is speaking to his own faithful. Obviously, being the pope, he believes that Muslims are apostates. How could he not? Obviously, Muslims think Catholics are apostates. How could they not? Catholic prelates and Muslim clerics are not to be condemned for making remarks that distinguish their religion from the Other -- that is the essence of religious leadership. They are, however, to be condemned for advocating the spread or defense of their religion through violence. Make all the reasonable arguments you will through reason, but if you choose violence, you have also chosen its consequences.
By Anonymous niroja, at Sat Sep 16, 10:57:00 AM:
One can certaqinly see the reflection of who a person thinks their God is by their choices and subsequent actions. I think Judaism and Christianity have escaped the god of this world (Satan) who is the god of hatred and violence. Certainly we have our share of fools but as a rule we do not give up our personal responsibility to seek the one true God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob who created mankind and gave us free will. Obviously, Mohammed would not have included free will.
By Blogger rhhardin, at Sat Sep 16, 11:05:00 AM:
Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote op-eds, or possibly eds, for newspapers, one characterizing Islam being
written in 1800. I don't know where he got his inclinations, but they don't seem wrong today.
By Anonymous Anonymous, at Sat Sep 16, 11:09:00 AM:
You mention Averroes, whose works on Aristotle did so much to advance Aquinas' thought, but no one in the West ever seems to mentions Averroes' more Platonic-minded predecessor and rival, Avicenna, and the plight of his followers.
For instance, the followers of Avicenna are among the most hated by Ahmadinejad and his Hojjatieh mentors. And why not? Following a more Platonic and gnostic line of thinking, an Avicennan treats his belief in the Mahdi, the 12th Shi'ite Imam, as a semi-metaphorical entity.
It goes without saying that Islamic idolators and fundamentalists would want to kill such people, a tradition which certainly predates Islam in the region!
I wish more Westerners were aware of Avicenna, whose mystical-minded followers are truly "moderate" Muslims, and are everywhere under threat throughout the ME.
(Thans for the S.T. Coleridge, rhhardin.)
By Anonymous Anonymous, at Sat Sep 16, 11:47:00 AM:
Put another way, concerned Westerners ought to familiarize themselves with more of the names on that long list of murdered moderates in the civilization. We ought to make the education of Muslims of their own pathetic history central to our propaganda campaign.
I agree that individual Muslims need to own up to their behaviors, but we don't even know the history of like-minded people over there to force anyone to own up to.
For instance, check this guy out, Ahmad Kasravi. I think you'll all be pleased with him. And be sure to pay close attention to the details of his demise!
By Anonymous quickjustice, at Sat Sep 16, 11:49:00 AM:
I agree with the thrust of your comments on matters theological and papal, TH. That said, these matters are playing out on a political stage, and for political purposes. Muslim and Christian "unity" both are convenient fictions, as adherents of the two highly fractured faiths know well.
The Muslim Turks sacked Constantinople, seat of the Byzantine Empire, with military help from the Christian Italians. The Italians sought to exploit Marco Polo's trade route to China without Byzantine interference, so they cut a deal with the Turks under which their eastern trade would be unimpeded under the Ottomans. This "unholy" alliance continued for some time.
My point is that self-interest trumps everything else. The extremist Muslims, sadists in their own right, have identified the masochism inherent in modern secular liberalism, and they feed off it to build their own credibility within their religious communities. Their ultimate ends are temporal power and domination. In this, they are no different from the Soviets.
By Blogger retrofuturistic, at Sat Sep 16, 11:53:00 AM:
Regarding the "john burgess" comment, in which he opines that it is our duty to submit to a bully.
So in his office, if a "co-worker" is furiously angry because a female in the office dressed provocatively, showing a little ankle and (gasp) some cleavage, mr. burgess advocates: submission. Cover up. Put on a burqua, woman.
Or if he were to state an opinion of any sort, say, that yesterday's weather was a bit cool, and a co-worker becomes furiously angry at the sound of your mere voice, mr. burgess advocates: submission. Keep your effin' trap shut!
Submission. Which is just another word for? Islam!
Just wonderin', but does mr. burgess think that all abortionists should stop performing abortions because this incited Eric Rudolph to murder and mayhem? You need to accommodate your co-workers. Can't we all just get along? And in the burgess world view, that means giving an absolute veto to the loudest and most vocal bully.
By Anonymous Anonymous, at Sat Sep 16, 11:56:00 AM:
"Regarding the 'john burgess' comment, in which he opines that it is our duty to submit to a bully. ..."
I didn't understand that from the Burgess comment at all. Please be more specific in your references and arguments, lest we take you for another internet blowhard.
By Blogger Michael in MI, at Sat Sep 16, 12:00:00 PM:
The pope has already apologized. Granted it is one of those non-apology apologies in which one apologizes that someone was insulted by what one said, but doesn't apologize for what one said. I think that is good. He shouldn't apologize for his statement. Muslims' reaction to what he said says more about them and the insecurity in their own religion than it does about the Pope.
Of course Reuters, as usual, gets the headline wrong: "Pope Sorry for Remarks". The Pope does NOT say he is sorry for his remarks, he states that he is sorry Muslims were offended by them. Big difference.
By Anonymous Anonymous, at Sat Sep 16, 12:16:00 PM:
It is a shame that muslims do not spend as much energy condemning the Islamic fascists beheading Jews and Christians as they do to speech that they find offensive.
By Anonymous Anne Crcokett, at Sat Sep 16, 12:20:00 PM:
Maimonides ("Rabbi Moses"), the Jewish scholar who wrote Guide for the Perplexed, another source used by Thomas Aquinas, was also fled Muslim Spain when offered the choice of death, exile, or conversion to Islam.
By Blogger Sirius, at Sat Sep 16, 12:26:00 PM:
It's interesting how we never see muslims in America reacting like this. Perhaps they're afraid that Americans would become the monsters they've accused us of being for so long.
By Anonymous Anonymous, at Sat Sep 16, 12:26:00 PM:
The Pope should be promoting peace and not inciting more hatred.
Now, the Muslim countries want nukes to deter attacks and invasions like Iraq and Lebanon.
The failed neocon plan is a disaster that grows daily.
By Blogger Charles Martel, at Sat Sep 16, 12:33:00 PM:
First of all, the truth of Manual II's statements cannot be denied. That Islam is a faith of the sword is bourne out in history and in its textual foundation (both the Koran and the Hadith attest to this. In fact, when a Muslim says "jihad" means inner struggle - ask them how, as Mohammed states in the hadith, that if one engages in jihad and dies, he gets the virgins, etc., but if not, he will come home with booty. How does one die OR get booty from an "inner struggle?").
The first "crusades" were carried out by Muslims. How do you think that faith spread across Northern Africa and into Spain? Seriously, people, do none of you know what a strong, and learned center, for Christianity Alexendria had been, for nigh 700 years, before those Christians were killed or forcibly converted by the Muslims? Or in Carthage? The list goes on and on . . .
The Christian crusades didn't start until the Patriarch of Constantinople actually *requested* the aid of the West to help repel the Muslim invaders. (Though, the pope who received the request did nothing, his successor found the request convenient to get rid of troublesome nobles, and consented). In effect, then, at least the first crusade was a RESPONSE to Muslim aggression.
Has no one else read the situation Manual II was in when he composed this book? CONSTANTINOPLE WAS UNDER SIEGE. From whom? The Muslims . . . *again*. Even today, the Patriarchate in Constantinople is constantly grieved by the religious intolerance and violations of religious rights by Turkey.
These barbarians, and they are barbians, and always have been, attacked and Anglican Church and a Greek Orthodox Church. I'm a convert to Orthodoxy, and in the Greek Tradition. I weep for these individuals, and the hatred for anything not Muslim that has driven them to attacked these churches, but I also have no patience for those who would excuse their actions because of something the pope said. This is only pretext: studying the history of the Byzentine Empire and the Orthodox Church, this is only the latest chapter in a history of aggression that goes back to Islam's founding.
As for the "science" of the Middle East: these days, places like Saudi Arabia, who attempt to hold up the veneer of "westernization," put lots of money into some, and I mean only some, sciences. During the so-called "golden age" of the "religion of peace," most of the great advances were by "infidels" living in Muslim lands. One of the great mathemeticians, often cited as a Muslim "contributor" to civilization, states in the opening of the very book cited that he is only "compiling" wisdom from others - they are not his own findings.
The periods of so-called "peace" were periods of regular persecution, oppression, dispossession, etc., of those who lived within the bounds of the Muslim worlds who were still not Muslim (the dhimmi).
There is so much more history - I would greatly suggest that you all familiarize yourselves with more actual history of the area. The Muslim writers who, themselves, take great delight in the rape of women of Constantinople who can't buy their freedom after it was conquered . . . the contemporaneous writers, like Manual II, who saw through eyes unclouded by PC nonsense. Read the words of those who wrote prior to even WWI, the beginnin of the latest round of Muslim propagandha that has obscured reality and history, created a non-existenct people ("Palestinians," as a separate Islamic tribe or nation of some kind). Learn about the true violence of this faith from its very inception, and its textual foundation.
This knowledge also includes the facts of the Koran: that Islam believes in the concept of abrogation, or progressive revelation. That is, the latest revelation in time is the operative one - so that "there is no compulsion in religion" is abrogated by the later revelations, found in surrah 9.005 and 9.023, to kill all infidels "wherever you find them." (Again, the Koran is not ordered chronologically - if it were, one would be able to see the progression of the revelations along a line, from a positon of military weakness, while Mohammed was in Medina, to a position of dictatorial strength, when he gained control in Mecca, and, suddenly, all non-Muslims either had to convert or die).
Don't buy the whitewash of history - it means a lot, even today.
By Anonymous Anonymous, at Sat Sep 16, 12:38:00 PM:
Anne Crcokett, don't forget that in the late 15th c. the Spanish government offered both Jews and Muslims the choice to convert to Christianity or to leave. The Inquisition later visited death upon some of those conversos it suspected of still harboring previous faiths and customs. Cervantes, among others notable figures, was probably a conversos.
By Anonymous Anonymous, at Sat Sep 16, 12:43:00 PM:
Charles Martel, you are as literal about the Koran and the Hadith as are our enemies, which is invaluable for knowing the enemy's mind but not much else.
By Blogger pst314, at Sat Sep 16, 12:47:00 PM:
"If you're working in an office with somebody who gets really upset when you criticize something they feel strongly about...it's just not good practice to provoke that person"
If you're going to make that analogy, then your office worker is someone who feels free to criticize everyone else--and even assault those he disapproves of--but who gets violently angry when he himself is criticized for his intolerance. With a person like that the proper policy is not appeasement but termination.
By Blogger Charles Martel, at Sat Sep 16, 12:50:00 PM:
How convenient is that? Anonymous. Your pathetic attempts at deflection aside, being literal does not dimminish the accuracy of the statement. Nor the history of your faith. You can claim "different interpretations" all you want, but your claims avail you nothing. This history of your faith contradicts you, the words of your religious predecessors contradicts you. The Hadith contradicts you, and centuries of interpretation by your forbears contradicts you.
You can say one thing here, and something somewhere else for all you know. If you honestly believe what you say, then you are a new breed of Muslim, not an historically based, or textually based, one.
As far as the Inquisition goes, there are a lot of misconceptions, and downright lies (like the so called "burning times" and witches in Europe). For a more balanced view, I refer anyone interested to this site:
By Anonymous Purple Avenger, at Sat Sep 16, 12:54:00 PM:
If you're working in an office...just not good practice to provoke that person if one of the goals of the office is a harmonious working environment.
Why would you even want to hire someone who looks like they could go postal over relatively innocuous comments?
I've walked away from jobs where people like that existed. In the most recent case, just two weeks ago, I stayed only one day before walking out.
As I've grown older, my tolerance for crazies has dimmed considerably. Screw'em, get someone else to do the job. I'm not your guy.
By Blogger Òrange Juice™, at Sat Sep 16, 12:56:00 PM:
Face it Islam is the most misunderstood religion in the world.
Islam does not except terrorism not at all.
If you play any part in it ur not a muslim.
I do not except the reactions of some so called muslims who have resorted to bombing of churches because as a muslim we are taught not to destroy places of worship nor harm the worshippers I can't explain much on a comment but yOu've got it all wrong you can't blame the muslim nation on a few people . You don't see us judging christians on prostitutes ,drug users and drunks .You don't see us going around insulting jesus (a.w) that's because we respect him as a prophet of god and it is that respect that prevents a lot of muslims from saying things about him that would definetly hurt the christians am suprised really with the popes words .The funny thing is that he says that prophet muhammed has brought a lot of inhumane things to the world he discusses his views with the germans who set up sex camps during the world cup making a buissness out of it instead of erradicating the problem of prostitution.
I went to chatholic school in the middle east since kg till highschool.living in the middle east surrounded by islam there were still a lot of misconception around the school about Islam .So am not really suprised by ur post
Anywho englighten urself learn a bit about Islam before you start attacking the relgion.Do not restrict your knowledge to what is printed in the newspapers.
Here are some links
Islam and terrorism
Islam in general
I hope I haven't pissed you off.
If I have offended you my apologies to you and whoever.
It's usually the case with most people when you try and contradict the general believe.
By Anonymous Anonymous, at Sat Sep 16, 12:56:00 PM:
What if all the uncomplimentary things that TigerHawk says are true? The Arabs, or Muslims, are floundering around in infantilism, have not accomplished anything, and are deeply insecure about their faith and everything else.
Whats an outside spiritual leader, an heir to the prince of peace, supposed to do?
Rub their face in it?
I really doubt that that was Benedicts intention. But that is certainly what it sounded like. The glee you hear from true Islam-bashers can confirm that.
The pope, any pope, is hyper-aware, on a moment to moment basis, of the impact of his words. He is, by definition, the supreme authority on spiritual matters for a billion or so people. He certainly examines every word before he utters it in public. His office has a couple of thousand years of experience dealing with, and hopefully understanding human nature and all its insecurities and foibles. (Lets face it, the history of the West was a crazy and violent, for almost all its history, as the Middle East seems today).
He screwed up big time with this. I do believe that his heart wants to build bridges of peace and understanding with the Isalmic world. And his words have had the opposite effect. And though you can rightly lay responsibility on those who react, you cannot ignore the responsibility that adheres to one who should absolutely have known better, should absolutely have thought things through more carefully.
Bottom line. He tried to do one thing and accomplished the opposite. Somehow I suspect he has enough integrity to recognize this, and to try to undo it.
I hope he does, and that by so doing he teaches a valuable lesson to those who think they are defending him today.
By Blogger cakreiz, at Sat Sep 16, 01:03:00 PM:
It is a shame that muslims do not spend as much energy condemning the Islamic fascists beheading Jews and Christians as they do to speech that they find offensive. Yep. And the real shame is that Islam's leadership could easily steer its train-wreck of a religion in an entirely different direction- since they have control and dominance of the Arab Street.
By Blogger Michael in MI, at Sat Sep 16, 01:04:00 PM:
Charles Martel - Excellent post with regards to the whitewashing of history. It is very important that we bring the truth to light and cure people of their ignorance of the history of Islam, before it is too late.
By Blogger TigerHawk, at Sat Sep 16, 01:08:00 PM:
Rub their face in it?
Pope Benedict hardly rubbed their face in it, as you say. And as for the rest of it, the answer to the problems of Muslims, from their economic backwardness to their insecurity and rage, is simple. Live for the future. Build, do not destroy. Allow women to develop their full potential. Encourage, rather than suppress, diversity in culture and ideas. Apply reason along with worshipping Allah. These are all choices. The verdict of history is clear: one set of choices leads to prosperity and relative happiness (recognizing that happiness is rare in the human condition). The other leads to rage and misery. Religion is suppose to give comfort; do the imams who preach rage rather than conciliation on Friday afternoons actually comfort their flock? Why do worshippers emerge from mosques with torches and fury in their eyes, instead of the contentment of the wise?
By Anonymous Anonymous, at Sat Sep 16, 01:10:00 PM:
Charles Martel, if I misunderstood you then I shall take another look. For the record, I'm not a monotheist of any stripe.
pst314, I agree with your comment, based as it is on the better analogy of officeworkers. But I understood the more important, albeit looser analogy of Burgess (above) in terms of the hoped-for outcome of any project.
To extrapolate from Burgess' professed criterion, that one of the goals of the office is a harmonious working environment, the most essential aim of every business and institution, even more than maximizing profit, is for its own survival.
The question then goes to our professed goals. If the goal is to step up the World War we're engaged in, then we should say that. We can then argue the strategic value of kicking wasp's nests at this particular moment (as opposed to say, a year from now). Personally, I want to 'step it up', but also be very careful about how we do it.
Since I'm not convinced that we will ultimately vanquish this foe, and because this war turns so delicately and hazardously on modern communications technology, widespread Islamic ignorance and its attendant propaganda (c.f. Rueters, AP, et al), I have to agree with Burgess that the Pope "could have excercised just a little more care in his choice of quotations."
By Blogger Michael in MI, at Sat Sep 16, 01:10:00 PM:
Here are some Islamic quotes regarding terrorism: "I shall terrorize the infidels. So wound their bodies and incapacitate them because they oppose Allah and His Apostle."
Sounds like a ringing endorsement for peace and tolerance to me.
Click the above link for many more quotes.
By Blogger Charles Martel, at Sat Sep 16, 01:14:00 PM:
Michael in MI: Thank you, sir. I wasn't an Asia/Africa/Islam emphasis in my history major for nuthin', hehehehe . . . Yes, I've read the Koran and the Hadith (three of the four majors versions in their entirety, in translations approved by major Muslim leaders in the US).
The Koran, unlike the Bible or the Torah, is not really open to much interpretation. It does not engage in the same level of allegory. Instead, as some have commented, it reads like truck driving instructions, though each step isn't necessarily strongly connected with either the step proceeding it or the step following it. Try reading it some time - and then try reading it in chronological order, and see the true order of the Muhammed's revelations.
anyway, orange juice, just read the book, and the Hadith, and then read the history of the faith. Not propagandha pieces put out by Muslims to mislead non-believers (which is also sanction by the Koran and Muslim history in periods of military weakness).
By Anonymous Anonymous, at Sat Sep 16, 01:15:00 PM:
This is the twenty first century people. Religion is a belief to show people how to live. It is not an instrument to kill others.
It is insane to have people who say their God told them to kill.
There are over one billion Muslims. People are going to have to accept living on this earth with each other and stop the insanity.
By Anonymous Anonymous, at Sat Sep 16, 01:19:00 PM:
Yes, 'rub their face in it', but knowledgeably and encouragingly. As a way out of their dilemma (which has become our dilemma), let them know what kinds of Arab, Persian, and Asian 'infidels' have suffered by their ignorance and murderousness.
I thought that one of the greatest contributions of the ABC miniseries, 'The Path to 9/11" was the introduction to most Americans of Massoud. I remember reading about this great man's death in the NY Times and thinking, "this is not a good sign". A few days later and ... Now, five years later and it's still rare that I come across anyone who's heard of him. Why's THAT?!
By Blogger Shochu John, at Sat Sep 16, 01:21:00 PM:
The radical Islamics use the pope comments to whip up outrage, with some success. Meanwhile, TH proclaims imperiously that Muslims are a silly folk who ought to try to be more like the Jews, for their own good of course. Bloody wogs sometimes need a swift boot to the bum to get them to act like civilised folk. Pity for the radical Islamics that TH does not have a bigger megaphone. It would mean less work for them.
By Blogger Reagan's Ranger, at Sat Sep 16, 01:25:00 PM:
By Blogger Charles Martel, at Sat Sep 16, 01:30:00 PM:
Kind host, even your own suggestions are unworkable. This is due to the very fact that Islam, as a faith, cannot allow it (unless another prophet equal to Muhammed comes along and changes the faith). Manual II's opponent was correct in his characterization of the Muslim god as being irrational, as we understand it - beyond our concepts of rationality and thus not bound by them. For the Christian, we are made in the image and likeness of God, which means our rationality is based on God's rationality - and since God is eternal and unchanging, He cannot suddenly become capricious or violate that which has been given to us through revelation as a view, however limited, of His nature without ceasing to be God.
However, for the Muslim, as Manual II records in the responses to his statements, the Muslim god can even require acts of idolatry. There is no promise of anything - their god is impersonal, aloof, utterly unknowable (as they reject the kind of revelation of any aspects of god's nature that is the basis of faith in Christianity).
Thus, Muslims believe in a different god, as even Saladin (as recorded by Baha' ad-Din in the late 12th, early 13th century) said, he wanted to conquer the Franks, who did not believe in "God," That is, HIS god. It is not the same god as that of the Christians.
Thus you are dealing with an entirely different mentality - a view of life that the West, especially the West influenced in history by the Roman Catholic and various Protestant Churches, weaned on scholasticism and egocentrism, has to make an effort to understand.
My first encounter with this was coming to grips with my conversion to Orthodoxy. The entire Orthodox understanding of faith - in the individual, in the group, in life, and in the world - is extremely different than the understanding I group up with (your basic, non-denominational Protestant). I have so far to go, but can see from whence I came: I can understand so many differences that some may consider subtle, but are, in truth of GREAT importance.
The same must be said of Islam. Only through the study of the Koran and the Hadith, and the HISTORY of those writings and the faith they founded, and not the history the current Muslim "leaders" tell us of, but true history. Usually, you have to find older textbooks that haven't been "sanitized for your protection" for this.
By Anonymous Monte, at Sat Sep 16, 01:31:00 PM:
Of course these outbursts of "Muslim Rage" are orchestrated. The interesting thing would be to explore how it's done. There is a sophisticated political media machine at work, here.
By Anonymous Anonymous, at Sat Sep 16, 01:42:00 PM:
Hmmm. The 'office' comment. What do you do if you are obliged to share an office with someone who is continually offensive and intolerant of your way of life, and yet takes vast umbrage if you make even the mildest comment -addressed at a third party about his way of life?
Do you kowtow and see how you can fit your life around his when he is totally unwilling to change, and responds to requests to do so as deadly insult? In the long term you cannot work like this, and either equal respect for the other needs to be established, or you must fight. We've been backing down and accomodating while Islam murders apostates, demands dress codes of our people in their and right to apply their codes in ours, burn our national symbols insult our cultures, deny our history. Enough. They want repect they must be told to give it.
By Blogger Charles Martel, at Sat Sep 16, 01:45:00 PM:
Your lack of understanding of Islam is not only sad, it is typical of the West and our mentality. We, in our "sacred, humanistic, rationality" cannot understand a faith that has standing orders to kill non-believers. But it is a fact. History has bourne this fact out.
The differences between Islam's terrors, like the "crusades" across Northern Africa and into Spain, and its constant forays into Eastern Europe, the genocides that took place even under the "secularized" Turks in the 20's, etc., and things like the Inquisition, are many.
Unlike Islam, the killing in the name of the faith of Christianity is contradictory to the textual, and historical, foundation of the faith. Heretics were not killed or burned in the early Church, simply anethametized. As the NT says, rebuke a mistaken man twice, then leave him be, for he's not going to change. In effect, then, the Church would simply separate itself from association with that individual (or group, as the case may be). This was done at the Councils, and at individual synods of regional authority.
In Islam, it clearly has standing orders to kill non-believers if they do not convert (that is, establish the regular prayer hours and pay the poor tax). The text of book 9 of the Koran is not concerned with a particular people or a particular time, say, like God telling Israel to wipe out the Canaanites at a particular time, in the OT. That is an historical (in the meaning of the text) account of a specific order at a specific time.
Book 9, that relates the surrahs mentioned above, is NOT so directed. Like the vast majority of the Koran, it is simply a list of things believers are supposed to do. Nowhere before 9.005 or 9.023, or after them, are they clarified as orders limited in time and scope. They are standing orders for the elimination of all non-believers (though some translations, as anyone who has followed them over the last decade will admit, have changed the word "non-believers" into "pagans" to allow an out for Muslims who claim that the group named "pagans" doesn't include Christians and Jews).
For your edification:
But when the forbidden months are past, then fight and slay the unbelievers wherever ye find them, an seize them, beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them in every stratagem (of war); but if they repent, and establish regular prayers and practise regular charity, then open the way for them: for Allah is Oft-forgiving, Most Merciful.
So, Muslims are freed from all liability to non-believers, unless there is a treaty (hmmmm . . . wonder why the so-called "Palestinians" don't want to sign anything?). Then, you have to wait until the terms of the treaty are fulfilled. Then, when the forbidden months (or sacred months) are past, kill 'em where you find 'em!!!
I weep for their being lost.
By Anonymous Jordan, at Sat Sep 16, 01:47:00 PM:
Yeah, because it's perfectly understandable that somebody would become a terrorist because somebody said something that offended them, right? Let's do away with that nasty 1st Amendment, lest we make Muslims made. Hmmm... I'm going to venture a guess that anyone who does so, wasn't "moderate" to begin with.
By Anonymous Mystery Meat, at Sat Sep 16, 02:08:00 PM:
From the ABC Online website (Australia)
Muslims demand apology for Pope's speech...
By Anonymous Anonymous, at Sat Sep 16, 02:10:00 PM:
Actually, I understood you perfectly Charles Martel. After several unsuccessful attempts to ask whether you aren't spreading some bad medicine yourself I shall try one last time to post at this blog.
Don't misunderstand me though, if Islam is the most misunderstood religion in the world (and so says oj) then it's Muslims who seem to misunderstand more than anyone else. Frankly, I'm sorry that I have to be thinking about any of this at all. I hardly needed Islam to complete my picture of reality.
But as an aid to the misinformed, as well as to the all-too-educated posters here, may I refer you to the specifics of image-as-metaphor, as found in Ismaili Gnosis-and-angelology (see the works of Henry Corbin), and also to the more general Shi'a practice of ijtihad, which runs parallel to Aristotlean phronesis, or practical reason.
"As Men's Prayers are a Disease of the Will, so are their Creeds a Disease of the Intellect" - Ralph Waldo Emerson
By Anonymous not RC, at Sat Sep 16, 02:29:00 PM:
When a billion and a half people don't function well in the modern world, a caring religious leader should be willing to engage those people in a thoughtful, hopefully effective way. But how does one say to the Muslim world, "there's a problem, and although you don't want to talk about it, it may have something to do with certain doctrines of your religion?" No criticism of Islam is allowed by Islam. So if it needs to be criticized, one must either stifle one's concern, or try to make the criticism as detatched and gentle as possible without rendering it useless. Such as merely quoting something a well-qualified expert said 700 years ago, as a tiny part of a scholarly and well-reasoned speech about faith and reason.
Now the Pope has reached out, and is predictably having his hand chewed off up to the elbow. Whether it is better to attempt a dialogue or continue enabling denial remains to be seen. I admire the Pope for daring to draw all this rage toward himself, and I do believe he risked it consciously in hopes of lancing this festering, life-threatening boil. If enough of us follow his lead, as delicately as possible and yet not yielding, there will be mayhem. If we go back to appeasing, the same, unless we all convert. But if there is a way to talk to Muslims about the violence and yes, compulsion, in their religion, then there is hope that it might even become a religion of peace. I know how unlikely it is, as I have Muslim friends with whom I find it extremely difficult to tread upon these eggshells. When and if we discuss the Pope's speech, they will be emotional, not rational. So now I tell them that he said unreasonableness is opposed to the nature of God, and we'll see if a discussion is possible.
By Anonymous Greg Mee, at Sat Sep 16, 02:32:00 PM:
This is a fascinating discussion. Thank you.
Office workers - It seems to me that if one of your fellow workers is explosive, obnoxious, and abuses his fellow workers then I have three choices: Put up with it, terminate him, leave the office space. Talking reasonably to and about him assumes that he will be reasonable.
It seems to me that regardless oh how peaceful the majority of Muslims might be that they're not the one's were concerned with. Somehow, someway the unreasonable ones have to be delt with. It doesn't seem that either living with it or leaving the office is an option here.
And let's not confuse being polite with being a doormat.
Perhaps the idea of Political Correctness should be eliminated, then we can have some honest discussion?
By Blogger Charles Martel, at Sat Sep 16, 02:52:00 PM:
History, through the actions of Muslims themselves, has done more to spread "poison" about the faith than anythng else. And their own words ring down through history - those of Imams and Caliphs before the end of those offices. On a side note, I'm not sure what your link has to do with "image-as-metaphor." It explains the legal theories surrounding continuing interpretations versus those already handed down in the Muslim legal world. And, even then, it comes from Wikipedia, a somewhat dubious source at best.
If you refuse to understand Islam as a very real component of your reality, that is your problem. If you could ask those who have died by its hand, I wonder what they would have to say . . .
And it's good to see Ralph Waldo Emerson's quote show him as the hypocrite he was - he declares "creeds a disease" through his own, egocentric creed. Of course, that is the necessary hypocrisy of a humanist.
By Anonymous Anonymous, at Sat Sep 16, 02:56:00 PM:
The problem is religion, period.
It should be banned before it leads to the death of us all.
By Blogger Arthur Parry, at Sat Sep 16, 03:28:00 PM:
Thanks, as always, for saying what the regular dissembling media won’t. I do have a slight issue with your proposal to recycle the word “jihad” yet again into a description of the struggle against ignorance, sloth, or corruption, etc… This facile redefinition of terms, and of “jihad” especially, is one the maddeningly juvenile tendencies of Islamist interlocutors and their apologists.
If “jihad” ever had any greater jihad sense that meant “internal struggle,” then that sense has become obsolete in common usage. OBL did not wage an “internal struggle” against the United States, nor are those frothing demonstrators carrying placards urging an “internal struggle” against the Pope. Muslims themselves have despoiled "jihad" – and the usage that they have chosen is inherently offensive to non-Muslims. The word itself is offensive and they should be called on it.
Only when Muslims stumble over “jihad” like westerners stumble over “crusade” – that is, only when they exhibit the very barest capacity to internalize the viewpoints of others – will we see the beginning of the end of the long war.
By Anonymous Peter Warner, at Sat Sep 16, 03:38:00 PM:
Anonymous wrote:
'The problem is religion, period.
It should be banned before it leads to the death of us all.'
No. The problem is religion without ethics:
'This is ethical monotheism:
There is a God.
God's primary demand is ethics.
God without ethics leads to religious evil.
Ethics without God produces secular evil.'
Quote from Dennis Prager- Ultimate issues 1991
By Blogger Dawnfire82, at Sat Sep 16, 04:05:00 PM:
Are you serious? Because these people do not conform to behavior that you think their religion should promote then they must be misunderstanding their own religion? They are led by people who have dedicated their entire lives to the interpretation of Islamic holy writings.
They can look in a book and read, "Kill the infidels if they do not submit" in several contexts, in Arabic, with diacritical (pronunciation guide) marks that have been passed down unaltered for the last 1350 years precisely so that no one could alter the interpretation of that phrase. So can you, if you can read Arabic.
I haven't seen anything that Charles Martel has said on this thread that is wrong, excepting the motivation for the Christian Crusades. (new scholarship is revealing that there was a lot more religious fervor and a lot less realpolitikal thinking involved than usually believed, at least in the beginning; but that's irrelevant to this)
The truth is that the idea that Islam is a progressive religion in tune with Western values is a big fat myth propogated by Muslims who live here and like it here, and tip toe-ing politicians trying to avoid civil strife. They fit into our culture by de-emphasizing or ignoring certain precepts of their faith. Like jihad against non-Muslim government for instance, or practically ignoring female testimony in legal cases, et cetera. They have to ignore them because those ideas (which are inherent in Middle Eastern culture and put into practice in the more theocratic ones) are *not* in tune with Western culture.
But those precepts exist, and they are taken literally in large parts (that majority, easily) of the Muslism countries of the world.
Here is an analysis of the chronology of Quranic commands concerning violence, and thereby their progression over time.
They got more bold, general, and *violent* as time went on. It went from "Do not practice violence" to "Fight only when they attack you" to "Fight until all religion is for God." Almost no one in the West knows this because no one repeats it. It's not PC, and I'm sure they'd be accused of 'Islamophobia.' Which is assinine, because *it's there.* In writing, unaltered for more than a millenium.
But the terrorists know it. They are absolutely sure that they are in the right and will be rewarded in the afterlife for their efforts. Because those words exist. And all those people who aren't terrorist foot soldiers but who think positively of them, and think that when Americans and British who are tortured and beheaded in Iraq and broadcast over the Internet they are getting what they deserve, do so because those words exist.
Those words are God's will made manifest via the Angel Gabriel and the Prophet Muhammad. They are part of Islam, which is defined as submission to the will of God. i.e. they are part of Islam.
By Blogger Michael McNeil, at Sat Sep 16, 04:10:00 PM:
one Anonymous said...
another Anonymous said...
In fact, the zero was invented by the Babylonians, a millennium before Mohammed, as part of their base-60, so-called “sexagesimal” positional numbering system. Moreover, when the Indians’ base-10 decimal system first arrived, much later, in the cognizance of the West (Arab and European, and as late as the 10th century AD), it had no zero, consisting of nine symbols only. Eventually, someone (we don't know who, might have been Arab, Greek, or Indian) hit on the bright idea of putting the already-known sexagesimal zero together with the base-10 system, and voila! — decimals had a zero, which in early manuscripts even looked exactly like the sexagesimal zero.
However, lack of a zero was not the principal drawback to the early decimal system — much more serious was the lack of capability for expressing fractions natively (so-called radix fractions; e.g., 3.14… for π) within the system, which hobbled decimals throughout most of their history, up until Western mathematicians (e.g., Francois Viète) extended the system to incorporate radix fractions during the 16th century [!] AD. By comparison, sexagesimals included notation for expressing radix fractions as early as 1800 BC! For that reason, sexagesimal numerals were used for serious scientific computations (astronomy, trigonometry) throughout the ancient and medieval periods, exhibiting basically the same utility as modern decimals. For instance, the trigonometric tables in Ptolemy's Almagest (c. 140 AD), the world-shifting computations of Copernicus (1540), were all executed and displayed using sexagesimal notation.
We still use sexagesimals, by the way, basically every one of us, every day: in the degrees-minutes-seconds of angles, but even more commonly in the hours-minutes-seconds of time. Thus minutes and seconds aren't some weird units, but rather are first and second order sexagesimal fractions, akin to the tenths- and hundredths-places in decimals, that Ptolemy (in Latin translation) called partes minutae primae and partes minutae secundae.
You can read more about it here.
By Anonymous Anonymous, at Sat Sep 16, 04:19:00 PM:
You wrote:
Maybe... But I work in a very large sofware company, very politically correct in the Western US and there are many muslims employees there, from different areas (Bengladesh, North Africa, Egypt, Pakistan etc) and when something really bad happens to the country they can barely contain their jubilation, even in front of the "kaffirs".
There are more and more entering the country: I cannot believe the number of fully covered muslim women I see in the stores nowadays. Particularly in the last year or so. A very uncommon sight has become very common.
'not RC', I like your comment best so far. Good luck with those acquaintances. Maybe you can still introduce them to more aspects of the theology of Islam than they are yet aware? If they're anything like this crowd though, I'd say you're in for some rough going.
Muslims the world over are primarily "educated" about their own corner of Islam only, which makes sense when you consider where they get their information from. Most of them can't even keep up with who's supposed to be an "infidel" or not among their own idiotic brethren.
It's my hope for our entire propaganda strategy that we coax AND TRAIN the so-called "moderates" in Islam back into public view (or maybe even back into existence). That is, after we've killed as many murderous extremists as we need to.
But the tone on this thread seems to lead us to a genocidal solution (even if we mean that in a civilizational, rather than a racial sense). If that's the idea, then the implication is as impractical as it is hideous.
Chalres Martel, you must have missed the "and also", when I wrote about Ismaili Gnosis "AND ALSO to the more general Shi'a practice of ijtihad."
I'm glad you looked the term up though, and so would Irshad Manji be pleased. There's more on that Shi'a principle online than can be found at Wikipedia though. Why not give this one a looksee:
By Blogger boinky, at Sat Sep 16, 05:04:00 PM:
John Burgess discusses how wonderful Saudi medicine is, and how great is their medical schools, which produce fully qualified doctors...well, duh. So do a lot of third world countries..
Indeed, I agree with him that Saudi Arabia's hospitals are good...they should be. they are full of Pinoy (and other non Saudi) doctors and nurses...
As for "uterine transplants"...the fact it was done by a woman surgeon proves nothing, since technically a first year resident in surgery could perform it...the trick in transplantation is to stop rejection of the organ...
Organ rejection and the medicines to stop this are dangerous to the life and health of one receiving an organ, which is why ethically one does not do trivial transplants for non life threatening conditions, such as face or uterine transplants.
To transplant a uterus is ethically forbidden because it threatens the life of the mother...and to have a baby while taking these medications risks the life and health of the baby.
As a doctor and as a feminist, such a procedure merely proves the subjugation of women in a society that sees them as nothing but baby factories and slaves of their spouses.
By Blogger Charles Martel, at Sat Sep 16, 05:10:00 PM:
Thank you for the link. I will check it out (though I have to leave for a while).
However, I will take umbrage at the inane comment regarding "banning religions." Your religion of egocentrism is no less dangerous, and truly even more so, than what is traditionally known as "religion." Anyone can take any ideology and twist it, but the foundational aspects, especially if they are textual, cannot be changed. And when there is a wealth of historical information regarding the teaching of that faith, and its role in the world, then later aberrations are clear to identify and reject as inaccurate.
The problem with Islam is in its textual foundation, as well as its clear history of violence and, as Manual II correctly identified, its teaching that Islam is to be spread by the sword (though not exclusively by that method, but when words do not convince).
This is in part due to the concept that Islam considers all people to be born Muslim, and their choice of other faiths a falling away. Any "conversion" to Islam, through choice or compulsion, is truly, for a Muslim, only "reversion" to the natural state of that individual. Thus, it is not a bad thing, but a good thing, to force conversions at the end of a sword. You are saving that "convert."
Regarding the "civilizational genocide" comment: I don't think so. If the Muslims don't act on their faith, then there isn't a problem. But, in the grander scheme, I would advise always being wary, for if they gain power, as they are taught by Muhammed, they are to resume hostilities (something he taught in word and deed - withdraw until you have the power to destroy your enemies).
I view this as Naziism and fascism (not the same thing, by the by) and Marxism. These are concepts that, as a POLITICAL entity, we must allow people to believe in. But if they attempt to exercise these ideologies in a broad sense, they must be opposed. This is true of Islam - everyone has the right to believe in this faith, but not the right to exercise the aspects of that faith that mean death to all non-believers.
True, this is, in a strict sense, interfering with a Muslim's right to exercise his faith. But that's just too damned bad for Muslims, as far as I'm concerned. For my own part, I pray for them as I pray for myself. I, in my own pathetic and weak attempt to follow the examples of St. John Climacus and the Desert Fathers, am attempting to purge myself of inappropraite anger (anger not directed at the provocations and temptations of sin), and to approach even those who would kill me with true, humble love. I can only pray that the Holy Spirit brings this out in me.
Which is why I do worry, sometimes, that your understanding of my position may mislead those, like yourself, to whom I fall so short in fully explaining my position. In that regard, I apologize. I can only hope that the above clarification brings my position into greater focus.
Anyhoo, gots to run. Good day to all, hope to see y'all back here some other time.
By Blogger Lanky_Bastard, at Sat Sep 16, 05:13:00 PM:
The pope says God doesn't want people to practice holy war.
People who believe in holy war get all upset.
Other people get upset at the people who believe in holy wars.
(ACT IV: reserved for holy war)
By Blogger Georgfelis, at Sat Sep 16, 05:48:00 PM:
Once again Islam proclaims itself to be the Religion of Peace, and promises to beat up and murder all who opposes them.
By Blogger peggy, at Sat Sep 16, 09:41:00 PM:
I think the problem is Islam and not at all cultural and the reason why is as follows.
If Islam is the greatest and last of God's revealations of mankind, why has it completely and utterly failed to civilize the barbaric tribes of the ME (and Afghanistan etc too)after 1400 years? Why did it fail where Christianity succeeded in civilizing the barbarian tribes of Europe? Does anyone see Christians in Sweden or Norway still acting like pre-Christian Vikings????
How is that Islam failed to prevent the total degradation of the ME?
Why is the most supposedly backward and fanatical islamic country the very same one where Islam got its start? Are we really to believe that the islam we find on the fringes of the muslim world is more authentic??
And why is it also that the native pre-islamic cultures of so-called moderate islamic countries are at the moment also failing to resist Islamic radicalism? Previously moderate Muslim areas all over the world are rapidly sucuumbing. At the same time in these same countries there is an islamic revival going on in which people are taking their faith more and more seriously.
And if militant Islam is such a perversion of normative islam, why dont these folks recognize it as an imposter and reject it instead of welcoming it?
The problem is Islam. The problem may not be all muslims, but it is islam. The sooner these good folks face up to it the better for all of us. We confuse the issue and we do them lasting damage by pretending that islam can be reformed.
Look at its handiwork. It sucked dry the civilizations that it conquered and once these areas were almost entirely muslim, why didnt they become even greater and stay great until this day?? That will be us if we dont win the battle of ideas. We begin by telling the ugly truth without apology. If anyone needs tough love it is these people. We are certainly not loving them by minimizing the problem.
By Blogger Mark in Texas, at Sat Sep 16, 10:56:00 PM:
Does anyone see Christians in Sweden or Norway ...
I don't think that there are any Christians left in Sweden and Norway or most anywhere else in Europe for that matter. The last Christian in Sweden or Norway was probably some 103 year old lady in Tromso who died last year.
And that is why Europe is going to be islamic within the next two decades. The Europeans are going to take Bill Maher's advice and make what they believe to be a meaningless conversion to Islam in order for the Muslims to stop setting off bombs.
After all, the Europeans don't believe that they have anything to lose and the unbelievers who will face restrictions under the sharia laws were just a bunch of religious fanatics and pains in the ass anyway. As for the religious instruction in the schools, well it is no secret that the Europeans have lost the knack or reproducing so most of those kids are from Muslim immigrant families anyway.
I think it's a shame because Europe was a nice place to visit, but see it quick because it is going to get real different pretty soon. The two questions that I wonder about are whether the UK will follow the rest of Europe and whether we will treat France's nuclear weapons arsenal like the French fleet in Oran.
By Anonymous Anonymous, at Sat Sep 16, 11:37:00 PM:
I think the pope's move is brilliant. The other side's weakness is to overplay the hand, a lack of nuance. So he gives them a bait that looks perfectly innocent to a thinking person, a quote from a medieval text, and some strong words in the quote so that they get reproduced in newsbites. The other side of course plays another chain of riots, but I think and hope that the general public is becoming more conscious of the warmongering that these mullahs and imams are engaging in, and the west's liberal multicultural allowance is getting strained, and more people will study mohammed's legacy. Hope by the time it's over we can avoid lobbing one on Mecca and one on Medina.
By Anonymous Anonymous, at Sun Sep 17, 12:19:00 AM:
Muslims offer the following:
1. Convert.
2. Die.
That's Islam in a nutshell (well, add sexual slavery, polygamy, female genital mutilation, general beheading, stoning to death women who were raped, killing poets, cartoonists, and authors they don't like, people of other religions, and the death penalty for leaving Islam).
Islam has left the Middle East in squalor, poverty, violence, and disease. While Israel is the home of Checkpoint Software, various mobile phone software companies, and leading edge biomedical and aeronautical companies.
WHAT exactly world class company has Islam produced? They can't even pump their own oil.
Muslims like Zawahari and bin Laden have made a clear offer: convert or die. Yes there's a billion of them. Since I have ZERO intention of giving up my booze, dog (Muslims hate dogs and often torture them to death, as bin Laden purportedly did to prove his holiness) or appreciation of women I offer an alternative to those billion plus Muslims who want me either dead or converted to their horrible, awful, sadistic religion.
You first.
By Blogger peggy, at Sun Sep 17, 12:28:00 AM:
As an aside, do you know why the Saudis wanted to do the uterine transplant in the first place?
Because Islam forbids surrogate mothers.
So they are driven to prove that it can be done so that they can say that the islamic way is better.
But as i heard, the transplant had to be taken out again because the woman began to have problems. As it was explained at the time, it is extremely difficult to connect the blood supply correctly.
In other words, as you said, the woman's life was endangered with an umedically necessary transplant procedure when a safer method was available but forbidden.
BTW it is forbidden because there can be no exchange of anything related to sex between unmarried people. So if a surrogate was not married to the man she could not have the product of his sperm, the egg, implanted in her body.
Apparently these folks were not in the market for a second wife. At minimum the woman was desparate for her own child because a woman cannot be fully muslim unless she is married and a barren woman could be easily divorced. She would be desparate to avoid being either divorced or being supplanted by a fertile second wife.
Its just sad. No word yet on whether the transplant was really successful. I havent heard if the woman actually has had a child yet. Who knows what might happen if she does.
By Blogger peggy, at Sun Sep 17, 12:37:00 AM:
There could be other explainations for Saudi medicine and engineering.
They are trying to prove something in reaction to Western success and they have more money than God with which to buy the best of everything. Engineering comes in handy if you are using your money conquer the world.
If there was no West to compete with and no oil billions, Saudi would be as backward today as they were at the start of the century. Money can buy a lot except a culture that truly values learning, invention and acheivement.
If the Saudis were so accomplished without the oil cajillions and if they were leading the way before the West put them to shame then we could talk about how islam is not a bar to acheivement. But that is not the case is it? Islam is the problem.
By Blogger peggy, at Sun Sep 17, 12:51:00 AM:
Re: the office analogy I have my two cents to put in.
An office is of a completely different and far smaller scale than a situation that involves cultures, religions and civilizations. You are comparing apples to oranges because we talking about two different things being at stake. In an office the worst that can happen is that money will be lost and people will lose their jobs. If office harmony prevails, people get to keep their jobs and make more money.
The stakes are not even close when we talk about the survival of whole civilizations. This is a battle of ideas on the grandest of scales and the penalty for us if we lose is nothing less than the loss of our culture and traditions not to mention a rational way of looking at the world using the objective standards of reason that have served us so well. If we lose, reason will be defined not by objective standards but by the koran. Nothing which contradicts it will be allowed.
when the stakes are high, a little provocation is in order if it gets reasonable and decent people to reconsider their position. If you think that muslims can only become more set in their ways and more violent when challenged then you think less of them than most of us here. I think that most of us here believe in the power of truth which is not sugarcoated. Muslims have never had the unvarnished truth before. They live in a lala land of sorts and the only way to get them to snap out of it is to paint them in a corner after demolishing all of their excuses and justifications. When there is no where left to hide, they will have to face up to the fatal flaws of islam. We do them no favors to pussy foot around their sensitivities. The roots of the problem must be exposed.
By Anonymous Anonymous, at Sun Sep 17, 01:02:00 AM:
Fair enough Charles Martel.
It must have been someone else who wanted to outlaw religion; the John Lennon fantasy is surely not mine.
I appreciate your attention to my "civilizational genocide" question, since you see that it can lead nowhere.
Yet I also agree with you that, "in a strict sense, [my] interfering with a Muslim's right to exercise his faith ... [is] just too damned bad" if that faith requires undermining my, and our existence.
Maybe the Europeans will eventually figure this out, but I agree with 'Mark in Texas' that it's late in the game for them (which in itself is worrying for us).
Tragically, there is a better way for Muslims from right within their own traditions. There are wise and beautiful Islamic thinkers from the past, but too few contemporary Muslims are encouraged to use their own minds to investigate them. There are far too many categories of infidel, and almost no centralized authority to guide or inspire them to anything but the most literal interpretations of their outwardly violent texts.
In that way they are not terribly unlike an earlier phase of Christendom, but today the world cannot tolerate such a situation as Europe knew during the counter-Reformation.
All I'm saying is, seek out the greatest figures in their history and make them aware of how badly they've fallen short of their own heritage. Now that would be a propaganda campaign: explain yourself to your own ancestors (whom WE understand better than you!).
[And I swear I'm not a Muslim, Christian, or Jew; I'm simply an educated American, and therefore have greater access to their own traditions than they do. Think of it as an interest in comparative mythology.]
The other option that you seemed in your writings above to prefer, the apocalyptic clash of civilzations, is frankly too horrifying to contemplate. It is also, mercifully, not necessary.
By Blogger peggy, at Sun Sep 17, 01:04:00 AM:
As for the muslim believer here who claims that islam is the most misunderstood religion in the world.
Has it ever occured to you that the reason why this is because of a flaw in islam? If it is so incomprehensible to other people, isnt there something wrong with it? Shouldnt the worlds greatest and most perfect religion be the easiest to understand? Isnt that in fact one of the selling points that islam is so fond of using to gain converts? If it is the most difficult to understand then the religion actually fails to pass its own test.
Whatsmore, muslims do blame the failings of the West on Christianity. Read any tract or book promoting islam and you will see the blame for all these things places squarely on Christianity. Christianity, in these texts, is in this way proven to be an incomplete and failed religion and Islam is advanced as the solution.
In fact, isnt it completely necessary to islams very existence to denigrate Christianity? If Christianity were not so denigrated then what would be the nned for islam? Your very beliefs about Christianity are an insult to us ie that it was never meant to leave Israel and that it is corruption and a denigration of the original teachings of Jesus designed his unethical followers to suit themselves. But islam's whole existence depended first of all on denigrating its only real competition in the universal himan religion league. It had to be defamed for islam to succeed.
By Anonymous John Burgess, at Sun Sep 17, 01:12:00 AM:
Tigerhawk: I beg to differ.
The Pope was making an excellent speech about the abuse of religion to foment violence.
I do not think it was necessary to provoke a particular audience which had already showed it was on a short fuse to make his point.
I don't blame him for quoting a Byzantine emperor, but question his staff in selecting such a quote.
I am not absolving the asshats who fly into a rage if Nike invents a new shoe design, if an ice cream cup has a "suspicious looking swirl", or a cartoon mocks them. They are asshats who confirm the stereotype.
My point is that the speech writer did not practice due dilligence in his reference materials. As a result, the world anger level is three degrees higher than it need be.
This distracts from far more important issues and sets back both what the Holy Father and moderate Muslims are trying to do. As a result, we all lose.
By Anonymous russell, at Sun Sep 17, 01:13:00 AM:
***Genesis chapter 16 explains very well why Arabian culture has for 4,000 years been quick with the sword. Today's Islamic culture is rooted in the ancient Patriarch Ishmael's violent nature.
By Anonymous Anonymous, at Sun Sep 17, 01:15:00 AM:
"In fact, isnt it completely necessary to islams very existence to denigrate Christianity?"
No more than is customary in Christianity.
I once asked a Roman Catholic theologian how the Church categorized people of other faiths who were obviously and unmistakably "saintly"? He answered that the Church considered them "involuntary Christians".
Chew on that awhile.
By Blogger peggy, at Sun Sep 17, 01:19:00 AM:
Mark in Texas,
You wouldnt be "newbie" would you?
Just ignore me if you're not ;-)
But I have to correct you on something. You are most certainly right about Sweden but in at least one Nordic country Christianity is doing well, well relatively. I cant remember if its Norway or Finland but the Church there is condidered in good shape and counts young people and young families as a decent portion of its membership.
My point however was that even when Sweden and Norway were strongly Christian nations, they were not still practicing their bloodier and more savage pre-Christian Viking culture. They were among the most civilized folks ever in the history of Europe. They were peaceful, tolerant and greatly and wonderfully accomplished in every conceivable area.
Even if we swallow the notion that the MEs problems are to be blamed on pre-islamic culture then we also have to conclude that islam has abjectly failed to civilize these people. That is a pretty damning indictment of what is supposed to be the summit of all religion.
By Anonymous Anonymous, at Sun Sep 17, 01:26:00 AM:
I understood you all day John Burgess, and I agreed with every word. (I'm the guy who's been arguing for a more educated propaganda campaign).
A clash of civilizations is not inevitable, but seems more and more unavoidable. I'm sure there's a better way. I agree that the Pope has hardly advanced that possibility.
T. O'Connor
By Blogger Lawrence 3X, at Sun Sep 17, 01:31:00 AM:
Respect for law, respect for the rights of other people, and responsibility for one's own actions . These are tactile lynchpins of Judeo/Christian philosophy. They have been the springboard for the advance (not always a straight line!) of civilization these last 2,000 years. That the Muslim world does not adhere - indeed, sneers - to these principles also, explains much of why it wallows in barbarity. One cannot debate with a barbarian. One can only fight, or give ground. Choosing the second only buys time until there is no more ground to give, and then fight. Best that the Muslim fanatics get a grip and stick to their knitting. Failing that (a foregone conclusion, if history is any judge), then better to fight now, while we're best able to do so. I support the Pope (though I'm not Catholic). And I will not submit, nor surrender.
By Blogger peggy, at Sun Sep 17, 01:37:00 AM:
You assume that I am claiming that Christianity and Christians can do no wrong. I said nothing about Christianity being innocent of hubris. I was speaking only to the completely erroneous claim that muslims dont disrespect Christianity and dont blame it for the flaws in Western society.
As for the quote you use, I dont consider it particularly damning although I understand your point in using it. What kind of religion doesnt believe that it is the better choice over all the others. All religions claim to understand the universe better and to behave better than all the others. It comes with the territory of ideas and belief. Yet in defense of most religions, including Christianity, a more nuanced position is taken than your single quote from a single guy would make it seem. Christianity, like other religions, has concluded that all other faiths have a degree of the truth. Some more. Some less. But since it believes in its own claims, Christianity, like most other religions, claims to have the fullest understanding of the truth. This is the official position of the Catholic Church as opposed to the unfortunate characterization of that position given by the priest that you quoted.
In addition, the Church teaches that God loves all of mankind and works in the lives of all who call on him regardless of their beliefs about him. We believe that he can and does answer the sincere prayers of all people. We also believe that the Holy Spirit does not discriminate and that it works in all human lives to bring them closer to God. The difference between us Christians and all the others is that we have a greater understanding and awareness of that loving activity and that through our informed consent and cooperation receive the full benefit of its power.
There are most certainly Christians who would disagree with the above but they have that right. But the official teaching of the largest body of Christians in the world is just as I have said.
By Blogger peggy, at Sun Sep 17, 01:56:00 AM:
One last comment before i go to bed.
While I'm as anti-islam as they come, I am not however anti-muslims.
I want to add my agreement that the worst possible outcome in this situation can be avoided and must be all costs. We will all lose if it comes to that.
We may differ on the methods to avoid this outcome. Some are for conciliatio. Some are for a better propaganda war. Myself, I am for a no holds barred confrontation approach in the still free realm of ideas to win the day. But I think many of us can agree that we must speak out against those who see the worst case scenario as an inevitability.
When people start talking nukes, it turns my stomach. Sorry. I'm just being honest. I trust in the power of ideas when coupled with the freedom and liberty of an open society. When people start talking about nukes that means that they have given up on the power of the truth and I refuse to do that.
BTW, Mecca and Medina are full of people. So are the cities of the ME. Its shameful to be so glib about destroying them.
I for one will never let a "nuke em" comment stand without saying something.
By Anonymous Anonymous, at Sun Sep 17, 02:08:00 AM:
"we also have to conclude that islam has abjectly failed to civilize these people"
From my very first post above, about the philosopher Avicenna, to everything I've said in support of Islam's capacity to reason since, I still must agree with that last estimate, Peggy.
Your considerations of Christianity are well taken. I am not a Christian, but neither am I a relativist. Our civilization is founded on Christendom, which has given rise to our notion of our own liberties and of our systems of self-government.
And yet I myself am quite willing to depart from questions of religion (which is my business of course). After a day on this thread, I would even recommend that people rely on philosophy and theology more than on their personal religious understandings, the language of which is usually unhelpful in a general dialogue.
The thread initially touched on the question of reason, correct?
Please do not think that I see much to value in contemporary Islam, especially as compared to Christianity today. But is it just possible that Americans, as the last survivors of the Western heritage (thinking ahead), must be even more than the "policemen of the world"? For our own survival, must we learn how to specifically inform Muslims about moving their own traditions forward?
Actually, that's George Bush's wager, and I'm still with him on that. They DO have a tradition of reasoning, as Tigerhawk and I have referenced in our mention of thinkers such as Averroes and Avicenna.
Another way to say it (and sell it) is "tradition is a process". But Muslims have that already in the principle of ijtihad. We just have to learn some new words and ideas which may be a bit of a nuissance, but there you have it.
And anyway, why shouldn't we wish to expand the limits of our reason? Do we think that philosophy is a done deal just because "post-modernists" say it is? When's the last time anyone here has dipped into Aristotle? Let's not pretend we're paragons of our own heritage just because we're willing to read more than a single book.
I must sleep now, but it's been nice speaking with you all.
T. O'Connor
By Anonymous Anonymous, at Sun Sep 17, 02:43:00 AM:
You and I are probably very much in agreement on a good many things, Peggy.
Blogging is such a strange, new world, isn't it? It does hold much promise, if we'd only devote the appalling amount of time it takes to organize difficult thoughts and then to converse honestly about them! It's so often easier for people to unthinkingly post an exhortation to "nuke 'em". That can be pretty discouraging, and turns my stomach too.
I really wish Americans were more educated about our enemy, their ideas and their traditions. Essential to my own private propaganda war - and as a suggestion by way of a personal style - when I talk to Muslims about their faith I do so knowingly, finding that most don't know too much about the Islamic ideas and figures of my own choosing. Then I act all surprised as if everyone must know these things, and that anyone really has to know them if they want to consider themselves well-rounded human beings.
Well, it works every time. The only problem is that you have to know the ideas and figures in the first place. My interests are in philosophy and comparative mythology, through which I try to ease any conversation away from the language of a particular religion. I say that without being a cultural relativist. You just have to be quick on your feet.
T. O'Connor
By Anonymous Anonymous, at Sun Sep 17, 11:29:00 AM:
As a biology wonk I see this from a different perspective; that of the evolution of the population located in the "Middle East". There is a demonstrated canon that in simple words says, that one must adapt to the changes in the environment or perish. This happens over time and does not occur in the space of a few hundred years. The islam influenced part of the population has been prevented from adaption to the changing environment, whereas that part of the population open to "adaptation" has prospered and survived. Turning to an economic perspective, it would seem that the aforementioned is demonstrated by the nature of the people; Limited societal innovation, an enforced stasis and a rejection of anything that would promote the long term survival. The current survival strategy of the population is to have high birth rates and to expand into other regions as opposed to being self sufficient and maintaining a sustainable population. Wait and see, the Islamic based societies will be gone in a thousand years. The question then becomes, will they destroy or kill off all other societies before then?
By Blogger peggy, at Mon Sep 18, 11:53:00 AM:
T O'Connor,
I couldnt agree with you more that the debate has to use the tools of reason and philosophy rather than have one side trying to out shout the others that their religion is right and the other is wrong.
However, I am a believer in making a philosophical defense not only of Western Civ but also of Christianity, which we both agree was a major contributor to the same.
I think that using by using the language of reason and philosophy to demonstrate what it is about Christianity that has led to success and what it is about islam that has led to failure, then we can make real progress. This is why I dont resort to what I call the duelling scriptures form of debate where scriptures are ripped from their context by both sides to try and discredit ones opponent. I talk in terms of ideas, objective standards and common sense. I look at concrete differences in outcome between us and them. I tell it like it is and work very hard to get folks to face the facts whenever an attempt is made to deflect blame from where it must be laid.
A religion is responsible for the outcomes, both good and bad, that its believers produce. I accept that there are things in the Christian tradition that had atrocious outcomes where either the Church instigated the bad outcome or failed to prevent it. I also credit my faith for the good it has accomplished. The same must be accepted by muslims about islam.
Unfortunately this will wreck havoc with their theology since they are taught that it is their religion that is perfect and penultimate whereas Christians are taught that only Jesus is perfect and penultimate and that our response to him, our religion, can, at times, go off the rails and be as flawed as we are as individuals. Personally I feel that muslims will not be able to make this transition without abandoning islam and its claims to being perfect. I believe that the best outcome of the project to engage muslims in a discussion based on reason will lead the decent and reasonable among them, the majority, to admit that their religion is composed of many failed ideas and that the good ones it contains are derivative. If they want to become agnostic, Bhuddist or whatever after that I dont care as long as the poisonous ideas of islam are rejected by Western and world society. This will be the best outcome for all. There will of course be die hards and fanatics that will hold out but when they are safely and clearly separted from the majority, they wont be very hard to take care of. Most muslims have a divided loyalty right now. We have to get tough with them to, I hope, force them to change. I truly believe as you do that most people are reasonable will make a choice for the best argument in the realm of ideas. I believe that the West, and so with it Christianity, has the best argument. We just have to stop being shy and apologetic about it and be honest even if that means coming across as being tough or harsh. Sometimes "nice" just doesnt cut it, does it?
By Blogger peggy, at Mon Sep 18, 12:07:00 PM:
T O'Connor,
I also wanted to mention how much I appreciate it when non-believers like yourself are reasonable enough to acknowledge the major positive contributions that Christianity has made to our society.
All too often there is a complete logical disconnect in the reasoning of Western non-believing relativists. They blame Christianity for every bad thing about our history and society and give credit for the good to any and everything else besides. These same people will talk about the total domination and control that Christianity once had over our society when it comes to blaming it for something and when it comes to something good about our society, then its all about those good ideas emerging from a Christianity-free vacuum and succeeding in spite of the Church due entirely to the efforts of thoroughly secular heroes who were alone willing to drive the all-powerful Christian beast away from decent society.
On the other hand these same folks will say that everything bad about islam can be blamed on pre-islamic culture while all the good things that muslims ever accomplished are due to the brilliance of islam alone and any pre-exisisting culture or civilization whether Christian, Jewish, Zorastrian, Persian, Hindu, or Bhuddist had nothing to due with that success in the least.
I, for just one, am absolutely sick of it.
Someone like yourself is a breath of fresh air. I admired Oriana Fallaci for the same reason. It gives me hope that we Westerners, whatever our stripe, can all come together to face the facts and deal with reality to save our great civilization.
By Blogger peggy, at Mon Sep 18, 12:33:00 PM:
Last comment.
The people who make me the most exasperated are the relativists who in addition to committing the logical diconnects that I mentioned above also give all the credit for the modern age to islam via Averroes and Avicenna etc. As if Christianity werent fundamentally Greek, as if we had completely and hopelessly lost all connection to Greek learning (The monks of Ireland would beg to differ) as if the resulting progress werent a case of a tradition coming home to its ideal environment and being returned to its best interpreters.
Europe was so primed and such a ready made environment because of the Greekness of Christianity. After all the field of Christian apologetics came about out of the efforts of Greek believers to reconcile their faith with their own tradition of thought and philosophy. This process began very early in our history, was profoundly influential on the faith, and continued with both good, bad and indifferent result up to and into the modern age.
Christianity has a long tradition of incorporating reason into faith which comes from our Greek hertitage. We may not always like or approve of the answers that come from that attempt but all reasonable people should be able to acknowledge that fact. The fact is that Christianity primed Europe for the modern age. Islam was just a courier.
By Blogger peggy, at Mon Sep 18, 12:54:00 PM:
Ok so I lied. This is my last post because something just occured to me that i feel the need to say.
You talk in terms of itdjitad (however thats supposed to be spelled) as the tradition within islam of reconciling faith and reason.
Yet I think there may be a problem in this approach. The tradition, if it is truly islamic, would lack objectivity. Islamic thought begins with the assumption that mohammed and the koran are correct about everything and the remaining task is justification the working out of proofs using the tools of reason to prove the faith is true.
So in Islamic tradition, we can say that believing muslims are using their heads to come up with reasons why islam is true working from an assumption that it is true. One example would be one of the reasons put forward for the veiling of women. Because islam teaches that men cannot control themselves unless women "help" them by covering, in order to prove that the teaching is correct, all the muslim apologist sees in the world are examples of men not being able to control themselves. See, they say, its true that it is better for women to cover up and a throughly reasonable sounding proof is created which excludes all other evidence to the contrary.
I think that one of the reasons that the Greek tradition was so remarkable and invaluable was because of its committment to the ideal of objetivity. No idea in that tradition was too sacred to examine or attempt to discredit. This is not to say that they were always objective. Perfect objectivity is a hard thing for anyone to acheive. But they were aware of its value of this ideal and it was something that they alone were committed to for a very long time before anyone else.
I think this is one of their very greatest gifts both to the West and to the Christian faith. We should be careful that we encourage muslims to be objective about their faith rather than just encourage them to do more of the same kind of "reasoning" that got them in the mess they're in in the first place. Its not enough to use one's brain. It must be used properly as well.
By Blogger Matoko Kusanagi, at Mon Sep 18, 10:26:00 PM:
tigerhawk, if i may.
here lies the body of john o'day
who died defending the right of way
he was right, dead right, as he sailed along
but he's just as dead as if he'd been wrong.
sure the pope is right.
but he did apologise, and said manuels thoughts were not his.
here is the real result of this foolishness.
Pope: Happy Birthday, Osama!
By Anonymous Purple Avenger, at Tue Sep 19, 12:09:00 PM:
Islam does not except terrorism not at all.
Ummm, what was that penalty for apostacy again? Refresh my memory.
Islam uses terror on its own faithful to keep them in line. The various christian and jewish sects gave up on that kind of medieval shit many many centuries ago.
By Anonymous Anonymous, at Sat Oct 28, 09:42:00 PM:
As a Muslim, is see 2 worlds of hate, one on the other side of the World that twists and distorts Islam to achieve their political agendas. And other in the form of neocons (such as peggy, for example, who oddly attempts to credit Christianity with the achievements of Secularism) who twist and distort Islam to support their own agenda.
As a Muslim, which do I speak out against? One on hand, my religion is being hijacked, with the unintential assistance of the media (whether it be CNN or Al-Jazeera), whereas I have people in my own backyard espousing ignorance, that will directly affect my rights here (which have been suffering since 9/11, ie. the right to legal council is denied to many American Muslims, as per the Patriot Act).
Both affect me, but one is more direct and apparent. Frankly I would love the ideal situation where I can use Islam to speak out against terror, hate, and ignorance that exists in a growing minority in the Muslim world. Unfortunately, as long as I'm being targetted by those in the West...that day will never come.
By Anonymous Anonymous, at Sun Jan 14, 08:31:00 AM:
If anything invented by arabs and islamic world, it is - TERRORISM. i hope everybody agrees to it. yes, US is partially to be blamed for arming them and teaching them to use weapons and modern gadgetry.
recently i came across a website where it mentioned that everything that we use are the inventions of islam. this is the greatest joke i have ever come across till now.
its true that the problem of middle east, arabs and islam are interconnected. as a race arabs are filthy, crude and uncivilized. they still think they can dominate the world with oil. what they fail to understand is that world has gone pst them centuries ago. the middle ages mentality will not get them anywhere.
By Anonymous Anonymous, at Sun Feb 25, 01:05:00 PM:
With the growth of Islam in numbers, its influence will undoubtably grow in the coming decades. By the mid-century, it may be the largest religion in numbers, exceeding that of Christianity. Therefore, terrorist activity will grow as well. We have a lot to fear from them. That the West finds Iranian Mahmoud Ahmadinejad so abominable is hardly a surprise. He's merely carrying out the will of his revered hero, the Ayatollah Khomeini. Ayatollah Khomeini was extremely EVIL--a power hungry, murderous, American-hating meglomaniac. He sent a million of his own people to their deaths in the Iran-Iraq War, when he could have stopped that conflict. That entire Islamic regime in Iran is evil. Bush attacked the wrong country. He should have reserved his pre-emptive strike for Iran. If Ahmadinejad doesn't back down, we ought to bomb Iran before they bomb us.
By Blogger sexy, at Fri Dec 19, 04:30:00 AM:
By Blogger sex999, at Sat Jan 10, 09:00:00 AM:
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} | 2,193 | Islam and Armageddon
Suddenly, everyone, or so it seems, is an expert on Islam. From Presidents and Prime Ministers to the humblest hack, all are ready to lecture the public on what real Islam is. If this` knowledge is so readily available to such unlikely mentors it seems odd that so much wrong opinion is abroad on the subject. Tony Blair, apparently, knows so much about it that he can confidently announce from a public platform that any 'muslim' who has a different view of Islam from his own is not a proper muslim. According to this view, real muslims are just like members of the Church of England, all sweetness and light, interested only in being good neighbours, engaging in 'inter-faith dialogue' and, presumably, voting for New Labour.
Islam, we are told over and over again by the self-appointed guardians of right thinking, is not a religion of violence and aggression but of peace and love. Does not the Koran have at the head of every chapter: 'In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate'? Who could disagree with that? That's the sentiment of all decent people everywhere isn't it? Why, we could even have it as the slogan for the next Labour Party Conference, fetchingly lit in shades of green and rose, with a copy of the Koran given away free to every delegate. This wonderful book is already the Prime Minister's favourite bed -time reading and was ostentatiously flourished on the plane to America in the wake of recent events.
How can people in high office be so naïve and stupid? Very easily it seems, almost a mandatory qualification, since it makes it easier to spout sanctimonious drivel with a straight face. But where are the doubting voices, the posers of awkward questions that might expose this ludicrous charade for the expedient nonsense it is? Certainly not the TV interviewers and ambitious journalists with careers to think about, who in any case know no more about the subject than the people they are interviewing, and are every bit as keen to appear 'tolerant' and 'understanding' for fear of something nasty happening on their own doorsteps.
Here are a few questions that might be put to Mr Blair or any other apologist for Islam that appear regularly in the media. (1) If real Islam is all about peace and love, how did it acquire an empire that stretched from Spain to India, by sweet reason? (2) When is Islam going to apologise for overrunning the Hellenic-Christian civilization of the Middle East, conquering Constantinople in 1453, and laying siege to Vienna in 1529? (3) If the Koran is all about peace and love, how are such verses as the following to be explained. K.4:74, 'Let those fight in the cause of God who sell the life of this world for the hereafter. To him who fights in the cause of God, whether he is slain or victorious, soon we shall give him a great reward'. K.4:76, 'Those who believe fight in the cause of God, and those who reject faith fight in the cause of evil.' K.5:54, 'O believers, take not Jews and Christians as friends, they are friends of each other. Those of you who make them his friends is one of them. God does not guide an unjust people.' K.9:29, 'Fight those who believe neither in God nor the Last Day, nor what has been forbidden by God and his messenger (Muhammad), nor acknowledge the religion of Truth (Islam), even if they are People of the Book (Jews and Christians), until they pay the tribute and have been humbled.' K.47:4, 'When you meet the unbelievers, smite their necks, then when you have made wide slaughter among them, tie fast the bonds, then set them free, either by grace or ransom, until the war lays down its burdens.'
It is not difficult to see how those who regard the Koran as God's own speech can find in verses such as these the justification for practically any act of 'terrorism' imaginable. When such texts are put to apologists the usual response is to say that they are bad translations and it is quite different in the Arabic, and in any case such verses are balanced or cancelled by other meliorating texts elsewhere in the Koran. Unfortunately, according to the traditional muslim chronology of revelation, early texts are abrogated by apparently contradictory later texts, and all the above texts are late or 'Medinan', while most of the 'compassionate' texts are early or 'Meccan'. It has been said that the text at K.9:5, 'Slay the idolaters wherever you find them', cancels 124 verses advocating mercy and toleration. There is no Pope in Islam, no ultimate authority able to say what real Islam is, or what is the right interpretation of texts, there is just and endless spectrum of opinion. Those involved in recent events, wearing red head -bands emblazoned with texts such as those above, have every right to consider themselves real muslims going about God's work and deserving reward in the hereafter. Indeed, such people probably have more right to consider themselves good muslims than those Western educated, Western suited, representatives of muslim institutions expressing sympathy and regret, or any benignly smiling Sufi talking about 'the heart'; the latter are especially nauseating in that they share many of the aims of the militants, such as the restoration of the caliphate, without the courage to do anything about it.
It is important that such things are said loudly and said now, since it is likely that before long both the writer and the publisher of these words could be deemed guilty of the crime of inciting religious hatred. This is the dream of yet another expert on Islam, the Home Secretary, who is so unstinting in his admiration that he thinks anyone suggesting that Islam is anything less than wonderful, and muslims anything other than wholly admirable, deserve to be prosecuted. So widespread are such sentiments amongst the liberal intelligentsia that it is surprising that there have not yet been mass conversions. In contrast, outside such circles, it appears that either Islam is true, in which case we all ought to be muslims, or it is not true, in which case it is pernicious nonsense and it cannot be criminal to say so.
The fear here of course is of blood on the streets. That there have been physical attacks on muslims arises largely from the fact that they choose to make themselves obvious by their mode of dress, and of course, as we all know, this is prescribed by their religion, especially in the case of women - well, no, actually we don't and it isn't. Nowhere in the Koran and the Hadith is it laid down that muslim women must go around wearing head scarves and long shapeless garments, all that is required is modest dress, and there are literally thousands of ways of dressing modestly, many of them indistinguishable from Western dress. The fuss about muslim women wearing head scarves is quite literally a fuss about nothing, they don't have to wear them.
The fact that some muslim women choose to make an exhibition of themselves by wearing head scarves is of no more significance or importance than any other affectation or fashion statement. With others it is simply a result of the ignorance and poor education that is endemic amongst muslims; they have been told by their communities that this is the proper muslim thing to do and they have no means of knowing anything to the contrary. This is especially chilling when it is applied to girls as young as four or five when the rule does not apply until the onset of puberty. But can we imagine any telly journalist putting these points to a female 'victim' of prejudice and misunderstanding? If Islam is all about peace and love and good behaviour, as we are constantly told, such things do not require a peculiar mode of dress, an attention attracting uniform, to make them manifest. Indeed, such a thing is redolent of a peculiar vanity - look at me, how modest I am, so virtuous, so beautiful, a veritable living reproach to your wanton ways, I must make a play of hiding myself for your good as well as mine.
We are constantly told that we are not engaged in a war against Islam, but why not a war against Islam? Why not a war against that billion of the world's population bound in benighted ignorance and superstition? Why not a war against a world-view diametrically opposed to all those secular, liberal, humanist, democratic values that it is supposed to hold so dear? Why not? Because the West is led by a pair of evangelical nincompoops, one with messianic delusions, more than half in love with what in their muddled minds they like to think real Islam is, and what in their dreams they would like the West to be - God-fearing, Bible-reading, Church-going, a land of inanely grinning communitarians whose highest value is that their pathetic little egos strut about the world stage for as long as possible. Compared with such people the hijackers are heroes.
We are also told that the events of September 11th were not a clash of civilizations or world-views, but that is exactly what they were. It was not by chance that the twin towers of the World Trade Centre were the first to go. In the minds of many muslims tall buildings are the ultimate symbol of infidel pride and arrogance and defiance of Allah, especially evident in the end times before the final reckoning. The fact that they were also temples of usury and symbols of the economic power with which Jews and Christians undermine and exploit the muslim world can only have added to the satisfaction of bringing them down, especially when it was achieved by just ten men wielding pen knives. That there were muslims in the building at the time is of no consequence, since their fate was already sealed by K.5:54 and K.9:29 quoted above.
The purpose of the attack on Afghanistan we are told is to bring about 'justice', as if there were some cross-cultural consensus on what any such word means, a Platonic archetypal heaven from which its form could be plucked by be-wigged Western lawyers for the recognition and satisfaction of all 'decent' people. The only relevant question to be asked about 'justice' is: Whose justice, mine or yours, ours or theirs, man's or God's? How much shar'ia is there in 'international law'? Where did that law originate, who invented it, with what purpose in mind? What kind of world did it come from and what kind of world was it intended to bring about? Certainly not that of the ecumenical imperium of the caliphate, where muslim justice held sway for almost 1400 years. (See the review of Muslim Kingship in this issue, p.?) It is not without significance that 'infinite justice', the original name for the American attack, had to be changed since it unwittingly usurped one of the Koranic names of God (al adl), it was replaced with the favourite shibboleth from the Western lexicon of praise: 'infinite freedom'.
The enormity of the crime - the attack on New York/Afghanistan - we are told, is the slaughter of the innocent, but who is not willing to sacrifice the innocent when it suits them? Certainly 'Western Civilization' was when, between 1914 and 1945 in Europe alone, it managed to wipe out over one hundred million civilians in the name of one cause or another. Such figures are the result of the employment of technology in the furtherance of a cause, but before the technological age the causes were no less virulent and murderous in intent, it was just more difficult to kill large numbers.
But who believes in causes any more? Not even the majority of modern muslims can be got of their backsides for a decent jihad. Like most Westerners their main motivations are money and sex and a comfortable life, with a little religion on top for identity, consolation, companionship, and at least the possibility of a continuation of the same in an afterlife. Religion survives, and will probably always survive, not because it is true but because human beings are pathetic.
Yet we still need war, if only to satisfy the barely subconscious, barely acknowledged recognition of how mind numbingly dull a perpetually peaceful world would be. Since God refuses to supply us with an apocalypse it seems we must supply our own: 'I am become Shiva the destroyer of worlds', as Robert Oppenheimer said. Who was not fascinated, amazed, entranced, by those planes going into those towers? Was it not the most astonishing and exciting thing you have ever seen in your life?
Perhaps Osama and his followers, like many others, are the true children of Turgenev's Bazarov, whose day may have finally dawned. Any cause will do, or no cause at all, we shall have terrorism for the hell of it. In the immortal words of Pisarev: 'Here is the ultimatum of our camp: what can be smashed should be smashed; what will stand the blow is good; what will fly into smithareens is rubbish; at any rate, hit out right and left - there will and can be no harm from it.' Allahu Akbar.
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Islamic Morality
by Anwar Sheikh
12 January, 2006
Man is born with a moral sense which enables him to differentiate between right and wrong. Without subjecting behavior to a common standard of vice and virtue, social evolution is not possible. This is the reason that even the primitive societies had words which denoted difference between good and bad.
All societies did not practice universal standards of vice and virtue, yet it is well known that almost all communities knew what was good and bad. For example, mutual fidelity of consorts, speaking the truth, keeping promises, respecting family ties, helping the poor and weak, were considered signs of good morality. Of course, morality cannot be coded but its rules are well understood. From this attitude arose the famous maxim: "Do not do to others what you do not want to be done to yourself."
It means that you must wish others what you wish for yourself. Since every one desires security of person and property, liberty to worship, fair trial, freedom of speech etc., these facts, over a period of time, rose to become what is called Human Rights. He who violates these rights is held the enemy of humankind.
When Islamic morality is judged by universal standards, this Arabian religion fails to qualify as the friend and guide of humanity. In fact, it constitutes a major threat to the survival of human race. I have no doubt that the Muslims will protest against this point of view, and as usual, will produce far- fetched and irrational evidence to prove that Islam advocates love and brotherhood of mankind. This type of sorcery has worked wonders for Muslim fundamentalists in the past, but with the dissemination of knowledge, it is difficult to cloud the truth with the magic of misinterpretation, marvel of memorization and mysticism of meaninglessness.
Islam has become a set of fundamentals which preach social segregation, hatred of non-Muslims and elimination of dissenters through dominance, death and destruction. These conclusions, no matter how true, cannot be palatable to the Muslims and therefore rank as fabrications, from their standpoint. I can do no better than quote from the Koran to decide the issue. Examine the following for yourself:
1. "Do not let non-Muslims enter mosques. They will go to hell." ( Repentance: 17 )
2. "O ye who believe! The non-Muslims are unclean. So let them not come near the Inviolable Place of Worship." (Repentance: 28)
3. "O ye who believe! Murder those of the disbelievers .... and let them find harshness in you." (Repentance: 123)
4. "Humiliate the non-Muslims to such an extent that they surrender and pay tribute." (Repentance: 29)
5. "O believers, do not treat your fathers and brothers as your friends, if they prefer unbelief to belief, whosoever of you takes them for friends, they are evil-doers." (Repentance: 20)
6. "Certainly, God is an enemy to the unbelievers." ( The Cow: 90 )
7. "God has cursed the unbelievers, and prepared for them a blazing hell." ( The Confederates 60 )
8. "Let not the believers take the unbelievers for friends.... whoso does that belongs not to God." (The House of Imram: 60)
9. "O believers, do not make friends with the Jews and Christians; ..whoso of you makes them his friend is one of them." (The Table: 55)
10. "The believers indeed are brothers." ( Apartments: 10 )
11. "Moslems are hard against the unbelievers, merciful to one another." (Victory: 25)
A Muslim naturally believes in all such Koranic verses, which determine his social outlook and he becomes a narrow- minded sectarian. This psychological approach is the fountain of fundamentalism. It is a myth to say that Islam advocates good relationship with the People of the Book, that is, the Jews and Christians. What I have said at 9 above supports this statement. If this were not enough, one could refer the matter to HADITH, the sayings of the Prophet: Chapter LXXI of SAHIH MUSLIM clearly states that since Islam is the religion for the entire humanity, it abrogates all other faiths. To illustrate the point further, the hadith no.285 asserts that any Jew or Christian who has heard of Muhammad but does not believe in him, will become "one of the denizens of Hell-Fire."
The Islamic fundamentalism has become the foundation of Islamic morality. What makes it a threat to human survival is the fact that it is not a passive approach but advocates active aggression to impose itself on the unbelievers. Why? It gives several reasons for this. Let me quote two:
1. "Muslims are the best of all nations." (House of Imram: 110). Obviously, the best nation is superior to other people, who must wear the yoke of discrimination.
2. The Prophet Muhammad has been sent by God with "the religion of Truth, that He may cause it to prevail over all religions.." (Private Apartments: 28)
Simply stated it means that Muslims are superior to non- Muslims and have the birth-right to dominate them. This is why Islam calls itself DIN-E-GHALIB, the religion of dominance.
As every student of psychology knows, the purpose of any fundamentalism is to secure blind following from its adherents. This is possible only when they are conditioned to a certain object or goal which begins to rank as the sole purpose of their lives. As a result, the purpose begins to overrule the method of acquisition; whatever secures it is good and whatever obstructs it is bad. In a nutshell, people must stop thinking for themselves, especially in terms of morality. As the Marxists brainwashed people in the name of proletarianism and what it stood for, the Muslims have been conditioned to the person of the Prophet Muhammad, who is projected as the Saviour of his followers, having complete power to find them permanent residence in paradise, which is the abode of luxury, love making and lasciviousness. Since Muslims, in most countries are deprived, depressed and desolated, they are prepared to do anything to uphold the honour of the Prophet. For total obedience, they are at liberty to indulge in the most convenient morality such as mendacity, rape, murder, theft and treason without losing their chance of entering the paradise which has been absolutely guaranteed by their faith in the Prophet Muhammad.
A corollary of this belief is the oppression of non-Muslims by the Muslims, who deny human rights to the unbelievers for upholding the Islamic precepts in relation to the infidels. As a result, non-Muslims are discouraged to live in the Muslim countries even if they have originally belonged to their ancestors. It is justified on the precedent that the Prophet Muhammad expelled all Jews and unbelievers from Arabia. The modern example is that of Pakistan, the original home of the Hindus. There were millions of non-Muslims in this land before partition of India but as Pakistan came into being they all were thrown out through malice, mutilation and massacre. On the contrary, over 100,000,000 Muslims live in India and demand human rights! In Islamic countries, the non- Muslim minorities are either non-existent or very tiny indeed. This strangulation of human rights has become a part of the Islamic morality.
Since Islam is the Din-e-Ghalib i.e. the religion of dominance by God's will, Muslim minorities in non-Islamic countries do everything possible to harass, humiliate and harangue the host countries to practise their faith and culture. The "Muslim Parliament" of Great Britain is an example in point. In fact, this coterie of a few hundred Muslim fanatics, is a mockery of the British tolerance and hospitality. Its major role is to collect donations from its adherents, forbid Muslims to seek identification with Great Britain and practice all rules of Islamic intolerance towards the host community. There is no concept of parliamentary government in Islam, whatever, yet these hatred-mongers have set up this association in the Land of Magna Carta, dedicated to liberty. It is only a matter of time before the British government take notice of its evil influence on the British culture, causing problems also for those who have adopted the British ways and are proud to be sincere citizens of this land.
Use of violence for securing worldly goal and terrorization of non-Muslims are the pillar of Islamic morality. It is done through:
1. secular laws which are made in the name of Islam, and
2. the laws which Allah has framed and require no legislative authority and procedures.
Now, let us ponder over these two points:
1a. Islam declares Muhammad the greatest of all prophets and therefore reserves the highest reverence for him. This has become an article of faith. A Muslim, unwilling to force it on others, is considered deficient in belief. As a result, every Muslim looks for an opportunity to demonstrate the magnitude of his faith by molesting non-Muslims, and even fellow- believers who express less bigotry in this field. Politicians have seized upon this emotional condition of the Muslim mind to enhance their grip on power. For example, Pakistan has passed TOHEEN-E-RASUL ACT (Contempt of Prophet's Act), which prescribes death for insulting the Prophet Muhammad. Such an Act has never been passed in the world of Islam during the last fourteen centuries; nor is there any religious justification for it. In fact such a law in itself is a gross contempt of the Prophet, who wanted to be known as the Blessing for mankind. A person who is so conscious of himself cannot be the Blessing for lacking tolerance and understanding of the human behavior. Yet they have done it to terrorize the dissidents and non-Muslims. The treatment of the Qadiyanis and Christians in Pakistan, speak for itself. In fact, it is an ambassador of moral perversion which is an echo of the European Inquisition conducted by the Christian clerics to defend the holiness of their savior, Jesus Christ.
This Islamic exploitation of the believers has led to their moral bankruptcy, and this fact is well demonstrated by what happened in Pakistan during the middle of April, 1994:
Hafiz Sajjad Tariq of Gujranwala in Pakistan, accidentally dropped a copy of the Koran in a fireplace. As it caught fire, people of the locality became aflame with rage. Not caring that Sajjad was a pious Muslim devoted to exalt holiness of the Scripture (Koran), they alleged that he had desecrated the Word of God. As mullahs of the area heard of it, they instantly issued Fatwas of apostasy against Sajjad. Like hawks, the fundamentalists swooped down on him, each hoping that his blow would dispatch the victim to hell assuring him (the assailant) a seat in paradise. As they were hitting him, someone shouted that he was being dished out an un-Islamic punishment because he must be stoned to death. By then, they had broken his ribs and he was not able to walk. A gallant police officer intervened and locked him up with a view to saving him from mob-violence. As the news spread, a large crowd of frenzied Muslims appeared before the local police- station demanding his immediate release. The Police Inspector, instead of enforcing the law, fell for the temptation of establishing himself as the champion of Islam and handed Sajjad to the attackers. They started stoning him mercilessly and thereafter set his body on fire. If this were not enough, they tied his corpse to a powerful motor-cycle and dragged it through the streets for two hours! After a pious show of Islamic morality, they felt that they had done enough to avenge the honour of the Prophet whom the Koran had been revealed.
This type of Islamic morality is rampant, not only in the Islamic countries, but also in the lands where the Muslims have settled in sufficient numbers. To explain this point, I may quote Britain where I live. I wrote and published a book: "Eternity" in 1990. It challenges the basic concept of revelation, the foundation of prophethood. As the Muslim organizations heard about it, they individually and severally issued a fatwa condemning me to death. Neither have they given me a chance to explain myself before a properly constituted tribunal of justice nor have they accepted my challenge for a public debate. Its consequences have been painful to me and my family.
What I have stated above roughly delineates the Islamic morality in relation to legislated law. Now, I may briefly touch upon the second part of the issue i.e. the direct commands of Allah which are so evident that they need not be legislated:
2a. Jehad is one of them, and forms an integral part of the Islamic morality. It is an open behest of Allah to murder, pillage, rape and create widows and orphans for imposing Allah's will on the unbelievers, who are considered His worst enemies just for the "sin" of unbelief. Yet, Allah calls himself the Independent (SAMAD), All-Compassionate, All- Powerful and Creator of the whole universe!
If Allah does possess all these qualities, how can He sanction the destruction of innocent people? If He were so desperate for worship, being the All- Powerful, Compassionate, Creator, He would have created humankind in such a way that everyone was born with the belief suited to God.
Instead of delving into this mystery, I hasten to add that Jihad or violence is considered holy by Allah, who, in return for persecuting, pillaging and paralyzing the infidels declares:
"Allah has bought from the faithful themselves and their belongings against the gift of paradise; they fight in the way of Allah; they kill and are killed.." (Repentance: 110)
A HADITH ( the saying of the Prophet Muhammad ) declares: "Know that Paradise is under the shades of swords." (Sahih Bokhari, Ch. 22: 73 )
What is paradise? The Muslim scholars are usually embarrassed by this question and pretend that it is not physical but a condition of the mind. The above Koranic verse clearly states that it is a definite exchange i.e. offer of paradise for killing a non- Muslim or getting killed in the process of obeying this divine command. The paradise is the main temptation for practicing Islam. This is the reason that the Koran explains it well. Paradise is the description of the luxurious surroundings dwelt in by Houris and Ghilman. Houris are the most beautiful ever-young virgins with wide, flexing eyes and swelling bosoms. Ghilman are the immortal young boys, pretty like pearls, clothed in green silk and brocade an embellished with bracelets of silver.
Allah shall give every believing man no fewer than seventy houris and many ghilmans. To make sure that the lucky fellow can cope with them, Allah will increase his virility a hundred-fold! This is the ultimate goal of the Islamic morality, and it is why that the Muslims, who are usually depressed, are ready to practice convenient morality based on violence. Even more potent factor in this field is their staunch belief in the intercessory powers of the Prophet Muhammad, which means that he has the authority to accommodate his followers in paradise irrespective of what they may have done. I shall deal with this point in the next issue of "Liberty."
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
Religion of What?
by Yashiko Sagamori
Every culture has its own definition of peace. Muslims, for instance, divide the world into two zones: Dar el Islam, which translates as the domain of Islam and encompasses the parts of the world ruled by Muslims, and Dar el Harb, which translates as the domain of war and comprises the rest of the world. They equate peace with Islam while designating everything outside it for conquest and destruction. Of course, it would only be destruction from our point of view; from theirs it would be bringing us into Dar el-Islam, the domain of peace. Actually, it's even better than that: they believe it would be bringing us back since the entire world belongs to their deity and every human being, beginning with Adam, comes into this world as a Muslim. As you can see, Muslims do not lie when they call their abominable superstition a religion of peace: according to their definition, it is. We find their definition unsuitable based on statistics rather than religious arguments. According to statistics, most Muslims who die a violent death are killed by other Muslims. I don't want their kind of peace either.
Peacemongers and Jihadeers, Part I by Yashiko Sagamori
-----Original Message-----
Sent: Monday, November 13, 2006 8:40 AM
Subject: peace
hello,i am rosli from Malaysia and i am a muslim.i had read what you had writen in the webpage.i totally disaggre the way you mention about us muslim.i think that you did not understand the true meaning of jihad.the best thing to describe islam is "islam is all about peace".the word islam itself mean peace. i want to give you a suggestion if you want to know islam better you must try to read the translation of the holy quran and observe it or you can log on to website to upgrade your knowledge about islam.ok may Allah give you guidance.
Dear Rosli,
When someone wakes you up in the middle of the coldest, darkest night of the winter and complains how unbearable the heat of the sun has become, he is either calling you from halfway across the world or he is blind and sitting dangerously close to a blazing furnace.
When someone tells you in the year 2006 that Islam is all about peace, he can be one of many things. He can be a Jewish liberal looking at the world and the approaching Holocaust through the pink glasses of political correctness. He can be someone as ignorant and unwilling to learn as President Bush. He can be an unapologetic liar like Condoleezza Rice. He can be a ridiculously apologetic coward like Tony Blair. He can be a schizophrenic, because schizophrenics live in an alternate reality. And, last but not least, he can be a Muslim, because Dar el-Islam is an alternate reality.
If Islam is all about peace, then I would like you to explain to me why Sunni Iraqis and Shiite Iraqis, instead of uniting against American invaders, are murdering each other to the tune of several dozens a day.
If Israel is truly oppressing the so-called “Palestinians”, why are they, instead of uniting against it, are killing each other at a steadily accelerating rate?
Why did the war between Iran and Iraq in the 1980's claimed more than a million lives without benefiting either side?
Why has the war between Turkish Kurds and “real” Turks, both Muslim people, killed more than 30,000? How could Abdullah Ocalan, the Muslim leader of the Kurds, declare in 1992: “Even if 100,000 people die this year, our movement cannot be disrupted,” while knowing that every single one of that impressive number of people whose lives he so easily deemed expendable was a Muslim?
How did the combined efforts of Islamic Salvation Army and Armed Islamic Group result in a civil war in Algeria that produced 150 to 200 thousand Muslim casualties between 1991 and 2002?
And look at Mecca, the holiest place of Islam, during the hajj, the holiest event of a Muslim's life. Here is a brief (and, by far, incomplete) chronology of Muslims' peaceful piousness in the modern times:
1979 November 21: On the first day of the 15th Islamic century, a group of 300 students from the Theological University of Medina take control over the Holy Mosque of Mecca. They keep control for two weeks, when 63 are captured alive and the mosque is recovered. All occupants are executed.
1987 July 31: Riots by Iranian pilgrims. More than 400 people die.
1989 July 9: Two bombs kill 1 person. Shiites of Kuwait are accused, and 16 are executed.
1990 July 2: Stampede leads to 1402 people dead.
1994: A stampede kills 400 people.
1997 April 15: Fire kills 340 people.
2004 February 1: Stampede kills 244 people.
2006 January 13: More than 345 pilgrims die in a stampede near the Jamrat Complex in Mina.
I hope you noticed that I only listed a few of the most notorious cases of Muslim violence against Muslims. Those are not isolated episodes. They are part of an ongoing process that has accompanied Islam throughout its entire history. In fact, the absolute majority of Muslims who die a violent death are not killed by “infidels”: they are slaughtered by other Muslims. Therefore, if your definition of peace has anything at all in common with mine, Islam, contrary to your opinion, is not about peace at all. If you disagree, I will be grateful if you share your definition of peace with me.
Maybe it is about deep personal beliefs? Let's see. Islam is the only religion in the modern world that accepts forced conversions. Just a few months ago, two Western journalists were abducted in Gaza and held for ransom — also a uniquely Islamic practice. While in captivity, they were given a simple choice: convert to Islam or die. They converted. Not a single person of any authority in the entire Dar el-Islam has objected against that rape. And why would they? For 14 centuries Mohammad's followers have spread Islam by the sword. For 14 centuries that worked for them. Why stop now?
I am no hero myself. I have to admit that if I were offered the same choice, I would, most probably, choose life and repeat the shahadah after my tormentors. But how would those foreign sounds that are utterly meaningless to me, sounds that were forced out of me by the gun at my temple or a knife at my throat, change the way I feel towards Islam and everything it stands for? You can force someone to follow your rituals; you can even force someone to fight on your side. But can you force a person to believe or not to believe something? No more than you can force an Islamic country into democracy, even if the entire military might of the United States is at your disposal. No, dear Rosli, Islam has nothing to do with personal beliefs.
Maybe, Islam is all about truth? I doubt that, too. You must know that Sharia expressly forbids non-Muslims to bear witness against Muslims. This means that your religious courts, and, therefore, your religion, are not interested in truth but in the Muslim domination over the “infidel”.
Besides, the Koran itself contains, shall we say, inaccuracies. For example, in 2.135 we read:
They say: “Become Jews or Christians if ye would be guided (To salvation).”
In reality, unlike Christianity or Islam, Judaism does not declare salvation a monopoly of its followers. Jewish law explicitly states that a gentile will go to heaven if he or she abstains from committing the seven mortal sins; a Jew, in order to go to heaven, must follow 613 commandments, including the seven mandated for gentiles. That's why, when a person approaches a rabbi asking for conversion, the rabbi's duty is to explain to the petitioner that the conversion will endanger his chances for salvation. A person desiring to become a Jew must understand the responsibility and accept it willingly and knowingly. This alone, as you can see, makes a forced conversion to Judaism even theoretically impossible.
Whether the quotation above was a deliberate lie or the result of ignorance of the man you mistook for a prophet, it certainly prevents me from accepting the idea of divine inspiration behind the text.
Maybe, Islam is all about love? I don't think so either, because Islam is the only religion in the world whose followers routinely practice “honor killings” of members of their own families. It is also the only religion in the world that does not promise family members a reunion in the afterlife. Instead, it guarantees good Muslim men a free brothel for all eternity. It does not spell out the reward for virtuous women, but does specify that dead Muslims will be segregated by gender in their X-rated heaven. Wouldn't a loving husband prefer to spend eternity surrounded by his family rather than fornicating like a priapic rabbit? He would, unless, of course, the loving husband in question is Muslim.
Maybe, Islam is about high moral standards? Not really. Even if you decide to disregard the overwhelming corruption reigning in all Islamic countries, without a single exception, as a perversion of the true faith, you must know that wine, sexual pleasures, and everything else Islam declares taboo in this life, is promised in abundance in the next one. But if something is evil here, on our sinful earth, it must be even more evil in the pristine purity of heaven. Therefore, the wrongness of the act is not the reason for the prohibitions. What is then? Here's my guess. If you forever prevent perfectly normal people from having fun, from enjoying their lives, they will be easier to control, easier to turn into “martyrs”. As you must know, this works wonderfully well.
You must also know that in Muslim countries mullahs run prostitution rings by officiating temporary “marriages” between their customers and the hookers in full compliance with Sharia. You must have heard about Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwas detailing what a man should do to an infant he raped or to domestic animals subjected to a similar treatment.
Besides, even Mohammad himself didn't rely on the high moral standards of his followers. He is quoted as saying, “When a man and a woman are in the same room together, the third person in that room is the devil.” I do not guarantee the accuracy of the quote (to the best of my knowledge, it is not found in either the Koran or Hadith), but I do know that it reflects the customary Muslim attitude: a person who has an opportunity to do wrong is not expected to resist the temptation. Don't you think that such an attitude alone makes the average Muslim enormously more immoral than the average Western teenager who manages to spend a day of fun at the beach surrounded by half (or, rather, nine-tenth) naked females without ever being tempted to rape anyone?
Maybe Islam is about charity? No, because all your charities support terrorism. After the devastating tsunami of 2004, Dar el-Harb provided tens of times more aid to its mostly Muslim victims that Dar el-Islam did.
What is Islam about then? What has Mohammad brought into the world that was unknown before he declared himself a prophet? Monotheism was discovered by the Jews millennia before Mohammad. Worshipping a mortal instead of God was practiced by Christians centuries before Mohammad succeeded in turning himself into a bloodthirsty deity. What else is there?
Having read the Koran and the Hadith long before you suggested it to me, I must tell you that Muslim sacred texts are not the best way for an outsider to acquire a practical understanding of your religion. If I wanted to help you understand Nazism or Communism, I would never invite you to start with the Mein Kampf or, respectively, Das Kapital. Instead, I would ask you to look at the Nazi atrocities during World War II or at the Communist atrocities wherever Communists came to power. And if, having learned what Nazis and Communists do, you decided to learn how they justify their crimes, then reading their propaganda materials might help you. Otherwise, you don't need to dive head first into the cesspool, no matter how curious you are about the taste of its contents.
In order to understand Islam, one doesn't need to read the Koran. One only needs to take a careful, unprejudiced look at life in Islamic countries. Or, even better, at the purest, least corrupted by Western influence implementation of Islam in modern times. I think you would agree with me that the Taliban regime in Afghanistan was exactly such an implementation of Islam. Would you like to live in Afghanistan under the Taliban? Would you like to deprive the women in your family of all opportunities to go to school, to pursue a career, to walk in the streets, to be able to see a doctor when they become ill? Would you enjoy attending public executions? Would you like to take part in the stoning of an adulteress? Would you like to be told what clothes to wear, what length beard? Would you like the government to deprive you of the last vestiges of your privacy by insinuating itself into every aspect of your personal life?
As a Muslim, you probably would. But as a reasonable person you shouldn't expect people from other cultures to wish that upon themselves.
My own initial acquaintance with Islam began not with its literature, but with the experience of living in a Muslim country. I decided to read the Koran when I heard about the Islamic belief that God handed Moses not the Torah, but the Koran and that later the evil Jews maliciously rewrote the holy book. I began reading the Koran out of curiosity. I wanted to see the other vision of the Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. I was curious if Muslims had an analogue of the Psalms or the Song of Songs.
A few years before that, I was going through a period of fascination with Russian history and politics. Russia is the biggest and, in terms of its natural resources, arguably the richest country in the world. I wanted to know how the Russians had managed to turn themselves into one of the most miserable nations on the planet. I turned to Lenin for answers. I was hoping to find in his writings a monumental vision of greatness and the clues of mistakes that had prevented that greatness from happening. Instead, I found volumes of bickering with ideological opponents, minutiae of arguments that had ended decades before I was born and could interest nobody today.
My experience with the Koran was similar to that. Instead of a different vision of the world I found fuming anger against Jews and Christians and shallow syllogisms intending to prove that the Forefathers of the Jewish people were Muslims rather than Jews. Allah in that book sounded like an insecure chieftain desperately trying to solidify his power over people who were uncertain as to whether they should submit to his will — which is exactly the situation Mohammad was in when he undertok the project of writing the Koran. The book is full of promises to his followers and threats to the rest of the human race.
And here is the most important detail that sets the Koran aside from the Torah and the New Testament. Just as the Koran never mentions Jerusalem, it doesn't contain a single reference to the Ten Commandments. All religions I am familiar with define good and evil in terms of how the believer is expected to relate to other people, whether or not they belong to the same religion. For Jews and Christians, the Ten Commandments provide the most fundamental guidance in distinguishing between good and evil. What about the Muslims? Their only measure of good is the loyalty to their prophet.
Koran 3.110 states:
Ye are the best community that hath been raised up for mankind. Ye enjoin right conduct and forbid indecency; and ye believe in Allah.
Since the right conduct is a lie and forbidding indecency is pure hypocrisy, what is left? What exactly makes you “the best community that hath been raised up for mankind”? Has there ever been a Muslim Newton? Or a Muslim Shakespeare? Or a Muslim Mozart? Or a Muslim Mother Teresa? A few Muslim names that you can name, like al-Khwarimi, could shine only in the darkness of the Dark Ages. As soon as Dar el-Harb moved forward, Dar el-Islam found itself unable to produce even a single person of any global significance, except for an enormous variety of Qaddafis, Saddams, bin Ladens, Arafats, and other Hitlers of every imaginable magnitude.
One of the most respected Muslim leaders of modern times, the former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohammad of Malaysia, made a remarkable admission in his farewell speech:
We need guns and rockets, bombs and warplanes, tanks and warships for our defense. But because we are discouraged from learning of science and mathematics as giving us no merit for the afterlife, today we have no capacity to produce our own weapons for our defense. We have to buy our weapons from our detractors and enemies.
It is remarkable because it makes clear that one of the most respected Muslim leaders has no clue what motivates the people of Dar el-Harb. He would never believe that our apocalyptic (and, due to the cowardice of our leaders, absolutely useless) military might is nothing but a side effect of our insatiable curiosity about God's creation. He also inadvertently admitted that his religion is nothing but a cult of death.
And this is why I keep urging everybody who will listen to read the Koran and the Hadith, so they can see for themselves that Islam is not “just another religion” but an ideology of jihad, and jihad is not an internal strife of a Muslim for spiritual perfection, but genocide that's been going on for 14 centuries in the name of a false prophet.
And, by the way, the Arabic world Islam does not mean peace; it means submission. Can you tell the difference between the two?
Having said this all, I must add that I understand that your letter was sincere and inspired by good motives. Let me respond with a sincere suggestion. Try reading the Torah. Don't be afraid; it won't make you a Jew, just as listening to Bach won't make you a composer. But it might provide you with something you so desperately need: an alternative view of the universe.
May you find good guidance wherever you seek it.
Yashiko Sagamori
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December 24, 2006
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
Fjordman: The Muslim Brotherhood's Infiltration of the West
from Jihad Watch
An important overview of Muslim Brotherhood activity in the West from the European essayist Fjordman:
I do not have the time right now to include hyperlinks to every single piece of information stated here, but almost all of this information should be available online with a quick web search. Robert Spencer has dealt with the Muslim Brotherhood in a number of books, for instance in Onward Muslim Soldiers. I would also strongly recommend the recent book "Global Jihad: The Future in the Face of Militant Islam," by former Muslim Patrick Sookhdeo. Sookhdeo does excellent research, particularly regarding the systematic Islamization of Britain, but the same blueprints are used in other countries, too.
The Muslim Brotherhood, today widely regarded as the largest Islamic movement in the world, was founded by Hassan al-Banna in 1928. Its member groups are dedicated to the motto: "Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. The Qur'an is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope."
Research analyst Lorenzo Vidino writes about The Muslim Brotherhood's Conquest of Europe: "Since the early 1960s, Muslim Brotherhood members and sympathizers have moved to Europe and slowly but steadily established a wide and well-organized network of mosques, charities, and Islamic organizations." Their ultimate goal "may not be simply 'to help Muslims be the best citizens they can be,' but rather to extend Islamic law throughout Europe and the United States. With moderate rhetoric and well-spoken German, Dutch, and French, they have gained acceptance among European governments and media alike. Politicians across the political spectrum rush to engage them whenever an issue involving Muslims arises or, more parochially, when they seek the vote of the burgeoning Muslim community. But, speaking Arabic or Turkish before their fellows Muslims, they drop their facade and embrace radicalism."
Moreover, "While the Muslim Brotherhood and their Saudi financiers have worked to cement Islamist influence over Germany's Muslim community, they have not limited their infiltration to Germany. Thanks to generous foreign funding, meticulous organization, and the naïveté of European elites, Muslim Brotherhood-linked organizations have gained prominent positions throughout Europe. In France, the extremist Union des Organisations Islamiques de France (Union of Islamic Organizations of France) has become the predominant organization in the government's Islamic Council. In Italy, the extremist Unione delle Comunita' ed Organizzazioni Islamiche in Italia (Union of the Islamic Communities and Organizations in Italy) is the government's prime partner in dialogue regarding Italian Islamic issues."
The irony, according to Vidino, is that "Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna dreamed of spreading Islamism throughout Egypt and the Muslim world. He would never have dreamed that his vision might also become a reality in Europe."
Al-Banna may not have believed that to be possible in the short run, but he did dream of conquering areas formerly under Islamic rule. German historian Egon Flaig quotes Banna as saying: "We want the flag of Islam to fly over those lands again who were lucky enough to be ruled by Islam for a time, and hear the call of the muezzin praise God. Then the light of Islam died out and they returned to disbelief. Andalusia, Sicily, the Balkans, Southern Italy and the Greek islands are all Islamic colonies which have to return to Islam's embrace. The Mediterranean and the Red Sea have to become internal seas of Islam, as they used to be."
One of the Brotherhood's first pioneers in Europe was Sa'id Ramadan. According to the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), Sa'id Ramadan, who was al-Banna's son-in-law, joined the Muslim Brotherhood in his youth. At the age of 20, Hassan al-Banna chose Sa'id to be his personal secretary and sent him to Palestine to establish a branch of the movement there. After World War II, when Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini returned to Palestine, Sa'id Ramadan helped him to form military groups for the struggle against the Jews. Al-Husseini was an active accomplice in the Holocaust and visited leading Nazis repeatedly. Terrorist organization Hamas is the Palestinian branch of the MB today.
After Hassan al-Banna's assassination in 1949, Sa'id Ramadan returned to Egypt and became a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood. In 1954 he went to Jerusalem with another leading Brotherhood member, Sayyid Qutb, in order to participate in the World Islamic Conference, and was elected conference secretary-general.
In the late 1950s, Sa'id Ramadan managed to persuade Saudi Prince Faisal to help him establish Islamic centers in Europe's main capitals. In 1958, he settled in Geneva and there founded the Islamic Center, which became the headquarters of Muslim Brotherhood members expelled from Egypt. In 1964, he opened Islamic centers in London and Munich, and became the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood abroad.
The oil-rich kingdom of Saudi Arabia has for years granted an influx of money to the powerful Islamic Center of Geneva, Switzerland, now run by Sa'id's son Hani Ramadan. He was made infamous by a 2002 article in the French daily Le Monde defending the stoning of adulterers to death. His brother Tariq Ramadan, a career "moderate Muslim," later called for a "moratorium" on stoning. In 2008 it was announced that Hani Ramadan would receive SFr255,000, the equivalent of two years' salary, in damages from the canton of Geneva. He was sacked in 2004 after defending the stoning of persons guilty of adultery. An appeal commission of the education department sided with Ramadan, annulling the termination. The government also agreed to pay Ramadan's legal fees.
It was the Muslim Brotherhood's spiritual leader Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a follower of Hassan al-Banna in his youth, who directed the prayer at Sa'id Ramadan's funeral in 1995, as Tariq Ramadan proudly reports. Sa'id Ramadan had close contacts with Brotherhood member Sayyid Qutb, whose writings have inspired countless Jihadists around the world, for instance terrorist leader Osama bin Laden. According to writer Paul Berman, Ramadan "not only knew Qutb; he was, at the crucial moment, Qutb's most important supporter in the world of the Egyptian intellectuals. Said Ramadan was the editor who got Qutb started on what became his most important work."
According to Dr. Ahmad Al-Rab'i, former Kuwaiti minister of education, "The beginnings of all of the religious terrorism that we are witnessing today were in the Muslim Brotherhood's ideology of takfir [accusing other Muslims of apostasy]. Sayyid Qutb's book Milestones was the inspiration and the guide for all of the takfir movements that came afterwards. The founders of the violent groups were raised on the Muslim Brotherhood, and those who worked with Bin Laden and Al-Qa'ida went out under the mantle of the Muslim Brotherhood."
Tariq Ramadan, the grandson of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, says decadent Europe will give way to an Islamized Europe. In the 21st century, "The West will begin its new decline, and the Arab-Islamic world its renewal" and ascent to seven centuries of world domination after seven centuries of decline. "Only Islam can achieve the synthesis between Christianity and humanism, and fill the spiritual void that afflicts the West." All good people are implicitly Muslims "because true humanism is founded in Koranic revelations." In a clash with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Dutch-Somali critic of Islam, Ramadan said it was wrong to say that Europe had a Judeo-Christian past. "Islam is a European religion. The Muslims came here after the first and second world wars to rebuild Europe, not to colonise."
Danish theologian Kirsten Sarauw writes in her article A Declaration of War Against the People of Europe that in 2007 in Vienna, Austria, a conference was held about so-called Euro-Islam.
Prominent Muslim delegates formulated a strategic vision of a Europe dominated by Islam. Mustafa Ceric, Grand Mufti of Bosnia, envisioned an "upcoming Islamic era." The conference was in agreement about the first and foremost goal, namely the introduction of religious Islamic jurisprudence (sharia) in Europe, "in the beginning at least as a parallel system alongside national laws in European states." As to the real meaning of sharia, they all agreed to avoid publicity as far as possible. According to Sarauw, Tariq Ramadan proclaimed that the real intentions of this work must be concealed from the general public.
In 2007 it was announced that Tariq Ramadan was to hold the Sultan of Oman chair of Islamology at the University of Leiden. Leiden is the oldest university in the Netherlands, founded in the sixteenth century by Prince William of Orange, the leader of the Dutch struggle for independence. Dutch Education and Culture Minister Ronald Plasterk said that he did not object to Ramadan's appointment. Meanwhile, the Amsterdam city council, dominated by the Dutch Labour Party which receives many Muslim votes, developed teaching material warning school children against the opinions of Dutch Islam critic Geert Wilders.
The European Council for Fatwa and Research, headed by Muslim Brotherhood spiritual leader Yusuf al-Qaradawi, is working on a Muslim Constitution for Europe that will be above national legislation. According to Tina Magaard from the University of Aarhus, behind these ambitions "lies decades of work." Islamic groups have for years aimed at establishing their control over the Muslim communities, and in some cases have won official recognition from government bodies. According to Magaard, "The Imams and Islamists consider the cooperation with the state institutions a transfer of power. Now it is they who rule."
Former Muslim Dr. Patrick Sookhdeo, author of the excellent book "Global Jihad – The future in the face of Militant Islam," warns that the Islamization going on in European cities is not happening by chance. It "is the result of a careful and deliberate strategy by certain Muslim leaders which was planned in 1980 when the Islamic Council of Europe published a book called Muslim Communities in Non-Muslim States." The instructions told Muslims to get together into viable communities, set up mosques, community centres and Islamic schools. To resist assimilation, they must group themselves geographically in areas of high Muslim concentration. According to Sookhdeo, the ultimate goal is Islamic rule in Europe.
Patrick Poole describes how discussion of a document called "The Project" so far has been limited to the top-secret world of Western intelligence communities. Only through the work of an intrepid Swiss journalist, Sylvain Besson, has information regarding The Project finally been made public. It was found in a raid of a luxurious villa in Campione, Switzerland on November 7, 2001. The target of the raid was Youssef Nada, who has had active association with the Muslim Brotherhood for more than 50 years.
Included in the documents seized was a 14-page plan written in Arabic and dated December 1, 1982, which outlined a 12-point strategy to "establish an Islamic government on earth" – identified as The Project. According to testimony given to Swiss authorities by Nada, the unsigned document was prepared by "Islamic researchers." It represents a flexible, multi-phased, long-term approach to the "cultural invasion" of the West.
Some of its recommendations include:
• Using deception to mask the intended goals of Islamic actions
• Building extensive social networks of schools, hospitals and charitable organizations
• Involving ideologically committed Muslims in institutions on all levels in the West, including government, NGOs, private organizations
• Instrumentally using existing Western institutions until they can be put into service of Islam
• Instituting alliances with Western "progressive" organizations that share similar goals.
As Patrick Poole says, "What is startling is how effectively the Islamist plan for conquest outlined in The Project has been implemented by Muslims in the West for more than two decades."
Included in this work was the powerful Yusuf al-Qaradawi. Sylvain Besson and Scott Burgess note the striking similarities between Qaradawi's publication, Priorities of the Islamic Movement in the Coming Phase and The Project. Qaradawi is backed by Saudi money and founded the major English language website IslamOnline, which has several hundred full-time employees and serves as an international outlet for his teachings. He is also leader of the European Council for Fatwa and Research, which spreads its rulings on sharia-related matters to mosques across Europe. He is based in Qatar, home to the influential Arabic satellite TV channel Al Jazeera, where he runs the popular program "Sharia and Life." The intellectual Dr. Khaled Shawkat warns that Al Jazeera "has been hijacked" by the MB "to the extent that three or four Muslim Brotherhood members sometimes appear on a single news program."
Yusuf al-Qaradawi was an important figure during the Muhammad cartoons riots in 2006 and was indirectly responsible for attacks against the Danish and Norwegian embassies in Syria. According to Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld and Alyssa A. Lappen, "Clearly, the riots in Denmark and throughout the world were not spontaneous, but planned and organized well in advance by Islamist organizations that support the MB, and with funding mostly from Saudi Arabia." The purpose was to impose sharia-style restrictions on free speech on Western nations.
Ehrenfeld and Lappen state that the Muslim Brotherhood and its offspring organizations employ the Flexibility strategy: "This strategy calls for a minority group of Muslims to use all 'legal' means to infiltrate majority-dominated, non-Muslim secular and religious institutions, starting with its universities. As a result, 'Islamized' Muslim and non-Muslim university graduates enter the nation's workforce, including its government and civil service sectors, where they are poised to subvert law enforcement agencies, intelligence communities, military branches, foreign services, and financial institutions."
Douglas Farah writes about the largely successful efforts by Islamic groups in the West to buy large amounts of real estate. Some groups are signing agreements to guarantee that they will only sell the land to other Muslims. The Brotherhood, particularly, is active in investments in properties and businesses across Europe, laying the groundwork for the future network that will be able to react rapidly and with great flexibility in case of another attempted crackdown on the group's financial structure. Most of the money comes from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.
According to Farah, the governments of Europe and the United States continue to allow these groups to flourish and seek for the "moderate" elements that can be embraced as a counter-balance to the "radical" elements: "We do not have a plan. They do. History shows that those that plan, anticipate and have a coherent strategy usually win. We are not winning."
According to journalist Helle Merete Brix, Muhammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the ruler of Dubai, aided by Saudi Arabia, gives large amounts of petrodollar to various organizations at the forefront of the Islamization of Europe, such as the European Council for Fatwa and Research headed by Yusuf al-Qaradawi. Qaradawi has publicly boasted that "Islam will return to Europe as a conqueror" and that Muslims will conquer Europe and the United States.
Former CIA director R. James Woolsey estimates that the Saudis have spent nearly $90 billion since the mid-1970s to export their ideology into Muslim and non-Muslim countries alike. That may well be a conservative estimate. Since the spike in oil prices following the embargo/financial Jihad in 1973, Arab and Muslim states have received trillions of dollars from the sale of oil and gas, probably the greatest transfer of wealth in human history. A significant portion of this money has been used to buy an army of hirelings and apologists in non-Muslim countries, as well as on financing the global Jihad.
Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal bin Abdul Aziz Al-Saud, a member of the Saudi Royal Family, is an international investor ranked among the ten richest persons in the world. In 2005, Bin Talal bought 5.46% of voting shares in News Corp, the parent of Fox News. In December 2005 he boasted about his ability to change what viewers see. Covering the Jihad riots in France that fall, Fox ran a banner saying: "Muslim riots." According to Talal, "I picked up the phone and called Murdoch... (and told him) these are not Muslim riots, these are riots out of poverty. Within 30 minutes, the title was changed from Muslim riots to civil riots."
Harvard University and Georgetown University have received $20 million donations from Prince bin Talal to finance Islamic studies. Martin Kramer, the author of "Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America," said: "Prince Alwaleed knows that if you want to have an impact, places like Harvard or Georgetown, which is inside the Beltway, will make a difference."
Georgetown said it would use the gift to expand its Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding. The leaders of the Center, renamed to Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, say it now will be used to put on workshops regarding Islam, addressing U.S. policy towards the Muslim world, addressing Muslim citizenship and civil liberties, and developing exchange programs for students from the Muslim world.
Georgetown professor John Esposito, founding director of the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, has, probably more than any other academic, contributed to downplaying the global Jihadist threat. Kramer states that during the 1970s, Esposito had prepared his thesis under his Muslim mentor Ismail R. Faruqi, a Palestinian theorist of the "Islamization of knowledge." During the first part of his career, Esposito never studied or taught at a major Middle East center. In the 80s, he published a series of favorable books on Islam. In 1993, Esposito arrived at Georgetown, and has later claimed the status of "authority" in the field.
Journalist Stanley Kurtz has demonstrated how the Saudis have managed to infiltrate the US education system and influence what American school children are taught about Islam and the Middle East, not just at the university level but also at lower levels.
Egyptian author Tarek Heggy warns that the Muslim Brotherhood "opposes the notion of a state based on democratic institutions, calling instead for an Islamic government based on the Shura (consultative assembly) system, veneration of the leader and the investiture of a Supreme Guide. In this, they are close to the model established by the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in Iran. (…) The Brotherhood calls for a constitutional and legal system based on the principles of Shari'a, including cruel corporal punishments in the penal code (stoning, lashing, cutting off the hands of thieves, etc.)."
Despite this, Robert Leiken and Steven Brooke published an article in Foreign Affairs about the "moderate" Muslim Brotherhood, arguing that the group has "rejected global Jihad" and "embraces democracy." Several US Democratic members of Congress met with the head of the Brotherhood's parliamentary bloc at the home of the U.S. ambassador to Egypt, despite that fact that the Egyptian MB has spawned several terrorist movements.
In a memo, the US State Department told its embassy in Cairo to launch a dialogue with religious groups because clashes with them would incite more attacks against US interests. They advised Washington to pressure the Egyptian government into allowing the MB to play a larger role in Egypt's political landscape. There are signs that American authorities are reaching out to the Brotherhood. Steven Stalinsky, the executive director of the Middle East Media Research Institute, warns that "A lack of knowledge about the Muslim Brotherhood is evident on the part of U.S. officials who are now cozying up to the organization."
As Youssef Ibrahim of the New York Sun comments, "For years, the Soviet Union benefited from those Vladimir Lenin is said to have dubbed 'the useful idiots of the West' — reporters, scholars, leftists, and assorted romantics who said the Soviet system of totalitarianism was not so bad." He argues that the Brotherhood is now taking over this role. Ibrahim is tired of the silence from the Muslim majority: "In Islam, 'silence is a sign of acceptance,' as the Arabic Koranic saying goes. (…) The question that hangs in the air so spectacularly now — particularly as England has been confronted once again by British Muslims plotting to kill hundreds — is this: What exactly are the Europeans waiting for before they round up all those Muslim warriors and their families and send them back to where they came from?"
The current leader of the MB, Mohammad Mahdi Akef, called on its members to serve its global agenda, declaring "I have complete faith that Islam will invade Europe and America." On its English website, the Brotherhood professes moderation and praises Multiculturalism as a way to spread Islam. However, on their Arabic website, Akef in February 2007 reassured his followers that "the Jihad will lead to smashing Western civilization and replacing it with Islam which will dominate the world." In the event that Muslims cannot achieve this goal in the near future, "Muslims are obliged to continue the Jihad that will cause the collapse of Western civilization and the ascendance of the Muslim civilization on its ruins."
Hassan al-Banna founded the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928 with the vision of restoring the Islamic Caliphate. There are signs that his disciple Yusuf al-Qaradawi hasn't given up this goal. In an interview with German weekly magazine Der Spiegel, Qaradawi said: "Islam is a single nation, there is only one Islamic law and we all pray to a single God. Eventually such a nation will also become political reality. But whether that will be a federation of already existing states, a monarchy or an Islamic republic remains to be seen."
Dr. Shaker Al-Nabulsi, a Jordanian intellectual, states that: "The Caliphate has remained unchanged from 632 through 2004 – it has kept its primitive, simple tribal form (the elite's allegiance to the sovereigns) – an un-democratic structure, despotic, and bloody except for a brief period of 12 years during the rule of Abu Baker and Omar Bin Al-Khattab [the first and second Caliphs]. (...) Since the time of [the Umayyad Caliph] Mu'awiya Ibn Abi Sufyan through the last Ottoman Sultan, (that is from the year 661 through the year 1924), the Islamic Caliphate was drenched with blood, and ruled by fist and sword – and even today the situation is the same in most of the Arab world."
Nabulsi quotes al-Qaradawi as saying: "'There are those who maintain that democracy is the rule of the people, but we want the rule of Allah.' Such ideas] are a call for the Rule of Allah, discussed by Sayyid Qutb in his book 'The Milestones.' [Qutb] borrowed this idea from Pakistani intellectual Abu Al-'Ala Al-Mawdudi, who introduced the theory that authority is Allah's, not the people's, and that the sovereign is none other than Allah's secretary and His representative on earth."
In one essay, al-Qaradawi writes that: "Secularism may be accepted in a Christian society but it can never enjoy a general acceptance in an Islamic society.
Christianity is devoid of a shari`ah or a comprehensive system of life to which its adherents should be committed." However, "as Islam is a comprehensive system of worship (`ibadah) and legislation (Shari`ah), the acceptance of secularism means abandonment of Shari`ah," and "the call for secularism among Muslims is atheism and a rejection of Islam. Its acceptance as a basis for rule in place of Shari`ah is downright riddah [apostasy]."
The adoption of secular laws and equality for Muslims and non-Muslims amounts to apostasy. Harsh words from a man who has voiced support for the traditional sharia death penalty for those leaving Islam.
According to the major website Islam Online, which is owned by Yusuf al-Qaradawi and sponsored by rich Arabs, "Islam is not a religion in the common, distorted meaning of the word, confining its scope only to the private life of man. By saying that it is a complete way of life, we mean that it caters for all the fields of human existence. In fact, Islam provides guidance for all walks of life — individual and social, material and moral, economic and political, legal and cultural, national and international."
Famed historian Bernard Lewis in 2007 told The Jerusalem Post that Islam could soon be the dominant force in Europe. He warned that this Islamization could be assisted by "immigration and democracy." It is a well-established fact that Muslims vote overwhelmingly for left-wing parties all over Europe.
According to journalist Salam Karam, "For the Muslim Brotherhood, Sweden is in many ways an ideal country, [and it] shares the ideals of the Social Democrats in their view of the welfare society. Leading figures in Muslim congregations are also active within the Social Democratic [Party], and have very good relations with Sweden's Christian Social Democrats – Broderskapsrörelsen. The Social Democrats have, in turn, and perhaps as thanks for the support they receive from the mosque leadership, shown a tendency to shy away from the fact that there is extremism in some of our mosques. This has given the Muslim Brotherhood the freedom to force its ideology upon [the mosque's worshippers]."
Writer Nima Sanandaji states that "The Social Democratic party has started fishing for votes with the help of radical Muslims clergies." They have been working with the influential Muslim leader Mahmoud Aldebe, president of Sweden's Muslim Association, which is widely believed to be inspired by the Muslim Brotherhood. In 1999 Aldebe proposed that sharia – the Islamic law – be introduced in Sweden. The Social Democrat Ola Johansson has referred to the book Social Justice in Islam by the Jihadist ideologue Sayyid Qutb as proof that the Socialist ideology could find common ground with Islamic ideas. After the elections in 2002, the Muslim Association sent a congratulation letter to the re-elected Social Democratic Prime Minister Göran Persson, hoping that his party would work for implementing some of the sharia demands of the Association in the future. In 2007, the Social Democrats launched a formalized network for cooperation with Muslims, after they lost the elections the year before.
Walid al-Kubaisi, a Norwegian of Iraqi origins and a critic of sharia supporters, believes Yusuf al-Qaradawi is more dangerous than terrorist leader Osama bin Laden: "In Europe, the Muslim Brotherhood discovered a unique opportunity: Democracy. The democratic system leaves room for freedom of religion and freedom of speech, and finances religious communities and religious organizations. This has been utilized by the Muslim Brotherhood to infiltrate the Muslim communities, recruit members and build the Islamist networks that have become so visible lately." Whereas bin Laden uses bombs, al-Qaradawi exploits democracy as a Trojan horse. The Brotherhood gets their activities financed from Germany, Britain etc. They gain recognition and infiltrate the democratic system.
According to Walid al-Kubaisi, the journalist Dr.Osama Fawzi has revealed that many of al-Qaradawi's trips to Western countries are for the purpose of receiving medical aid and treatment for impotence because he is married to a girl 60 years younger than himself. Kubaisi, who writes Arabic fluently, sent an email to Qaradawi's website, asking whether it was legal according to Islamic law to marry a nine-year-old girl. He got a "yes" in reply.
Muhammad himself, according to Islamic sources, married his wife Aisha when she was six years old and consummated the marriage when she was eight or nine. Since he is the perfect example to emulate for Muslims for time eternity, this is still legal in Islamic law today: Sahih Bukhari Volume 7, Book 62, Number 64
Yusuf al-Qaradawi has been hailed as a "moderate Muslim" by people such as London's Mayor Ken Livingstone, who represents the British Labour Party. Many Muslims voted for the Labour Party in previous elections, and London has a large and growing Muslim population. The cleric visited the UK in 2004, where he was welcomed by Livingstone, and chaired the annual meeting of the European Council of Fatwa and Research at London's City Hall. In January 2008, prominent Muslims pledged to back Ken Livingstone as Mayor of London during the elections in May 2008. A statement praised Livingstone for his support of a Multicultural society and for protecting Muslim communities against Islamophobia, and said that "We pledge to continue our support for the mayor on all levels possible in order to secure his staying in office for a third term." Among the 63 signatories was Tariq Ramadan.
In February 2008, al-Qaradawi was refused a visa to enter to the UK following pressure from British Conservatives. The Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) said that it deplored the decision, while the British Muslim Initiative (BMI) described the decision to bar al-Qaradawi as "an unwarranted insult to British Muslims." Yusuf al-Qaradawi has called for the death penalty for homosexuality, for the destruction of the state of Israel, has defended suicide attacks and preaches that husbands should beat disobedient wives. He was also indirectly responsible for the torching of the Damascus embassies of NATO member states Denmark and Norway during the Muhammad cartoon riots in 2006.
Posted by Robert at February 12, 2008 3:01 AM
Monday, February 11, 2008
A Letter to the Germans from one who cares for the well-being of the German nation and of all of Europe:
Moslems are not the Jews!
Some of you might not be too comfortable with what happened to the Jews of Europe some sixty-odd years ago. You are perhaps concerned about offending the sensibilities of another group in your midst--let me warn you: Don't be! Do not bend over backwards to accomodate Islamics. They will eat you alive!
You see my dear German friends: The MOSLEMS ARE NOT LIKE THE JEWS. Islam is NOT A RELIGION like the one the Jews practice, quietly without infringing on anybody's rights.
Islam is an ideology that demands all othes knuckle under to it. They--the Islamics (I like that term it's sort of a contraction of Islam and clerics--get it? Islamics)--the Islamics are not like Jews. Islamics make demands: they want this, they want that, they want head scarves obligatory for all females, not only Islamic ones. They want mosques everywhere, blaring out the muezzin's call to prayer to the faithful, so foreign to European ears.
Islamics would prefer pork were not sold or eaten, it offends them. They do not want women wearing revealing clothes (it might excite the oh-so-pure-in-thought Moslem males and cause them to lose control and --well--you know what they do then).
But they demand. They are insulted. Their prophet is insulted. Their pride is insulted.
German, do not feel bad about not giving in to any--to all--of their demands for apologies for not observing Islamic customs yourselves.
Stand up to them. These are not Jews that you may want to handle with kid gloves because of memories that are not quite comfortable yet.
Do not coddle the Islamics to make up for what was done by prior generations to the Jews.
No. Islamics are not Jews and you can--you should stand up to them. Refuse their demands. Who are they, these foreign "Asylum seekers" and what have you, to make demands on the citizens of the country that took them in?
They should be grateful for what you have done for them, but they are not. They threaten, they whine, they rage, they want you to cringe,
You see, my dear Germans, they are not Jews. What Jews would have tried to intimidate the citizen of their host country?
Islamics want you to be afraid of them, to fear their rage, their threats of throat slittings and head off-choppings (abzuhacken). They want you to fold up and let Eurabia become the reality not the goal. Eurabia now! They want. "We will get it, never you fear. We will outbreed you. we will have you living under our 'protection.'" (or not at all.)
Germans, don't you see: These are not the Jews about you might have an uneasy conscience. Don't worry, you can resist them. Do not let them play on your perhaps subconscious feelings
By being so sensitive to the sensibilities of the Islamics, you are not being kind to the memory of the Jews that not only made no demands, certainly did not try to strike fear in your hearts , spoke your language fluently, contributed to your literature even, your music, your art, and did not insist that their laws and customs be followed by Germans.
Whence comes your reluctance, Germans, to stand up to those who refuse to be part of you but want you to become part of them or be their "Untermenschen?"
Well, from a Moslem himself you might be surprised to learn. A Moslem who dare not use his name nor reveal himself in the country that accepted him and treated him as a human being: one of your fellow European countries, Holland.
Here is what he writes:
- Mohammed Rasoel
vom dem Buch
The Downfall of the Netherlands
['De ondergang van Nederland']
Land of the Naive Fools
by Mohammed Rasoel [or Rasool]
Translation courtesy of Faust
The Downfall of the Netherlands('De ondergang van Nederland') Land of the Naive Fools by Mohammed Rasoel
So, you see, my dear Germans, do not make the mistake that he accuses the Netherlanders (die Hollaender) of having made. Do not make amends for what happened to the Jews of Europe of yesteryear by knuckling under to the Islamics of today.
[Please, my Dear Germans, remember the valiant Mohammed Rasoel's admonition:
["save yourself and guarantee the continuance of your own culture and your own country" ]
Remember what the Danes said to the Islamics that threated and demanded after the cartoons appeared in Denmark.
If you cannot recall, let me refresh your memory:
After the Mohammed Cartoons, the Danes begged the Islamics's pardon for having offended them. Their apology is non pareil--without parallel-- in the annals of European-Islamic relations. And here it is in all its simple beauty:
The Excuse of the Danes for the Cartoons that offended the sensibilities of the Islamics in Denmark first and of course of all Islamics in the world, who apparently are always waiting for an incident that they can pounce upon and give vent to their inborn rage.
(If you have seen this before, bear with me please. Reread the the abject apology of the Danes to the Islamics.)
Here it is:
We're Sorry
(Auch gut fuer die muslime der ganzen Welt die in unsern Laendern uns das Blut aussaugen)
We´re sorry we gave you shelter when war drove you from your home country....
We´re sorry we took you in when others rejected you....
We´re sorry we gave you the opportunity to get a good education....
We´re sorry we gave you food and a home when you had none....
We´re sorry we let you re-unite with your family when your homeland was no longer safe...
We´re sorry we never forced you to work while WE paid all your bills....
We´re sorry we gave you almost FREE rent,phone,internet,car and school for your 10 kids...
We´re sorry we build you Mosques so you could worship your religion in our Christian land...
We´re sorry we never forced you to learn our language after staying 30 years!...
And so....from all Danes to the entire Muslim world, we just wanna say:
F**K YOU!!
(This apology also applies to all the Islamics of the world that have been sucking the life-blood from the nations that gave them asylum, or shelter, and welcomed them as "new citizens.")
--from the Book "Hurra, wir kapitulieren" by Henryk M. Broder
To be certain that all Germans, whether they are proficient in English or not understand this abject apology from the deeply sorry Danes, it is reprinted in their native language, in German, here:
Es tut uns leid, dass wir euch aufgenommen haben, als andere euch ablehnten...
Es tut uns leid, dass wir euch die Gelegenheit gaben, einen gute Ausbildung zu erhalten...
Es tut uns leid, dass wir euch Essen und ein Zuhause gaben, als Ihr keines von beiden hattet...
Es tut uns leid, dass wir eure Familie nachkommen ließen, als eure Heimatländer nicht mehr sicher waren...
Es tut uns leid, dass wir euch nie zur Arbeit gezwungen haben, während wir alle eure Rechnungen bezahlt haben...
Es tut uns leid, dass wir euch in unseren Sozialwohnungen wohnen ließen, euch Telefone, Internet, Autos und Schulbildung für eure zehn Kinder gaben...
Es tut uns leid, dass wir Euch erlaubt haben Eure Moscheen in unserem christlichen Land zu bauen, damit Ihr Eurem Glauben nachgehen könnt...
Es tut uns leid, dass wir Euch in den 30 Jahren die Ihr bei uns lebt, nie gezwungen haben, unsere Sprache zu lernen...
Deshalb, ...von allen Dänen an die gesamte moslemische Welt, nur ein einziges:
F**K YOU!!
[es ist schwer die letzten zwei Worte auf Deutsch zu uebersetzen. Villeicht kann mir jemand damit helfen. Danke sehr.] | http://islamicdanger2u.blogspot.com/2008/02/ | robots: classic
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} | 1,742 | Democratization And Reform In The Arab And Muslim World
I wanna share this article by "Dr Kamel Al-Najjar" he is an ex-muslim atheists that I always enjoy reading his books and articles.. His book "Critical reading of Islam" has effected me to the point that I decided to leave Islam! all his articles are in arabic and I'm a bit lazy to translate his article :P,,,, but, saved me the job... well, I am really amazed by memri!!!
Reformist Writer Dr. Kamel Al-Najjar: ‘If the Muslims are Serious About Presenting the Radiant Face of Islam… They Must… Acknowledge Their Dark Past’
The following are excerpts from his article:
"Islam was Tolerant Only During the Mecca Period, When it was Weak"
"The phenomenon of Arab and Islamic conferences has come to dominate activities in the Arab and Muslim world almost completely, especially since the tragedy of September 11, 2001 in the U.S... Experience teaches us that those who talk a lot do little, while those who act do not talk. I hope that the conference held by the Austrian-Iraqi Association for Development is not an Islamic conference of that sort, but a look at its recommendations does not inspire optimism...
"The conference participants did not bother to explain what the humane side of Islam is. When was Islam humane, and when did it respect others and call for co-existence? Anyone who studies Islamic history discovers that Islam was tolerant only during the Mecca period, when it was weak. This is the period in which the tolerant verses were revealed, such as the verses... 'You have your religion and I have my religion [Koran 109:6]' and 'Call to the way of your Lord with wisdom and goodly preaching, and reason with them in the best ways [16:125].'...
"Later, the Prophet emigrated to the city of Al-Medina, and the first Koranic sura revealed to him there - the sura of Al-Baqara - starts with a rejection of the other... Later [verses] call to fight anyone who does not convert to Islam: 'And kill them wherever you find them, and drive them out from whence they drove you out [2:191]'... Subsequently, the sura of Al-Tawba was revealed, and the 'verse of the sword': 'So when the sacred months have passed, then slay the idolaters wherever you find them, and take them captive and besiege them and lie in wait for them in every ambush [9:5]'... The 'verse of the sword' and all the [other] warlike verses of the Al-Medina period were revealed later than the verses of the Mecca period, and as the newer verses, they [come to] replace the Mecca verses. According to the religious scholars, the 'verse of the sword' abrogates at least 120 tolerant verses. So where is the tolerant side of Islam?...
"If we put aside the theoretical statements of the Koran and the hadith, and examine the actions of the Prophet and his companions... will we find anything that can be regarded as tolerance and acceptance of the other? The Prophet, after all, drove the Jews out of the Arab peninsula and made raids on the Arab tribes so that they would convert out of fear.
"[The First Caliph] Abu Bakr fought against the tribes who abandoned Islam, and [the Second Caliph] Omar [bin Al-Khattab] imposed his famous contract on the Christians, which forced them to cut their hair and wear special garments so they would be easily recognizable, and forbade them to ring their church bells. Islamic conquests of non-Muslim [lands] continued until the time of the Ottoman Caliphate during the 15th century, and even later. Can we find the radiant face of Islam in any of these statements or actions?"
"Violence is Rooted [in Islam] From its Very Inception"
Regarding the recommendation to condemn all forms of violence and terrorism, Al-Najjar wrote: "The problem with Islam is that violence is rooted in it from its very inception. Islam commands beating a 10-year-old child if he does not pray regularly. Islam permits beating a woman if she does not obey her husband...
"The [Islamic] states terrorize non-Muslim minorities, as occurs in Egypt. There is also the terrorism of the religious clerics... who carry a stick to beat women on their legs if any part of the leg is showing, and to beat the men in the marketplace on Friday so they hurry up and get to the mosque. There is the terrorism of religious groups like the Muslim Brotherhood, the Taliban, the Shi'ite groups in Basra, and the Sunni groups in Falluja which burned down shops selling computer diskettes and shops selling wine... Every day, we encounter the ideological terrorism of Al-Azhar [University] and other religious institutions, which ban books, newspapers and movies that do not conform to their views, and issue fatwas accusing Muslim intellectuals of heresy..."
"How Can We Call for Co-Existence Between Religions When the Religious Scholars... Say Every Day That the Bible and New Testament are Falsified, That Christians are Polytheists... and That Jews are the Descendants of Apes and Pigs?"
Al-Najjar next refers to the recommendation that calls for cooperation between the world's cultures: "How can we call for co-existence between religions when the religious scholars of Al-Azhar, Najaf, and Qom say every day that the Bible and the New Testament are falsified, that Christians are polytheists because they worship the Trinity, and that Jews are the descendants of apes and pigs? [When] every Friday, the [Muslim] worshipers call upon Allah to eradicate the Jews, and when the Muslims ridicule the Hindus for worshiping a cow? Who are those who [supposedly] call for [dialogue]? Are they religious scholars who believe in the superiority of Islam?..."
Regarding the recommendation to recognize the Palestinians' right to establish an independent state based on U.N. resolutions, Al-Najjar said: "The hostility that both sides have instilled in their children will not allow them to co-exist peacefully in the near future. As long as there are religious scholars like Sheikh Al-Qaradhawi who permit Palestinian youths to blow themselves up among Israeli civilians, [and as long as there are] religious scholars and sheikhs from Hamas who recruit and train these youths, there is no use in emphasizing the need to establish a Palestinian state based on international resolutions."
About the recommendation to consolidate Iraqi national unity while preserving the Arab and Islamic character of Iraq, Al-Najjar wrote: "The homeland has no religion. Faith belongs to Allah and the homeland belongs to all [its citizens]. But since Islam does not recognize any other [religion], the conference participants called to preserve the Arab and Islamic character of Iraq. [However, it should be noted that] before it became Arab or Muslim, Iraq was Akkadian, Assyrian, Babylonian, and Christian, and now most of its population is Muslim. So how can we preserve the unity of the homeland and say that it is [only] Islamic and Arab? [Additionally,] which Islam are we referring to [when we characterize Iraq as Islamic]? Shi'ite Islam and the rule of the religious scholars, or Sunni Islam which accuses the Shi'ites of heresy?..."
"Since When are the Muslims a Nation of Peace?"
"Islam includes theoretical principles that the Muslims do not implement in practice. For example [the Koran says in sura 42, verse 38]: 'Those who... conduct their affairs by mutual consultation [shura].' But when the Taliban seized power in order to implement the laws of the Islamic shari'a, they did not come into power by means of shura and did not implement the principle of shura in governing [the country]. When Al-Turabi and Al-Bashir took over Sudan in the name of Islam, they [also] did not come into power by means of shura, and did not implement [this principle]. In the Gulf states, power is inherited, and not gained by means of shura...
"The Muslims are always boasting groundlessly of what they do not have, and claiming that Islam has [characteristics] that it [actually] lacks. Mr. Khaled Mash'al, head of the Hamas political bureau, said in Damascus: 'Muslims are the nation of peace, and they extend their hand to anyone who wants to make peace.' Since when are the Muslims a nation of peace? Who spilled rivers of blood in Asia Minor, conquering its cities and enslaving its people?... Who conquered Spain and North Africa?
"If the Muslims are Serious About Presenting the Radiant Face of Islam, They Must Drop This False, Hollow Arrogance and Acknowledge Their Dark Past and Even Darker Present"
Views: 130
Tags: And, Arab, Democratization, In, Muslim, Reform, The, World
Comment by ernie garcia on September 15, 2011 at 12:58am
you've probably already read it, but if not you should also check out "why i am not a muslim" by ibn warraq.
Comment by Kairan Nierde on September 15, 2011 at 11:11pm
Thank you hope, that was very illuminating. I think his recommendations are a tall order to fill, but who knows how far the next generation will take this spirit of reform? It may become possible.
Comment by Hope on September 18, 2011 at 10:42am
Thanks Ernie and Kairan.
@ Fadi,, I read your blog post..that was great from you..thanks for sharing!
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Mr. Fethullah Gülen's interview for Moskovskiy Komsomolets newspaper
Director of the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS) Vitaly Naumkin has made an interview with Mr. Fethullah Gülen in Pennsylvania, the US. In the interview that was published at one of Russia's most popular newspapers, Moskovskiy Komsomolets (MK), Mr. Gülen talked about the aircraft crisis between Russia and Turkey, the divided state of the Muslim world, secularism, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and terrorism. "Certain things done [the Turkish government] in recent years were wrong. The downing of that warplane was wrong," he said.
Mr. Fethullah Gulen's interview for Moskovskiy Komsomolets newspaper
The article written by Vitaly Naumkin for the MK about Mr. Gülen is as follows:
In late January, when I was in the US, I had an opportunity to visit the distinguished Turkish civil society leader and cleric Fethullah Gülen, and as a scholar of Oriental studies, didn't want to miss the opportunity. He received me at his house in a small town in the state of Pennsylvania. He has been living here in exile since 1999. Followers of Fethullah Gülen are being oppressed in Turkey, but their numbers are pretty much.
Gülen is a controversial figure. This old man has established a wide network of schools and universities around the globe and is considered as one of the most influential people in our time (ranking in the top 100 according to some statistics).
This article consists of abbreviated answers of this dissident critic to our questions. With the questions I asked Mr. Gülen during this extraordinary interview, we seek to introduce to Russian readers this man who enjoys huge popularity among Turkish people and who has unique perspectives on event and is distanced away from the official ideology.
Vitaly Naumkin: Mr. Gülen, the role of Muslim counties continues to increase despite enormous problems. What can be done to boost the role of the Muslim world and make it emerge as an effective power in the world? Why are there disagreements among Muslims? Sunnis and Shiites fight each other; Sunnis compete with each other; in my country, Salafis are trying to destroy the traditional Hanafi and Sunni understanding. How can this war be stopped?
Fethullah Gülen: This disagreement is nothing new. There was discord during the time of the Rightly Guided Caliphs (Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthman and Ali, may God be pleased with them) as well. We can say that it emerged during the time of Umar (may God be pleased with him). With the conquest of Iraq and Persia, hostility grew among Persian in these countries against Umar. This insurgency was suppressed by al-Hajjaj to a certain extent under the Umayyad rule. During the rule of Ali, the Haruri incident (the strife caused by Kharijites) occurred and Kharijites emerged; we can see them as the precursors of today's Salafis or we refer to Salafis as neo-Kharijites. Salafis can be categorized into various groups. Today's ISIL is the strictest of Salafis; they are linked with al-Qaida. The Taliban, too, may be placed into the same category to a certain extent. Likewise, Boko Haram falls into this category as well. There is also al-Mourabitoun, who has faded to the background for the time being. As for Salafism, they choose to rely solely on the nass (undisputed text), i.e., the Holy Qur'an and Sunna (prophetic tradition), but rejects the Prophet's approach, the understanding of the Rightly Guided Caliphs as well as linguistic particulars of the language. They refuse to make discursive analysis of the nass. In the religious terminology, there are types of signification, such "literal meaning." There are other terms related to the religious procedure. But they don't take these into consideration. For instance, take the verse, "Kill them wherever you find them." What were the circumstances when this injunction was revealed? Was self-defense involved? In "The Eternal Message of Muhammad," Abdul Rahman Hassan Azzam argues that all wars that occurred during time of the Prophet and Rightly Guided Caliphs consisted of defensive wars or wars that sought to open up to the world. This was dictated by the circumstances or the conjuncture, he says. An overall perspective about the Qur'an does not endorse any war that seeks to destroy the people who have different beliefs or ideologies and who don't pose any threat. If we don't adopt a holistic look on the text of the Qur'an without due consideration of the context, we may end up with distortions of the text's message.
Systematization of Salafism was largely made possible by Ibn Taimiyyah and Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya, who were moderate Salafis in Hijaz. The reasoning (ijtihad) so far had been the one made by Prophet's Companions. Some members of the generation that came after the Companions turned a blind eye to this body of reasoning and approached to the Qur'an text selectively. "Seize them and kill them wherever you find them" (Sura an-Nisa, 89). But under what conditions? What is the context? What are the verses that came before and after it? The approach by superficial people who look at the matter without taking all this into consideration has created a number of problems. As for the Shiism, some people promoted the approach, "Loving Ali impossible without hating Umar," at that time. On a couple of TVs belonging to them, people openly say, "I am perfectly justified to hate Umar as he destroyed the Persian state." This approach influences the matter. Some naive people have adopted this approach with sheer love for Ali and Ahl al-Bayt. The approach by Sunnis differs. In particularly, Abu Hanifa defended Imam Zayd against Abbasids. "If loving Ahl al-Bayt is Shiism, then let the world witness that I am a Shiite," said Imam Shafi. I agree completely with Imam Shafi's words. If loving Ahl al-Bayt, Ali, Fatima, Hasan, Husayn, Zayn al-Abidin, Jafer, and Muhammad al-Hanafi is Shiism, let the world witness that I am a Shiite. But that is not the point. What was destroyed wasn't actually the Persian state, but Zoroastrianism. In a sense, it was a reactionary movement. Here, I would like to draw attention to a psycho-sociological that the balance couldn't be maintained in the reactionary movement. Even, our scholars tell positive things about Wahhabism, but they keep silent after a point.
I think their silence implies: they destroyed Maqbaratul Baqi, the cemetery for the Companions near the Prophet's Mosque in Madina. They also demolished the building the Ottoman Empire had built near the spot where our Prophet had lost his tooth during the battle of Uhud. When I went there, the house where our Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, was born, was a museum which I could visit then. Ekmeleddin İhsanoğlu, the former president of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, told me that they build a lavatory in its place. Yes, they are certainly reactionary movements. What do they react to? They exhibit reactions to certain widespread traditions in our society, perhaps among Iranians, or in other nations, treating them as signs of idolatry. For instance, take the practice of paying respect to the Prophet's beard. I'd personally sacrifice myself for a single piece of the Prophet's beard or hair, but there is the practice of creating a religious ritual out of a specific matter by putting a piece of the Prophet's beard and making everyone kiss it. When this is done as if it were a religious ritual or when worship-like attitudes are adopted in front of sacred trusts such a gown, mantle, sword or spear from that times, I think this is reminiscent of what people did with idols Wadd, Suwa', Yaghuth, Ya'uq and Nasr at the time of Prophet Noah. They said these were righteous people, and they should hang their pictures to be and act like them. This initial intention was, however, forgotten over time, and people started to worship Wadd, Suwa', Yaghuth, Ya'uq and Nas. Perhaps, the same process applied to idols like al-Lat, Manat, al-Uzza, Isaf and Naila. They might have been originally placed to represent the sacred, but they have suffered from aberration. Practices of visiting certain graves, tying clothes at the trees near them, making wishes, burning candles, etc. have emerged. Perhaps, the emergence of Salafism can be attributed to the efforts for redressing these practices according to the Holy Qur'an and the Prophet's traditions. Indeed, Prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings be upon him, had asserted: "The path you should take after me is the path of my Rightly Guided Caliphs. You should stick to it with all might and main." With this intention, they reactionarily opted to ignore all deviant practices, and even went further to turn the Prophet's house into a lavatory... If balance cannot be maintained in reactions, then there will be deviations.
Today, there are three types of Salafism. A similar brand of reactionaryism can be seen in Shiism as well. We might choose to look for a compromise in our approach to them. I am in no position to question Selim I. But he sought to quash rebellions such as Şahkulu rebellion, and the Ottoman army went to Chaldiran. Persians took Shah Ismail, who was originally an Azeri, make him marry someone who descended from Ahl al-Bayt, and advertised him as the representatives of Ahl al-Bayt. Wasn't there anything that could be done in the face of these developments? Didn't we take the matter to extremes? Couldn't we take another path? For instance, we could take the matter from a scholarly perspective and promote education instead. That is, we could send scholars to those places. We could establish schools or madrasas there. Couldn't we adopt persuasion as a method? Couldn't we take the people we both love as our common denominators? This is what happened in the past. I am not a historian. I didn't witness any of those events. I don't know the conjuncture or historical context. I am just talking about what occurs to me. Lack of moderation or compromise led to actions in extremes and vice versa. This vicious circle has continued until our time. It has spawned neo-Kharijites, neo-Haruris and neo-Salafis.
How can these annoying problems be settled? I don't know, but there are certain things I should stress. First, education is an important matter. That is, we should be open to the entire world and take the matter seriously by adopting an education-centric approach in order to come up with a generation of people who can talk to each other and come to compromise with each other and who are strictly loyal to own values. We should accept everyone in their own position with the awareness that love for our method does not entail hostility against followers of other methods. This applies to diverse sects, races or religions. I should pay respect to my own values, but at the same time, I should pay respect to Christians as well. This is already what the Holy Qur'an ordains. The Holy Qur'an makes frequent references to Jesus (UWP) or Mary. In comparison, the Qur'an does not make explicit references to Khadija (the wife of Prophet Muhammad), Aisha (the wife of Prophet Muhammad), Fatima (the daughter of Prophet Muhammad), but to Mary. The Holy Qur'an attaches great importance to Jesus, and this should inspire us for building bridges with Christian or other groups, interacting with them and coming up with new arguments. In the past, there were causes for antagonism such as the Crusades. Wars and disputes have led to animosity which has been inherited for ages. I believe the efforts to forget about this antagonistic sentiments and approach to the matter basically through educational projects are quite important. I think they nurture the same hope.
As for the second matter, the people with great standing such as Sidney (Griffith) and Scott (Alexander) have visited this place. They, too, look for ways to build bridges and repair the past's confrontations. At that time, I had asked Ekmeleddin İhsanoğlu if the OIC could hold conferences to ensure that everyone should pay respect to values of others. In addition to discussing the very basics of the matter, we could bring together reputable scholars and academic with international prestige to take certain decisions on this matter. There would always be tiny oligarchic minorities to raise objections to these decisions. But this initiative could minimize, reduce or neutralize the effects of ongoing antagonism. This is one of the methods we could utilize, in my humble opinion. The today's problems may be overcome by employing these methods for minimizing the agitation.
Vitaly Naumkin: Mr. Gülen, you wrote articles about how democracy can flourish in Turkey. And there are debates about where democracy and Islam can coexist around the Muslim world. Do you think Islam can coexist peacefully with democracy? A significant proportion of Muslims see 'secularism' as Islam's enemy. However, they live mostly in secular states in peace and without a problem. They don't have problems [with secularism] in my country which is a secular state as well. Can the secular state be maintained in peace with Islam? Can Muslim feel themselves secure in secular state? Does Islam need to be modernized? Mr. Gülen, you argue in your work, academic research and interviews that certain Islamic views betray individual and regional differences and they can be revised. God addressed Arabs using their own language. And there were slaves at that time. Islam urged people to free their slaves by describing the act as a great reward from God. Today, on the other hand, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) enslave women. To what extent is it possible in your opinion to revise these medieval interpretations and adapt them to our time?
Fethullah Gülen: I have previously voiced my modest description about democracy. Democracy has diverse implementations around the world. If rights and fairness entail respect for everyone's rights and positions, democracy can hardly be imagined differently from Islam. I think people were hesitant in their approach to democracy due to it was a foreign word. Actually, they had adopted a similar approach to the republic. In comparison, Bediuzzaman Said Nursi embraced the concept of republic long before the general public. He would share his food with ants because he saw them as practicing republicanism. "I love the nation of ants for their republicanism. I give food to them for their love for republicanism," he would say. If we examine the way the Rightly Guided Caliphs were elected to office as well as their stance in the face of truth, their just and fair administration, we can come up with much support for democracy. For this reason, it is wrong to raise straightforward objection to democracy just because of its name or origin. Such an approach is indicative of rigidity and reaction. You didn't mention it in your question, but the republic can be treated in a similar manner.
As a matter of fact, what is essential in administration is respect for rights, justice, integrity, God and human beings. Man was created for being loved and respected. Otherwise, God wouldn't order all angels to prostrate before Prophet Adam. Satan failed to comply with that order. Man is created in the best stature and is capable of attaining the Highest of the High. Human beings are capable of emerging as superior to angels as soon as they focus on spirituality. In authentic hadith, it was reported that our Prophet got ahead of Archangel Gabriel (UWP) during the Ascension. Mevlana Jalal al-Din al-Rumi said: Sometimes, angels envy our courtesy and grace; this is indicative of attaining the Highest of the High, perfection and spiritual culmination. Sometimes devils detest our arrogance. This signifies the point of the lowest of the low." Human beings should be treated essentially as mirrors reflecting the Divine Essence. "God is seen always on the mirror of Prophet Muhammad," Aziz Mahmut Hudai once said. This is an important matter. It means that when you look at that mirror, you seem to see the Divine Essence. In a sense, he is a lustrous target of manifestation. He is a place of manifestation. Our Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, is manifested. In this regard, respect for human beings should be the very basis of democracy, and our understanding about democracy should be revised. Any flaws in our approach to it should be rectified. It should be put into a process of review under the conditions of our time. I think it should be held in high esteem. When I voiced this fact about 20 years ago, the media outlets which are currently hostile to the Hizmet movement, attacked me, criticizing for promoting democracy, and you know it.
Secularism has diverse implementations around the world. In France, the implementation of secularism has introduced certain level of restriction on religion. But this is not the case in the US. The US, too, pays respect to the principle of secularism. Even one of our friends who is an academic wrote a book discussing the two distinct implementations of secularism. I think the second implementation of secularism does not contradict with the religion. Everyone should be free with their own beliefs or ideologies provided that they don't do any harm to the community. Respect should be paid to beliefs, ideologies, worldviews, lifestyles, and opinions of others unless they pose threat to the community. Secularism in this sense can be reviewed as well. That is, if it needs to be reformed or rectified in some respects, this can be done. In this way, this principle may be recast as a more reasonable and perpetual concept acceptable to everyone. In this way, everyone may start to show respect for mentalities, ideologies, lifestyles or worldviews of others. Media freedoms may be included in this process so that everyone can freely express their minds. The use of insults and bad language should be carefully avoided. People may even question certain points. For example, they may say, "We have questions about this matter." They may ask for review of a certain matter. Criticism and questioning may be acceptable, but affront, slandering, lying, forced relocation, destruction, intimidation, etc., cannot be reconciled with the very spirit of Islam and the Holy Qur'an.
As for the matter of slavery, it was widespread for some time. Islam didn't introduce slavery; it already existed. As long as war continued, people would be enslaved. But Islam left the door ajar regarding the matter of enslaving people. A system of freed slaves came to being. Both the freed slave and the owner of that slave would be referred to as mawla. This word has etymological affinity with the wali, which means guardian or protecting friend. In some period in the past, great importance would be attached to the act of freeing slaves. During the early periods of Islam --the time of Companions or Tabi'un-- Abdulmalik inquired someone. "Do you know this man in the field of hadith or Qur'an commentary?" he asked. "He is from the mawali," was the answer he got. "What about that man?" he asked again. "He is from the mawali as well" was the reply. "What about that man?" he asked once again. "He is also from the mawali," was the answer. Abdulmalik was coming from Banu Umayyad; so he said with a dignified and somewhat racist manner: "For God's sake! Is there any free man?" Thus, we can say that freed people who were staying with great Companions like Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthman and Ali would become like them. For instance, Nafi, a great hadith imam for the jurisprudence system established by Imam Maliki, was Ibn Umar's mawali. A woman named Marjana was captured. Her owner remembered the following Qur'anic verse: "You will never be able to attain godliness and virtue until you spend of what you love (in God's cause, or to provide sustenance for the needy). Whatever you spend, God has full knowledge of it" (Sura Al 'Imran, 92). He frees Marjana because he loved him. Marjana married someone and gave birth to Nafi. And Nafi became the number one tutor of Imam Malik. Examples can be multiplied.
Even great scholar like Kayy bin ibn Wahb was Hajjaj's mawali. Those who study the hadith scholars know him very closely. In this respect, re-establishing the slavery system by making wars and enslaving people in order to free them and get rewards in return is not a correct method. Being martyred in wars is sacred. If you die while fighting for a legitimate goal such as defending your life, honor, property, and even for your freedom, then you are a martyr. But if you kill yourself for trivial things by blowing yourself up as a suicide bomber in order to die as a martyr, No, certainly no. As I previously noted, such a person will go to Hell. Only a person who dies while fighting to promote a higher ideal within the scope of a general campaign waged by the state or defend oneself will become a martyr who deserves to go to Paradise. A suicide bomber who kills himself in order to kill others will certainly go to Hell. In this regard, revival of the slavery institution is unacceptable. However, some nations still treat certain people or groups as slaves with different designations. There are certain places where this is practiced and this is unfortunately under way in our time. In his Al-Adala al-Ijtima'iyya fi'l-Islam (Social Justice in Islam), Sayyid Qutb said, referring to slavery, "No single nation can abolish slavery if the entire humanity agrees to abolish it." You abolish it, but others will continue to maintain it. In this field, international conferences, seminars, presentations from lecturers may help to minimize this problem. The efforts to revive this historical problem can hardly be reconciled with the very spirit of Islam and the Holy Qur'an.
Vitaly Naumkin: My last question will be about terrorism. We appreciate your stance against terrorism. You argue that Islam forbids the killing of innocent people and disapproves all those atrocities committed by terrorists. I support this position fully. Our country is utterly victimized by terrorism and combats it. But why are there such people? Why do they support terrorism? What should be our strategy to combat this evil? What are your comments about potential cooperation between Russia and Turkey despite the disagreements between the two countries following the downing of the Russian warplane?
Fethullah Gülen: Terrorism is practiced by many nations. It can be found in the Christian or Jewish nations. There are sometimes terrorist organizations like the ISIL or al-Qaida. Sometimes, there are terrorist states. Look at the Muslim world today, there are terrorist states. I cannot bring myself to utter the same thing for my country, but I am still forced to keep the door ajar in that regard. If pressures are exerted on people and if their freedoms are denied and if there is no justice or fairness, and if laws are bypassed to do certain things and pass the necessary laws afterwards, this can be considered as sort of terrorism. Terrorism that emerges from the Muslim world is attributable to failure to implement Islam in the correct manner. As we are unable to practice Islam as it was described in the Holy Qur'an and the Prophet's traditions and understood by the prominent guides among the Companions and their followers, certain ignorant people search for another understanding of Islam. They seek ways to promote the perspicuous religion of Islam in people's lives. If Muslims and the Muslim world had been able to practice Islam according to the Holy Qur'an, thereby showing an exemplary system, this would encourage people to adopt it. This actually happened at times in the past, including the time of the Rightly Guided Caliphs, the time of Umar ibn Abdulaziz of the Umayyads, Hadi, Mihdi and Mutasim of the Abbasids, and the time of Ottomans, to a certain extent. These experiences have certainly encouraged people to adopt Islam.
French king François came to Turkey and sought refuge with Suleiman the Magnificent. The time of Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror was likewise stimulating. As the world currently lacks a dazzling and satisfactory practice of Islam that would bring relief and contentment to people's hearts, certain people start to look for something else. Certain secret services manipulate such searches both inside and outside. That it, they channelize people to terrorism. There are people all around the world who seek to join the ISIL, al-Qaida, or Boko Haram. This Taliban in Afghanistan was in office for a certain period of time, and they advertised themselves as Muslims. They were fans of Zahid Kawthari. But now they indulge in suicide attacks, killing people and various acts of violence. This is unacceptable. As the correct brand of Islam is not practiced, people end up in wrong versions. Certain younger people ignorantly indulge into false interpretations. They are not only ignorant about the religion, but also they think such a religion will dominate the world. By doing so, they commit the greatest treason to Islam unintentionally. What they do is a black stain on the bright face of Islam. In my humble opinion, they look for the correct implementation of Islam around the world, but fail to find it. Then, they let themselves in such movements. Such a mindset may emerge among Christians, Jews or Muslims. Not every attribute of a Muslim is a Muslim attribute. Likewise, not every attribute of an unbeliever is an unbeliever attribute. Some Muslims have attributes of unbelievers while some unbelievers have attributes of Muslims. God will pass His judgment according to people's attributes. As reported by the Prophet, “God looks not at your outward appearances, nor at your wealth or belongings, but at your deeds and behaviors."
Going back to the previous considerations, education may be the solution. If the elite classes and intellectuals focus on this matter, a solution may be found. Perhaps, an alliance may be established to counter the armed terrorist organizations. This alliance may beat the ISIL and then al-Qaida. For instance, the US and Russia, as two major powers, may come together in such an alliance.
In the past when Russia shifted toward communism, people in Turkey had disapproved the development. However, Russia is currently governed with a democratic system and democratically elected governments. It is Turkey's neighbor. Turkey is a member of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). It has to keep good neighborly relations with Russia and refrain from contention with it, but at the same time, maintain its interests with the US. Turkey's certain moves in recent years, including the downing of the Russian warplane were wrong. Still, we should stick to common sense and find to a workable solution with moderation. Russia is a tremendous state. It is of crucial importance for Turkey to maintain close and lenient relations with Russia. Any contention with Russia will weaken Turkey. It will give put other alternatives into spotlight. For instance, Iran may come to prominence. Syria may emerge, and Turkey, a country with a population of 70-80 million, will be zeroed. Turkey will find itself engulfed in a swirl of problems. This entails foresight from the people who govern Turkey. I hope God may endow them with this foresight which is then properly used by Vladimir Putin, Dmitry Medvedev, Russian people and the elite class there to restore our relations to their previous friendly nature.
Vitaly Naumkin: Thank you very much. I wish you health, success, and peace in life.
This interview, Director of the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences Vitaly Naumkin made with Mr. Fethullah Gülen was published on Moskovskiy Komsomolets (MK) on March 10, 2016.
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} | 5,844 | Al-Imâm Ahmad (Allâh’s mercy on him) was describing the people of desires: ‘They are different types in the Book; opposers to the Book; unanimous in opposing the Book. They speak (freely) about doubtful matters confounding the ignoramuses among the masses therewith.’ [Al-Aadaab Ash-Shar’iyyah 1/209]
The trio of Al-Imâm Al-Bukhârî, Ahmad and al-Hâkim recorded that the Messenger of Allâh (sallaLlaahu alahyi wa sallam) said: ‘There shall be tribulations, whoever sits therein is better than whoever stands; whoever stands is better than whoever walks; whoever walks therein is better than whoever paces. Whoever makes himself prominent in it shall be consumed by it. Whoever (however) has the means of safety or refuge from it. Let him take it.’ Amr bn Aal-Aas (may Allâh be pleased with him) said to his son: ‘O my son, take this advice from me. A just ruler is better than rain (from the sky), a fierce lion is better than an unjust ruler. But an unjust and tyrant ruler is better than a pervading tribulation.’ [Al-Aadab Ash-Shar’iyyah 1/172]
Al-Imâm Ahmad (Allâh’s mercy on him) also said: ‘…do not fight in a tribulation; stay put in your house. This is what the scholars of all the regions have agreed upon.’ [Ibn Jauzi’s Manaaqib Al-Imâm Ahmad 166]
Shaykhul-Islâm Ibn Taymiyyah (Allâh’s mercy on him) said: ‘The Prophet (sallaLlaahu alahyi wa sallam) forbade from fighting during tribulation. That therefore is from the fundamentals of Sunnah; that is the position of the people of Sunnah and Hadith; so also the scholars of Madînah, its jurists and others.’ [Al-Istiqaamah: 1/32]
Therefore in the face of the happenings in the Muslim World of recent, the pervading silence that has come from the People of Sunnah is from the Sunnah. It is not cowardice or hypocrisy.
Read : Saudi is a Holy Land – what is my own with Qatar?
Meanwhile some people have taken the silence for granted. They think the People of Sunnah are vanquished and conquered. So the People of Sunnah have been repeatedly bashed by some elements who hitherto were nowhere to be found as far as the Sunnah of Muhammad is concerned. All of a sudden they became champions of Islamic Law brandishing wanton ignorance imbued in their flawed inclination and allegiance to evil thoughts of the Muslim Brotherhood and all other stupidities.
One of those voices is the writer of ‘Saudi Is a Holy Land – What’s My Own with Qatar?’ A crafty write-up written to blemish the Land of Tawheed and its scholars, Salafiyyah and its callers; and defend Ikhwaaniyyah and its goons.
Expectedly the write-up has attracted some myopic cheers and thumbs-up hence the propriety of this response to, once again, set the record straight, defend the noble cause and assuage the People of Sunnah, and of course, send the sellers of evil thoughts back to their holes.
وَلِلَّهِ الْعِزَّةُ وَلِرَسُولِهِ وَلِلْمُؤْمِنِينَ وَلَكِنَّ الْمُنَافِقِينَ لا يَعْلَمُونَ
“But honour, power and glory belong to Allâh, his Messenger (Muhammad Sal-Allaahu ‘alayhi Wa Sallam), and to the believers, but the hypocrites know not.’ [Munaafiqoon 8]
One of the people of knowledge has said Allaah the Mighty Lord, in His Legal and Universal Will, allows conflict to be between the truth and falsehood, guidance and misguidance such that each of them will have its helpers and followers, defenders and upholders. And every time the truth appears and increases in glows and clarity, the falsehood becomes rapacious and more exposed.
O Allaah make the truth dearer to us and falsehood more hated.
From the outset, he denied being a member of the Muslim Brotherhood [al-Ikhwaanul-Muslimeen] and any interaction with groups such as The Muslim Congress, Tadaamunul-Muslimeen, etc, that make allegiance to the Muslim Brotherhood. He said ‘I am not a member…I have no interaction…’ We hope he is not double-speaking, and clandestinely selling a lie. He claimed it is just ‘the mere fraternity that exists amongst brothers of the same faith.’ Anyway, your denial of Ikhwaaniyyah is your first defeat more importantly when you are discovered a liar.
Even your bogus denial of Ikhwaaniyyah but free interactions with all ‘including those in the Salafi class and the haraki trend!’ speaks volumes. It depicts you as nothing but someone treading a confused path.
مُذَبْذَبِينَ بَيْنَ ذَلِكَ لا إِلَى هَؤُلاءِ وَلا إِلَى هَؤُلاءِ وَمَنْ يُضْلِلِ اللَّهُ فَلَنْ تَجِدَ لَهُ سَبِيلا
‘(They are) swaying between this and that, belonging neither to these nor to those, and he whom Allâh sends astray, you will not find for him a way (to the Truth – Islâm). [Nisâ: 143]
People of such Manhaj like yours are the most dangerous because they can easily blend with any gathering upon the precept of ‘Likulli maqaam maqaal’ – for every gathering is its suitable approach, a maxim people of talawwun – Da’wah multi-culture have often invoked to cause problem within the ranks of the righteous.
إِنَّ شَرَّ النَّاسِ ذُو الْوَجْهَيْنِ الَّذِي يَأْتِي هَؤُلَاءِ بِوَجْهٍ وَهَؤُلَاءِ بِوَجْهٍ
‘Verily the worst of the people is the two-faced person who goes to so-and-so with a face but to others with another face.’ [Bukhârî and Muslim]
So your Manhaj is that of confused specie.
But you have nowhere to hide. Your soft and hard spot for the Muslim Brotherhood is not farfetched from your tirade.
وَلَوْ نَشَاءُ لأرَيْنَاكَهُمْ فَلَعَرَفْتَهُمْ بِسِيمَاهُمْ وَلَتَعْرِفَنَّهُمْ فِي لَحْنِ الْقَوْلِ
‘Had we willed, we could have shown them to you, and you should have known them by their marks, but surely, you will know them by the tone of their speech!’
So it did not take you much time before you declared for Yûsuf Qaradawee – who is your intent of defence. Lest a right thinking person should castigate you with him, you went double speaking again – which is your hallmark in the article. You wrote: ‘But there is hardly a contemporary scholar whose love has completely overwhelmed my heart like the distinguished scholar, Shaykh Muhammad Sâlih Al-Uthaymeen.’
Did you write: ‘Whose love has completely overwhelmed?’ Are you sure you are not telling another lie? Okay, but you must agree you went pretentiously aboveboard. If the love of Shaykh Uthaymeen – rahimahuLlaahu ta’aala (remember the love did not even make you ask Allaah to show him mercy), indeed has overwhelmed your heart. Where is your love for Allaah and His Prophet? You would say we should not take you literally, but the basis of every word is its reality.
عَنْ أَبِي هُرَيْرَةَ رَضِيَ اللَّهُ عَنْهُ أَنَّ رَسُولَ اللَّهِ صَلَّى اللَّهُ عَلَيْهِ وَسَلَّمَ قَالَ فَوَالَّذِي نَفْسِي بِيَدِهِ لَا يُؤْمِنُ أَحَدُكُمْ حَتَّى أَكُونَ أَحَبَّ إِلَيْهِ مِنْ وَالِدِهِ وَوَلَدِهِ
On the authority of Aboo Hurairah (may Allaah be pleased with him) that the Messenger of Allaah (salaLlaahu alahyi wa sallam) said: ‘I swear by He in Whose Hands is my soul, none of you believes until I am more beloved to him more than his parent and child.’ [Bukhârî and Muslim]
Your real man is Yûsuf Qaradawee [may Allâh rectify us and him]. It is from him you learnt your wretched Fiqhu Waaqee and other evils. You learnt nothing from Shaykh Uthaymeen (Allâh’s mercy on him) if you indeed learn anything you will never later come and say evil about the present-day Mufti of Saudi Arabia. And you will never malign the rulers of the Land of Tawheed. It is Qaradawee that taught you that, not Uthaymeen. Stop the lie.
What you claim to know is Fiqh Waaqee (the Jurisprudence of Current Affairs), good of you. You brand yourself a researcher in global politics and a Da’wah activist (like the people in MURIC and MUSWEN and ‘MUSU’). You indeed said you are a progressive thinker!
خَيْرُكُمْ مَنْ تَعَلَّمَ الْقُرْآنَ وَعَلَّمَهُ
‘The best of you is he who learns the Qur’aan and teaches it.’
You emphasized the ‘self’ in you trying to equate yourself with the scholars. ‘I am “me” and they are “themselves”’ Please who are you? You can start all over again. Radarada. If not colonialism that beclouds your intellect and gives you English, and a platform like Facebook, can you write a Muqaddimah the like written by the student of Shaykh Uthaymeen, from the fifth level? It is a challenge anyway.
You have indeed said in ‘Secrets of the Rift’ that the intent of your write-ups are ‘those who are capable of independent thinking’. In other words, your desire has been to implant the thoughts of the mu’tazilah – those who pride in their intellect at the expense of the revelation. No wonder, this your writing and several others are always free of Qur’aan passages and hadith. Not even a weak hadith! And what is that ‘independent thinking’? Thinking devoid of understanding of the Salaf to issues. We can really see that picture of yours where you showcased (we dont’t want to say ‘show-off’) a ‘heavy’ library of books. So is this what you have been reading in those books (if that picture is not fake anyway).
Aboo Hayyaan did compose:
‘The fool thinks books alone can guide.’
Then you wrote: ‘I really sympathize with all my brothers whose role models are the Saudi’s scholars.’ That is your first assault on the scholars of the Land of Tawheed. Of course, your first disposition of apparent Ikhwaaniyyah. It is no secret; the greatest enemies of the Muslim Brotherhood are the scholars of Salafiyyah the bulk of whom are found in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Yours is not going to be an exception. So where is that love for Uthaymeen if the products of Uthaymeen are your enemies?
Having hit the scholars, you went for the rulers, you wrote: ‘Saudi’s shameless dance in the market place.’ To help you re-construct your expression, the Saudi rulers are shameless that they dance in the market place. And you wrote down-down, ‘a kingdom that is foolishly subservient to the enemies.’ ‘Whoever honours the ruler appointed by Allâh – the Mighty and Most High – in this world Allaah will honour him on the Day of Resurrection; and whoever disgraces the ruler appointed by Allaah – the Mighty and Most High – in this world, Allaah will disgrace him in the hereafter.’ Saheehah: 2297.
You better repent.
Yet he went specifically for Mufti ‘Abdul-Azeez bn Abdillâh bn Muhammad bn ‘Abdul-Lateef Aal-Shaykh [may Allâh preserve him]. He insulted him saying the fatwa (religious edict) issued by the Muftee on the gulf imbroglio was to legitimize ‘a shameful act’ and is itself ‘a spurious verdict.’
Allâh however protected the honour of the Mufti. He – Mighty Lord saved his name from his insult. Rather he was referring to one ‘Mufti Shaykh Ibrahim AlShaykh.’ In those simple words, Allaah exposed the ignorance of the fellow. Didn’t he claim he was an expert in global politics with special interest in Middle East? Nonsense, a common name of Mufti of Saudi Arabia you don’t know. An expert of Fiqh Waaqee indeed!
You have been told disgrace awaits people like you, unless he repents.
He was even told of his manifest and costly error, he felt too big to correct it. So go back and correct it, and everywhere it has been taken to. We later saw that he grudgingly but deceptively changed it to ‘Mufti Shaykh Al-Shaykh’ when his error hit him on the face. Yet he is wrong, his correct name is ‘Mufti ‘Abdul-Azeez bn Abdillâh bn Muhammad bn ‘Abdul-Lateef Aal-Shaykh [may Allâh preserve him].’ So go and do the needful, don’t be a stubborn ignoramus.
And know that the matter is indeed a Fitnah, not a fitan. You need to check your linguistic capability in Arabic. That error of calling a Fitnah a fitan is unpardonable. Well, a student in ‘Idaadee level may be excused not an international political analyst with special interest in Middle East like you! You said the crisis has divided the Ummah, haba, when the majority of the Muslims world over is not even aware. If you are indeed truthful carry out a survey in Tejuosho Market from the Muslims and ask them what is the matter. They will just look at you in dismay. So the matter does not really concern us, yes it does not concern us and you. Mind your business. Just as the crisis between the Sahaba did not concern us. Can you get that? So if that does not concern us, the happenings around the world do not concern us. Allaah will never ask a dead Muslim today what is happening in Pakistan and China. Prove it if He will ask him.
The Three Questions in the Grave are: who is your Lord? Who is your Prophet? What is your Deen? That is what we learnt from Al-Usool Ath-Thalaathah of Ash-Shaykh Muhammad bn Abdilwahhaab, Allâh’s mercy on him.
It was people like you that were following the news of Trump election last year. Some of us were not even aware the day he was elected. But we are always aware of the Qur’aan and the Sunnah. Those are the main things, wal hamdulillah. May Allaah make you forget the happenings around the world and remember the Qur’ân and Sunnah. Did you say Aameen? An Ikhwaanee will prefer to forget the Qur’aan and Sunnah to forgetting the news about Chenchya and Kosovo. That is one of the problems with Ikhwaaniyyah. So there are many experts among you, yes about the warped Fiqh Waqee but not the Qur’aan and Sunnah. May Allaah take you people out of your slumber.
You wrote the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia ‘has been consistently manipulated by the West’. You are not the first to say that. But we wonder what sort of manipulation is that if till date democracy is still far from Saudi Arabia, in fact, it is not mused. If till date, Saudi is the only country in the world where the Sharî’ah is publicly implemented. Despite the West outcry, the public beating and beheading of offenders of related-offences still go on. Lest you said it is selective judgement, Allâh made open a case of recent when an influential Saudi prince was executed for a capital punishment. Yet they are being manipulated by the West! What a manipulation!
In ‘Secrets of the Rift’, you confessed yourself that ‘the Saudi kingdom is the best place to live…its citizens are kind-hearted…the best scholars in the Muslim world today are, arguably, products of the kingdom’s citadel…’ Then what is your problem that made you eventually showcase a morbid hatred like this for the kingdom? You said its government policy. Don’t you think you have really delved into something you are not qualified to delve into? You said no, ‘this raging issue is not one that is open to all scholars and students of students (sic), for it’s neither of Fiqh nor Usuul Din.’
Subhaanallah, this is serious ignorance from you. Please go back to Ile Keu Sunnah and start learning all over again.
You wrote ‘the West knows how foolish we are (indeed you are), they only fear the progressive Muslim thinkers amongst us – Those who think beyond the rudiments of the five daily obligatory prayers, those who seek Islamization of the polity are not cordoned by the West.’ That is where your Da’wah activism comes in, abi? The type that pushed your teachers to participate in the Occupy Nigeria Protests. Were you there too, Mr. Da’wah activist? Okay, that was why Qaradawee was at Tahreer Square.
Progressive Muslim thinkers! What is that? Okay those who seek to Islamize all kinds of Kufr and shirk such as democracy under the ostensible but satanic principle propounded by Ismail Al-Faarouqi in Islamization of Knowledge. So you belong to the IIIT fools! Yes the West hates you because you are the bedrock of the suicide bombers, wanton killers and miscreants. Allaah will expose you all.
So you arrived at where you are going: ‘I am not therefore surprised if the Brotherhood movement is the ultimate target of the whole crisis.’ You are out to defend the Muslim Brotherhood, we told you, and you cannot hide.
You asked: ‘At what stage did a movement that partakes in democratic processes become a terrorist group? Can a movement with a large parliamentarian representation in Jordan and Bahrain be called a terrorist group? Is it possible that members of a terrorist group would fold their arms and watch themselves killed; their wealth and property confiscated and their wives and children thrown into deadly dungeons as it happened in Egypt?’
A simple poser to you, Mr. Da’wah Activist, Progressive Thinker, Political Analyst; Osama bn Laden and other terrorists (you will probably shudder at that) what methodology influenced them most? Ikhwaaniyyah or Salafiyyah?
Now to Qaradawee, you wrote: ‘And about the Shaykh, I still marvel at the Muslim world’s thought system. What could have ever made a distinguished scholar whose major “fault”, as always analyzed by the Saudi clergy, is his liberal approache (sic) to jurispudential (sic) issues, a terrorist?’ That is where lies your greatest booboo, you pretend as if you don’t know the problem with Qaradawee. In many ramifications, Yûsuf Qaradawee’s Fiqh, Manhaj and Aqeedah are dangerous path to follow.
You must have read his ‘Halâl and Haraam’, a book filled with filth and dirt. Nobody reads it and comes out sane.
So the problem with him is not about his dangerous Fiqh alone but his Manhaj and Aqeedah. To Allaah be the praise, many of the contemporary scholars of the Sunnah have refuted Yûsuf Qaradawee massively. Let us see some.
Someone asked Ash-Shaykh Al-Albaanee from Australia about a fatwa of Qaradawee that misled the people. The Shaykh said among other things: ‘…Yûsuf Qaradawee study was Azhar-based not upon the methodology of the Book and Sunnah. He does pass verdicts that contradict the Shariah. He has a philosophy that is very dangerous. If anything comes prohibited in the Shariah, he will shy away from calling it so, he will say: ‘There is no clear-cut evidence for its prohibition. This is what made him legitimized listening to music; he permitted it for that English man (Cat Stevens) that accepted Islam to remain a Musician and eat from music proceeds. Qaradawee claimed that there is no clear-cut evidence against music or musical instruments. This position of his (that is, that there must be a clear-cut evidence for a prohibition) is at variance with the consensus of scholars of Islam…[Shaykh then mentioned some ahadith against some of his Fatâwâ then he said] these ahadith are against Qaradawee and his likes who pass verdicts with their thoughts upon the methodology of free thinkers of old…’. [Source: Suufiyaat Hasan Al-Bannah wal Qaradawee’ as found in the tape, Silsilah Al-Hudaa Wan-Nuur 1/262.]
You can see your mentor in progressive thinkership!
Among his errors in Aqeedah was his statement, on a Jumu’ah pulpit, about an election that took place in Israel sometime ago where he shaded the Arabs for not being able to conduct a free and fair election in their country. He marveled at the victory of a candidate in the said lection whereby he defeated his opponent by 99.9% margin. He stupidly said: ‘If Allâh Himself had presented Himself before the people, He would not curry home this percentage of vote; we praise Israel for a wonderful job…’
Shaykh Uthaymeen – rahimahullaah (your loving scholar) was asked about the ruling regarding anybody that says such a thing. The Shaykh said: ‘Refuge is sought in Allaah, such a person must repent otherwise he must be executed as an apostate because he made the created being to be more knowledgeable than the Creator. He must repent to Allaah; Allaah indeed forgives sins of His slaves. If he does not repent, then it becomes imperative for the people at the helms of affairs to sever his neck.’
We want to believe Qaradawee has truly repented from that.
So it was not far reaching when Shaykh Muqbil Al-Waadi’ee (Allâh’s mercy on him) wrote a book against Qaradawee entitled: ‘Silencing the Howling Dog; Yûsuf bn Abdillâh Al-Qaradawee.’
Those have been long time ago. So his problem did not start yesterday as being maliciously canvassed. Was he not part of the Arab Spring campaigners? What did he say that day when that first protester killed himself in Tunisia: He said in a recorded video: ‘I request from the people of Tunisia and all the Muslims of the world to seek Allâh’s intercession for the committer of suicide that killed himself by burning in Tunisia because he is the cause of the removal of the tyrant rulership in Tunisia; I also request that there should be many like that that will burn themselves or what is similar to remove injustice from the Muslims.’
What Manhaj is that?
Wasn’t he there at Tahreer Square inciting the populace against the rulership in Egypt?
He was an ‘epitome’ of democracy at Tahreer Square when he was saying: ‘O Muslims and Copts, I invite you bow down in prayer together…the revolution isn’t over. It has just started to build Egypt…guard your revolution…in this square sectarianism died.’
The crimes of Qaradawee are many to mention. If not for certain reasons, we would have brought many of his video links here where he was saying his nonsense.
The following are some of his evil speeches:
‘The matters between us (and the Christians) are mutual. We are sons of the same country, our goal is one. I will refer to them as our Christian brothers. Some will not like to hear this (from the Muslims), that why should I say so. ‘Believers are brothers’ Yes we are believers and they are believers in the other way.’
‘The love a Muslim will have for a non-Muslim is no problem.’
‘The crisis between us and the Jews is with regards to the land (in Palestine) not because of the Deen.’
‘We call to democracy; we fight in its cause.’
‘I make judicial reasoning just as [Prophet] Muhammad used to make judicial reasoning; I can be correct the same way he [Prophet Muhammad] could be correct, and otherwise.’
Qaradawee said about the Sahîh hadith: ‘My father and mother are in the hell.’ ‘What was the crime of Abdullâh bn AbdilMuttalib to warrant the hell fire; he was among the people of fitrah. What is more correct is that they will be saved from hell.’
He rejected the hadith that said ‘death’ will brought in a form of a ram and slaughtered on the Day of Resurrection. He said: ‘What is clearly known as agreed in the intellect and report is that ‘death’ is not a ram or an ox or any other animal. That statement (that death will be brought on the Day of Qiyaamah) is falsehood…’
He constantly rejects separating men from women in public gatherings. He said: ‘I am in my seventies, I do travel to America to attend Islamic conferences, I do meet in these conferences that men and women are separated. Extremism has indeed overshadowed the people even there…’
Just too many, by Allaah.
Shouldn’t a sensible person, let alone a state, be wary of a person like Qaradawee? May Allaah the Mighty Lord guide the State of Qatar.
Back to Mr. Progressive Thinker.
You wrote: ‘Nothing radicalises as much as the Saudi’s teachings of pristine Islam. Give someone the right Tawheed, and watch him stand against anything but Allah. What commendable radical phenomenon!’ So to you, it is the teaching of Tawheed that radicalizes the people to act unconscionably. That also exposes your Ikhwaaniyyah. The Muslim Brotherhood does not teach the Tawheed. They only teach ‘Fiqh Waaqi’.
Don’t you think that statement is an assault on the very basis of Islam itself? That if you agree Tawheed is the basis. By Allaah you have just assaulted Tawheed; we give you an excuse of ignorance.
You wrote: ‘Qaradawee has been teaching Islam in Qatar for more than three decades, and no one (single) Qatari has ever partaken in any major terrorist act.’ You need to give us the data. Also kindly give us statements of Al-Qaradawee where he denounced Al-Qaeda or the present ISIS mad dogs. ‘From the 9/11 disaster, to Al-Qaeda networks and the ISIS camps in the Levant, thousands of Saudis are involved.’ Are you saying there are no Ikhwaanee recruiters in Saudi that can incite to such? And do you mean the majority of those graduating from Jaamiah Islaamiyyah are al-Qaeda and ISIS recruits? It is a well-known fact; you and your comrades know it, as you know your sons, that Salafiyyah being preached and taught in Saudi Arabia and by other many scholars of Sunnah all over the world is the major threat to Qaradawee and his goons. And that this Salafiyyah, is the major threat against the harakiyyah of the Muslim Brotherhood and its offspring such as Al-Qaeda and ISIS. Didn’t you say you have ‘Salafi’ and ‘haraki’ friends? Ask them.
Yes you delved very much into International Politics especially the issues in the Middle East. One thing is very clear from your tirade, you relied heavily on what your oriental teachers teach you at your Institute [of Oriental Studies], so your positions are heavily flawed. If not for the fact that, we are not interested in that dirty and murky thing called international politics (which in the past we had taken our precious time), we would have given you a point by point response to everything you said. We are afraid, because we are Salafis; we owe respect to all Muslim rulers.
One other thing is very clear; you do not understand As-Siyaasah Ash-Shar’iyyah – the Legislated Islamic Politics. If you were there when the Prophet salaLlâhu alayhi wa sallam distributed those war booty that made that great grandfather of you people to say, ‘O Muhammad be just, you have not been just’, you would definitely cheer that man. The man did not understand the wisdom in the way the Messenger of Allâh (salaLlaahu alhyi wa sallam) had distributed the war booty, he thought he was cheated. We know the treaties the Prophet (salaLlaahu alhyi wa sallam) had with the Jews in Madeenah (before they betrayed him), and those ones he had with the Mushrikoon of Makkah, were all borne out of this mighty principle of As-Siyaasah Ash-Shar’iyyah.
Muslim rulers, down to the Ottoman era, had always been conscious of this principle. That was what has always been informing their relationship with the non-Muslim states.
كَيْفَ يَكُونُ لِلْمُشْرِكِينَ عَهْدٌ عِنْدَ اللَّهِ وَعِنْدَ رَسُولِهِ إِلا الَّذِينَ عَاهَدْتُمْ عِنْدَ الْمَسْجِدِ الْحَرَامِ فَمَا اسْتَقَامُوا لَكُمْ فَاسْتَقِيمُوا لَهُمْ إِنَّ اللَّهَ يُحِبُّ الْمُتَّقِينَ
How can there be a covenant with Allâh and with His Messenger for the Mushrikûn (polytheists, idolaters, pagans, disbelievers In the Oneness of Allâh) except those with whom you made a covenant near Al-Masjid-al-Harâm (at Makkah)? So long, as they are true to you, stand you true to them. Verily, Allâh loves Al-Muttaqûn (the pious) [Taubah: 7]
In essence the meaning of that is that the Muslim state is permissible to have legitimate deals with the non-Muslim states.
Why is it not permissible to kill a mu’aahad? Check it out who is a mu’aahad.
Why did the Qur’aan praise the Romans victory over the Persians?
And why did the Muslims have to seek protection in the Christian State of Abyssinia in the early days of Islam?
In your thinking, the Prophet (salaLlaahu alahyi wa sallam) might probably be wrong for adopting the Persian war tactics at Battle of Trench.
So go and learn the basics in Siyaasah Shar’iyyah, and never you castigate the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia when it carries out what is permissible in the Deen.
The Gulf Affair!
We are not going to talk about that. It does not concern us. We want to mind our business in that respect!
However may Allaah not allow the Safavid State in Iran to become a major power in the region such that it can threaten our faith.
It is our dream and prayer that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia becomes the most powerful state in that region, and beyond, so that the tentacle of Tawheed can easily spread across the globe. It is for that single reason.
مَنْ كَانَ يَظُنُّ أَنْ لَنْ يَنْصُرَهُ اللَّهُ فِي الدُّنْيَا وَالآخِرَةِ فَلْيَمْدُدْ بِسَبَبٍ إِلَى السَّمَاءِ ثُمَّ لِيَقْطَعْ فَلْيَنْظُرْ هَلْ يُذْهِبَنَّ كَيْدُهُ مَا يَغِيظُ
Whoever thinks that Allâh will not help Him (Muhammad) in this world and in the Hereafter, let Him stretch out a rope to the ceiling and let him strangle himself. Then let him see whether his plan will remove that whereat He rages! [Hajj: 15]
You wrote: ‘I must clearly affirm from the onset that I hate that sick ideology called Shiism.’ This same way you said you do not belong to Muslim Brotherhood but spent good energy in defending its ethos and promoters. Here you are to do the same for Shiah.
You wrote again: ‘…the Saudi’s politics with Iran is not about this ideology, but rather, it is a regional politics of the power play, involving the US. In the region, Saudi Arabia is never secure with the Iranian military might. But if Iran could just play the diplomacy of humility in its relationship with the Saudi kingdom, the game will change.’ Read that again and see how unreasonable you have been. Iran itself knows that the feud it has with Saudi is basically about its heresy; other things are ancillary. And why should Saudi be secure with Iran so-called military might? The King with his court is not a fool.
You said: ‘Nevertheless, the whole scenario was, to me, very interesting, because I know the Saudis too well.’ What an assertion! Have you ever seen any of the Saudi kings face-to-case?
You wrote: ‘However, something occurred in the era of this unusual diplomatic romance…I was in Umrah and i (sic) did withness (sic) it. It was during a ziyaarah procession at the prophet’s grave inside the holy sanctuary in Medina, a notorious Shite cleric from Iran after saying his salaam to the holy Prophet, walked towards Abubakri and Umar’s graves and then spat heavily on them in disgust. The organized queue of the belivers (sic) was enraged and the cursed iranian (sic) cleric was almost lynched, but for his immediate rescue by the Saudi police. The day after was a Friday which the Saudis and other visitors to the Prophet’s mosque would not forget in a hurry, as the famous Imam Hudhaifi climbed the pulpit to deliver a powerful, historic Friday sermon, tongue-lashing the kingdom’s leadership for its newly found satanic friendship with the Shites who came visiting, desecrating the two leading companions’ graves. The khutbah was so severe, and immediately after he said his tasleem, which heralded the two rakat prayer to an end, he was whisked away by the state security agency for interrogation…!’
The event you are alluding to occurred in 1998! You said you were there as a witness. It was about the visit of Rafsanjani a former president of Iran who just left power in the year before. It was the visit that elicited the Imam Hudhaifi’s reaction for it was geared towards mending Saudi-Iranian relations in a way. The Imaam was afraid that if the hobnobbing between the Saudi state and the Iranian government, on one hand, and the Saudi state and the Kuffâr governments, on the other hand, was not put in the right perspective, it might have adverse effect on the Muslims; he was right. So the Imam was censured for the tough sermon by the authorities.
But the picture you painted above is a crass exaggeration characteristic of an Ikhwaanee blood. One, that you were there remains a khabar susceptible to acceptance or otherwise; it was in 1998 remember. Two, you referred to Akbar Hashimi Rafsanjani as just a notorious Iranian cleric; this belies your claim to Middle East knowledge. We wonder why you would not know he was a former president. Agreed, he was one of their numerous ayatollahs (which anybody can be in Iran so far your graduated from Qom Seminary) but his being a former president should be more important than being a mere cleric. Three, you said he spat on the graves of Abu bakr and Umar. Nobody would do that in Saudi and go scot-free. You must provide a proof for that. Four, you said the Imaam was whisked away (in a Gestapo style or otherwise), that requires another proof from you.
In summary, you were just peddling some lies which you probably heard from people like Faisal Al-Jamaikee. Unless you prove it, you were not at the event.
The relationship between Saudi and Iran has been that of carrot and stick. Saudi has some Shia population no doubt especially at the oil field region which borders Iran, so managing those miscreants has been a tough job for Saudi over the decades. Any country that has citizens like the Shia will understand that managing them will require some diplomacy. Saudi has always been trying to contain them in one way or the other. Sometime it will use force sometime peace. Everything goes back to the Siyaasah Shar’iyyah earlier mentioned.
The Saudi Shia population looks at Iran as their backer, Iran has never shied away from this fact. Therefore it is Saudi relationship with its Shia population that often informs its relations with Iran, and sometimes, vice versa. There is no sin upon Saudi in entering into some truce with Iran in some circumstances, isn’t that possible with the full-blown Kuffaar like the US and UK?
Saudi Arabia will never tolerate any dissident act from the Shia on its territory because for all intent and purpose, they are khawaarij in a way. The 1987 macabre in Makkah where many Shia lost their lives after a violent demonstration against the authorities that led to skirmishes between the Shia pilgrims and the Saudi security agents, what did Khomeini tell the Shia population in Saudi, ‘overthrow the murderers in the House of Saud’, please what was that?
And do you know about the pact made between King Fahd (Allâh’s mercy on him) and the followers of Saffar’s Harakah Islaahiyyah in 1993 that bettered the lot of the Shia in Saudi, when they became subservient to the authorities?
When some trouble makers led by one miscreant by name Nimr reared their heads in 2015, the rebels among them were all put to death including their head.
So the situation has, obey the law or face the consequence. Do not forget Saudi Arabia is a country where the Sharia is strongly and effectivley applied (do not ask us about other Gulf States). Ask any Nigerian drug trafficker the danger in trafficking drug to Saudi Arabia.
And should will tell you what the Sunni minority faces in Iran? Another day, Inshaa Allaah.
You wrote: ‘Unfortunately, in spite of the kingdom’s abundance of wealth and its goodwill of Muslim solidarity, the virtual lack of experience in international diplomacy on the part of its new crown Prince, Muhammad Bn Salman, under whose ego lies the entire crisis, the kingdom has become a losing giant in the region as much as it is frustrated!’ a self-contradiction from you, is the present crisis because of the Crown Prince or Muslim Brotherhood cum Yûsuf Al-Qaradawee? Remember you wrote: ‘I am not therefore surprised if the Brotherhood movement is the ultimate target of the whole crisis.’ International political analysis went wrong!
The intent here therefore is to defend the Sharia position of respect for the Muslim rulers and the scholars of Sunnah. This is one of the fundametals of the Deen.
That is the little we have intended to shed on the matter. We declare before the world that we are little learners of the Deen. We are grateful to Allâh who has blessed the Deen with scholars home and abroad, which we pray Allaah make us benefit from more.
In this article, we would have made a mistake or more. That is from us and Shaytaan. But if we come near any correctness, to Allaah the Mighty belongs the glory.
Written by: Aboo Aamir Al-Atharee
This article is the authors opinion and they do not reflect policies.
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CLARIFYING AND DECLARING THE TRUTH ABOUT ISLAM :: Fatwa Management System :: World Fatwa Management and Research Institute: "Habashis"
In reference to question: 10077, Fatwa 7669, I think you misunderstood my question: My question is: Why not hold this international convention and conference by scholars and thinkers of Ahl al Sunnah Wal' Jamaa'a to declare to the whole world that Ahl al Sunnah Wal' Jamm'a represents authentic Islam and are real Muslims, and the other 72 deviated and innovating sects such as Khawarij, Rawaafidh/Shia, Jahamiya, Tooruqi/Suffis, Qadyaniya/Ahmadiya, Al Murjji'a, Habashis, Akshabandis al Baatiniya, etc. Do not represent the authentic Islam, neither are they true Muslim? I believe this is the authentic truth that no one can deny or avoid which should be said, spread worldwide, and not kept hidden!
What the dear brother has suggested is impracticable for many reasons. For instance sometimes the scholars of Ahl-al-Sunnah themselves differ in some matters, which depend on Ijtihad. This difference of opinion does not have any affect on their way of following Qur'an and Sunnah or Aqeeda. As you know, acceptable difference of opinion is permissible in Shariah such as the different opinion held by the Sahabah. There is Deep Wisdom of Allah in their various viewpoints. But the Ahl-al-Sunnah have consensus upon the fundamentals of Aqeeda and about those matters where opinions are not accepted by Allah. The truth is evident for the one who wants to know it. All Muslims are obliged to follow the way of the Prophet and his companions. They should call others to that way with good manners without forming a party or being partial to any specific group, also they should not bind the truth to a given group.
Murjia and Sufism. The Muslim scholars have written many books, given many lectures and issued many Fatwas warning against such groups. So, the rule concerning them depends on the extent of their innovative acts. Some groups are disbelievers, hence not Muslims. Others are Muslims but innovators. So, it is the responsibility of all Muslim scholars to warn people against these devious groups. But if what our brother suggested could be achieved, this would be a great achievement. But there are many constraints to it. So, we should do our best to warn people against these devious groups and teach them the true religion.
Fatawa Issuing Body : Islam
WebAuthor/Scholar : Dr. Abdullah Al-faqih
Date Of Issue : 08 Safar 1422
Al-Ahbash: Evolution and Beliefs
Al-Ahbash: Evolution and Beliefs :: Fatwa Management System :: World Fatwa Management and Research Institute
Dear scholars, As-Salamu `alaykum. I would like to ask you about the Association of the Islamic Charitable Projects in Germany. Is it a reliable association? I visited their web site on the net "", and I read some of the articles about Islam. However, I discovered that the information included is mainly concerned with at-tabarruk bil-awliya' was-salihin (seeking blessings of saints and righteous people). Could you please shed more light on the origin and beliefs of such a sect in detail.
We have visited the site you mentioned in your question and we came to the conclusion that this site is maily concerned with publishing information and articles about Al-Ahbash. Here, we will try our best to brief you on Al-Ahbash sect as well as their dogmas and beliefs by citing the following:
"Al-Ahbash is a stray sect that follows `Abdullah ibn Al-Habashi. It has recently appeared in Lebanon taking advantage of the ignorance and poverty that resulted from the Lebanese civil war. It calls for the revival of the approaches of the advocates of the science of Kalam (theology), Sufis, and the Batiniyyah, with the aim of corrupting the Islamic creed, fragmenting Muslims and distracting them from their main issues.
`Abdullah Al-Harari Al-Habashi is `Abdullah ibn Muhammad Ash-Shybi Al-`Abdary by lineage, and is called Al-Harary because he comes from the city of Harar in Abyssinya (Al-Habashah). He came to Lebanon in 1950 after he incited sedition against Muslims there. He joined hands with the ruler of Indragy , the son in law of Hilasilasy , against the Islamic schools for teaching Qur’an in the city of Harar in 1376 AH/1940 CE causing what is known as the sedition of the Kolob country which resulted in sentencing the manager of the schools to twenty three years of imprisonment then he was exiled to Joury county and died there.
Moreover, the rest of the Sheikhs and callers to Islam fell in the hands of Hilasilasy who humiliated them and drove them to flee to Egypt and Saudi Arabia. That’s why `Abdullah Al-Harary was called ‘ the leader of the sedition”. Since he came to Lebanon he kept inciting sedition exactly as he used to do in his country and kept spreading his corrupt beliefs, insulting the Prophet’s Companions (may Allah be pleased with them all) accusing `A'ishah, the mother of the believers (may Allah be pleased with her) of not following Allah’s orders in addition to issuing wrongful fatwas.
Al-Habashi has recently succeeded in attracting a large group of insolent fanatics who do not consider anyone as a Muslim unless he declared his submission to their leader and his corrupt creed that includes the Batinyyah and the Rafidah. Moreover, they force themselves on people by going to their houses and insisting that they learn the Habashi creed.
Beliefs and dogmas:
Reading thoroughly all that has been issued by such sect, one would clearly see that they violate the principles of Islam and its main creed. Following are some of their beliefs:
1- Concerning creed, they follow the condemned school of Irja'. It is well known that the Islamic creed held by the Prophet’s Companions and their successors states that faith is a matter of declaring in words, believing in the heart and all this must be reflected in action for belief without practice and submission to Shari`ah has no place in Islam. However, according to them it is not necessary that faith be reflected in action and hence a person remains a believer even if he neglects all the pillars of Islam.
2- Such a sect consider it permissible to seek the help of the dead besides instead of that of Allah and this is clearly considered in the Qur'an and Sunnah as ascribing partners to Allah. They urge people to do so claiming that the dead get out from their graves to fulfill the requests of those who call upon them and then get back to the graves. Allah Almighty says: “They worship beside Allah that which neither hurteth them nor profiteth them, and they say: These are our intercessors with Allah.” (Yunus: 18)
3- They consider that the Qur'an is not the words of Allah but that of Gabriel.
4- They claim to follow the Shafi`i School in respect to fiqh and belief. However, they are, in fact, very far from the principles of the School of Imam ash-Shafi`i.
5- They claim that Allah has created the universe and sent the Messengers to humans for no purpose or wisdom and whoever attributes any of Allah's actions to the Divine Wisdom is a mushrik.
6- They abuse the Prophet’s Companions (may Allah be pleased with them all) particularly Mu`awiyah, `A'ishah, Khalid ibn al-Walid. They declared that Mu`awayh (may Allah be pleased with him) was not a true believer. In such case, they are similar to the Rafidah who also insult the Prophet’s Companions. [Muslims must abstain from discussing the relationship between the Prophet’s Companions and their disagreements. They must also recognize their role in promoting Islam and their being privileged with the Companionship of Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessings be upon him). It is confirmed that Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessings be upon him) said: "Do not abuse my Companions for if any one of you spent gold equal to Mountain Uhud (in Allah's Cause) it would not be equal to a mudd or even a half mudd spent by one of them." Allah Almighty says: “And those who came (into the faith) after them say: Our Lord Forgive us and our brethren who were before us in the faith, and place not in our hearts any rancor toward those who believe. Our Lord! Thou art Full of Pity, Mercifl.” (Al-Hashr: 10)]
7- One of the most flagrant violations of this sect is their issuing of wrong fatwas that contradict the Qur'an and the Sunnah. For instance, they consider gambling with non-believers permissible in order to take away their money as long as this does not lead to sedition. Moreover, they consider robbing the harvest and the cattle of non-believers and permissible. They also consider it permissible to deal in Riba (interest) with non-Muslims, and to join lottery games. Moreover, one of their most obvious violations to the principles of religion is their declaration that it is permissible to look lustfully at women, on television or elsewhere, and also that intermingling between men and women without any restrictions is permissible. These are some examples of their weird fatwas that clearly contradict Shari`ah and consider all grave sins as permissible practices.
8- One of their mean ways of making Mulsims abstain from following the scholars of Islam is their belittling of their status, insulting them and labeling many of them as kuffar (non-Muslims). Among the scholars which they labeled as kuffar Ibn Taymiyyah, Adh-Dhahabi, Muhammad ibn Abdel-Wahhab, Sayyed Sabiq, Sayyed Qutb, etc."
Translated excerpts, with modifications, from Al-Mawsu`ah Al-Fiqhiyyah Al-Muyassarah fi Al-Adyan wal Madhahib Al-Mu`asirah. In this context, we'd like to cite for you the following fatwa issued by the eminent Muslim scholar, Dr. `Ali Jum`ah, Professor of the Principles of Islamic Jurisprudence at Al-Azhar University:
“This sect follows `Abdullah Al-Harary Al-Habashi, and it has surface and deep levels. At the surface, this sect seems to adhere to the Shafi`i School of Jurisprudence, and to Imam Al-Ash`ari’s School as regards creed. However, at the deep level, their main intention is to corrupt the Muslim creed and incite sedition amongst the Muslim Ummah. Moreover, they are paid agents to the enemies of Islam.
After inciting sedition in Harar, `Abdullah Al-Habashi moved to Beirut where he started deceiving young men into joining his suspected group. He worked as an editor for publishers in Lebanon and started to cooperate with the Jews and their agents in South Lebanon. He started in the seventies to spread his corrupt thoughts and to declare many scholars as non-Muslims, especially Imam Ibn Taymiyyah , Imam Muhammad `Abdul Wahhab , the Hanbalis and all those who held different views from his under the pretext that they violate the principles of Imam Al-Ash`ari or what he has understood from the texts of the Shafi`is .
Moreover, he urged his followers to incite sedition wherever they go. For instance, they cause such a controversy concerning the direction of the Qiblah in America violating all the principles of modern science claiming that they are just innovations and rejecting substantial evidence. They caused the same problem in Japan.
In addition to causing a problem over their following other Muslims in prayers, the problem over food, the controversy over getting married to women belonging to other revealed religions and other issues that are controversial amongst Muslim scholars.
They hold strange deviant views that have never been expressed by any Muslim sect, group or movement. They declared that intermingling between men and women is permissible without any restrictions, and that Muslim leaders are not true believers and that it is permissible to cooperate with non-believers. They also once spread that their leader died then they declared that it was a rumor. In such a way, they made people detest them as they were always linked with sedition. Several Muslim authorities warned against such a sect including: the Islamic Research Academy at Al-Azhar, the General Authority for Research, Fatwas and the Islamic call and guidance in Saudi Arabia, the Higher Council for Fatwas in Northern America.
In order to continue deceiving people, they usually do not express their true views and intentions in the books or any of the publications that they issue. Even the books issued by their leader is quite ordinary and do not contain any of their aberrant views which is, in fact, part of their plan to deceive people and attract more followers. However, many of their followers repent and revert to the true path when they learn the truth about such sect."
Based on the aforementioned facts, we'd like to conclude with the following points:
1- The Ahbash group is a stray group that is not considered among main stream Muslims and they have to revert to the true path of the Companions and their successors, both in belief and in action.
2- It is not permissible to follow the fatwas of such sect.
3- They are not trustworthy and people must be warned against their dangerous corrupt views. Moreover, Muslims should advise the followers of such sect to revert to the true path.
You can also read: Casting Aspersions on Erudite Scholars Differences among the Companions: Islamic Approach Allah Almighty knows best.
Country Of Origin : Morocco
Fatawa Issuing Body : Islam online
Author/Scholar : A Group of Islamic Researchers
Date Of Issue : 7/Jun/2003
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} | 12,160 | Ruling on seeking help from the Creation
April 25, 2012
Compiled by Saad Khan
Allah Most High says in the Qur’an,
“You alone do we worship, and from You alone do we seek aid.” (Al-Fatihah, 5)
‘Allamah Husayn bin Mas’ud Baghawi al-Shafi’i (d.516 AH) writes in the commentary of this verse, “We seek assistance from You in Your ‘ibadah (worship) and in all of our affairs. If it is said, ‘Why was ‘ibadah mentioned before isti’anah (beseeching for help) even though help is sought before ‘ibadah?’ By this those who believe ability (istita’ah) occurs before an action are defeated. But we, by the grace of Allah, believe accordance and seeking help (isti’anah) occur simultaneously with an action, so there is no difference between placing [isti’anah] before and placing [it] after [‘ibadah]. It was [also] said: Isti’anah is a type of ‘ibadah, so it is as though ‘ibadah as a whole was mentioned first, and then one of its particular types [i.e. isti’anah] was mentioned.” (Ma’alim al-Tanzil, 1:53)
Therefore it can be seen that istighathah/isti’anah is a form of worship.
Verdicts on seeking aid from the creation:
[1] The author of the well-known work I’la’ al-Sunan, `Allamah Zafar Ahmad ‘Uthmani (d.1394 AH), has discussed the issue of istighathah in detail in his treatise Al-Irshad fi Mas’alah al-Istimdad. He has divided istighathah into several categories for a better and a clearer understanding. The summary of which is:
[a] To call a prophet or a saint (dead or alive) from nearby or at their grave.
[b] To call them from a distant place when the purpose is not to address them directly, such as when their name is called out due to overwhelming [emotion and] rapture of their love [as sometimes done in poetry].
[c] To call them [with the intention of addressing them] and with the belief that they can hear from far.
[d] To call them in their absence, not to address them, [seek aid from them] or due to overwhelming rapture [emotion], but rather as a recitation of a supplication (du’a) which contains their name as being addressed (ba sighah al-nida’).
[The ruling on the above mentioned points:]
[a] It is permissible according to the agreement of the research scholars (muhaqqiqin). This is provided that isti’anat (help) being sought is not haram, [such as] asking those alive for things that are considered umur ghayr `adiyyah[1] (those things that are `adatan -according to natural disposition – or shar’an – as per Shari’ah – outside the power (qudrah) of humans and are not considered their actions – [also referred to as ma fawq al-asbab]) like saying, ‘O shaykh, give me children’.
Or to ask those in the grave for things that are either umur ghayr `adiyyah or things that are considered umur `adiyyah (those things are that `adatan or shar’an within the power of humans and are considered their actions – [also referred to as ma taht al-asbab]) but become umur ghayr `adiyyah after death, like asking for help in a trial, or asking for sustenance, children, rain, cure from disease, etc.
[b] It is permissible.
[c] It is shirk.
[d] It is permissible provided that this supplication (du’a) is present in the Qur’an or hadith, like in tashahhud where `al-salamu `alayka ayyuhannabiy’ is reported with sighah al-khitab. (For more see: Maqalat ‘Uthmani, 2:287-288)
[2] Shaykh ‘Abd al-Fattah Abu Ghuddah al-Halabi (d.1417 AH) was falsely attributed with having supported istighathah. He clarified his stance by stating, “I, by the grace and guidance of Allah Most High, His favor and help, did not commit any of the matter which they [falsely] claimed. I subscribe to that which the great scholars and pious predecessors [have already] determined in the past, like Imam Ahmad and other imams (may Allah have mercy on them) who said: ‘It is unlawful to seek aid (istighathah) from the creation; it is impermissible to seek aid from anyone other than Allah in matters which are not in the power (qudrah) of anyone except Allah’. [Thus] I acted upon the clear texts [which] prevailed in the Qur’an and Sunnah of the Messenger (Allah bless him and give him peace). I have no need to provide the texts here, since my purpose here is not to prove and provide evidence for this, but to expose slander and oppression.” (Kashf al-Abatil, p.36)
It is clear from the above statement of Shaykh ‘Abd al-Fattah that to seek aid above the means (ma fawq al-asbab) is not permissible under any condition, and he attributes this principle to Imam Ahmad bin Hanbal.
[3] Imam Muhammad bin Pir ‘Ali al-Birgivi al-Hanafi (d.981 AH), the famous Ottoman scholar and author of Tariqah al-Muhammadiyyah, writes in Ziyarat al-Qubur while discussing visitations to graves that are not deemed permissible according to the Shari’ah, “Visiting graves to offer prayers by them, circumambulate them, kiss them, brush up against them, rub cheeks on them; take their dust, supplicate to their occupants, seek their aid (isti’anah), ask from them help, sustenance, well being, children, fulfillment of debts, removal of difficulties, help with sorrows and other needs which the worshippers of idols used to ask their idols – none of this is sanctioned in Shari’ah according to the consensus of the imams of Muslims, because neither the Messenger of Allah (Allah bless him and grant him peace) did this nor did any of the Companions and Followers and the imams of the faith did this. Rather, the basis of this heretical (bid’ati), polytheistic visit has been derived from the worshippers of statues.” (Ziyarat al-Qubur, p.18)
He further writes while responding to one of the arguments used by the proponents of istighathah and describing how Satan deceives them, “There are stories narrated by them about the people in graves: A man performed istighathah to a certain grave in intensity, so he came out of it [i.e. came out of his difficulty]. Another person called the dead person or supplicated to him in need, so his need was fulfilled. Likewise, a person was afflicted with a trouble, so he beseeched a certain dead person in the grave, and his trouble was removed. These priests and grave-worshippers have many such incidents to report; if we mention all of them, the chain will be too long. They are the worst liars of Allah’s creatures from the living and the dead. They are bent to fulfilling their needs and removing their harms, so when they hear that the grave of a person is an antidote they tend to it and the Satan acts gently to invite them. Satan first invites the person to pray near it. Thus, the person prays there with earnestness and humbleness and Allah accepts his prayers due to his humbleness, and devotion and not because of the grave. Had he called Allah in a bar, wine shop, bathroom or a market, Allah would have responded to his call. As a result, the ignorant has a false impression that the grave has some effect in the acceptance of the prayers. And Allah accepts the prayers of the helpless even if he is a disbeliever (kafir). Therefore, it is not necessary that Allah is pleased with the one whose prayers are responded to or He loves him or He approves of his actions, as Allah accepts the prayers of the righteous and the dissolute and of the believer and disbeliever.” (Ziyarat al-Qubur, p.31-32)
[4] ‘Allamah Taqi al-Din Subki (d.756 AH) writes, “This [i.e. hasr (restriction)] only appears in [the verse]: ‘You alone we worship, and You alone we ask for help’ because of the certainty that none is [rightfully] worshipped except Allah, and help is sought from none save Him.” (Fatawa al-Subki, 1:13)
[5] Imam Shah Waliullah Muhaddith Dahlawi (d.1174 AH) has at length refuted the practice of seeking aid from the dead. He writes regarding those people who visit the graves of the saints in order to present their needs, “Tafhim (Instruction): Anyone who goes to the town of Ajmer [to the grave of Khawaja Mu’in al-Din Chishti] or to the grave of Shaykh Salar Mas’ud Ghazi (may Allah have mercy on them), or to any such place, in order to ask [them] for his needs (hajat), [his going] is indeed a sin more grievous than murder and adultery. He is not but like those who worship the creation or like those who call on Lat[2] and ‘Uzza [for help]. However, we do not [explicitly] declare disbelief [upon him] due to the absence of a text from the Lawgiver in this specific matter. Anyone who assigns life to the dead and requests his needs from them, ‘his heart is surely sinful’ (Qur’an, 2:283), and [this act] is included in His statement (Exalted is He), ‘that is iniquity’ (Qur’an, 5:3).” (Tafhimat al-Ilahiyyah, 2:45)
Shah Waliullah writes at another place, “Some of them [Mushrikin] believe that Allah alone is Noble and the Master, and He alone has influence over the world, but [they also believe that] sometimes He grants some servants the garment of highness and majesty and provides them with power and discretion (tasarruf) in certain matters of the world, just like the emperors give some of their slaves the robe of ruling and set them as rulers of some parts of their empires… And this is the illness of the majority of the Jews and Christians, and the idolaters, and some of the extremists of the hypocrites of the religion of Muhammad (Allah bless him and give him peace) in today’s time.” (Al-Budur al-Bazighah, p.123-124)
‘Allamah Muhammad Sarfaraz Khan Safdar writes in Tanqid-i-Matin bar Tafsir Na’im al-Din, p.27, that from the above quote of Shah Waliullah it becomes clear that the polytheists used to seek help from entities other than Allah, even though they did not seek their help considering them as independent, rather they considered them phenomena (mazhar) of Allah’s help and aid. And this is the reality of polytheism; there is no polytheist in the world who believes that anyone besides Allah is the real helper in the sense of considering him ‘necessary per se and an independent source of power. Instead the polytheists used to seek help [from other entities] under the gifted power [which they believe was gifted to them by Allah].
Shah Waliullah writes while explaining the principles of religion, “Besides, the rejection of polytheism in relation to Him in worship, in seeking aid, in remembrance, in sacrifice, and in vows and oaths is among the principles of this religion.” (Al-Budur al-Bazighah, p.251)
And he writes while distinguishing between various types of hypocrites, “People who have been prevailed upon by paralogism [their bad knowledge about Allah]… are like the hypocrites of the Muslim community. They follow the religion of Islam and conceal in their hearts others who they associate with Allah in their worship, as in their asking others besides Allah for help (isti’anah). They have thought that the pleasure of God is confined to the pleasure of His worshipping devotees.” (Al-Budur al-Bazighah, p.202)
The clever amongst those who propagate seeking aid from the dead say, ‘when we ask the dead for help, we merely use them as a means; it is no different from taking medicine when sick’. Shah Waliullah Muhaddith Dahlawi refutes their deception by stating, “And you should know that seeking to fulfill needs (hajat) through the dead with the belief that they are [merely] a means to fulfillment is disbelief (kufr) which must be avoided; the Kalimah Shahadah regards it as prohibited, but nowadays people are excessively involved in these things.” (Al-Khayr al-Kathir, p.105)
Shah Waliullah writes in Al-Qawl al-Jamil, p.46 – a book on the Sufi practices of the four major tariqahs of tasawwuf, “Explanation of Major Sin: Among the major sins is ascribing partners with Allah in worship and in seeking aid [in a matter that is not established by the natural means (asbab) or established in the Shari‘ah] for livelihood, cure, and other such things. And an indication to repent from these two [ascribing partners in worship and in seeking aid] is His utterance (Exalted be He) ‘It is You we worship and You we ask for help’ (verse five of Surah Fatihah).”
[6] Shaykh Khurram ‘Ali al-Balhuri[3] (d.1271 AH) writes while commenting on the above quote of Shah Waliullah from Al-Qawl al-Jamil, “Mawlana [Shah ‘Abd al-‘Aziz Dahlawi ] wrote in the footnote of this book [i.e. Al-Qawl al-Jamil] that it is common in our age to seek aid in acquiring livelihood and cure through graves and the dead.
The translator [Shaykh Khurram ‘Ali] says that ‘ascribing partners in worship’ is to perform practices to other than Allah which were specifically meant for Allah or the House of Allah. These include fasting [in the name of] Sayyiduna ‘Ali al-Murtada (may Allah be pleased with him), or prostrating to someone, or calling someone other than Allah with a name of Allah, or circumambulating around graves just like the tawaf of Ka’bah. As far as the indication of repenting from ascribing partners in worship and in seeking aid (as in verse five of Surah Fatihah) is concerned, it is because advancing the maf’ul (object) on the fi’l (verb) is useful in creating emphasis and stress, i.e. “You alone [and only You] do we worship, and from You alone [and only You] do we seek help”. So, when worship and isti’anah (seeking aid) have been established to be exclusive for Allah, it is absolutely unlawful to worship ghayrullah or to seek aid, ask for livelihood or cure, etc. from them. The reason for specifying worship is obvious. As for the reason for specifying isti’anah, it is that helping depends on three qualities: [1] knowledge (‘ilm), [2] power (qudrah) and [3] mercy (rahmah). [The reason for knowledge] is that one who is unaware of the other’s needs, how can he help him? And if he has the knowledge, but does not have the power, then how can he assist his needs? And if knowledge and power both are present, but he does not have mercy and compassion, then why would he help the needy one? So, these three qualities are exclusive to Allah alone, who is All-Knowing, All-Powerful and Very Merciful; therefore seeking aid from other than Allah is unlawful. Some grave-worshipers say that Allah has bestowed knowledge and power to awliya’ so seeking aid will not be prohibited from them. The response to them is that if they are truthful in their claim, they should prove from the Qur’an or Hadith or Ijma‘ (consensus) of the Ummah that the awliya‘ have such vast knowledge that the far and near as well as the ghayb (unseen) and shahadah (seen) are equal for them, and in every moment [these awliya‘] are aware of the needs of the entire world and have the power to remove their troubles. But this is absolutely impossible to establish. Therefore, their unfounded notions are not worth paying any attention. May Allah grant us through His generosity correct understanding and protect us from misguidance and misunderstanding. Amin!” (Shifa’ al-‘Alil, p.46-47)
[7] Imam Rabbani Mawlana Rashid Ahmad Gangohi (d.1323 AH) writes while discussing the issue of seeking aid from the prophets and saints with the belief that they are merely a means (sabab), “Although it seems the fulfillment of needs is through instruments, to supplicate and seek aid from the instruments is shirk. This is because leaving the Powerful Creator and seeking aid from an instrument is not free from the resemblance of shirk. Supplicating and calling is something else as it requires the one being called to have knowledge and discretion (tasarruf), while being a means is something else because it indicates that it is a medium and accepted before Allah, and there is a vast difference between the two! For example, the sun provides light, but seeking light from the sun is shirk.” (Rasai’il Rashidiyyah, p.93)
[8] ‘Allamah Mansur ibn Yunus al-Bahuti[4] (d.1051 AH) in Kashaf al-Qina’, 5:145, and ‘Allamah Mustafa Suyuti al-Rahbani (d.1243 AH) in Matalib Uli al-Nuha Sharh Ghayat al-Muntaha in the chapter ‘Ruling of the Apostate’ have also refuted this notion of using the dead as intermediaries for seeking aid. They state, “The Shaykh said: [The ruling of apostasy is given towards one who] has an aversion towards the Messenger or what he came with, according to consensus. He added: [This ruling also applies if] he took intermediaries between himself and Allah, relying on them and supplicating to them, according to consensus. [Such belief] is infidelity (kufr) since it resembles the acts of the idolaters who say: ‘We worship them for no other reason but because they would bring us near to Allah’.”
[9] Imam Shah `Abd al-`Aziz Muhaddith Dahlawi (d.1239 AH), the son of Shah Waliullah, while discussing the permissible and impermissible types of istimdad at the grave, writes, “Seeking help is of two types. Firstly, a creation (makhluq) seeks help from another created being, like servants and beggars asking the rich and the kings for help in their needs. [This is permissible when the ones being asked are alive, since after death this ability is beyond their means – as was explained above and will be explained later]. And [as for the] general public, requesting the saints to pray to Allah regarding their needs – this type of request is allowed in Shari’ah, be it from the dead or those who are alive.
He continues:
“Secondly, to request the creation for matters which are permanently exclusive to Allah – like giving children or sending rain or curing diseases or increasing the lifespan and other similar things which are invoked and asked only from Allah, this type [of istimdad] is not only absolute haram, but rather disbelief (kufr). And if anyone from among the Muslims asks for this type of help from the saints of his madhhab, dead or alive, he is outside the fold of Islam.” (Fatawa ‘Azizi, 1:35)
From the above it also becomes evident that to ask aid above the means (ma fawq al-asbab), from the dead or alive, is not permissible.
Shah ‘Abd al-‘Aziz Dahlawi further writes while discussing deviant beliefs, “…Or elevates the status of the imams and saints to the level of the prophets and messengers, and establishes for the prophets and messengers divine characteristics (lawazim al-Uluhiyyat) such as knowledge of the unseen (‘ilm al-ghayb), answering the invocation (faryad) of anyone from anywhere and having power over everything…” (Tafsir `Azizi, 1:40)
The three beliefs refuted by Shah `Abd al-`Aziz, [i] ‘ilm al-ghayb, [ii] hadir nadir, and [iii] mukhayyir al-kull, make the backbone of the beliefs of the innovators of our time. The innovators assume that prophets and saints have ‘ilm al-ghayb and are aware of everything that goes on in the universe, and they are able to hear us when we call upon them because of them being hadir nadir. And since they can hear our needs, they can also help us by their authority of discretion (tasarruf) in the matters of the universe because they are mukhayyir al-kull.
Shah ‘Abd al-‘Aziz mentions that being aware of everything that goes on the tongues or in the hearts of the creation is only the special quality of Allah Most High, and the creation has no authority in this matter. He mentions that the polytheists and some so-called Muslims affirm this for the saints and seek aid from them with this belief that they are aware of our states at all times.
He writes in an explanation of the “drawing close” mentioned in the hadith: ‘My slave shall continue drawing close to me’, “However, this way of closeness (taqarrub) is particular to Allah Almighty. If someone wishes to seek closeness to any of the creation in this way, it is not possible and applicable. The reason for this is that, in this type of relationship, the one being approached one must have two qualities:
[a] The first is the encompassing knowledge of the verbal and mental dhikr of the dhakirin (those who remember) despite of being in different places and at different times, and being varied in intellectual capacities and languages, so that he could know the verbal and mental dhikr of every dhakir.
[b] The second is the power of being close, and the intruding in place and covering it, and creating such a condition which, in terminology of Shari’ah, is known as ‘dunu’, ‘tadalli’, ‘nuzul’ and ‘qurb’ (nearness, coming closer, descending, closeness).
Both these qualities are special to Allah Almighty alone; none of the creation shares these qualities. Yes, some of the disbelievers establish the first matter for some of their deities while some among the Muslims who worship the saints also affirm the same for their saints, and at times of need seek aid (istia’nat) from them with this belief. (He continues)… And this applies to all created things, even if they have souls, because they firstly do not have encompassing knowledge that allows them to know of the dhikr of everyone who is doing dhikr.” (Tafsir ‘Azizi, Juz 29, p.18, from Itmam al-Burhan fi Rad Tawdih al-Bayan, ‘Allamah Sarfaraz Khan Safdar)
Shah ‘Abd al-‘Aziz Dahlawi writes while discussing different types of shirk, “The fourth type is worshipers of saints (pirs) [who] say that when a saint becomes in the sight of Allah mustajab al-da’awat (whose du’a is accepted) and maqbul al-shafa’ah (whose intercession is approved) because of his spiritual exercise and effort (mujahidah) [and then he] leaves this world, his soul acquires great power and immense expansion. So if one envisions (tasawwur) him, or prostrates at his place of residence or grave and expresses full humility, then [the saint’s] soul comes to know of that because of its expansion and freedom, and then intercedes on his behalf in this world and the hereafter.” (Tafsir ‘AziziSurah Baqarah, p.127)
Shah ‘Abd al-‘Aziz writes in the commentary about Wadd, Suwa’, Yaghuth, Ya’uq and Nasr mentioned in Surah Nuh, “In short, all these five are the names of the five sons of Sayyiduna Idris[5] (may the peace of Allah be upon him) and all of them were men.” (Tafsir `Azizi, p.131)
The people of Sayyiduna Nuh (may the peace of Allah be upon him) considered these saints as phenomena and manifestations of Allah’s help, and referred to them with titles such as dafi’ al-bala’ (remover of distress). The leaders among his people urged their public not to leave these saints.
Shah ‘Abd al-‘Aziz continues, “Yaghuth, who is [considered to be] the phenomena of giving aid and resolving difficulties, was created in the form of a horse by the people of Sayyiduna Nuh (may peace be upon him); this was so because the horse symbolized running, rushing, and helping. And as per the Shari’ah, this attribute is called ghiyath al-mustaghithin (fulfilling the need of help-seekers) and mujib da’wat al-muztarrin (answerer of the supplications of the afflicted), and in Hindi language this phenomenon is called indar. [And they said] not to leave Ya’uq either, who is the phenomena of protection and removal of troubles, and in Islam this attribute is called kashif al-dhur (warder of harm) and dafi’ al-bala’ (remover of affliction).” (Tafsir `Azizi, p.131, from Itmam al-Burhan, ‘Allamah Sarfaraz Khan Safdar)
[10] ‘Allamah Ahmad Din Bughwi al-Lahori[6] (d.1286 AH) wrote Dalil al-Mushrikin on the enormity of shirk. In there he states, “Shirk fi ‘l-isti’anah (shirk in seeking aid): Committing shirk in seeking help and seeking the fulfillment of one’s needs through the dead, and committing shirk in directing one’s attention towards them, is the most heinous form of shirk[7]. Do you not see that ‘ibadah (worship) and isti’anah (seeking aid) are specific for Allah as in Surah al-Fatihah: ‘You alone do we worship, and from You alone do we seek help,’ (1:4). In every Salah we admit and acknowledge in Surah al-Fatihah,O Allah! We make our worship for You [and You alone]. And we do not seek help from anyone other than You. And all of our needs we ask help from You alone. We neither worship any other than You, nor do we ask help from any other than You [in matters that are ma fawq al-asbab]. And look, Allah Most High has in the Holy Qur’an rejected asking for help and aid from other than Him: ‘Other than Allah, you have neither a patron, nor a helper’ (2:107). Likewise, He also negated Shifa’ah [from other than Allah]: ‘Other than Him, there is neither a guardian for you, nor an intercessor,’ (32:4). And Allah has limited help to His own self: And help is not except from Allah, the All-Powerful, the All-Wise,’ (3:126). And Allah is sufficient for being a guardian and helper: ‘Allah is enough as a friend, and Allah is enough as a supporter,’ (4:45).” (Dalil al-Mushrikin, p.107-108)
He further writes, “This issue has been mentioned in the treatise of Hafiz Hamid al-Qari al-Lahori: ‘If anyone says while boarding a ship, ‘Appear, O Khidr!’ and he believes that Khidr (peace be upon him) is aware of his affairs, then he will turn kafir. Likewise, if someone says, ‘O Farid Ganj Shakar, or O Nizam al-Din help me in my affair’, and he believes that they are aware of his affairs and matters, he will become kafir. The proof is that if the belief that the Holy Prophet – who is the best and the most knowledgeable of the creation – knows the ghayb is kufr, as the Qur’an says: ‘With Him [Allah] are the keys of the Unseen’ (6:59), and: ‘If I [the Messenger of Allah] had the knowledge of the Unseen, I would have accumulated a lot of good things,’ (7:188). When the Messenger of Allah himself does not know the knowledge of the unseen, what can we say about others? And this issue has been mentioned in Nafi’ al-Muslimin and Fatawa al-Muhit that one who believes that the Messenger of Allah (Allah bless him and give him peace) or the angels knows the ghayb will become kafir. This is because supplicating and invoking them [the prophets, angels, etc.] entails that they are aware of these prayers and invocations. This is prohibited and not supported by any proof, ‘surely, conjectures are of no avail in the matter of truth at all,’ (10:36). And even if one does not believe that they are hadhir nadhir, it will be sheer nonsense and still considered haram [to ask and supplicate from them].” (Dalil al-Mushrikin, p.85-86)
‘Allamah Bughwi al-Lahori continues while distinguishing between istighathah and tawassul, “However, if in both the cases [whether near the grave or far from it], he says, [for example]: ‘O Prophet of Allah’! or, ‘O Martyr! give me children, memory of knowledge, or cure my patient, or fulfill my such-and-such need, [and so on,]’ then in this situation saying thus will clearly be kufr. This is because he denies the Qur’an: ‘Other than Allah, you have neither a patron, nor a helper,’ (2:107). He has clearly denied an explicit verse therefore it is kufr. And if he says before the grave: ‘O so and so! Ask Allah to give me children, or memory of knowledge, or to fulfill my such and such need, or to cure my patient,’ then supplicating like this is disputed among the scholars. Some regard it unlawful [while others regard it lawful]. But the unlawfulness is before the graves of those who are other than those we have mentioned [i.e. making such du’a is not lawful at the graves of people other than the prophets, the martyrs and those who have been given the glad tidings of Paradise by Allah and his Messenger].” (Dalil al-Mushrikin, p.111)
And he writes while discussing the severity of seeking aid from the dead, “And Shaykh ‘Abdullah al-Multani writes: ‘When a man directs his attention away from Allah Most High and towards some other being and he knows that his need would be fulfilled by this other being, his need is fulfilled quickly. The angels submit before Allah Most High, ‘The person did not put his request before You, yet You hurriedly granted his request. What is the wisdom behind that?’ Allah Most High replies that this person has sold his iman (faith) and I have taken it from him, so why should I not hurry to fulfill his need?” (Dalil al-Mushrikin, p.152)
Lastly, he answers an objection by the proponents of istighathah. They say, “If it is said that all these verses are about idols and statues, then how, from these verses, do you negate power (qudrah) and discretion (tasarruf) for the awliya’ who spent their lives in following His orders and carrying out His commands?’ The Shaykh replies, ‘First, this statement is not worthy of accepting that these verses were exclusively meant for idols. Instead, as we have mentioned in the commentary and explanation of these verses, these verses are general, and include angels, saints, prophets, jinns idols, and the rest of the creation. Associating anything in the worship of Allah Most High has been negated. Second, if, suppose we do say that these verses were exclusively for the idols, even then the statement is not worthy of accepting because it is an established principle of Usul al-Fiqh (principles of jurisprudence) that the generality of the words will be considered. The specificity of the cause is not considered. If the specificity of the cause is considered and the rulings are limited [to that specific cause], then the teachings of the Qur’an will no longer be general and common, which is against the promise made by the Qur’an: ‘It is nothing but a reminder for all the [people of the] worlds,’ (12:104)].” (Dalil al-Mushrikin, p.68-69)
[11] ‘Allamah Sun’ Allah bin Sun’ Allah al-Makki[8] (d.1120 AH) wrote a treatise Sayfullah ‘ala man Kadhiba ‘ala Awliya’ Allah – The Sword of Allah against one who attributes lies toward the friends of Allah. In it, he has refuted the practice of istighathah and other deviant beliefs prevalent among the ignorant masses. He writes on pp.22-3, “Nowadays, multitudes amongst the Muslims have emerged claiming that the saints (awliya’) have discretion (tasarrufat) in their life and after death, and through them help is sought (yustaghathu bihim) in difficulties and calamities, and by their aspirations, matters of concern are resolved, so they come to their graves, call to them to fulfil their needs, adducing as evidence for [this practice] that these are miracles (karamat) from them. [Some of those] who claim knowledge of [juristic] issues reinforce this for them, and support them with fatwas and treatises…This, as you see, is speech containing negligence and excess, and extremism in the religion due to abandoning precaution (tark al-ihtiyat). Rather, therein is eternal damnation and infinite punishment, due to what it contains of the odors of actual shirk, and of contending with the authoritative Mighty Book and opposition to the beliefs of the Imams, and that which this ummah has agreed upon.”
He further writes on p.36-38, “Whoever attributes lies to His friends (awliya’), it is as if he attributes lies to Allah and takes his desires as his god. ‘They [shall] have shackles around their necks,’ (13:5). ‘They are like cattle. Rather, they are more astray.’ (7:179). As far as what they say regarding the saints (awliya’) having discretion (tasarruf) in their lives and after death, it is rejected by His (Exalted is His Mention) saying: ‘Is there any god along with Allah?’ (27:60). ‘Know that to Him belongs the creation and the command,’ (7:54). ‘To Him belongs what is in the heavens and the earth,’ (31:26). ‘To him belongs the dominion of the heavens and the earth,’ (25:2).
And there are many other similar verses which state that Allah alone has the attributes of creation, discretion (tasarruf) and predestination without any kind of partnership with anyone. So, everything is under His dominion and control, in discretion and ownership, in giving life and death, and in creation. This was accepted by the predecessors and their successors, and it was agreed upon by all Muslims and they believed it as they believed in ‘la ilaha illallah’.
Many verses of the Qur’an praise Allah Most High for His singularity in His dominion and power [in the universe], like His saying: ‘Is there any creator except Allah?’ (35:3). ‘Only He created everything,’ (25:3). ‘We created everything with measure,’ (54:49). ‘That is Allah, your Lord, the Creator of everything,’ (40:62). ‘Is then the One who creates [everything] equal to one who does not create?’ (16:18). ‘Show me what they have created from the earth; Or have they a share in [the creation of] the heavens?’ (35:40). ‘And those whom you invoke besides Him do not own even the membrane on a date-stone,’ (35:13). ‘Say: call upon those whom you claim besides Allah. They do not possess [anything] even to the measure of a particle, neither in the heavens nor in the earth. They have no share at all in them,’ (34:22). ‘Surely, those whom you invoke beside Allah are slaves [of Allah] like you,’ (7:194). ‘Those whom you call beside Him cannot help you, nor can they help themselves,’ (7:197). ‘That is because Allah is the truth and that whatever they invoke besides Him is false and that Allah is the High, the Great,’ (22:62).
There are uncountable verses containing the same meaning. In all these verses His saying ‘min dun Allah (other than/besides Allah) means [all] other than Him Most High, as it is general including within it those you believe to be a satan and a saint from whom you seek help. One who has no power to help himself [i.e. ghayrullah], how can he render help to others?”
‘Allamah Sun’ Allah al-Halabi writes on p.40, “As far as the belief that after death they have discretion (tasarruf) in matters, it is more heinous than saying they have discretion in their lifetime.”
He further writes on p.45-47 while explaining the correct understanding of miracles, “As for their support that these powers are from their karamat [and at their discretion], it is fallacious, because karamah is something that originates from Allah by which He honors (yukrim) His friends and prophets, without their intention, challenge, power and knowledge, as in the matter of Maryam bint ‘Imran[9], Usayd ibn Hudayr[10], Abu Musa al-Khawlani, and those that are like them as you will soon learn. Thus it can’t be said that they are from their powers and [nor can it] be unqualifiedly said of them what they say of tasarruf (discretion). ‘Undoubtedly they utter an evil word and a lie’ (58:2) and the sincere Muslims are free from such things.
As for as their statement: ‘through them help is sought in difficulties and calamities, and by their aspirations, matters of concern are resolved’, this is worse and strange, and more abominable and repulsive, because this contradicts the Qur’an: ‘Or the One who responds to a helpless person when He prays to Him and removes distress, and who makes you vicegerents of the earth? Is there any god along with Allah? (27:62). ‘Say, Who is the One who delivers you from the darkness of the land and the sea? Say, Allah delivers you from it and from every pain,’ (6:64). ‘Whatever blessing you have is from Allah. Then, once you are touched by distress, to Him alone you cry for help,’ (16:53). ‘Say, call those whom you assume [to be gods], besides Him, while they have no power to remove distress from you, nor to change it,’ (17:56). ‘Then, tell me about those whom you invoke other than Allah, if Allah intends to cause some harm to me, are they [able] to remove the harm caused by Him? Or if He intends to bless me with mercy, are they [able] to hold back His mercy [from me)]’ (39:38). ‘If Allah causes you harm, there is no one to remove it except He Himself; and if He causes you good, then He is powerful over everything,’ (6:17).
And there are other similar verses in which Allah Most High declared that no one is the remover of harm but He and only He can remove distress and pain and He alone grants the supplications of the distressed ones and no one but He is called for help. He is all Powerful to do good and He alone can do so. Since He [Allah] was indeed meant [in these verses], the ghayr (others) – like the angels, prophets, saints and so on – were automatically negated, as was explained in the Holy Qur’an: ‘Say, call those whom you assume, besides Him, while they have no power to remove distress from you, nor to change it,’ (17:56) with further argument from the following verse: ‘Those whom they invoke, do themselves seek the means of access to their Lord as to which of them becomes the closest, and they hope for His Mercy and fear His punishment. The punishment of your Lord is really something to be feared,’ (17:57). The verse declares clearly that the prophets do not have power to remove harm from anyone, so how can the others who are even lower in rank than them do so? But, ‘whomsoever Allah lets to go astray, for him you will find no one to help, [and] no one to lead,’ (18:17).”
‘Allamah Sun’ Allah al-Makki answers a misconception of the proponents of istighathah, on p.49-51, “What has been said [by some scholars] of istighathah through the prophets and saints being permissible, the meaning of it is only attaining blessing (tabarruk) through their mention, and tawassul through them, and not seeking assistance (imdad) from them.[11]
So, beware, and then again, beware, with respect to your condition of the fallacy of your brethren!
O Allah! Cleanse us from this ignominy and protect us from suspicion of that in which is destruction [i.e. shirk].”
‘Allamah Sun’ Allah continues while distinguishing between help that is within the means and that which is above the means, “Seeking aid (istighathah) is permissible in the ordinary outward means (al-asbab al-zahirat al-‘adiyyah), of fighting or catching an enemy or a predator and the like of this like their statement: ‘O Zayd!’ ‘O my people!’, or ‘O Muslims!’ as they mentioned them in the books of Nahw in accordance with actual (bi l-fi’il) outward means.[12] However, seeking aid by potential [means] (bi l-quwwah) or in intangible matters of difficulties, of sickness, fear of drowning, distress, poverty; and seeking provision and its like; these are from the exclusive qualities of Allah and no one besides Him can be invoked with regards to them.
Allah, Glorious is His Mention, states: ‘And when you face a hardship at sea, vanished are those whom you used to invoke, except Him ,’ (17:67). Thus He negated the invocation of other than Him, so His uniqueness in this is stipulated. Thus, hold to such belief, and do not be of those who deviated due to his reason, ‘when shackles will be round their necks, and chains they will be dragged into the hot water after which they will be thrown into the Fire as fuel,’ (40:71-72).
As for their condition of coming to their [i.e. saints] graves and calling them to fulfill their needs, deducing as evidence that this is from their karamat; then, if their arrival is with the intention to supplicate near their grave and tawassul through them, there is no harm, just as ‘Umar (may Allah be pleased with him) performed tawassul through Sayyiduna Al-‘Abbas (may Allah be pleased with him), because there is success in supplication in the places of the righteous.
As for their condition of believing in effectuation (ta’thir) from them, and that they have discretion in fulfilling their needs, as the pre-Islamic Arabs and ignorant Sufis do, while calling them and seeking aid from them, this is from the abominable acts because when discretion is negated from the living – as has preceded – how can it be established for the dead?!”
[12] ‘Allamah Muhammad Kamil ibn Mustafa al-Tarabulusi al-Ash’ari al-Shadhili[13] (d.1315 AH) writes in his fatawa, “I was asked about a common occurrence among the masses with regards to the vow of a goat or cow for dead awliya saying: ‘O Shaykh! O Badawi! If I get relief, or if my patient is relieved or if my lost item returns, then I will owe you a ram or a bull or a sheep’. Is this lawful or not?
The answer is: It is not lawful. It is mentioned in Al-Durr al-Mukhtar under the discussion of vows in the Book of Fasting: ‘And know that indeed the vows (nadhr) made to the dead by the majority of the lay-masses and what dirhams, candles, oil and their likes are taken at the mausoleums of the noble awliya to gain proximity to them, this is baseless and haram by consensus, as they don’t intend to spend them on needy people. People are heavily involved in such practices, especially in our times.’ The commentator of Al-Durr al-Mukhtar, Ibn ‘Abidin says [quoting Al-Bahr al-Ra’iq]: ‘[[His saying: this is baseless and haram]] on account of a few reasons. Among them is that it is a vow to the creation and a vow to the creation is not permissible because this is a [form of] worship and worship should only be for the creator; and among them is that the person being promised is dead and the dead cannot own; and among them is that he thinks that the dead person has discretion (tasarruf) in issues beside Allah Most High. And his belief in that is kufr, oh Allah, except if he says, “Oh Allah, surely I promise you — if you cure my illness, or return me my lost possession, or fulfill my need — that I shall feed the poor, who are at the door of Sayyidah Nafisah, or Imam Shafi’i, or Imam Layth, etc,” from among those things in which there is benefit for the poor, and the vow (nadhr) is to Allah Most High, then such a vow will be valid. The Shaykh mentioned that this is subject to the vow being diverted to those deserving of it who live in its rabat, so it is permissible by this consideration. Later, he transmitted consensus (ijma’) on the prohibition of making a vow to creation, that it will not take place and it will not occupy one’s responsibility. The complete [discussion] can be found therein [Hashiyah Ibn ‘Abidin], referencing Al-Bahr al-Ra’iq [of ‘Allamah ibn Nujaym al-Misri]. And Allah knows best!
Note: That which the masses and the rural scholars do is shirk. That is, taking oath on the grave of a wali with the belief that if one takes an oath on it, and breaks [it], [the wali] will take recompense from his body, wealth and children. This is just as the idolaters used to believe that whoever takes an oath on idols and breaks [the oath], they will harm him and do with him what they will do. May Allah protect us! The jurist who instructs [the one taking an oath] to do this with the belief in what was mentioned, he falls under the [same] ruling as the one who took the oath [i.e. shirk]. We seek Allah’s safety. [It is found] in the noble hadith, according to what [Shah Wali Allah] al-Hindi quoted in Hujjat Allah al-Balighah, ‘One who swears by anyone except Allah has committed shirk.’ [Shah Wali Allah] said: ‘Some people have understood it as a severity and harshness in warning; but the reality is that it applies to those who from amongst them believe in the causative effect [of such an oath], for thereupon he will be a true polytheist – and there is no power, nor might, but with Allah!’” (Fatawa Kamiliyyah, p.241 – Provided by Mufti Husain Kadodia)
He writes at another place, “I say: it is not hidden what has been the consequence of the common people revering the graves of awliya’ and drawing covers over them of great harm to their beliefs. They believe with respect to the saints in their power to cause effect along with Allah, so much so that they stopped making vows for Allah, despite this being something established., and [instead], they increasingly began making vows for saints and seeking their closeness, and they abandoned taking oaths on Allah until this practice became almost nonexistent amongst them, and they do not dare take an oath on them [i.e. the saints] because they believe that if one will not fulfill his oaths taken in the name of a wali, he will cause harm to his body, wealth and children. This is shirk, may Allah protect us! Do you not see what the author of Hujjat Allah al-Balighah [Shah Waliullah al-Dahlawi] reported, that the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) said: ‘Whoever takes an oath for other than Allah then indeed he has committed shirk’. He said: ‘Some of them have understood it as a warning and emphasis. But it is not so, as the hadith is upon its apparent meaning when they take an oath with the belief that the saint can cause them harm in their bodies and wealth.’
I heard some knowledgeable and pious Ottoman qadis saying: ‘If I had the power to demolish the domes of saints, I would have demolished them entirely,’ as did Sayyiduna ‘Umar bin al-Khattab (may Allah be pleased with him) with the tree under which Ba’yat [al-Ridwan] took place, when it was reported to him that some people visit it and pray near it, for he uprooted it from its root, lest the common people get affected by it. It is mentioned in the Sahih from Sayyiduna Ibn ‘Umar (may Allah be pleased with him) that the identity of the tree was concealed. They [the scholars] said: [this was] so that people do not fall into temptation because of it after the goodness that occurred beneath it. Had it remained, it would not be safe from the ignorant masses revering it until they may believe that it possesses the power to benefit and harm, just like we observe now in that which is less than it. Sayyiduna Ibn ‘Umar alluded to this in his statement: ‘It was kept hidden as a mercy from Allah Most High.’ Ibn Sa’d narrated with an authentic chain from Nafi’ that it was reported to Sayyiduna ‘Umar (may Allah be pleased with him) that some people visit the tree and pray near it. He warned the people and later ordered it to be chopped off, and so it was done.” (Fatawa Kamiliyyah, p.264-265 – Provided by Mufti Husain Kadodia)
[13] And Imam Shah Rafi’ al-Din Muhaddith Dahlawi (d.1233 AH), the son of Shah Waliullah Dahalwi, writes in refutation of the polytheistic practices, “And Mushrikin resort to polytheistic acts in the matter of [assigning] partial control (juzwi tasarruf) of the universe [to the prophets, saints, etc.] such as increasing sustenance, bestowing children, averting sickness, making the souls subservient and things of that sort. This is nothing but clear shirk – there cannot be an excuse [for such beliefs].” (Fatawa Shah Rafi al-Din, p.7, from Tanqid Matin, Sarfaraz Khan Safdar)
[14] Hafiz Ibn Rajab al-Hanbali (d.795 AH) writes in his book Kalimat al-Ikhlas, “The analysis of this meaning and its explanation is that the saying of the servant ‘there is no god but Allah’ requires that there is no god for him but Allah. And a god is one who is obeyed and not disobeyed; due to His lofty status, He is honored, loved and feared; He is one from whom one hopes, trusts or places reliance on; He is one who is invoked (su’al) and to Whom supplication (du`a) is made – and no one deserves all these things save Allah. Therefore, if anyone ascribes any partner in any of these matters which are exclusive to Allah alone (Khasa’is al-Uluhiyyah), it will prove that his sincerity in saying ‘there is no god but Allah’ is stained and his tawhid is defective.” (Kalimat al-Ikhlas, p.18)
It therefore becomes manifest that to make du’a to the creation – the key component in istighathah – is akin to making the creation partners in attributes which are exclusive to Allah (Khasa’is al-Uluhiyyah) alone.
[15] Hakim al-Ummah Mawlana Ashraf ‘Ali Thanawi (d.1362 AH) writes, “[Kufr and shirk is] to ask someone for the fulfillment of one’s needs, sustenance and children… To implore someone from a great distance and to think that he must have definitely come to know of it… To recite the name of a particular saint in the form of remembrance or incantations… To say that if Allah and His Messenger (Allah bless him and give him peace) wish such and such a thing, it will be done…” (Bahishti Zewar, section on Beliefs)
Mawlana Thanawi mentioned in relation to the verse 45 of Surah al-Zumar:
“Similar to it is the condition of some ignorant claimant of tasawwuf. That is, at the mention of pure/authentic tawhid they are sickened. And [are delighted to] do istighathah with the awliya’.” (Masa’il al-Suluk min Kalam Malik al-Muluk, p.468)
[16] Dr. Wahbah Mustafa al-Zuhayli, a contemporary Syrian Shafi’i Ash’ari scholar writes in his treatise entitled Al-Bida’ al-Munkarah (Reprehensible Innovations), “One of the more widespread innovations amongst the Muslim laity is seeking istighathah and madad from other than Allah, the Most Exalted, such as the person who says, ‘Oh Rifa’i, Oh Badawi, assist me, or Oh so-and-so, come to my aid’. All of this is a reprehensible innovation, due to the statement of Allah, the Most Exalted, ‘So do not call upon, instead of Allah, that which can neither benefit nor harm you. If you do so, then you are certainly from amongst the wrongdoers’. (Yunus,106)
And [it is further supported by] the statement of the Prophet, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, as reported by Ibn ‘Abbas, may Allah be pleased with him:
‘He said, I was behind the Prophet, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, on a donkey called Ya’fur, and he said to me, ‘Young man, I shall teach you some words [of advice]: Be mindful of Allah, and Allah will protect you. Be mindful of Allah, and you will find Him in front of you. If you ask, ask of Allah, and if you seek help, seek help from Allah.’” (Musnad Ahmad, Sunan Tirmidhi)
After imploring and seeking help has been restricted to being directed only towards Allah in such a manner, how then can it be said, ‘I beseech so-and-so for help’. The condition of the ignorant and the laity is indeed strange.
Istighathah is not the same as tawassul (intercession), for it is seeking from the Creation that which only the creator is capable of, and tawassul is seeking from Allah by means of His creation. The tawassul that is established from the sunnah is through the living and not the dead, and through one’s righteous deeds, as is the meaning of Allah, the Most Exalted’s, statement, ‘Oh you who believe, be conscious of Allah and seek means (wasilah) towards him’. (Al-Ma’idah, 35) An example of this is the story of the three people who were trapped in a cave when a boulder descended from the mountain and blocked the entrance of their cave, so they supplicated to Allah by means of their righteous deeds, and a third of the boulder budged at the end of each man’s supplication until the entrance was open, allowing them to exit. (Sahih Muslim)” (Al-Bida’ al-Munkarah, p.31-32)
[17] ‘Allamah Qadi Thana’ullah Panipati (d.1225 AH) writes, “To prostrate before the graves of the prophets and saints, to circumambulate around them, to invoke them [for help], or to make offerings to the inhabitants of graves is haram; rather some of these matters lead to kufr. The Messenger of Allah, may peace and blessings of Allah be upon him, cursed the people who do such things and forbade the Ummah from doing them, and ordered us not to make his grave an idol.” (Ma la Budda Minhu, p.80)
He writes at another place, “It is recommended to go to Uhud early on Thursday and to visit its martyrs and to begin with the grave of Hamzah, may Allah be pleased with him, the uncle of the Prophet, and leader of the martyrs. During his visit, an intelligent person should be careful to avoid innovations in greetings, like touching and kissing the grave, walking in a circle around it, asking from the person buried there, and praying at it because what is prescribed is supplication and asking forgiveness for them. As for asking for something from them and taking oaths by them to Allah Almighty; that is misguidance and innovation (by the agreement of the Imams of the believers). None of the Companions did that. The Imams agree that when one wants to make supplication, he should face the qiblah and not face the grave.” (Ma la Budda Minhu, p.215)
[18] Imam Shah ‘Abd al-Qadir Muhaddith Dahlawi (d. 1242 AH), the son of Shah Waliullah Dahlawi, defines shirk, saying, “Shirk is to ascribe any attribute of Allah to anything else, such as believing that someone knows everything or has [been given] the ability to do whatever he wants or that our benefit or harm is in his control, or prostrating to someone and asking him to fulfill one’s needs, believing he has [been given] the ability to do so.” (Mawdah al-Qur’an, p.22)
In this quote he has refuted the deviant concepts of istighathah, hadir nadir, ‘ilm al-ghayb and mukhayyir al-kull.
[19] ‘Allamah ‘Abd al-Rahman Abu Shamah al-Shafi’i (d.655 AH), the teacher of Imam Nawawi (d.676 AH), writes in his book Al-Ba’ith ala’ Inkar Al-Bid’ah wa ‘l-Hawadith, p.100-101, “…Then these innovations and ugly invented matters are of two types. The first is that which the laymen and the specialists both understand to be an innovated matter. It could be an unlawful act or an undesired act. The other type is that which most people – excluding those who are protected by Allah – consider to be an act of worship, getting close to Allah, obedience, and a Sunnah. We will not spend a lot of time discussing the first type because there is no need for a lengthy discussion when the participant already knows that this is not an established practice of Islam. However, we will give a few examples of the second type in which many ignorant laymen have fallen in. These people have discarded the divine code of Islam and have abandoned following the scholars of Islam… Other examples of this type include the widespread practice which Satan has beautified for the masses in which they make walls, pillars, and lanterns in specific places in a city. A person tells them that he saw in a dream that a pious person and a friend of Allah is buried there. They start honoring these pious people and being particular about this, despite the fact that they are neglecting the obligations of Islam and the Sunnah practices. They believe that they are doing good by venerating these pious people. Then, they take this to a more extreme level until the veneration of these places overcomes their hearts. Thereafter, they start honoring the places themselves and they begin hoping that sick people will be cured and their needs will be fulfilled by making oaths at these places. These areas tend to be between fountains, trees, walls, and rocks.
In the city of Damascus – may Allah preserve it – there are many such places, including a specific spring near the Tawma gate, a specific pillar near the ‘small gate,’ and the accursed dry tree near Bab al-Nasr – may Allah facilitate the cutting of this tree and uproot it. How similar are these places to the thorn tree which is mentioned in the books of hadith related to the battle of Hunayn.”
[20] ‘Allamah Murtada al-Zabidi al-Bilgrami (d.1205 AH ), a student of Imam Shah Waliullah Dahlawi, said, “It is atrocious for believers to present their needs to [anyone] other than Allah Most High despite their knowledge of His Oneness and His uniqueness in [the attribute of] Lordship, and they hear His Most High saying: ‘Is Allah not enough for His slave?’ (39:36).” (Ithafus Sadah Al-Muttaqin, 9:498)
[21] Shaykh Sayyid ‘Abd al-Rab Husayni al-Dahlawi (d.1305 AH), a khalifah of ‘Allamah Shah Ishaq Muhaddith al-Dahlawi[14] (d.1263 AH) and founder of Madrasah ‘Abd al-Rab in Delhi, writes, “… Now, for him to take the name of tariqah is haram. Does he believe that listening to flutes in the ‘urs [annual festivals held at the shrines to commemorate the death anniversaries of Sufi saints] and falling unconscious in them; prostrating to, kissing and circumambulating the graves of the pious; becoming the murid of a drum-beating faqir; having faith that the souls of the pious are hadir nadir; and to seeking aid from them is tariqah? I seek refuge with Allah. I seek forgiveness from Allah. There is no power to do good or evil except with Allah, the High, the Great. This is the deception of the accursed Satan, the vanity of the disobedient soul. It is haram for such a person to take the name of haqiqah and ma’rifah (gnosis) because he has not recognized Godly Glory nor recognized the Muhammadan Reality. How can such a person be bestowed with irfan?” (Risalah Irshad-i-Pir, from Hayat Shah Ishaq, p.173)
[22] Shaykh Sayyid Ahmad al-Rifa’i al-Husayni (d.578 AH) writes in Al-Burhan al-Mu’ayyad, p.6, “The worst of whims is to see others [besides Allah] and to busy oneself from the Creator with creation. According to a sane person, what is busying oneself in other than Him? Believing that others have influence in matters, whether little or much, partial or whole, is polytheism. The Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) said to `Abdullah ibn ‘Abbas (may Allah be pleased with him): ‘Oh child! I will teach you some words: Be mindful of Allah and He will be mindful of you. Be mindful of Allah, and you will find Him in front of you. When you ask, ask Allah and when you seek help, seek help from Allah. Know that if the whole community were to gather together to help you with something, they would not help you but with something Allah had written for you. And if they were to gather together to harm you with something, they would not harm you except with something Allah had written for you. The pens have been lifted and the pages have dried’.”
And he writes on p.28-29, “When you seek aid (ista’antum) from the servants of Allah and His friends (awliya’), do not acknowledge help and aid from them as it is polytheism (shirk), but ask [Allah] to fulfill your needs through His love for them. There are many unkempt and dusty people with rags who are pushed aside from doors; if they swear by Allah, Allah will fulfill their promise. Allah empowered them in the existents, and overturned for them the entities, and He made them say by His permission to something ‘be’ and it would occur – kun fayakun. ‘Isa, peace be upon him, created birds out of clay with Allah’s permission and made the dead alive with Allah’s permission. The trunk [in the mosque] yearned for our beloved and our Prophet, the master of the chiefs of the prophets, upon him the best of blessings and peace; the stones saluted him and Allah united in him the miracles which were dispersed in the [earlier] prophets and messengers; and the secrets of his miracles continue in the awliya’ of his Ummah. Thus, for the awliya’ they are karamat that continue. The miracle of the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) also continues. O my son, O my brother, when you say: ‘O Allah, I beg You through Your mercy,’ it is as though you said: ‘I beg you through the wilayah of your servant Shaykh Mansur and other awliya,’ because wilayah is a specialty with which He favors by His mercy whomever He likes.”
[23] Shaykh Bayazid al-Bastami (d.261 AH) is reported to have said, “One created being calling another such being for help is just like a prisoner calling his inmate for help.” (Ruh al-Ma’ani, 6:128)
[24] Responding to those who declare the hadith of Sayyiduna Ibn Umar[15] a fabrication only because some innovators use it as a proof for seeking aid from the creation, ‘Allamah Habib al-Rahman al-A’zami (d.1992 C.E) writes, “In particular, some innovators (mubtad’iah) present it as a proof that istighathah from ghayrullah is valid. And whatever is presented by the innovators as proof of istighathah, we see it imperative that you say: it is fabricated!” (Al-Albani Shudhudhuh wa Akhta’uh, p.41)
[25] ‘Allamah ‘Abd al-Haq Haqqani Dahlawi (d.1336 AH) writes, “Fiqhi Issues: From this verse [You alone do we worship, and from You alone do we seek aid], this point is established that worshiping any other than Allah is haram whomsoever it may be, and neither is prostrating to someone permissible, nor bowing down. The Companions (Allah be pleased with them) submitted, ‘O Messenger of Allah! We wish to prostrate to you but you have forbidden us.’ (Mishkat) And neither is it lawful to fast with someone’s name nor is it permissible to give charity in the name of other than Allah. Neither is it lawful to circumambulate any other house like the Ka’bah nor is to head to it wearing ihram. It is even impermissible to slaughter an animal with the name of other than Allah. And similarly, seeking aid [above the means] from other than Allah is unlawful, as well as considering someone as fulfiller of needs (qadi al-hajat) and remover of afflictions (dafi’ al-baliyyat).” (Tafsir Haqqani, 2:33)
[26] ‘Allamah Ibrahim Bin Mar’i al-Maliki (d.1106 AH) writes, “[The Prophet’s (upon him peace) saying:] ‘When you seek help,’ i.e. you seek help in a matter from the matters of the world or religion – for this [reason], the object [of the verb] is omitted which indicates generality. [His saying:] ‘then, seek help from Allah,’ as He has power over all things, while [all] besides Him have no power over anything. Help is sought from one who is able to give help. And as for the one who is dependent on his master, unable to implement what he wishes for his own self, let alone others, how can he be worthy of being asked for help or his means relied upon? One who is unable to benefit and repel harm from himself, he is even more incapable [of benefitting or repelling harm] from others. If only man would humble himself! Thus, [the example of] a creation seeking help from another creation is like a prisoner seeking help from another prisoner. So, do not seek help but from your Master, for He [alone] is your Guide in your latter and former [lives]. How can you seek help from a slave despite your knowledge of his helplessness? How can a person who is unable to save himself from calamity save others of the children of his genus from it? Do not seek assistance from anyone besides Allah, for indeed He is the Protector and Helper. Do not hold fast [to anything] besides His rope as He is the Mighty and Powerful.” (Futuhat al-Wahbiyyah bi Sharh al-Arba’yan Nawawiyyah, p.184)
[27] We will close by presenting the verdict of Shaykh ‘Abd al-‘Aziz bin Dabbagh[16] – who is held in high regard by the proponents of istighathah – on this topic.
Shaykh Ahmad bin Mubarrak al-Lam’ati (d.1156 AH) asked his teacher Shaykh ‘Abd al-`Aziz bin Dabbagh (d.1132 AH) concerning the people who ask the saints for help as is mentioned in Ibriz[17], p.249-250,
“And I asked him: ‘Why do people seek aid (yastaghithuna) by mentioning the pious ones instead of [turning to] Allah? [And] when a person is keen in swearing an oath; you observe him say: ‘By the right of Sayyidi So-and-So!’ like Sayyidi `Abd al-Qadir al-Jaylani or Sayyidi Ya’zi or Sayyidi Abu ‘l-`Abbas Sabti and others – may Allah benefit us through them! And if one wishes to have someone swear an oath and to confirm his oath, he says: ‘Swear to me by Sayyidi So-and-So!’ And if he is afflicted by some loss and he wishes to implore, like those who undertake to beg from the people, he invokes the name of Sayyidi So-and-So. In doing all this they are cut off from Allah— mighty and glorious is He —and if it’s said to them: ‘Call upon Allah as your intermediary or swear oaths by Him’ or something to that effect, these words make no impression on them. So what’s the reason for this?’
In response, he [‘Abd al-‘Aziz bin Dabbagh] said, may Allah be pleased with him, “The people of Diwan from the friends of Allah did this deliberately due to the intense darkness of [people’s] essences, and because of the great number of those cut-off from Allah— mighty and glorious is He —whose essences have become wicked. The friends of Allah love that the essences of those who remember their Master and their Lord, the Most High, are pure. This is because Allah, the Exalted, answers the one who supplicates while he is devoted completely to Him inwardly at the time of supplication. The supplication is answered in two ways: either He gives him what he asked, or he is shows the secret of the [divine] decree of rejection if it is withheld. This latter happens only to the true friends of Allah and not to the deprived and distant ones. For if the gloom-laden essence were to turn towards Allah the Sublime with all its vessels and all its substances and it asked Him for something which He refused and He didn’t inform it about the secret of the divine decree behind the refusal, it might experience doubt concerning Allah the Sublime’s existence and fall prey to something more calamitous and more bitter than not having its request fulfilled. Therefore, it is of great benefit what the people of Diwan resorted to by linking people’s thoughts to the pious individuals. Should they then experience doubt about whether the upright are friends of Allah, this would not harm them.
Explaining this further, he said (may Allah be pleased with him), “Another indication for you of the large number of people cut off from Allah, and the great amount of darkness in their essences, is that you observe, for example, a person leaves his house and takes about twenty mauzunahs to a grave of a saint in hopes that his requests are answered. How many needy and poor persons, in their way to the grave, asked him for help for Allah’s sake and he did not give them even a single dirham, but he proceeds to the friend of Allah and places the money by his head. Now this is one of the ugliest things that occur. The reason for this is that the charity was not intended for Allah the Most High and, had this been the case, he would have given it to every needy person he met. But since the incentive for them and the motive for bestowing them was the intention of profit for himself and the fulfillment of his own purposes and allotments, he singled out one particular place for them because he imagined profit was attached to that place in both presence and absence.
He also added, may Allah be pleased with him, that I am a witness of what has been gifted to the righteous people from the entrance of Tilimsan to Saqiya al-Hamrah, which was 80 dinars, three hundred and sixty sheep, two cows and seventy bulls, all donated in one day to the pious people, but not even ten dirhams were donated for the sake of Allah the Exalted [i.e. to the poor].
He further explained, may Allah be pleased with him, that this a cause from the causes leading to disconnection from Allah the Most High which has overcome this Ummah without most of them realizing it. There are a total of 366 causes which all derail people from their Lord.
I said: Do you remember some of these causes now?
He responded saying: Write [this] down:
The first: Gifting to the dead saints, as we stipulated above, and not [giving for] the sake of Allah— mighty and glorious is He.
Second: Taking an intermediary to the righteous through Allah – mighty and glorious is He – so that they fulfill one’s wish. The visitor to the tomb says: ‘I’ve come to you, Oh Sayyidi So-and-So by Allah’s glory, that you fulfill my need (hajat) for me!’ This also causes separation from Allah as the visitor to the tomb has distorted what is required and reversed the matter. He should have taken a means to Allah – mighty and glorious is He – through His friends and not the reverse [i.e. asking directly].
Third: Visiting [the graves of] saints, while the visitor has not done all the obligatory prayers incumbent on him. It is obvious that abandoning what is to be done for Allah to visit a saint is a manifest darkness and an act of disconnection from Allah…”
Dr. ‘Allamah Khalid Mahmud has explained the above quote in Mutali’ah Barelwiyyat. The summary of which is that, according to Shaykh ‘Abd al-‘Aziz bin Dabbagh, many of the ignorant from Ahl al-Bid’ah, with darkness in their hearts, were on the verge of leaving Islam, and they did not have anything that would have them labeled a Muslim, but it was not the will of Allah that these people leave Islam openly and become Hindu, [etc]. Therefore, they were left aside not to convert from Islam openly, nor to have the honor of calling Allah the Sublime, since only the one who is pure-hearted receives such a blessing. But those who devour unlawful wealth and who are inherently wicked, they keep on invoking the ones in graves. This is the punishment for those who go astray from the path of tawhid. The people of Diwan, according to Shaykh ‘Abd al-‘Aziz bin Dabbagh, had the innovators turn towards the graves and domes so they do not leave Islam openly and nor does the light of tawhid enter their hearts. These people, with darkness in their hearts, if they were to ask Allah directly and their supplication was not answered, it was feared that they would lose hope in Allah Most High and have doubts about Allah’s existence. Instead, they were turned towards the graves for the fulfillment of their needs, and if their supplication was not answered, they would have doubts about the saints and not Allah Most High, and this was thought to be less harmful than doubting Allah, even though it led people to deviation.
See: Istighathah by Ismaeel Nakhuda
See: Istighathah: Seeking aid from other than Allah by Saad Khan
Aap kay Masa’il awr un ka Hal – Shaykh Yusuf Ludhianwi Shahid
Fatawa Rashidiyyah – Imam Rashid Ahmad Gangohi
Guldastah-i-Tawhid – ‘Allamah Sarfaraz Khan Safdar
Itmam al-Burhan fi Radd Tawdih al-Bayan – ‘Allamah Sarfaraz Khan Safdar
Maqalat ‘Uthmani – ‘Allamah Zafar Ahmad ‘Uthmani
Rasa’il Chandpuri – ‘Allamah Sayyid Murtada Hasan Chandpuri
[1] Shaykh Yusuf Ludhianwi Shahid (d.1421 AH) writes, “To consider prophets or saints mutasarrif in umur ghayr ‘adiyyah is shirk.” (Aap kay Masa’il awr un ka Hal, 1:43) ‘Allamah Sayyid Murtada Hasan Chandpuri (d.1370 AH), who Shaykh Zahid al-Kawthari referred to as ‘the eminent teacher’ (al-ustad al-jalil), mentions that to affirm the qudrah and tasarruf of anyone besides Allah in umur ghayr ‘adiyyah is shirk, regardless of whether or not one believes that this was bestowed by Allah. (See: Tawdih al-Murad li man Takhabbat fi ‘l Istimdad, p.611)
[2] According to Sayyiduna Ibn ‘Abbas (may Allah be pleased with him), Lat was a pious and generous person who used to mix and give barley (Sattu) to the pilgrims. When he died, people started to gather at his grave and began to worship him. (Bukhari, 2:761; Tafsir Ibn Kathir, 253) What kind of worship was it? Shah Waliullah writes, “And they would ask him for help (yasta’inuna) in the time of hardships.” (Al-Budur al-Bazighah, p.126) Shah Waliullah further writes that this was the reason Allah has declared the polytheists of Makkah as infidels.
[3] He studied the traditional books under the sons of Shah Waliullah, and then became a disciple of Imam Sayyid Ahmad Shahid. He translated sections of Al-Durr al-Mukhtar on Hanafi fiqh, called Ghayat al-Awtar, which was then completed by other ‘ulama after his death. He translated Mashariq al-Anwar by ‘Allamah al-Saghani and he translated Al-Qawl al-Jamil of Shah Wali Allah and called it Shifa al-‘Alil. He has a popular work called Nasihat al-Muslimin similar to ‘Allamah Shah Isma‘il’s Taqwiyat al-Iman (Nuzhat al-Khawatir, p. 963)
[4] See Mansur ibn Yunus al-Bahuti
[5] According to Tafsir Ibn Kathir, however, Wadd was the name of Sayyiduna Sheeth (Seth) (may the peace of Allah be upon him) and the other four were his sons.
[6] He is Ahmad Din (1217 AH – 1286 AH) bin Hafiz Nur Hayat bin Hafiz Muhammad Shifa’ bin Hafiz Nur Muhammad Bughwi. He traveled to Delhi, at the age of eight, with his elder brother, ‘Allamah Ghulam Muhyi al-Din Bughwi (1203 AH – 1273 AH), for higher learning. There they studied under the likes of Imam Shah ‘Abd al-‘Aziz Dahlawi and ‘Allamah Shah Ishaq Muhaddith Dahlawi. He is the author of many books like Hashiyyah Jalali, Hashiyyah Sharh Mulla, Mas’alah Ghina’, and Dalil al-Mushrikin (on the enormity of shirk). (Hada’iq al-Hanafiyyah, p.504-505) Mawlana Faqir Muhammad Jhelumi writes in Hada’iq al-Hanafiyyah, p.504, “However, the extent of the spread of the rational (ma’qul) and transmitted sciences (manqul) in Punjab was not done by anyone as much as by these brothers. Thousands of people graduated and received benefit at their hands. It seemed as if no person of knowledge remained deprived of being their student, some of them directly and others by being connected to their students.”
[7] ‘Allamah Ahmad Din Bughwi has divided shirk into 20 types. (1) Shirk fi ‘l-dhat. (2) Shirk fi ‘l-‘ilm. (3) Shirk fi ‘l-mashiyyat. (4) Shirk fi ‘l-tasarruf. (5) Shirk fi ‘l-qudrah. (6) Shirk fi ‘l-‘ibadah. (7) Shirk fi ‘l-‘adat. (8) Shirk fi ‘l-nazr. (9) Shirk fi ‘l-tasmiyyah. (10) Shirk fi ‘l-half. (11) Shirk fi ‘l-zabh. (12) Shirk fi ‘l-tathir. (13) Shirk fi ‘l-isti’anah (seeking aid). (14) Shirk fi ‘l-nida’ (calling). (15) Shirk fi ‘l-bismillah. (16) Shirk fi ‘l-tayrah. (17) Shirk fi ‘l-akhbar. (18) Shirk fi ‘l-tasawwur. (19) Shirk fi ‘l-tama’im wa ‘l-raqi. (20) Shirk al-asghar.
[8] He is Sun’ Allah bin Sun’ Allah al-Halabi al-Makki al-Hanafi. He is an orator, jurist and muhaddith of high stature. He has a number of authorizations to narrate hadith. He authored Sayfullah ‘ala man Kadhiba ‘ala Awliya’ Allah and Iksir al-Tuqa ‘ala Sharh al-Multaqa. (Hadiyyat al-‘Arifin, 1:428; Mu’jam al-Mu’allifin, 5:24)
[9] As Allah Most High said: “Whenever Zakariyya visited her at the place of worship, he found food with her. He said: ‘Maryam, from where did you have this?’ She said: ‘It is from Allah. Surely, Allah gives whom He wills without measure,’ (3:37).”
[10] This is mentioned in Sahih al-Bukhari (3805), chapter of the Merit of Sayyiduna Usayd bin Hudayr and Sayyiduna ‘Abbas ibn Bishr (may Allah be pleased with them). Sayyiduna Anas (may Allah be pleased with him) narrates: ‘Usayd bin Hudhayr and a man from Ansar (the Helpers) went out in a very dark night, when suddenly there was a light in front of them, and when they parted, the light also parted’. Imam Muslim narrated a hadith in the virtue of Sayyiduna Usayd bin Hudayr in his Sahih (796), chapter: ‘Descent of peace while reciting the Qur’an’. The Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) said: ‘You should have kept on reciting, Ibn Hudhayr.’ The angels descended like a canopy with what seemed to be lamps in it, and he (Allah bless him and give him peace) said: “Those were the angels who listened to you; and if you had continued reciting, the people would have seen them in the morning and they would not be hidden from them’. The original story was quoted in Sahih al-Bukhari (5011), Chapter of the Virtue of Al-Kahf (the cave), but the hadith of Bukhari (5018) says clearly that he would recite Surah al-Baqarah. Hafiz Ibn Hajr explained it that the incident might have taken place more than one time. (Fath al-Bari, 9:57)
[11] This was also elucidated by others such as Imam Rashid Ahmad Gangohi, Mawlana Sayyid Murtada Hasan Chandpuri, etc. It says in Fatawa Rashidiyyah, p.200, “Since istimdad is a mushtarik (common) word, some adopted one [meaning] while others opted for the other.” Meaning that sayings such as, ‘O, so and so, please make du’a to Allah concerning my needs’; certain scholars referred to this as istighathah/istimdad. ‘Allamah Ibn Hajr Makki (d.974 AH), ‘Allamah Taj al-Din Sukbi (d.771 AH), etc. can be cited here as an example. They never endorsed directly seeking aid from the creation.
[12] The author distinguishes between actual (bi l-fi’l) means and potential (bi l-quwwah) means. The first is where the means are directly accessible, and can be utilized to attain the objective. Potential means are also effective means but they are not directly accessible in the circumstance. The author says that only actual means can be asked for help, but potential means cannot be asked for help.
[13] He is Muhammad Kamil ibn Mustafa ibn Muhammad al-Tarabulusi al-Ash’ari al-Shadhili, a jurist from amongst the people of western Tripoli and one of the most outstanding scholars of Libya. He was born in Tripoli in the year 1244 AH and studied in Jam’iah al-Azhar. There he studied the three madhahib other than the Hanbali madhhab in depth. Likewise, he benefited from the senior scholars of Al-Azhar, like Shaykh Muhammad ‘Illish, Shaykh Hasan al-‘Adawi (d.1882 AH), and Shaykh Ahmad ‘Abd al-Rahim al-Tahtawi (d.1885 AH). He assumed responsibility for giving fatwa in Tripoli and he taught there, until a large number of students graduated at his hands. He died in Tripoli in the year 1315 AH. He has a super commentary on Tafsir al-Baydawi entitled Majmu’ah al-‘Abd al-Dhalil ‘ala rub’ Anwar al-Tanzil, and other works, including Fath al Wadud fi hall Nazm al-Maqsud, Kulliyat fi ‘l-Mantiq, and others.
[14] ‘Allamah Shah Ishaq Muhaddith al-Dahlawi has divided shirk into 13 categories. (1) Shirk fi ‘l-dhat. (2) Shirk fi ‘l-‘ibadah. (3) Shirk fi ‘l-isti’anah (seeking aid). (4) Shirk fi ‘l-‘ilm. (5) Shirk fi ‘l-qudrah. (6) Shirk fi l’-tasarruf. (7) Shirk fi ‘l-khalq. (8) Shirk fi ‘l-nida’ (calling). (9) Shirk fi l’-qawl. (10) Shirk fi ‘l-tasmiyyah. (11) Shirk fi ‘l-zabh. (12) Shirk fi ‘l-nazr. (13) Shirk fi ‘l tafwidh umur al-khala’iq. (Risalah Shu’ab al-Iman, from Hayat Shah Ishaq, p.142)
[15] Sayyiduna Ibn ‘Umar had numbness in his leg, whereupon a man said to him: “Remember the most beloved of people to you”, so he said: “Ya Muhammad”. (Adab al-Mufrad, hadith No. 964)
[16] According to the chronicler, Shaykh Al-Qadiri (d.1187 AH), a student of Shaykh Ahmad al-Lam’ati, Shaykh Al-Dabbagh was unschooled (ummi), though not illiterate, and yet, he was significantly devoid of madrasah education. Moreover, it was claimed that he [Al-Dabbagh] received training from shaykhs that no one is acquainted with, shaykhs that neither we nor anyone else we have come across. (See Introduction to English translation of Al-Ibriz by John O’ Kane and Bernd Radtke, Brill – Boston.)
[17] Translation compared with English translation of John O’ Kane and Bernd Radtke, Brill – Boston. | https://barelwism.wordpress.com/tag/mustafa-suyuti-al-rahbani/ | isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2020-29
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} | 479 | Is it not shirk addressing the prophet?
As slm alkm,
Is it not shirk addressing/requesting the Prophet as in the Saturday Section of the Dalailil Khayrat?
Wa alkm slm
Why is it shirk? Don’t you address the Prophet (s) 5 times a day in at-Tahiyaat?
See: ‘How can we seek help from Prophet Muhammad if we are only allowed to seek help from God?‘ at Dar al-Fatawa al-Misriyya (Egypt’s Religious Affairs Ministry).
Excerpts from the Fatwa:
Allah the Almighty says, “Do not make [your] calling of the Messenger among yourselves as the call of one of you to another” [Qur`an 24: 63]. A request may constitute worshipping the person to whom the request is directed such as in the verse, “And ask Allah of his bounty” [Qur`an 4: 32], or it may not be so as in the verse “For the petitioner and the deprived” [Qur`an 70: 25]. Furthermore, seeking help may constitute directing worship to the object or person from whom help is sought as in the verse “It is You we worship and You we ask for help” [Qur`an 1: 5] or it may not be so as in, “And seek help through patience and prayer” [Qur`an 2: 45]. Love may constitute worship of the beloved or it may not be as the Prophet says in the hadith,
“Love Allah for the blessings He has poured on you, and love me through your love for Allah and love the members of my household through your love for me.
Shirk then means glorifying other than Allah in the manner due to Him. The Almighty says,
So do not attribute to Allah equals while you know [that there is nothing similar to Him]. [Qur`an 2: 22].
Allah also says:
And [yet], among the people are those who take other than Allah as equals [to Him]. They love them as they [should] love Allah. But those who believe are stronger in love for Allah. [Qur`an 2: 165).
Based on this, the difference between wasila and shirk becomes clear. Wasila includes venerating what Allah has venerated and doing so is in fact venerating Allah as per His words, Exalted be Him,
That [is so]. And whoever honors the symbols of Allah – indeed, it is from the piety of hearts. [Al-Hajj: 32].
Contrary to this, shirk would mean venerating an entity either alongside or other than Allah. Therefore, the angels’ prostration before Prophet Adam (peace be upon him) was out of faith and monotheism, while the polytheists’ prostration before the idols was disbelief and shirk, even though the prostration in both cases was to other than Allah. However, since the angels’ prostration to Prophet Adam was a form of glorifying what Allah has venerated and performed in the manner prescribed by Allah, it was permissible and rewardable, while the polytheists’ prostration to idols was a veneration emulating that which is due to Allah and therefore prohibited and punishable.
Taher Siddiqui
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} | 2,417 | Author Topic: Does the Qur'an contradict monotheism? (Read 4246 times)
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Offline adeel.khan
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Does the Qur'an contradict monotheism?
« on: December 28, 2013, 06:31:16 AM »
It has been alleged that there are a number of passages in the Qur'an which indicate that Islam is not a monotheistic religion and that there are a number of verses which indicate so.
Let us examine the verses claimed to contradict monotheism.
Allegation 1
That is Jesus, the son of Mary, the word of truth about which they are in dispute. It is not [befitting] for Allah to take a son; exalted is He! When He decrees an affair, He only says to it, 'Be,' and it is. 'And indeed, Allah is my Lord and your Lord, so worship Him. That is a straight path.' [1]
It is claimed that since the speaker at the start is Allah, hence the ending words are also the words of Allah i.e. it is Allah who is saying And indeed, Allah is my Lord and your Lord, so worship Him which would indicate that Allah is referring to someone else as Allah and His Lord. If only the selected passage is seen as it is, the outcome would most certainly appear to be as claimed. However, one needs to see the context as well. Let us understand these verses again with the context i.e. by selecting a few preceding verses.
[Jesus] said, 'Indeed, I am the servant of Allah. He has given me the Scripture and made me a prophet. And He has made me blessed wherever I am and has enjoined upon me prayer and zakah (obligatory charity) as long as I remain alive And [made me] dutiful to my mother, and He has not made me a wretched tyrant. And peace is on me the day I was born and the day I will die and the day I am raised alive.' [2]
The passage quoted here immediately comes before the first passage quoted above. Here we see that it was Prophet Eisa (Jesus) (peace be upon him) who was the one speaking. As soon as it is mentioned that he spoke in the cradle, the following verse mentions that this is the truth about Prophet Eisa (Jesus) (peace be upon him) about which they doubt. In other words, the miracle of the cradle is mentioned followed by a clarification from Allah about the truth. Then that truth is further explained in the next verse as to how Allah decrees an affair. Then when the matter is stated and explained, the context goes back to the speech of Prophet Eisa (Jesus) (peace be upon him) where he states And indeed, Allah is my Lord and your Lord, so worship Him. Notice that the words of Prophet Eisa (Jesus) (peace be upon him) in both the passages above start with Indeed. His sentence starts with Indeed, I am the servant of Allah followed by clarification and explanation from Allah and then again the words of Prophet Eisa (Jesus) (peace be upon him) continue with And indeed, Allah is my Lord and your Lord, so worship Him.
It does not require too much of a brain to understand the way of explaining here. The context and the words of Prophet Eisa (Jesus) (peace be upon him) themselves clarify who the speaker is in each verse.
There are similar passages in the Qur'an where an incident or event is mentioned preceded by a break to explain that incident or event and then continuing back with that incident or event and therefore the passages quoted above are not an exception. The only way to find problems in them is to look at them out of context in isolation.
Allegation 2
'And we descend not except by the order of your Lord. To Him belongs that before us and that behind us and what is in between. And never is your Lord forgetful. [3]
It is argued that since the entire Qur'an is the word of Allah in first person and there not being a mention of someone else's speech before the above quoted verse, the speaker is Allah and He describes His own descending by the order of the Lord of Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) who is other than Allah. They argue that the structure of the sentence is in such a way that this is the only conclusion derived from the verse.
To assume that this is the only and correct conclusion derived from this verse would be trickery. For the Qur'an, the entire book is the context. If a matter has been established somewhere in the Qur'an, then that cannot be ignored in other parts of the Qur'an. The Qur'an explicitly establishes that the Lord of Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) is none other than Allah.
The unbelievers _ be they among the people of the scriptures, or among the idolaters _ would not like to see any blessings ever conferred upon you by your Lord. But, for His mercy Allah selects whom He wants. Allah is the Lord of Infinite Grace and Bounties! [4]
(Tell them), 'Are you going to argue with us concerning Allah? He is our Lord, and your Lord! We have our deeds, and you have yours to account for. We have devoted ourselves (exclusively) to Him.' [5]
That definitely is the truth from your Lord. Allah is not unaware of anything you do. [6]
'Truly! Allah is my Lord, and your Lord! Therefore, worship Him (alone); that is the straight path!' [7]
This message is repeated hundreds of times in the Qur'an. If this is kept in mind while understanding the verse in question, no one would arrive at the faulty conclusion that there is a Lord other than Allah or that Allah Himself has a Lord.
Another question that may arise could be that how one can be sure that those that descend are the angels as the text is ambiguous. As has been explained before, the entire Qur'an is the context. When that is kept in mind, there appears no confusion, contradiction or ambiguity. The Qur'an states:
The angels and the Spirit (Jibreel) descend therein by permission of their Lord for every matter.
And we descend not except by the order of your Lord are the words of Angel Jibreel. The sentence takes a grammatical shift. Grammatical shift or Iltifāt is a feature of the Arabic language. [8] The concept requires a separate topic for explanation and the link is highly recommended.
Indeed, Allah knows the best.
[1] Qur'an 19:34 to 36
[2] Qur'an 19:30 to 33
[3] Qur'an 19:64
[4] Qur'an 2:105
[5] Qur'an 2:139
[6] Qur'an 2:149
[7] Qur'an 3:51
[8] Grammatical Shift For The Rhetorical Purposes:
« Last Edit: December 28, 2013, 10:12:33 AM by adeel.khan »
Offline ThatMuslimGuy
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Re: Does the Qur'an contradict monotheism?
« Reply #1 on: December 28, 2013, 08:00:58 AM »
Great post. I was surprised to hear there are people out there making these claims haha.
Offline adeel.khan
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Re: Does the Qur'an contradict monotheism?
« Reply #2 on: December 28, 2013, 09:52:48 AM »
There are more such allegations that some passages of the Qur'an appear to contradict monotheism.
Servants of Allah or of the Messengerﷺ?
The verse under discussion is as follows:
قُلْ يٰعِبَادِيَ ٱلَّذِينَ أَسْرَفُواْ عَلَىٰ أَنفُسِهِمْ لاَ تَقْنَطُواْ مِن رَّحْمَةِ ٱللَّهِ إِنَّ ٱللَّهَ يَغْفِرُ ٱلذُّنُوبَ جَمِيعاً إِنَّهُ هُوَ ٱلْغَفُورُ ٱلرَّحِيمُ
Qul (Say/Proclaim/Declare), 'O 'Ibadi (My servants/slaves) who have transgressed against themselves [by sinning], do not despair of the mercy of Allah. Indeed, Allah forgives all sins. Indeed, it is He who is the Forgiving, the Merciful.'[1]
The argument derived from the quoted verse is as follows:
Adding 'Qul' before the statement in quotation marks means that the speaker (Allah) asks/ orders/ informs the recipient of the revelation (the Prophet) to say or declare to the people the message spoken after 'Qul' and hence the speaker then changes from Allah to Prophet Muhammad (on him be peace and blessings of Allah) and hence 'O My servants' would mean the servants of Prophet Muhammad (on him be the peace and blessings of Allah).
Abul A'la Maududi mentions, for this verse, in his tafsir of the Qur'an as follows:
Some commentators have given a strange interpretation to these words. They say that Allah Himself has commanded the Holy Prophet to address the people as 'My servants' therefore, all men are the servants of the Holy Prophet. This interpretation is no interpretation at all but a worst distortion of the meaning of the Qur'an and indeed tampering with the Word of Allah. If this interpretation were correct, it would falsify and negate the whole Qur'an.
For the Qur'an, from the beginning to the end, establishes the concept that men are the servants of Allah alone, and its whole message revolves around the point that they should serve none but One Allah alone. The Holy Prophet (upon whom be Allah's peace) himself was Allah's servant. Allah had sent him not as rabb (sustainer, providence) but as a Messenger so that he should himself serve Him and teach the other people also to serve Him alone. After all, how can a sensible person believe that the Holy Prophet might have one day stood up before the disbelieving Quraish of Makkah and made the sudden proclamation: 'You are in fact the slaves of Muhammad and not of al `Uzzah and ash'Shams.' (We seek Allah's refuge from this).
The explanation for the verse can be sufficient for a Muslim but for someone having a bias against Islam, this could be a confirmation of his allegation that this mistake has negated and falsified the whole Qur'an. We find answers to their claims in the second part of the same verse:
Do not despair of the mercy of Allah. Indeed, Allah forgives all sins. Indeed, it is He who is the Forgiving, the Merciful: The address here is to all mankind. There is no weighty argument to regard only the believers as the addressees. As has been observed by Ibn Kathir, to address such a thing to the common men does not mean that Allah forgives all sins without repentance, but Allah Himself has explained in the following verses that sins are forgiven only when the sinner turns to Allah's worship and service and adopts obedience to the message sent down by Him. As a matter of fact, this verse brought a message of hope for those people who had committed mortal sins like murder, adultery, theft, robbery, etc. in the days of ignorance, and had despaired whether they would ever be forgiven. To them it has been said: 'Do not despair of Allah's mercy: whatever you might have done in the past, if you sincerely turn to your Lord's obedience, you will be forgiven every sin.' The same interpretation of this verse has been given by Ibn `Abbas, Qatadah, Mujahid and Ibn Zaid.[2]
Non Muslims who have not accepted Islam or who even hate the Messenger of Allah (on him be the peace and blessings of Allah) cannot and will not accept to be servants of him whereas the verse speaks of all mankind. We can therefore, conclude based on the same verse that the servants mentioned are none other than the servants of Allah as also understood by the companions of the Prophet and earliest scholars. A person who denies Allah is still under the complete Lordship of Allah. Allah mentions elsewhere which further confirms our understanding:
أَلَمْ يَعْلَمُوۤاْ أَنَّ ٱللَّهَ هُوَ يَقْبَلُ ٱلتَّوْبَةَ عَنْ عِبَادِهِ وَيَأْخُذُ ٱلصَّدَقَاتِ وَأَنَّ ٱللَّهَ هُوَ ٱلتَّوَّابُ ٱلرَّحِيمُ
'Know they not that Allah accepts repentance from His servants.'[3]
The theological aspect to the argument should be clear to everyone by now since it is also approved by the Prophet and his companions themselves. However, another issue that still remains under question and that is the linguistic part. Those having further questions on the My servants part, state either the Qur'an made a mistake in choice of words while it meant something else or it uses casual human way of explaining the matter both indicating serious issues regarding the Qur'an.
It appears that this criticism comes up with the understanding whenever Allah says 'Qul' in the Qur'an, the next words are of that of the Prophet (on him be peace and blessings of Allah). This is, however, not exactly true. The Qur'an is the complete word of Allah without a single letter being from anyone else. With this in mind, consider the following verse:
قُلْ يَتَوَفَّاكُم مَّلَكُ ٱلْمَوْتِ ٱلَّذِي وُكِّلَ بِكُمْ ثُمَّ إِلَىٰ رَبِّكُمْ تُرْجَعُونَ
Say, 'The angel of death will take you who has been entrusted with you. Then to your Lord you will be returned.'[4]
Here, Allah is the One who speaks after Say. He mentions to the Prophet Muhammad (on him be peace and blessings of Allah) to proclaim to the people what Allah is saying. The speaker of these words becomes Prophet Muhammad (on him be peace and blessings of Allah) but he is merely conveying or forwarding the words of Allah. Allah is speaking through the Prophet. When Allah says Say, the words spoken afterwards do not become the words of the speaker.
In fact, the greatest example where Allah changes the grammatical person from third person to second person could be the first chapter of the Qur'an i.e. Fatiha (The Opening) where All praise is [due] to Allah (Qur'an 1:2) changes to It is You we worship and You we ask for help (Qur'an 1:5). Here Allah is praised at the start and then the Servant addresses His Master directly.
The key is in the context and the translation:
An earlier verse of the same chapter speaks in similar words:
قُلْ يٰعِبَادِ ٱلَّذِينَ آمَنُواْ ٱتَّقُواْ رَبَّكُمْ لِلَّذِينَ أَحْسَنُواْ فِي هَـٰذِهِ ٱلدُّنْيَا حَسَنَةٌ وَأَرْضُ ٱللَّهِ وَاسِعَةٌ إِنَّمَا يُوَفَّى ٱلصَّابِرُونَ أَجْرَهُمْ بِغَيْرِ حِسَابٍ
Qul (Say/Proclaim/Declare/State/Mention), 'O My servants who have believed, fear your Lord. For those who do good in this world is good, and the earth of Allah is spacious. Indeed, the patient will be given their reward without account.'[5]
The word Qul has several meanings. If translated as 'Say' in every verse, it does give rise to questions of the kind discussed above. However, if it translated using a different words such as Proclaim or Declare or Tell them, then the reader would not have any question at all and would simply understand it as an order of Allah to declare to the people His words or message. Translations have their limitations and this is the reason anyone conversant with the Arabic literature does not raise such silly questions.
Indeed, Allah knows the best!
[1] Qur'an 39:53
[2] Ibn Jarir, Bukhari, Muslim, Abu Da'ud, Tirmidhi
[3] Qur'an 9:104
[4] Qur'an 32:11
[5] Qur'an 39:10
« Last Edit: December 28, 2013, 10:01:42 AM by adeel.khan »
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Sura 37 - Those who set the ranks.
The title comes from v. 1 & 165 and seems to be referring to “the ranks” of faithful Muslims.
(The) single-minded (chosen) slaves of Allah. 37:40, 74, 128, 160, 169
Date, Context and Theme
It is a middle Meccan sura again dealing with the rejection of the Meccans to Muhammad and his message. The main body of the sura is an extended description of paradise and hell. In this description the “single-minded” service to God is explained, illustrated and defended.
vv. 1-5, Introduction addressing those faithful Muslims who live the genuine Muslim life.
vv. 6-10, The planets or stars seem to hinder the devils from listening to the Qur’an. They are the source of turning people away. They contrast to vv. 1-5.
vv. 11-17, The Meccan are rejecting Muhammad and his message about the resurrection and judgement.
* vv. 18-34, But they will be resurrected and judged. Judgement day described.
* vv. 35-37, They would not accept Allah alone and Muhammad. In the judgement you will either go to paradise for hell.
vv. 38-61, The reward, welcome and conversation of paradise. How I was saved from hell.
vv. 62-73, The reward and conversation of hell. The illustration show how to be saved from hell.
* vv. 74-82, Noah, a single minded slave, saved from the flood while others drowned.
*vv. 83-113, Abraham opposed the star worship of his people and was persecuted but he was saved. Allah rewarded Abraham with a son, whom he was prepared to sacrifice and Isaac will be a prophet like Abraham.
*vv. 114-122, Moses and Aaron were believing slaves and were saved while others drowned.
*vv. 123-132, Elijah and Baal event and Elijah was saved while others died.
* vv. 133-138, Lot was saved but the old woman destroyed.
* vv. 139-148, Jonah did wrong but was saved.
vv. 149-159 Therefore repent and be saved. Does God have daughters while you have sons? God does not have children from relations with the angels or the genies. Stop believing this.
vv. 160-173, We are serving God while the others turn away.
Vv. 174-182, Conclusion: Muhammad, withdraw from them for a while and wait.
What I found interesting.
1. Introduction
I found the introduction to be a beautiful poetic moving start to the sura.
By those who set the ranks in battle order, And those who drive away (the wicked) with reproof, And those who read (the Word) for a reminder, Lo! thy Lord is surely One; 37:1-4
2. Cosmology
There seems to be an understanding that planets or stars help to defend the devils.
Lo! We have adorned the lowest heaven with an ornament, the planets; With security from every froward devil. They cannot listen to the Highest Chiefs for they are pelted from every side, 37:6-8
3. Poet or Prophet?
Again Muhammad is said to be a poet but replies by saying he is like the prophets before him.
And said: Shall we forsake our gods for a mad poet? Nay, but he brought the Truth, and he confirmed those sent (before him). 37:36-37
4. Descriptions of Paradise and Hell
The follow description of paradise is interesting because the wine is “non-alcoholic”. I wonder if this is an answer to any objections that may have been raised about the rivers of wine that Muhammad had mentioned in his previous descriptions of paradise? Certainly the wine must be real and not symbolic to make such a qualification. The reward of virgins in paradise is also in these verses.
In the Gardens of delight, On couches facing one another; A cup from a gushing spring is brought round for them, White, delicious to the drinkers, Wherein there is no headache nor are they made mad thereby. And with them are those of modest gaze, with lovely eyes, (Pure) as they were hidden eggs (of the ostrich). 37:43-49
The punishment of hell is quite detailed in this sura.
Is this better as a welcome, or the tree of Zaqqum? Lo! We have appointed it a torment for wrong-doers. Lo! it is a tree that springeth in the heart of hell. Its crop is as it were the heads of devils And lo! they verily must eat thereof, and fill (their) bellies therewith. And afterward, lo! thereupon they have a drink of boiling water. And afterward, lo! their return is surely unto hell. 37:62-68
5. Repeated Phrases
Save single-minded slaves of Allah. 37:40, 74, 128, 160, 169
This phrase was often repeated. I wonder if the Arabic, “muhlaseen”, is a desirable title in Islamic culture?
This phrase too was often repeated.
Peace be unto Noah among the peoples! 37:79 (109 Abraham, 120 Moses and Aaron, 130 Elijah)
This blessing of the prophet certainly is part of the Islamic culture. In this case it is a reward for the prophet and their righteous behaviour.
This is a point of difference to the Bible. In the Bible people are not praised like this, only God is praised in this systematic fashion. The Qur'an does think more highly of the righteousness of men than the Bible does.
6. Noah
In sura 11 it was said that one of Noah’s sons did not come onto the ark.
And Noah called to his son, who was standing apart (from the ark), "Embark with us, my son, and be thou not with the unbelievers!" He said, "I will take refuge in a mountain, that shall defend me from the water." ... And the waves came between them and he was drowned. (Sura 11:42-43, Arberry)
But in this sura it was his whole family.
And Noah verily prayed unto Us, and gracious was the Hearer of his prayer And We saved him and his household from the great distress, And made his seed the survivors, 37:75-77
I do not see this as a problem. We have similar situations in the gospels where different details are given at different times. However Muslims should not be critical of the Bible when they see these types of differences there.
7. Abraham
The longest illustration in the was about Abraham.
A. Abraham opposes the worship of his people and they build a furnace to throw him in, vv. 84-99. The origin of this story is very interesting. In the Law of Moses we read,
"I am the Lord who brought you (Abraham) from Ur of the Chaldeans". (Genesis 15:7)
Ur is the ancient city where Abraham come from, but the word “Or” in Hebrew means light/fire (Strongs 215-217). A misreading of the Babylonian “Ur” for the Hebrew “Or” led to an interpretation, and subsequent tradition, where Abraham was brought out of a fire not out of a city.
See 2. Story of Abraham's deliverance from the fire which Nimrod made to destroy him.
This means that Abraham coming out of a fire is in no sense historical because we know exactly how the incorrect story developed. This is another example of the Jewish myths that Christians are warned to stay away from.
(P)ay no attention to Jewish myths or to the commands of those who reject the truth. (Titus 1:13, NIV)
It also means that the Qur'an fails to be a watcher over all scripture.
And unto you (Muslims) have We revealed the Scripture with the truth, confirming whatever Scripture was before it, and a watcher over it. So judge between them (Jews and Christians) by that which Allah hath revealed ... 5:48
The story of Abraham being saved from a fire is a myth that we know the origin of. Abraham came out of the city of Ur not a fire. The Qur'an however, fails to correct this false idea and instead perpetuates this false story.
B. Abraham's Sacrifice. Abraham then prays to God and is given a son. He is then instructed to sacrifice his son, (vv. 100-111). This account is differen to the account in the law of Moses in that in the Qur'an the son is willing and obedient too while in the Bible this is not mentioned. This distinction is important because this event in the Qur'an is not just about Abraham but it is equally about the obedience of his son.
And when (his son) was old enough to walk with him, (Abraham) said: O my dear son, I have seen in a dream that I must sacrifice thee. So look, what thinkest thou? He said: O my father! Do that which thou art commanded. Allah willing, thou shalt find me of the steadfast. Then, when they had both surrendered (to Allah), and he had flung him down upon his face 37:102-103
An important question is which son was it? Muslims today hold that it was Ishmael who was sacrificed but this is not what the Qur’an says. First Abraham prays to God.
My Lord! Give me of the righteous. So We gave him tidings of a gentle son. 37:100-101
He is given a son but the son is not named. As I said before the test shows the righteousness of not only Abraham but also his son. After this event both Abraham and his son are commended. Firstly, Abraham is said to be one of Allah's slaves and his son is declared to be "of the righteous" and will be a prophet. "Of the righteous", is what Abraham asked for in the beginning.
My Lord, give me one of the righteous. 37:100
Then We gave him the good tidings of Isaac, a Prophet, one of the righteous. 37:112 Arberry
The reading seems to be that Isaac is the son. Pitckhall adds the phrase “of the birth of” but this is not in the Arabic. The flow seems to be that Abraham asks for not a son directly but “of the righteous”. He is given a son, then he and his son obey God. Abraham is then praised and his son is then declared to be “of the righteous” too and a prophet, and this son is clearly named as Isaac. This reading agrees with Islam’s greatest scholar.
The earliest sages of our Prophet's nation disagree about which of Abraham's two sons it was that he was commanded to sacrifice. Some say it was Isaac, while others say it was Ishmael. Both views are supported by statements related on the authority of the Messenger of God. If both groups of statements were equally sound, then - since they both came from the Prophet - only the Quran could serve as proof that the account naming Isaac is clearly the more truthful of the two. (Al-Tabari, The History of al-Tabari, Vol. II, p. 82, Prophets and Patriarchs (trans. William M. Brenner), State University of New York Press, Albany 1987)
I really get the feeling that much of Islam is a development away from the Qur’an. The Qur’an stipulates three daily prayers (24:58, 11:116, 17:78-79, 20:130, 30:17-18) but Muslims have five. The Qur’an says Muhammad gave no miracle (14:10) yet the Hadith has many. And here we see that the Isaac of the Qur’an has been replaced by Ishmael.
C. The substitute sacrifice that God provides Abraham is seen as a ransomed. This is quite similar to the Christian idea.
Then We ransomed him with a tremendous victim. 37:107
8. We learn about the Meccan beliefs that God has daughters.
(And again of their falsehood): He hath preferred daughters to sons. Allah hath begotten. Allah! verily they tell a lie. 37:152-153
Then produce your writ (book), if ye are truthful. 37:157
9. The Voice of the Qur’an.
Normally the voice of the Qur’an is “We” and is referring to Allah, but in these verses the “We” is clearly angels or the Muslims community.
There is not one of us but has his known position. Lo! we, even we are they who set the ranks, Lo! we, even we are they who hymn His praise 37:164-166
This change in voice is similar to Sura 1, 2:286, and 19:64-65.
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
Sura 36 - Ya Sin
The name of the sura comes from the two letters of verse 1.
Date, Context and Theme
This is a middle Meccan sura that continues to deal with the Meccan rejection of Muhammad, the Qur’an and the teaching that there is only one God with no associates.
So let not their speech grieve thee (O Muhammad). Lo! We know what they conceal and what proclaim. 36:76
vv. 1-12, Introduction - The Qur’an is guidance and it is Allah’s sovereign choice who will believe.
Vv. 13-44 Parables and Stories to prove the message of Muhammad.
* Vv. 13-32, The story of the three messengers from Allah who went to a city and were rejected and mocked but one person from the city accepted. Then the city was destroyed.
* Vv. 33-36, The dry ground giving life when rain comes
* Vv. 37-40, The movement of the sun and moon.
* Vv. 41-44, The danger of travelling by ships. Your life is in the hands of God and at his mercy.
Vv. 45-53 Dealing with the arguments of the Meccans who rejects the Qur’an:
* vv. 45-53 They reject the signs/parables that are given in the Qur’an and ask when will the judgement come? They are told that the judgement will come and each will get what he deserve and go to paradise or hell.
* Vv. 54-68, The dialogue of and a description of judgement day
* vv. 69-70 Muhammad is not a poet but a warner.
* Vv. 71-75, the Sign of domesticated animals. Allah has given us these animals yet we do not give thanks and worship others.
Vv. 76-83, Conclusion - Do not be grieved by their rejection Muhammad. Consider the evidence. Allah brings you forth from seed, give you fire, created the heavens and earth and only has to say for something to be. Worship Allah alone.
What I found interesting.
1. God’s Sovereignty
There is a strong theme of God’s sovereign choice.
Lo! We have put on their necks carcans reaching unto the chins, so that they are made stiff-necked. And We have set a bar before them and a bar behind them, and (thus) have covered them so that they see not. 36:8-9
This is similar to the Bible.
2. Examining the arguments.
In this sura, and many others, there are arguments put forward for why Muhammad’s message is true. These seem to fit into three categories.
A. The stories of the earlier prophets.
B. Referring to the cycles of creation.
C. The logic of the fact that if those you associate with Allah are powerless what use are they.
I think it is good to consider these arguments. They show us the thought world of Muhammad, maybe the thought world of his hearers, and also raise the question of how do these arguments engage with the modern world? This same question can be asked of the Bible too.
It does seems that the arguments of the Qur’an were not convincing to the Meccans.
Never came a token of the tokens of their Lord to them, but they did turn away from it! 36:46
3. Which City?
The first story/parable in the sura is to the coming of three prophets to a city.
Coin for them a similitude: The people of the city when those sent (from Allah) came unto them; When We sent unto them twain, and they denied them both, so We reinforced them with a third, and they said: Lo! we have been sent unto you. 36:13-14
The point of the story is straight forward, this city rejected their messengers in the same way the Meccans are rejecting Muhammad, but who are the messengers and what was the city? This is not an unreasonable question to ask if the story is meant to be taken as true history. Where are the basic details like names of people and places? Islamic scholars identify them in various ways, some even suggesting that they were disciples of Jesus, one being Paul (Bulus).
4. Women in paradise.
We often think of Islamic paradise as being a place for men and their pleasure. Certainly this is true in other parts of the Qur’an, but this verse shows that wives will be happy too.
Lo! those who merit paradise this day are happily employed, They and their wives, in pleasant shade, on thrones reclining; 36:55-56
5. The dialogue of judgement day.
I found this an interesting method of teaching. It is like a play were the lines for each actor are written out. In this case it is the discussion between God and the believers and unbelievers on judgement day.
The word from a Merciful Lord (for them the believers) is: Peace! But to you, O you guilty, this day! Did I not charge you, O you sons of Adam, that you worship not the devil - Lo! he is your open foe! - But that you worship Me? That was the right path. 36:58-61
6. Muhammad the Poet?
It seems that the Meccans were saying the Muhammad was just like their poets. That is to say that Muhammad is not unique in what he was reciting.
And We have not taught him (Muhammad) poetry, nor is it meet for him. This is naught else than a Reminder and a Lecture making plain, To warn whosoever liveth, and that the word may be fulfilled against the disbelievers. 36:69-70
Monday, May 9, 2011
Sura 35 - Angels
The title takes its name from the reference to angels in the first verse.
Date, Context and Theme
An early Meccan sura dealing with the Meccan rejection of Muhammad and his message. The illustrations in this sura are not of the earlier prophets but of the power of Allah.
vv. 1-3, Praise Allah and remember his grace.
Vv. 4-8, Those who reject Muhammad and Allah are doomed.
Vv. 9-17, Examples of how Allah makes and controls all things, therefore pray and serve him alone.
Vv. 18-26 Muhammad is a warner like the warners before him. Those who rejected their warner were punished.
Vv. 27-35 Allah brings life to this world so serve him and the righteous have done in the past.
Vv. 36-39, The unbelievers will suffer for their rejection.
Vv. 40-45, Conclusion. Deals with a few final complaints from the Meccans. Ends with the idea that everyone needs Allah’s mercy.
What I found interesting.
1. Angels.
Praise be to Allah, the Creator of the heavens and the earth, Who appointeth the angels messengers having wings two, three and four. He multiplieth in creation what He will. Lo! Allah is Able to do all things. 35:1
2. A wide range of illustrations of Allah’s power and application.
Whoso desireth power (should know that) all power belongeth to Allah. Unto Him good words ascend, and the pious deed doth He exalt; but those who plot iniquities, theirs will be an awful doom; and the plotting of such (folk) will come to naught. 35:10
Allah created you from dust, then from a little fluid, then He made you pairs (the male and female). No female beareth or bringeth forth save with His knowledge. And no-one groweth old who groweth old, nor is aught lessened of his life, but it is recorded in a Book, Lo! that is easy for Allah. 35:11
And the two seas are not alike: this, fresh, sweet, good to drink, this (other) bitter, salt. And from them both ye eat fresh meat and derive the ornament that ye wear. And thou seest the ship cleaving them with its prow that ye may seek of His bounty, and that haply ye may give thanks. 35:12
He maketh the night to pass into the day and He maketh the day to pass into the night. He hath subdued the sun and moon to service. Each runneth unto an appointed term. Such is Allah, your Lord; His is the Sovereignty; and those unto whom ye pray instead of Him own not so much as the white spot on a date-stone. 35:13
Say: Have ye seen your partner-gods to whom ye pray beside Allah? Show me what they created of the earth! Or have they any portion in the heavens? Or have We given them a scripture so they act on clear proof therefrom? Nay, the evil-doers promise one another only to deceive. 35:40
3. Pray only to Allah not to your intercessors.
If you (the Meccans) pray unto them they hear not your prayer, and if they heard they could not grant it you. On the Day of Resurrection they will disown association with you. None can inform you like Him Who is Aware. 35:14
My question is if this is the case why do Muslims pray to Muhammad in the Salaat?
4. The Earlier Scriptures and Believers
There were several verses about the earlier scriptures and believers.
And if they deny you (Muhammad), those before them also denied. Their messengers came unto them with clear proofs (of Allah's Sovereignty), and with the Psalms and the Scripture giving light. 35:25
As for that which We inspire in thee of the Scripture, it is the Truth confirming that which was (revealed) before it. Lo! Allah is indeed Observer, Seer of His slaves. 35:31
Here we see that there are three different types of earlier believers before the Muslims.
Then We gave the Scripture as inheritance unto those whom We elected of Our bondmen. But of them are some who wrong themselves and of them are some who are lukewarm, and of them are some who outstrip (others) through good deeds, by Allah's leave. That is the great favour! 35:32
The example of the earlier scriptures and believers is given as a way of contrast to the rejection of the Meccans to Muhammad and the Qur’an.
And they swore by Allah, their most binding oath, that if a warner came unto them they would be more tractable than any of the nations; yet, when a warner came unto them it aroused in them naught save repugnance, 35:42
5. Lost in the grave.
And they cry for help there, (saying): Our Lord! Release us; we will do right, not (the wrong) that we used to do. Did not We grant you a life long enough for him who reflected to reflect therein? And the warner came unto you. Now taste (the flavour of your deeds), for evil-doers have no helper. 35:37
This is sort of like Jonah crying out from the grave.
6. All fail and need Allah’s mercy.
This is an interesting verse because it clearly says none are righteous.
7. Science in the Qur’an.
There is a whole area of promoting Islam that seeks to show that modern science is in the Qur’an. A common verse that is used is the following.
He hath loosed the two seas. They meet. There is a barrier between them. They encroach not (one upon the other). 55:19-20
This is meant to show that the Atlantic Ocean and Mediterranean Sea do not mix even though they are connected. However 35:12 seems to identify the “two seas” as fresh and salt water.
8. "Say"
Often in the Qur'an we read at the start of a verse, "Say". This normally is indicating a set answer to an objection raised against Muhammad. It seems to me that the suras are like the letters of the New Testament in that they often are addressing particularly issues. Certainly the suras are a different type of genre but they still function like the letters in addressing a particular situation.
Tuesday, May 3, 2011
Sura 34 - Saba
The title of the sura comes for v. 15 where the people of Saba are referred to as an example of those who were proud and destroyed.
Date, Context and Theme
This is a Meccan sura and the main theme is dealing with the pride of those who reject the belief in one God, in resurrection to judgement, the Qur’an and Muhammad as a prophet.
vv. 1-9 Praise belongs to Allah so do not be proud. Accept that there is only one God, the resurrection unto judgement, the Qur’an and Muhammad.
Vv. 10-11, David received blessings from God and was thankful not proud.
Vv. 12-14, Solomon received blessings from God and was thankful and proud.
vv. 15-21, Saba received blessing from God but were not thankful and so were destroyed.
Vv. 22-54, A dialogue with the Meccans which discusses.
* There is only one God and your worship of partners, angels, jinn will not help you.
* There will be a the resurrection of the dead unto judgement.
* You have rejected the Qur’an as you rejected the other books.
* You have rejected Muhammad as you rejected the other prophets.
* Your problem is pride and that you are pampered.
What I found interesting.
1. Striving against the Qur’an.
But those who strive against Our revelations, challenging (Us), theirs will be a painful doom of wrath. 34:5, 38
I was expecting the word for “strive” here to be jihad as it was in 31:15, but it is not. It is saaiaou instead. This is important to note for those of us who want to know what the Qur’an says about striving/jihad. This idea is expressed in a variety of words and we need to consider all of them to understand the subject properly.
2. Meccan Objections.
Again there is a good description of the objections of the Meccans to Muhammad.
3. Set Answers
The start of each verse for 22-27 and 46-50 began with “say”. Say this ... Say this ... Say this ... etc. This really emphasises that the Qur’an was to be used by the Muslims to answer the objections of those who rejected Islam. The Qur’an originally provided the set answers for the early Muslim community.
Here is two examples.
Say: You will not be asked (by God) of what we committed, nor shall we be asked of what you do. 34:25
Say: The Truth hath come, and falsehood showeth not its face and will not return. 34:49
4. David
The reference to David was interesting. It included a reference to the Psalms and to him making chain mail armour.
And assuredly We gave David grace from Us, (saying): O ye hills and birds, echo his psalms of praise! And We made the iron supple unto him, Saying: Make thou long coats of mail and measure the links (thereof). And do ye right. Lo! I am Seer of what ye do. 34:10-11
The history I have read says that chain mail actually replaced metal scales sewn onto a vest as a means of armour around the year 400BC. David was 1000BC. It seems that the Qur’an has the wrong technology for the time of David.
5. Solomon
In sura 27:17 we saw that the genies fought for Solomon. Here we see that they build for him whatever he wants. This is also the verse were the idea of travelling on a magic carpet comes from. The Islamic commentaries say that Solomon was carried by the wind on a carpet.
It is interesting to see what the genies built for Solomon.
It is true that Solomon built many things but what about the temple? Does the Qur’an realise that Solomon’s greatest building achievement was the temple in Jerusalem. The temple is mentioned in 17:7 (called a mosque) but does the Qur’an understand that Solomon built a temple? I will have to keep reading.
7. Intercession
It seems that the Qur’ an is not opposed to all intercession before but just the wrong intercession before God.
8. While the Meccans may know about the scripture of Jews and Christians the Qur'an is clear that they have not received a scripture directly themselves.
And We have given them no scriptures which they study, nor sent We unto them, before thee, any warner. 34:44
Monday, April 18, 2011
Sura 33 - The Clans
The title for this sura comes from the context of the sura which is clear, the battle of the Clans, also known as the Battle of the Trench.
Date, Context and Theme
The contents of this sura allow it to be dated to the famous Battle of Trench, 5-7th years of the Hijrah, a Medinan sura. This battle was initiated by the Meccans and some other tribes who wanted to defeat Muhammad once and for all. The Jewish tribe, Bani Qureyzah, broke their truce with Muhammad and supported these Arab tribes. They marched against Medinah and lay siege to it. But Muhammad had a trench dug on the side of attack and this halted their advance. After no progress for a month and difficult conditions, these tribes departed. Muhammad then marched on the towns of Jewish Bani Qureyzah and all their men were executed.
While this is the context of the sura it is not the main theme of the sura. The main theme is dealing with the complaints of “hypocritical” Muslims. There were two complaints. One had to do with questioning Muhammad’s advice about the situation under the siege, and the second was to do with Muhammad and the wives he was taking. Most of the sura deals with the issue of his wives and not the battle. The main theme is do not slander Muhammad but bless him instead.
O ye who believe! Be not as those who slandered Moses, but Allah proved his innocence of that which they alleged, and he was well esteemed in Allah's sight. 33:69
Lo! Allah and His angels shower blessings on the Prophet. O ye who believe! Ask blessings on him and salute him with a worthy salutation. 33:56
vv. 1-3 Do not listen to the unbelievers and hypocrites but listen to Allah instead.
vv. 4-6 All adoptions are now cancelled.
Vv. 7-27. Reflections on the battle of the Clans or Trench. Allah gave victory but the hypocritical Muslims did not trust Muhammad but the true Muslims did.
Vv. 28-34, Muhammad’s wives must be careful how they live among the hypocrites. They will be punished if they sin, so speak carefully, stay inside and obey Muhammad.
Vv. 35-36, The true believers must live carefully among the hypocrites too and obey Muhammad.
Vv. 37-38, Now they adoptions are cancelled Allah has given Muhammad Zayd’s wife.
vv. 39-48 Who is Muhammad? Father of none, a warner, a summoner, announcing good tidings. Therefore, listen to Muhammad and not the hypocrites.
Vv. 49-52 Marriage: Consummation makes the marriage, Muhammad alone can take whoever he likes in marriage, his wives are not to remarry
v. 53, Do not annoy the prophet, he does not like it and is too shy to say so.
vv. 53-62, Behaviour of his wives, must not remarry, can talk to their male relatives, must talk from behind a screen, must dress. Must not give the hyprocites any excuse.
* Vv. 56-58 Bless Muhammad and lift him up in the presence of the hypocrites.
* Vv. 59, Muhammad’s wives must dress with dignity.
* vv. 60-62, If the hypocrites do not stop complaining then fight them.
Vv. 63-73 The Final Hour - The hypocrites will pay and the true believers be rewards
What I found interesting.
1. Disjointed?
I have often heard non-Muslim scholars say that the Qur’an is disjoined and jumps from one topic to another. Sura 33 appears to be such a sura as it talks to and fro about the battle and then Muhammad’s wives, but I do not agree with these scholars. I think each sura does have a unity and we just need to work out what it is. In this case it is the accusations of the “hypocritical” Muslims against Muhammad. They are complaining about the battle and his wives.
2. Adoption and Zaynab
The opening verses of the sura announce that all adoptions are now cancelled.
Allah hath not assigned unto any man two hearts within his body, nor hath He made your wives whom ye declare (to be your mothers) your mothers, nor hath He made those whom ye claim (to be your sons) your sons. This is but a saying of your mouths. But Allah saith the truth and He showeth the way. 33:4
I can understand why Islam wants remove idolatry, theft, gambling, but why adoption? The context behind this is quite revealing.
One day the Messenger of God went out looking for Zayd (his adopted son). Now there was a covering of haircloth over the doorway, but the wind had lifted the covering so that the doorway was uncovered. Zaynab (Zayd’s wife) was in her chamber, undressed, and admiration for her entered the heart of the Prophet. (Al-Tabari, The History of al-Tabari, vol. viii, p. 4)
Here we see why adoption is forbidden in Islam. Muhammad saw his daughter-in-law undressed and “admiration for her entered” his heart. Zayd offers to give Zaynab to Muhammad but this is scandalous as Muhammad would be marrying his daughter-in-law. Muhammad then receives a message from God saying that all adoptions are canceled. He then receives another word saying that Allah has given him Zaynab.
... So when Zeyd had performed that necessary formality (of divorce) from her, We gave her unto thee in marriage, so that (henceforth) there may be no sin for believers in respect of wives of their adopted sons, when the latter have performed the necessary formality (of release) from them. The commandment of Allah must be fulfilled. 33:37
It seems that the practice of adoption is cancelled so that Muhammad can be righteous. That is, the law confirms to Muhammad.
3. The Privileged Prophet
In 33:50 there is a big list of all the women that Muhammad can take as a wife or slave. The list is very broad but it is clear that it is,
... a privilege for you (Muhammad) only, not for the (rest of) believers ... 33:50
33:51 then says that Muhammad does not have to share his time equally with wives but can visit for sex whichever wife he wishes. So here we see that Muhammad has sexual privileges that no other Muslim is allowed to have.
Narrated Aisha (Muhammad’s wife): ... I said (to the Prophet), "I feel that your Lord hastens in fulfilling your wishes and desires." (Bukhari: vol. 6, bk. 60, no. 311, Khan)
4. Do not annoy the prophet.
Muhammad did not like being annoyed.
These examples of “revelations” demand questions to be asked. It really seems to me that Muhammad received revelations that fulfilled his desires. Revelations that allowed him to take another man’s wife, to have sexual privileges and to not be annoyed. It seems to me that these words are from Muhammad not God.
5. Bless the prophet
Maybe the reason the “hypocritical” Muslims were complaining was that they were not convinced that a Muhammad should be so privileged. This sura makes it very clear that you are not to question Muhammad about any of this. He is the best example and you must bless him.
The Prophet is closer to the believers than their selves, and his wives are (as) their mothers. And the owners of kinship are closer one to another in the ordinance of Allah than (other) believers and the fugitives (who fled from Mecca), except that ye should do kindness to your friends. This is written in the Book (of nature). 33:6
Verily in the messenger of Allah ye have a good example for him who looketh unto Allah and the Last Day, and remembereth Allah much. 33:21
And it becometh not a believing man or a believing woman, when Allah and His messenger have decided an affair (for them), that they should (after that) claim any say in their affair; and whoso is rebellious to Allah and His messenger, he verily goeth astray in error manifest. 33:36
There is no reproach for the Prophet in that which Allah maketh his due. That was Allah's way with those who passed away of old - and the commandment of Allah is certain destiny - 33:38
Lo! Allah and His angels shower blessings on the Prophet. O you who believe! Ask blessings on him and salute him with a worthy salutation. 33:56
This last verse explains why Muslims say, “peace be upon him” whenever they mention Muhammad’s name. The problem I have is the context. If the context was just, bless Muhammad, that would be ok, but the context here is do not question Muhammad, instead bless him. Therefore saying “peace be upon him” is actually a method of stopping any examination of Muhammad.
When we consider all of these previous points we see that no one is allowed to question Muhammad or annoy him, and that he is allowed special sexual privileges. We must be honest here and not make excuses. No other prophet is given these types of privileges. This type of behaviour is normally associated today with a cult leader.
6. The True Believers and Hypocrites
As we have seen there was a lot in this sura about true and hypocritical Muslims. The hypocrites are reminded that they are under a covenant. This is a very important verse for understanding the concept of covenant in the Qur’an and for seeing how it compares to the Bible.
And when We exacted a covenant from the prophets, and from thee (O Muhammad) and from Noah and Abraham and Moses and Jesus son of Mary. We took from them a solemn covenant; 33:7
The true believers will be rewarded, the hypocrites punished.
There were the believers sorely tried, and shaken with a mighty shock. And when the hypocrites, and those in whose hearts is a disease, were saying: Allah and His messenger promised us naught but delusion. 33:11-12
That Allah may reward the true men for their truth, and punish the hypocrites if He will, or relent toward them (if He will). Lo! Allah is Forgiving, Merciful. 33:24
On the day when their faces are turned over in the Fire, they say: Oh, would that we had obeyed Allah and had obeyed His messenger! 33:66
So Allah punisheth hypocritical men and hypocritical women, and idolatrous men and idolatrous women. But Allah pardoneth believing men and believing women, and Allah is ever Forgiving, Merciful. 33:73
Here is another verse that threatens war on the hypocrites.
If the hypocrites, and those in whose hearts is a disease, and the alarmists in the city do not cease, We verily shall urge thee on against them, then they will be your neighbours in it but a little while. Accursed, they will be seized wherever found and slain with a (fierce) slaughter. (33:60-61, 2:278-279, 9:73, 49:9)
It is important to realise that the Qur’an and Hadith actually command war on hypocrite Muslims. I say this because I keep hearing people say, “that person is not a Muslim because he attacked other Muslims”. This fails to engage with the many verses of the Qur’an which command such action. See The War on Muslims. It also raises the practical question of who are the "true" Muslims who have the duty to fight "hypocritical" Muslims? Who decides?
7. The seal of the prophets
This is the famous verse from which Muslims understand that Muhammad is the last prophet.
Muhammad is not the father of any man among you, but he is the messenger of Allah and the Seal of the Prophets; and Allah is ever Aware of all things. 33:40
In the Hadith literature, the “seal” is a literal seal or birthmark on Muhammad
Narrated As-Sa'ib:My aunt took me to Allah's Apostle and said, "O Allah's Apostle! My nephew is- ill." The Prophet touched my head with his hand and invoked Allah to bless me. He then performed ablution and I drank of the remaining water of his ablution and then stood behind his back and saw "Khatam An-Nubuwwa" (The Seal of Prophethood) between his shoulders like a button of a tent. (Sahih al-Bukhari: vol. 7, bk. 70, no. 574, Khan)
Abdullah b. Sarjis reported: ... I then went after him (Muhammad) and saw the Seal of Prophethood between his shoulders on the left side of his shoulder having spots on it like moles. (Sahih Muslim: bk. 30, no. 5793, Siddiqui)
8. The Sunnah
This verse is a key verse for the sunnah.
The Sunnah is the practices of Muhammad. Muslims are required to imitate him.
Monday, April 11, 2011
Sura 32 - The Prostation
The title comes from verse 15 and seems to represent the ideal response to the sura.
Date, Context and Theme
It is a middle Meccan sura. The main theme seems is answering the objections of the Meccans who say that what Muhammad is saying is strange and doubtful.
v. 1, Mystery letters.
Vv. 2-3, Doubting the Qur’an and Muhammad. This is the issue the sura addresses.
Vv. 4-9, Allah is the one God who created all things. A declaration of tawheed. You should not doubt this.
Vv. 10-22, How can Allah recreate us when we are dead? Allah will and will bring you to judgement.
Vv. 23-26 You have seen a book before with Moses so be not surprised at the coming of the Qur’an..
Vv. 27-30 Allah will bring his judgement therefore wait for the victory.
What I found interesting.
1. This sura seems to answer this verse.
Or say they (the Meccans): He hath invented it? Nay, but it is the Truth from thy Lord, that thou mayst warn a folk to whom no warner came before thee, that haply they may walk aright. 32:3
There were three main evidences that were put forward for why the Qur’an and Muhammad are genuine.
a. Allah is the one God who rules over all. This is logically seen in the created order. Tawheed, one God, is the logical conclusion from creation.
b. The idea that Allah would send a book is not new. You already know this from Moses.
We verily gave Moses the Scripture; so be not ye in doubt of his receiving it; and We appointed it a guidance for the Children of Israel. 32:23
This assumes that the Meccans know about Moses.
c. Allah will resurrect to judgement. Look at the dry land and see how it goes from death to life.
This is similar to Paul’s argument in 1 Corinthians 15:35-36.
2. God and Time
This is similar to Psalm 90:4, 2 Peter 3:8.
3. The Creation Account.
Allah it is Who created the heavens and the earth, and that which is between them, in six Days. Then He mounted the Throne. Ye have not, beside Him, a protecting friend or mediator. Will ye not then remember? 32:4
At first I thought that this verse was saying the same thing as Genesis 1. But I do not think so now because in the Bible it never says God created the world in six days and finish there. It always refers to the seven days. There is work and then there is rest. A rest that we as the image of God share in.
This is just another example of how the Qur’an appears to be similar to the Bible yet lacks the content and details. For example the Qur’an mentions Abraham but there is no mention of covenant of circumcision. It has sacrifices but none for sin. It talks about the Spirit but there is no gift. It alludes to many of the Biblical stories yet has very few details. Most of the content and detail from the Law of Moses, the Prophets, the Psalms and the Gospel are missing.
4. The sura ends with promise of victory to the Muslims. Muhammad must have been preaching that he would rule and the Meccans did not seem to think that this would happen.
And they (the Meccans) say: When cometh this victory (of yours) if ye are truthful? Say (unto them): On the day of the victory the faith of those who disbelieve (and who then will believe) will not avail them, neither will they be reprieved. So withdraw from them (O Muhammad), and await (the event). Lo! they (also) are awaiting (it). 32:28-30
Monday, April 4, 2011
Sura 31 - Luqman
The name of this sura comes from v. 12. Luqman is recounted in this sura as a man of wisdom.
Date, Context and Theme
The scholars say that it could be a Meccan or Medinan sura so I am not sure. It felt like it was dealing with Meccan issues to me. The theme is wisdom. The Qur’an and Islamic worship are portrayed as the wise way to live.
v. 1, Mystery letters, Alif. Lam. Mim.
Vv. 2-3, the Qur’an is introduced as wisdom.
Vv. 4-11, Those who believe in the here-after will receive this guidance but the unbelievers turn away and will receive doom.
Vv. 12-34 The story of the wisdom of Luqman and it application to Muhammad’s situation.
* vv. 12-13 Luqman’s receives wisdom from God.
* Vv. 14-15 Luqman’s wisdom applied to Muhammad’s situation.
* vv. 16-20 Luqman’s conversation of wisdom to his son.
* Vv. 21-34 Luqman’s wisdom applied to Muhammad’s situation.
What I found interesting.
1. This sura was quite short and had an easy structure. My Muslim friends tell me that Luqman is a famous name in Islamic culture for wisdom. Lugman is not a person from the Christian and Jewish scriptures. Thus the Qur'an is not bound to the Jewish and Christian scriptures.
2. It is interesting to see that the word for Jihad is used of those (Meccans?) who are trying to turn the Muslims away from Allah.
But if they strive (jihad) with thee to make thee ascribe unto Me as partner that of which thou hast no knowledge, then obey them not. ... 31:15
3. We learn about what the pre-Islamic Meccans believe in these verses.
And if it be said unto them: Follow that which Allah hath revealed, they say: Nay, but we follow that wherein we found our fathers. What! Even though the devil were inviting them unto the doom of flame? 31:21
If thou shouldst ask them: Who created the heavens and the earth? they would answer: Allah. Say: Praise be to Allah! But most of them know not. 31:25
4. Some Muslims have said to me that John 21:25 is a bit ridiculous,
But there is a similar description in the Qur’an.
And if all the trees in the earth were pens, and the sea, with seven more seas to help it, (were ink), the words of Allah could not be exhausted. Lo! Allah is Mighty, Wise. 31:27
5. I want to think more on this verse.
Your creation and your raising (from the dead) are only as (the creation and the raising of) a single soul. Lo! Allah is Hearer, Knower. 31:28
When it talks about creation and a “single soul” is that referring to Adam or is it describing the ease with which Allah creates and resurrects?
6. I thought that this verse beautifully preserves the ancient view that ships lead to discovery and wonder, in this case Allah's wonders. I think we do not view ships this way any more, though we may view space ships this way?
Hast thou not seen how the ships glide on the sea by Allah's grace, that He may show you of His wonders? Lo! therein indeed are portents for every steadfast, grateful (heart). 31:31 | http://reading-the-quran.blogspot.com/ | robots: classic
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} | 2,557 | Dead men tell no tales
Dead men tell no tales
The origin and root of shirk (polytheism) is because of the veneration of pious men. That is established by several authentic narrations. Why is it that you say otherwise?
The narrations that are often alluded to when making this argument are a) not authentic, and b) not derived from revelation (waḥy). The weight of overall evidence does not support the proposition you make. Neither does this assertion consider the body of evidence as a whole, namely the authentic narrations and verses in the Qur’ān.
To begin, there are two narrations which are cited as being ‘foundational evidence’ to try and argue that the origin of polytheism (shirk) – within pre-Islamic Arabia or elsewhere – is because of the veneration of pious men. The first is recorded in Ṣaḥīḥ Bukhāri:
حدثنا مسلم بن إبراهیم حدثنا أبو الاٴشهب حدثنا أبو الجوزاء عن ابن عباس رضي الله عنهما في قوله اللات والعزی ڪان اللات رجلا یلت سویق الحاج
Muslim bin Ibrāhim narrated to us Abu’l-Ashab narrated to us Abu’l Jawza narrated to us from Ibn A’bbās (may Allah be pleased with him) – regarding His Statement about the Lāt and the U’zzaLāt was originally a man who used to mix (prepare) Saweeq for the pilgrims.
Without dwelling upon the isnād and the fact that it can reasonably be argued that it is not actually properly connected to Ibn A’bbās (may Allah be pleased with him), a number of fundamental points can be established just from the actual text of the narrative itself. First and foremost, it is not connected to the Prophet (peace be upon him). Ibn A’bbās is not reporting a statement or a saying from the final messenger. Therefore it cannot be said that it is revelation or that it should be taken as such. Secondly, the text of the reported narrative is in direct conflict with another narration, this time fully connected and reported in Bukhāri. For the sake of brevity, only the relevant portion of the narration is cited due to its considerable length:
حدثني عبد الله بن محمد حدثنا عبد الرزاق أخبرنا معمر قال أخبرني الزهري قال أخبرني عروة بن الزبیر عن المسور بن مخرمة ومروان یصدق ڪل واحد منهما حدیث صاحبه قالا…فقال عروة عند ذلڪ أي محمد أرأیت إن استأصلت أمر قومڪ هل سمعت بأحد من العرب اجتاح أهله قبلڪ وإن تڪن الاٴخری فإني والله لاٴری وجوها وإني لاٴری أوشابا من الناس خلیقا أن یفروا ویدعوڪ فقال له أبو بڪر الصدیق امصص ببظر اللات أنحن نفر عنه وندعه فقال من ذا قالوا أبو بڪر قال أما والذي نفسي بیده لولا ید ڪانت لڪ عندي لم أجزڪ بها لاٴجبتڪ
Abdallah bin Muḥammad narrated to me Abdar-Razzāq narrated to us Ma’mar reported to us he said az-Zuhri reported to me he said U’rwa bin az-Zubayr reported to me from Marwarn and al-Miswar bin Makhrama whose narrations attest one another, they said….
….Then U’rwa said: O Muḥammad! Won’t you feel any scruple in extirpating your relations? Have you ever heard of anyone amongst the Arabs extirpating his relatives before you? On the other hand, if the reverse should happen, (nobody will aid you, for) by Allah, I do not see (with you) dignified people, but people from various tribes who would run away leaving you alone. Hearing that, Abu Bakr said – Suck al-Lāt’s clitoris, do you say we would run and leave the Prophet (peace be upon him) alone? Urwa said: Who is that man? They said – He is Abu Bakr. U’rwa said to Abu Bakr – By Him in Whose Hands my life is, were it not for the favour which you did to me and which I did not compensate, I would retort on you.
If alLāt was supposed to be a man who prepared Saweeq for pilgrims in antiquity, why did Abu Bakr say to U’rwa to ‘suck al-Lāt’s clitoris’? More significantly, Abu Bakr has said this in the presence of the Qurayshi emissaries and what would appear to be many other companions and none other than the Prophet (peace be upon him) himself. Yet there is no mention, either in this narrative or any other, where Abu Bakr was rebuked, a) for what he said or b) its accuracy. Surely given the high political stakes during these negotiations, Abu Bakr would have been ridiculed by the Quraysh and the other tribes for referring to alLāt as female and not as a man.
Thirdly and perhaps most compelling, is the fact that the narrative in Bukhāri regarding alLāt is at odds with a large number of Qur’ānic verses. No one in the history of Islam has claimed that a narrative such as this can outweigh or override explicit verses in the holy Qur’ān. Explicit mention of alLāt is made in the Qur’ān in Surah Najm (verses 19/22), where Allah has said:
أَفَرَأَيْتُمُ اللَّاتَ وَالْعُزَّىٰ، وَمَنَاةَ الثَّالِثَةَ الْأُخْرَىٰ، أَلَكُمُ الذَّكَرُ وَلَهُ الْأُنثَىٰ، تِلْكَ إِذًا قِسْمَةٌ ضِيزَىٰ
Have you then considered al-Lāt and al-U’zza, and Manat, the third, the last? What! For you the males and for him the females; indeed this is an unjust division!
Again, if the narrative regarding alLāt is correct and it is a man, why is Allah referring to it as well as al-U’zza and Manat as being female? It is not necessary to set out here that the pagan Arabs would bury their female daughters alive as they preferred sons. The verse challenges them implicitly on this, since they are attributing these imagined ‘female’ deities to Allah. Other Qur’ānic verses provide further clarification as to the ‘gender’ of these idols which are mentioned as well as the specific belief that the pagan Arabs had about them. In the same Surah (verses 26/27) we read:
وَكَم مِّن مَّلَكٍ فِي السَّمَاوَاتِ لَا تُغْنِي شَفَاعَتُهُمْ شَيْئًا إِلَّا مِن بَعْدِ أَن يَأْذَنَ اللَّهُ لِمَن يَشَاءُ وَيَرْضَىٰ، إِنَّ الَّذِينَ لَا يُؤْمِنُونَ بِالْآخِرَةِ لَيُسَمُّونَ الْمَلَائِكَةَ تَسْمِيَةَ الْأُنثَىٰ
And how many an angel is there in the heavens whose intercession does not avail at all except after Allah has given permission to whom He pleases and chooses. Most surely they who do not believe in the hereafter name the angels with female names.
In the verses set out below (6: 100/101), the wider context of this belief which the pagan Arabs had can be better understood. These verses should be read in context with the verses mentioned thus far:
وَجَعَلُوا لِلَّهِ شُرَكَاءَ الْجِنَّ وَخَلَقَهُمْ وَخَرَقُوا لَهُ بَنِينَ وَبَنَاتٍ بِغَيْرِ عِلْمٍ سُبْحَانَهُ وَتَعَالَىٰ عَمَّا يَصِفُونَ، بَدِيعُ السَّمَاوَاتِ وَالْأَرْضِ أَنَّىٰ يَكُونُ لَهُ وَلَدٌ وَلَمْ تَكُن لَّهُ صَاحِبَةٌ وَخَلَقَ كُلَّ شَيْءٍ وَهُوَ بِكُلِّ شَيْءٍ عَلِيمٌ
وَيَجْعَلُونَ لِلَّهِ الْبَنَاتِ سُبْحَانَهُ وَلَهُم مَّا يَشْتَهُونَ، وَإِذَا بُشِّرَ أَحَدُهُم بِالْأُنثَىٰ ظَلَّ وَجْهُهُ مُسْوَدًّا وَهُوَ كَظِيمٌ
And they ascribe daughters to Allah, glory be to Him; and for themselves (they would have) what they desire. And when a daughter is announced to one of them his face becomes black and he is full of wrath [16: 57/58]
ذَٰلِكَ مِمَّا أَوْحَىٰ إِلَيْكَ رَبُّكَ مِنَ الْحِكْمَةِ وَلَا تَجْعَلْ مَعَ اللَّهِ إِلَٰهًا آخَرَ فَتُلْقَىٰ فِي جَهَنَّمَ مَلُومًا مَّدْحُورًا، أَفَأَصْفَاكُمْ رَبُّكُم بِالْبَنِينَ وَاتَّخَذَ مِنَ الْمَلَائِكَةِ إِنَاثًا إِنَّكُمْ لَتَقُولُونَ قَوْلًا عَظِيمًا
قُل لَّوْ كَانَ مَعَهُ آلِهَةٌ كَمَا يَقُولُونَ إِذًا لَّابْتَغَوْا إِلَىٰ ذِي الْعَرْشِ سَبِيلًا
This is of what your Lord has revealed to you of wisdom, and do not associate any other god with Allah lest you should be thrown into hell, blamed, cast away. What! Has then your Lord preferred to give you sons, and (for Himself) taken daughters from among the angels? Most surely you utter a grievous saying. Say: If there were with Him gods as they say, then certainly they would have been able to seek a way to the Lord of power. [17: 39/40, 42]
فَاسْتَفْتِهِمْ أَلِرَبِّكَ الْبَنَاتُ وَلَهُمُ الْبَنُونَ، أَمْ خَلَقْنَا الْمَلَائِكَةَ إِنَاثًا وَهُمْ شَاهِدُونَ، أَلَا إِنَّهُم مِّنْ إِفْكِهِمْ لَيَقُولُونَ، وَلَدَ اللَّهُ وَإِنَّهُمْ لَكَاذِبُونَ، أَصْطَفَى الْبَنَاتِ عَلَى الْبَنِينَ، مَا لَكُمْ كَيْفَ تَحْكُمُونَ، أَفَلَا تَذَكَّرُونَ، أَمْ لَكُمْ سُلْطَانٌ مُّبِينٌ
Then ask them whether your Lord has daughters and they have sons; Or did We create the angels females while they were witnesses? Now surely it is of their own lie that they say: Allah has begotten; and most surely they are liars. Has He chosen daughters in preference to sons? What is the matter with you, how is it that you judge? And they assert a relationship between Him and the jinn; and certainly the jinn do know that they shall surely be brought up. Glory be to Allah (for freedom) from what they describe [37: 149/156]
إِن يَدْعُونَ مِن دُونِهِ إِلَّا إِنَاثًا وَإِن يَدْعُونَ إِلَّا شَيْطَانًا مَّرِيدًا
They do not call besides Him on anything but idols, and they do not call on anything but a rebellious Shayṭān. [4: 117]
Without even marshalling the other extensive evidences from archaeology, pre-history and the civilisations of Iraq, Syria and Egypt, we can have full certainty in what Allah has set out in these verses about the beliefs of the pagan Arabs and the reality of these idols. The second narration, also cited in Bukhāri, is alleged to specifically show the relationship between the veneration of pious men and idolatry.
حدثنا إبراهیم بن موسی أخبرنا هشام عن ابن جریج وقال عطاء عن ابن عباس رضي الله عنهما صارت الاٴوثان التي ڪانت في قوم نوح في العرب بعد أما ود ڪانت لڪلب بدومة الجندل وأما سواع ڪانت لهذیل وأما یغوث فڪانت لمراد ثم لبني غطیف بالجوف عند سبإ وأما یعوق فڪانت لهمدان وأما نسر فڪانت لحمیر لاۤل ذي الڪلاع أسماء رجال صالحین من قوم نوح فلما هلڪوا أوحی الشیطان إلی قومهم أن انصبوا إلی مجالسهم التي ڪانوا یجلسون أنصابا وسموها بأسماٸهم ففعلوا فلم تعبد حتی إذا هلڪ أولٔڪ وتنسخ العلم عبدت
Ibrāhim bin Musa narrated to us Hishām reported to us from Ibn Jurayj and he said A’ṭā from Ibn A’bbās (may Allah be pleased with him): All the idols which were worshipped by the people of Nuḥ (Noah) were worshipped by the Arabs later on. As for the idol Wadd, it was worshipped by the tribe of Kalb at Daumat-al JandalSuwā’ was the idol of (the tribe of) Murad and then by Ban, Ghuṭaif at Al-Jurf near Saba; Ya’ooq was the idol of Hamdān, and Nasr was the idol of Ḥimyr, the branch of Dhi-al-Kala.’ The names (of the idols) formerly belonged to some pious men of the people of Nuḥ and when they died Shayṭān inspired their people to prepare and place idols at the places where they used to sit, and to call those idols by their names. The people did so, but the idols were not worshipped till those people (who initiated them) had died and the origin of the idols had become obscure, whereupon people began worshipping them.
There are many points of contention in relation to the narrative. Firstly, as with the previous one in relation to al-Lāt, it is not Prophetic; Ibn A’bbās does not say that the Prophet (peace be upon him) has said this. Consequently, it cannot be taken or viewed as being revelation. This is very important given that it is purporting to show something from pre-history, which cannot be established by a narrative chain of transmission. Secondly, there is dispute in relation to the identity of A’ṭā in the isnād. Some have contended this is A’ṭā ibn Abi Ra’bah, who is a well-known narrator from Ibn A’bbās and is trustworthy. We would argue that it is not this A’ṭā who is reporting, but rather, A’ṭā al-Khurāsāni. Narrations where A’ṭā al-Khurasāni reports from Ibn A’bbās are not regarded as being sound as there is an issue as to whether this A’ṭā actually met and / or took narrations from Ibn A’bbās in relation to Tafsir. Although it is quite a lengthy and detailed discussion, suffice is it to present a single narrative as cited in the Tafsir of Abdar-Razzāq, which identifies the A’ṭā as being A’ṭā al-Khurāsāni:
ثم أضاف عبد الرزاق بعد ذلك فوراً: [عَنِ ابْنِ جُرَيْجٍ، عَنْ عَطَاءٍ الْخُرَاسَانِيِّ، عَنِ ابْنِ عَبَّاسٍ، مِثْلَهُ إِلَّا أَنَّهُ قَالَ: «صَارَتِ الْأَوْثَانُ الَّتِي كَانَتْ فِي قَوْمِ نُوحٍ فِي الْعَرَبِ» ثُمَّ ذَكَرَ مِثْلَ حَدِيثِ قَتَادَةَ
When comparing the narration of the idols at the time of Nuḥ (peace be upon him) with the Qur’ānic text, again there is a striking disparity. The narration says:
But this is not what the text of the Qur’ān has. Rather, it shows that the idols that are mentioned are already in existence at the time of Nuḥ (peace be upon him) and are regarded as deities. Only a short excerpt is presented here for brevity [71: 1/2, 5/7, 23], but it is instructive to read the entire Surah:
إِنَّا أَرْسَلْنَا نُوحًا إِلَىٰ قَوْمِهِ أَنْ أَنذِرْ قَوْمَكَ مِن قَبْلِ أَن يَأْتِيَهُمْ عَذَابٌ أَلِيمٌ، قَالَ يَا قَوْمِ إِنِّي لَكُمْ نَذِيرٌ مُّبِينٌ
Surely We sent Nuḥ to his people, saying: Warn your people before there come upon them a painful chastisement. He said: O my people! Surely I am a plain warner to you
قَالَ رَبِّ إِنِّي دَعَوْتُ قَوْمِي لَيْلًا وَنَهَارًا، فَلَمْ يَزِدْهُمْ دُعَائِي إِلَّا فِرَارًا، وَإِنِّي كُلَّمَا دَعَوْتُهُمْ لِتَغْفِرَ لَهُمْ جَعَلُوا أَصَابِعَهُمْ فِي آذَانِهِمْ وَاسْتَغْشَوْا ثِيَابَهُمْ وَأَصَرُّوا وَاسْتَكْبَرُوا اسْتِكْبَارًا
وَقَالُوا لَا تَذَرُنَّ آلِهَتَكُمْ وَلَا تَذَرُنَّ وَدًّا وَلَا سُوَاعًا وَلَا يَغُوثَ وَيَعُوقَ وَنَسْرًا
He said: O my Lord! Surely I have called my people by night and by day! But my call has only made them flee the more. And whenever I have called them that you may forgive them, they put their fingers in their ears, cover themselves with their garments, and persist and are puffed up with pride. And they say: By no means leave your gods, nor leave Wadd, nor Suwa; nor Yaghus, and Yauq and Nasr.
And all success is with Allah and unto him is the highest attainment.
1. There are loads of books that explain and support Shia arguments and I am sure you are already aware of some of them. However, being a political opponent you really should not engage in such issues!! We all, Sunna and Shia, suffer from the same regime. Why not accepting each other and unifying with each other??
1. The express purpose of the article is to answer in brief a question that was raised concerning two narrations that have been attributed to Ibn A’bbās (may Allah be pleased with him).
Many have argued based upon these two narratives that the origin of polytheism (Shirk) stems from the veneration of pious men. Notwithstanding the various problems that are encountered when analysing these two narratives, the article seeks to show, in brief, that the origin of Shirk, cannot be understood in this manner.
Further articles and chapters upon this subject are going to be published in due course.
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Surah Al-Mumtahina (she that is to be examined, examining her)
Search :
By Yusuf Ali | By Shakir | By Pickthal | All 3
In the name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful.
Total Verses :
13 - Listen to Recitation of this Surah with Translation
Ayah: 1
Pickthal: O ye who believe! Choose not My enemy and your enemy for allies. Do ye give them friendship when they disbelieve in that truth whichhath come unto you, driving out the messenger and you because ye believe inAllah, your Lord? If ye have come forth to strive in My way and seeking Mygood pleasure, (show them not friendship). Do ye show friendship unto themin secret, when I am Best Aware of what ye hide and what ye proclaim? Andwhosoever doeth it among you, he verily hath strayed from the right way.
Yusuf Ali: O ye who believe! Take not my enemies and yours as friends (or protectors),- offering them (your) love, even though they have rejected theTruth that has come to you, and have (on the contrary) driven out theProphet and yourselves (from your homes), (simply) because ye believe inAllah your Lord! If ye have come out to strive in My Way and to seek My GoodPleasure, (take them not as friends), holding secret converse of love (andfriendship) with them: for I know full well all that ye conceal and allthat ye reveal. And any of you that does this has strayed from the StraightPath.
Ayah: 2
Arabic: إِن يَثْقَفُوكُمْ يَكُونُوا لَكُمْ أَعْدَاء وَيَبْسُطُوا إِلَيْكُمْ أَيْدِيَهُمْ وَأَلْسِنَتَهُم بِالسُّوءِ وَوَدُّوا لَوْ تَكْفُرُونَ
Yusuf Ali: If they were to get the better of you, they would behave to you as enemies, and stretch forth their hands and their tongues against youfor evil: and they desire that ye should reject the Truth.
Ayah: 3
Arabic: لَن تَنفَعَكُمْ أَرْحَامُكُمْ وَلَا أَوْلَادُكُمْ يَوْمَ الْقِيَامَةِ يَفْصِلُ بَيْنَكُمْ وَاللَّهُ بِمَا تَعْمَلُونَ بَصِيرٌ
Pickthal: Your ties of kindred and your children will avail you naught upon the Day of Resurrection. He will part you. Allah is Seer of what yedo.
Yusuf Ali: Of no profit to you will be your relatives and your children on the Day of Judgment: He will judge between you: for Allah sees well allthat ye do.
Ayah: 4
Arabic: قَدْ كَانَتْ لَكُمْ أُسْوَةٌ حَسَنَةٌ فِي إِبْرَاهِيمَ وَالَّذِينَ مَعَهُ إِذْ قَالُوا لِقَوْمِهِمْ إِنَّا بُرَاء مِنكُمْ وَمِمَّا تَعْبُدُونَ مِن دُونِ اللَّهِ كَفَرْنَا بِكُمْ وَبَدَا بَيْنَنَا وَبَيْنَكُمُ الْعَدَاوَةُ وَالْبَغْضَاء أَبَدًا حَتَّى تُؤْمِنُوا بِاللَّهِ وَحْدَهُ إِلَّا قَوْلَ إِبْرَاهِيمَ لِأَبِيهِ لَأَسْتَغْفِرَنَّ لَكَ وَمَا أَمْلِكُ لَكَ مِنَ اللَّهِ مِن شَيْءٍ رَّبَّنَا عَلَيْكَ تَوَكَّلْنَا وَإِلَيْكَ أَنَبْنَا وَإِلَيْكَ الْمَصِيرُ
Pickthal: There is a goodly pattern for you in Abraham and those with him, when they told their folk: Lo! we are guiltless of you and all that yeworship beside Allah. We have done with you. And there hath arisen betweenus and you hostility and hate for ever until ye believe in Allah only -save that which Abraham promised his father (when he said): I will askforgiveness for thee, though I own nothing for thee from Allah - Our Lord!In Thee we put our trust, and unto Thee we turn repentant, and unto Thee isthe journeying.
Yusuf Ali: There is for you an excellent example (to follow) in Abraham and those with him, when they said to their people: "We are clear of youand of whatever ye worship besides Allah: we have rejected you, and there hasarisen, between us and you, enmity and hatred for ever,- unless ye believein Allah and Him alone": But not when Abraham said to his father: "I willpray for forgiveness for thee, though I have no power (to get) aught on thybehalf from Allah." (They prayed): "Our Lord! in Thee do we trust, and toThee do we turn in repentance: to Thee is (our) Final Goal.
Ayah: 5
Arabic: رَبَّنَا لَا تَجْعَلْنَا فِتْنَةً لِّلَّذِينَ كَفَرُوا وَاغْفِرْ لَنَا رَبَّنَا إِنَّكَ أَنتَ الْعَزِيزُ الْحَكِيمُ
Ayah: 6
Arabic: لَقَدْ كَانَ لَكُمْ فِيهِمْ أُسْوَةٌ حَسَنَةٌ لِمَن كَانَ يَرْجُو اللَّهَ وَالْيَوْمَ الْآخِرَ وَمَن يَتَوَلَّ فَإِنَّ اللَّهَ هُوَ الْغَنِيُّ الْحَمِيدُ
Pickthal: Verily ye have in them a goodly pattern for everyone who looketh to Allah and the Last Day. And whosoever may turn away, lo! stillAllah, He is the Absolute, the Owner of Praise.
Yusuf Ali: There was indeed in them an excellent example for you to follow,- for those whose hope is in Allah and in the Last Day. But if anyturn away, truly Allah is Free of all Wants, Worthy of all Praise.
Ayah: 7
Arabic: عَسَى اللَّهُ أَن يَجْعَلَ بَيْنَكُمْ وَبَيْنَ الَّذِينَ عَادَيْتُم مِّنْهُم مَّوَدَّةً وَاللَّهُ قَدِيرٌ وَاللَّهُ غَفُورٌ رَّحِيمٌ
Yusuf Ali: It may be that Allah will grant love (and friendship) between you and those whom ye (now) hold as enemies. For Allah has power (over allthings); And Allah is Oft-Forgiving, Most Merciful.
Ayah: 8
Pickthal: Allah forbiddeth you not those who warred not against you on account of religion and drove you not out from your homes, that ye shouldshow them kindness and deal justly with them. Lo! Allah loveth the justdealers.
Yusuf Ali: Allah forbids you not, with regard to those who fight you not for (your) Faith nor drive you out of your homes, from dealing kindly andjustly with them: for Allah loveth those who are just.
Ayah: 9
Pickthal: Allah forbiddeth you only those who warred against you on account of religion and have driven you out from your homes and helped todrive you out, that ye make friends of them. Whosoever maketh friends ofthem - (All) such are wrong-doers.
Yusuf Ali: Allah only forbids you, with regard to those who fight you for (your) Faith, and drive you out of your homes, and support (others) indriving you out, from turning to them (for friendship and protection). Itis such as turn to them (in these circumstances), that do wrong.
Ayah: 10
Arabic: يَا أَيُّهَا الَّذِينَ آمَنُوا إِذَا جَاءكُمُ الْمُؤْمِنَاتُ مُهَاجِرَاتٍ فَامْتَحِنُوهُنَّ اللَّهُ أَعْلَمُ بِإِيمَانِهِنَّ فَإِنْ عَلِمْتُمُوهُنَّ مُؤْمِنَاتٍ فَلَا تَرْجِعُوهُنَّ إِلَى الْكُفَّارِ لَا هُنَّ حِلٌّ لَّهُمْ وَلَا هُمْ يَحِلُّونَ لَهُنَّ وَآتُوهُم مَّا أَنفَقُوا وَلَا جُنَاحَ عَلَيْكُمْ أَن تَنكِحُوهُنَّ إِذَا آتَيْتُمُوهُنَّ أُجُورَهُنَّ وَلَا تُمْسِكُوا بِعِصَمِ الْكَوَافِرِ وَاسْأَلُوا مَا أَنفَقْتُمْ وَلْيَسْأَلُوا مَا أَنفَقُوا ذَلِكُمْ حُكْمُ اللَّهِ يَحْكُمُ بَيْنَكُمْ وَاللَّهُ عَلِيمٌ حَكِيمٌ
Pickthal: O ye who believe! When believing women come unto you as fugitives, examine them. Allah is Best Aware of their faith. Then, if yeknow them for true believers, send them not back unto the disbelievers.They are not lawful for them (the disbelievers), nor are they (thedisbelievers) lawful for them. And give them (the disbelievers) that whichthey have spent (upon them). And it is no sin for you to marry such womenwhen ye have given them their dues. And hold not to the ties ofdisbelieving women; and ask for (the return of) that which ye have spent;and let them (the disbelievers) ask for that which they have spent. That isthe judgment of Allah. He judgeth between you. Allah is Knower, Wise.
Yusuf Ali: O ye who believe! When there come to you believing women refugees, examine (and test) them: Allah knows best as to their Faith: if yeascertain that they are Believers, then send them not back to theUnbelievers. They are not lawful (wives) for the Unbelievers, nor are the(Unbelievers) lawful (husbands) for them. But pay the Unbelievers what theyhave spent (on their dower), and there will be no blame on you if ye marrythem on payment of their dower to them. But hold not to the guardianship ofunbelieving women: ask for what ye have spent on their dowers, and let the(Unbelievers) ask for what they have spent (on the dowers of women who comeover to you). Such is the command of Allah: He judges (with justice) betweenyou. And Allah is Full of Knowledge and Wisdom.
Ayah: 11
Arabic: وَإِن فَاتَكُمْ شَيْءٌ مِّنْ أَزْوَاجِكُمْ إِلَى الْكُفَّارِ فَعَاقَبْتُمْ فَآتُوا الَّذِينَ ذَهَبَتْ أَزْوَاجُهُم مِّثْلَ مَا أَنفَقُوا وَاتَّقُوا اللَّهَ الَّذِي أَنتُم بِهِ مُؤْمِنُونَ
Pickthal: And if any of your wives have gone from you unto the disbelievers and afterward ye have your turn (of triumph), then give untothose whose wives have gone the like of that which they have spent, andkeep your duty to Allah in Whom ye are believers.
Yusuf Ali: And if any of your wives deserts you to the Unbelievers, and ye have an accession (by the coming over of a woman from the other side),then pay to those whose wives have deserted the equivalent of what they hadspent (on their dower). And fear Allah, in Whom ye believe.
Ayah: 12
Arabic: يَا أَيُّهَا النَّبِيُّ إِذَا جَاءكَ الْمُؤْمِنَاتُ يُبَايِعْنَكَ عَلَى أَن لَّا يُشْرِكْنَ بِاللَّهِ شَيْئًا وَلَا يَسْرِقْنَ وَلَا يَزْنِينَ وَلَا يَقْتُلْنَ أَوْلَادَهُنَّ وَلَا يَأْتِينَ بِبُهْتَانٍ يَفْتَرِينَهُ بَيْنَ أَيْدِيهِنَّ وَأَرْجُلِهِنَّ وَلَا يَعْصِينَكَ فِي مَعْرُوفٍ فَبَايِعْهُنَّ وَاسْتَغْفِرْ لَهُنَّ اللَّهَ إِنَّ اللَّهَ غَفُورٌ رَّحِيمٌ
Pickthal: O Prophet! If believing women come unto thee, taking oath of allegiance unto thee that they will ascribe no thing as partner unto Allah,and will neither steal nor commit adultery nor kill their children, norproduce any lie that they have devised between their hands and feet, nordisobey thee in what is right, then accept their allegiance and ask Allahto forgive them. Lo! Allah is Forgiving, Merciful.
Yusuf Ali: O Prophet! When believing women come to thee to take the oath of fealty to thee, that they will not associate in worship any other thingwhatever with Allah, that they will not steal, that they will not commitadultery (or fornication), that they will not kill their children, thatthey will not utter slander, intentionally forging falsehood, and that theywill not disobey thee in any just matter,- then do thou receive theirfealty, and pray to Allah for the forgiveness (of their sins): for Allah isOft-Forgiving, Most Merciful.
Ayah: 13
Arabic: يَا أَيُّهَا الَّذِينَ آمَنُوا لَا تَتَوَلَّوْا قَوْمًا غَضِبَ اللَّهُ عَلَيْهِمْ قَدْ يَئِسُوا مِنَ الْآخِرَةِ كَمَا يَئِسَ الْكُفَّارُ مِنْ أَصْحَابِ الْقُبُورِ
Pickthal: O ye who believe! Be not friendly with a folk with whom Allah is wroth, (a folk) who have despaired of the Hereafter as the disbelieversdespair of those who are in the graves.
Yusuf Ali: O ye who believe! Turn not (for friendship) to people on whom is the Wrath of Allah, of the Hereafter they are already in despair, just asthe Unbelievers are in despair about those (buried) in graves.
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Oxford SEO and PPC Consultant/Blogger
Ultimate success – the qualities of the believers from Surah Mu’minoon and Surah Furqan
| 1 Comment
Assalamu alaikum warahmathullahi wabarakathahu!
This post is dedicated to the seeker. The one who is seeking guidance to a path that is not crooked nor leads astray. The path that will lead you to your Lord and all that He promises.
Glad tidings to you, for your Lord has revealed qualities and characteristics that will lead you toward your ultimate success.
This post will list the 6 qualities that a believer possesses as mentioned by Allah (swt) in Surah Mu’minoon (the believers) and the 12 qualities that Allah (swt) mentions in Surah Furqan (the criterion).
Most or all of us will be falling short in one or more of the qualities. May we identify where we need to make improvements and may Allah grant us the gift of implementing these qualities into our lives.
Qualities of the believers - Surah mu’minoon
1. when they are in salah they pray with full Kushoo (complete focus, concentration and humbleness – they feel that they stand before their Lord while in prayer)
2. they avoid vain talk (anything that does not add any value to their lives in this world or the next – such as gossip, back-biting, lewd and indecent conversation etc.)
3. they are active in doing zakah (notice here that the emphasis is on doing zakah as opposed to giving zakah? So the implication is that these people (the believers) don’t just give charity when asked, but they are proactive in searching for people in their localities or within their own families to help. This could also mean people using their God given talents for the service of mankind, such as volunteer doctors who use their own money, their skills and expertise, to help as many underprivileged patients as they can, or the lawyer who helps as many people fight injustice pro bono etc.)
4. they protect their private parts. They don’t commit fornication or adultery or go anywhere near fahsha (lewdness) or anything that would lead toward zina.
5. they keep their promises and trusts (if they say they will meet you at a certain location at 5pm, they will meet you at that location at 5pm and not 5.01pm. Also they can be trusted with your wealth and belongings).
6. And finally: they strictly guard their 5 daily prayers (notice how Allah comes back to salah? The first quality refers to Khushoo or the quality of your salah, here Allah refers to the number or the quantity of the salah. So these people protect their daily salah no matter what).
And Allah promises these people that they will be the ones who will inherit Jannah and they will dwell therein forever! What a beautiful reward? Alhamdulillah!
My dearest reader, please note down the above six qualities and ask yourself in which areas do you need further improvements in? Insha’Allah let’s work toward rectifying this and make small but daily improvements in at least one area that we are lacking.
Now let us move on to the qualities of the believers in Surah Furqan
1. They walk on the earth in humility
2. When the ignorant address them with harsh words they respond with peace (Salam)
3. They spend their nights in adoration of Allah in prayer.
4. Those who make the following dua:
(Surah furqan:65-66) the nearest meaning – “our Lord! Avert from us the wrath of hell, for its wrath is indeed an affliction grievous. Evil indeed is it as an abode, and as a place to rest in.” (Dear reader, I would like you to keep this dua at the back of your mind, I’ll come back to this in a bit insha’Allah).
5. When they spend, they are not extravagant and are not stingy but hold a balance between these extremes.
6. They do not invoke anyone other god or deity (they don’t commit shirk).
7. They don’t kill innocent people.
8. They don’t commit fornication (and adultery).
9. They don’t witness falsehood (I.e. they don’t give false witness, they don’t lie and they don’t help with anything that implies fraud, cheating or falsehood).
10. When people are engaged with vain talk, bad jokes, useless show etc. they don’t walk away in an arrogant or fussy fashion but they withdraw from such people in a dignified and honourable way.
11. Those when they are admonished with Allah’s signs they don’t ignore the message or act as if they are deaf or blind but are those who take heed.
12. Those who make the following dua:
(Surah furqan:74) nearest meaning “our Lord! Grant unto us spouses and offspring who will be the coolness of our eyes, and make us leaders of the pious”.
Allah Rabbul Izzath summarises with the following -
“Those (the ones who have the above qualities) are the ones who will be rewarded with the highest place in heaven (Jannathul Firdous) because of their patient constancy: there they will be met with salutations and peace. Dwelling therein – how beautiful an abode and place of rest” (Surah Furqan:75-76)
Dearest reader, remember I asked you to keep the first of the two duas mentioned here in mind? Please go back to it (point number 4 above) and have a quick read. What does the believer ask protection from and how does he/she describe hell? He says it is a place evil to rest in. Now what does Allah say these people will get as a reward? Allah says they will get Jannathul Firdous and how does Allah describe Jannah as? He says how beautiful an abode and place of rest :)
May we strive to implement each of these qualities into our lives and May we be able to inculcate all of them before we die so we meet our Lord saying “ya Allah we have heard and we obeyed!”
May Allah grant us hidaya and sabr in order to be this person that Allah talks about in both Surah Furqan and Surah Mu’minoon.
Barakallahu lee wa lakum fil quranil kareem
Wa nafa’nee wa iyyakum bil aayaati wa dhikril hakeem
Innahu jawaadun malikun barrun rabbur ra’oofur raheem
May Allah bless me and you through the guidance of this noble Quran
And may its teachings and remembrances benefit me and you
Truly Allah is the possessor of wealth, the sovereign, the all good, the one who has authority and power over us, the loving and infinitely-merciful.
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Author: Shaad Hamid
Shaad used to be an Oxford based SEO and PPC blogger, consultant and citizen journalist. He has recently moved to Dubai and is currently working as an SEO Account Manager at DigitasLBi. He is passionate about internet marketing and is the SEO lead for numerous clients from diverse sectors such as FMCG to Travel & Tourism. Find Shaad on Google | http://www.shaadhamid.com/2013/12/ultimate-success-qualities-believers-surah-muminoon-surah-furqan/ | robots: classic
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Ibn al-Qayyim: 10 Useless Matters
Ibn al-Qayyim: 10 Useless Matters
The Hafiz of Damascus Imam Ibn al-Qayyim al-Jawziyyah says in his wonderful book on wisdom and exhortation Kitab al-Fawa’id there are ten useless matters that benefit no-one.
1. Knowledge that is not acted on.
2. The deed that has neither sincerity nor is it based on following the righteous examples of others.
3. Money that is hoarded, as the owner neither enjoys it during this life nor obtains any reward for it in the Hereafter.
4. The heart that is empty of love and longing for Allah, and of seeking closeness to Him.
5. A body that does not obey and serve Allah.
6. Loving Allah without following His orders or seeking His pleasure.
7. Time that is not spent in expiating sins or seizing opportunities to do good.
8. A mind that thinks about useless matters.
9. Serving those who do not bring you close to Allah, nor benefit you in your life.
However two matters are the severest and they both are the source of all things useless: wasting the heart and wasting time.
Wasting the heart is when one prefers this worldly life over the Hereafter, and wasting time is done by having incessant hope. Destruction occurs by following one’s desires and having incessant hope, while all goodness is found in following the right path and preparing oneself to meet Allah.
How strange it is that when a servant of Allah has a [worldly] problem, he seeks help of Allah, but he never asks Allah to cure his heart before it dies of ignorance, neglect, fulfilling one’s desires and being involved in innovations. Indeed, when the heart dies, he will never feel the significance or impact of his sins.
1. Knowledge that is not acted on
As Muslims we seek knowledge from a young age, some of us attended evening madrasa's others were taught at home, but we then grow up in a system where we study at college, and then University. And if we are lucky we apply those skills and knowledge at our work place. Here's a thought: Do we apply the Islamic knowledge we have learned? Do we attend Islamic courses and seminars then pass the messages or important lessons to our friends and family?
1. The da`wah carrier of all people must be far from failing to act on what he/she knows. How can we know the obligation of re-establishing the khilafah but not move our limbs to work for it?
2. How can there be incongruence between our knowledge and actions? This is weakness in faith (iman).
3. How can we have general knowledge of our individual and collective duties yet see no reason to fulfill them?
4. What worth is knowledge if they merely reside in the mind as information or hoarded in our computers, books and libraries?
5. We of all people must strive and hasten to implement the shari`ah rulings that we know and learn.
Tip number 1
Those are questions for you to ask yourself, so here is tip number 1, how to overcome useless matter 1: Knowledge that is not acted on
After learning something new from talks, circles, courses etc, try and spread it amongst your brothers and sisters (and mum and dad) at home. For example today I learnt this hadith:
Abu Hurayrah (ra) narrates, “The Prophet (saw) passed by me once while I was planting some crops. He said, 'O Abu Hurayrah! What are you planting?' I answered, 'some crops.' The Prophet said, 'shall I inform you of crops which are far better than all this? Saying: “SubhanAllah" – 'Glory be to Allah' and “Alhamdulillah" – 'All praise and thanks is for Allah alone', and “Laa ilaha ilAllah" – 'There is no deity worthy of worship except Allah', and “Allahu Akbar" – 'Allah is Greater than everything'. With every one of these [words], a tree will be planted for you in paradise'." (Ibn Majah)
2. The deed that has neither sincerity nor is based on following the righteous examples of others
This is like doing things for the sake of it. For some of us, we give charity but do we do it for the sake of Allah or to show others? Or another great example, we do wudu many times a day, but what goes through our heads?
1. Sincerity (ikhlas) is a duty (wajib) on all Muslims – and must be the staple attribute especially of the da`wah carrier.
2. This means abandoning any form of ostentatious worship (riya’), i.e. to avoid impressing other people.
3. Ikhlas is an interior action of the heart (a`mal al-qulub) that only Allah and the servant know.
4. One’s insincerity can be obscure (khafy) until it is brought into sharp focus through scrutinizing and accounting/introspection of the ego-self (muhasabat al-nafs).
5. The motive of the da`wah carrier in acts of worship (`ibadat) must be Allah and His pleasure and nothing else.
6. Position in the community, status, public perception and profile are not the primary or secondary objectives of the da`wah carrier. They must not underpin the reason why he/she does an action.
7. How can we as da`wah carriers demonstrate and follow the best model of conduct and behavior if we do not understand or know the best example for mankind – our beloved Prophet (saw)?
8. How can we influence and change others if we ourselves exhibit no qualities that will transform hearts and minds?
9. How can we be people who fail and neglect to read the lives of the best generation, e.g. that of the companions (may Allah be pleased with them all), and then the tabi`i, the atibba` al-tabi`in as well as the lives of the salihin, awliya’ and `ulama’?
Tip number 2
When doing a good action like charity, prayer, fasting etc, think about it. Think about Allah and the Prophet in your heart and try not to think about what you are going to eat for lunch, or what to wear when you are going out in the evening!
If you're really good at saving money, (which I am not!) you probably have thousands of pounds stashed away in your numerous bank accounts. What benefits will that bring you, any idea?
1. The da`wah carrier must remember that he/she is not the real or true owner of wealth but is merely a trustee of it.
2. Allah alone is Owner.
3. In the service of the struggle for the din, we may – no we will have to – sacrifice dear and cherished things (objects, items, possessions, etc) and will have to spend it in the way of this service knowing that Allah will multiply it manifold.
4. The da`wah carrier is never a hoarder of wealth and this should not be one of his/her attributes.
Tip number 3
Try and use your money effectively, give to the poor, pay zakat, give Qard Hasana and save too with an aim to go Hajj, pay your families debt off and other useful reasons.
Our hearts are sometimes filled with worldly affairs, so much so that we forget about Allah. Instead our hearts are thinking about food, (what's mum cooking for dinner) and clothes, our loved ones and our favourite past times (Arsenal the best team in the world!).
All that fills our hearts, and sometimes loneliness too, and the love of this dunya, you can see the list can go on and on and on.
This is why it's important to have time to yourself and reflect on life and remember Allah. Here's a great quote I found in a nasheed:
"If you ask me about love, and what I know about it. My answer will be it's everything about Allah, the PURE LOVE..."(Maher Zain Nasheed)
1. How is it possible for the da`wah carrier to be empty of love for Allah (swt)?
2. How can a sign (`alamah) of love of Allah be to avoid following his commands? A sign of love is obedience.
3. He/she must be constantly infused and invigorated by the love of Allah – prepared to offer his/her life for Him.
4. His/her heart must be developed and nourished by remembering and contemplating on the attributes and extreme love, mercy and benevolence Allah has for His creatures and how He helps and intervenes in protecting those struggling in His path.
5. Allah desires a reciprocal intimacy with His servants and a da`wah carrier must burn with desire for this.
6. Should our hearts be buried in the love of things (cars, clothes, gadgets…), objects, wealth, the benefits of the dunya, etc. or should it be enveloped in the love and longing of Allah and His Messenger (saw)?
7. Should love of the dunya eclipse our love for Allah?
Tip number 4
After prayers or when you're walking to work, the shops etc, try and remember Allah. This can be done by dhikr (remembrance) or think about Allah's attributes his 99 names and what these attributes tell you about your Lord. How about thanking him whilst looking at the shining sun, or the beautiful night skies?
5. A body that does not obey and serve Allah.
Have you looked at yourself, your eating habits, and your fitness level, your hands and you feet? Did you know they will all answer on the Day of Judgement how you have utilised them? If all you do is eat, sleep and drink and do not pray, exercise and have a healthy balanced lifestyle then your body will slowly perish and soon you will realise you have become feeble and unable to do all the great ibadah as much as you want to, which you didn't do enough of when your body was healthy!
This hadith sums it up;
"A strong believer is more beloved in the sight of Allah than a weak believer but there is good in both."(Muslim)
1. The da`wah carrier must remember that our limbs are one of the greatest blessings Allah has bestowed.
2. They are a trust from the Creator to fulfil the duties of worshipping Him properly.
3. How is it that the da`wah carrier uses it for other than the service of his/her Lord?
4. How is that through it we neglect the halal and perform the haram? Engage in the shubhat and avoid any pietistic restraint (wara`)?
5. The da`wah carrier hastens to the good, however little and avoids the bad, however little and thanks Allah for enabling him to fulfill his/her duties.
Tip number 5
Enjoy a balance diet, keep active by doing regular sports this will keep your body fit, but remember to also strengthen the mind and the soul too. A balance of all three is key to being a strong believer in the sight of Allah.
6.Loving Allah without following His orders or seeking His pleasure.Some of us Masha Allah love Allah, and have strong links in our hearts, but we find it difficult to follow his commands or don't know how to follow him or how to best seek the pleasure of Allah. I remember when I was at college, we use to have this teacher, 'Muslim' but he never used to pray or fast, and when we asked him why? He replied 'I believe in Allah and he is in my heart and that is all that I am required to do'. And there are more people like him, so it's important that we seek knowledge.
"Allah will exalt those who believe among you, and those who have been granted knowledge to high ranks."(58:11)
Tip number 6 (refer to 4)
Seek knowledge, the best way is to do so in small bite sizes, apply what you have learned from the Quran and Sunnah and be consistent. When you apply what you have learnt see if you're still doing so a week later or you have totally forgotten about it. Best thing to do is write that down on a post it pad and stick it somewhere visible in your bedroom.
Hence I started writing this article, time is flying away from us, ask yourself this question, if I were to die today what good deeds have I got to show to enter Jannah? Start counting...
1. A da`wah carrier must be using his/her every moment to plan, prepare and aid the da`wah due to the urgency of the re-establishment of the khilafah.
2. How can it be that his/her thoughts are filled with the contents of useless things like unlawful music, television programmes and other matters?
3. Should not the desire and yearning for Allah and Jannah alone loom large in the focus of the da`wah carrier?
4. Should not time be spent expiating the many sins as well as performing the good deeds?
Tip Number 7
Before you go to sleep every night, think about what good deeds you have done that day, what bad sins knowingly you have committed that day? This is called 'Muhasabah', self reflection; the idea is to improve day by day. For example today I prayed 3 Salah behind the imam, tomorrow I must aim to do 4 prayers, maybe even 5 Insha Allah!
8. A mind that thinks about useless matters.
We spoke about this in an earlier blog, our thoughts are always full of rubbish and it does not help watching TV and all those soaps on TV, which puts more rubbish in our brains. Instead of food for thoughts, it’s more like rubbish for thoughts. LOL
Tip Number 8(refer to 7)
Just for one day, try not to watch TV or films, try not to hear about the latest gossip around the work or school place. Try and think about Allah and his attributes, try and do Dhikr. I know this is hard, and if it’s not working why not fast, that helps a lot, trust me!
We live in a time of celebrity and lifestyle culture, some young people imitate their so called idols, be they musicians, footballers or stars. These people do not bring us any closer to Allah and sometimes they take us away from Allah.
1. The work of the da`wah carrier is perilous but the noblest. He/she must remember that tawakkul, sabr, rida’and steadfastness – as essentials – will be always be required.
2. Fear of any creation over Allah is inverted belief and is irrational.
3. The da`wah carrier must remind him/her self that only Allah alone can bring about harm and benefit; no ruler, king, president, MP, etc. has any might or power over Allah.
4. The dunya is not permanent but the abode of jannah is permanent. For the da`wah carrier the choice ought to be easy.
Tip number 9
Ask yourself who your idol/hero is? Then, compare that individual to our greatest ever role model – our beloved Prophet (saw). Ok, here’s the test how much do you know about your idols lifestyle, background, beliefs etc and compare this to your knowledge of the Prophet (saw). Do you know the family of the Prophet (saw), do you know his life story? What happened to him when he was young? What did he wear? How did he live his life? If our knowledge of his is little, seek knowledge by attending courses or reading up.
Fear, Love and hope in Allah and no one else. Simple!
The Prophet (saw) said:
"Islam began as something strange, and it shall return to being something strange as it began, so give glad tidings to the strangers." (Muslim)
Tip number 10 (refer to 9)
By being a stranger in this world, we can detach ourselves from it, but still live in it. We must always seek knowledge and do good deeds.
The tips are just my thoughts, and I am sure for each one you can think of so many examples and so many situations. I’m no scholar, so take what is best and leave the useless behind.
Surah Al-Asr
1. By Al-Asr (the time).
2. Verily! Man is in loss,
3. Except those who believe (in Islamic Monotheism) and do righteous good deeds, and recommend one another to the truth (i.e. order one another to perform all kinds of good deeds (Al-Maroof) which Allah has ordained, and abstain from all kinds of sins and evil deeds (Al-Munkar) which Allah has forbidden), and recommend one another to patience (for the sufferings, harms, and injuries which one may encounter in Allahs Cause during preaching His religion of Islamic Monotheism or Jihad, etc.).
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The Excuse Of Personal Problems
Regardless of their own difficulties and hardships, sincere believers choose to please Allah rather than placate their lower self. However, another segment of humanity does just the opposite. In moments of trial, these people, who assert the importance of supporting believers, frequently saying that they have no other aim in life, forget their words and even retreat when they see potential hardship coming their way.
One of the major reasons for this attitude is that they dwell on their personal problems: finding a good job, starting a family, and investing for the future, among others. They consider satisfying these concerns to be more important than striving to please Allah even though He states in the Qur'an:
These possessions and children are blessings from Allah. Of course, people may try to find a good job, start a family, and engage in profitable business. However, these things must never become the main goals in life or divert them from the importance of praising Allah, working toward the Hereafter, and winning His approval. On the contrary, all of these should help them attain these goals. Otherwise, as Allah says in the above verse, these things may have evil consequences and cause a person's downfall in this world and the Hereafter.
By pursuing their own interests and avoiding self-sacrifice, they cannot grasp the idea of Allah's power, His mercy and forbearance toward believers, or His protecting and helping them. Ignoring the fact that Allah sends their difficulties to test them, these people think that they have absolute power and strength. Since they think that other people can harm them, they are overwhelmed by fear. For an example, in the Qur'an Allah cites the case of those people who accompanied our Prophet (saas) to the battlefield but then wanted to retreat because they were terrified that they would be hurt. Allah tells these people to trust that Allah would help them:
Remember when you left your family early in the day to install the believers in their battle stations. Allah is All-Hearing, All-Knowing. And remember when two of your clans were on the point of losing heart and Allah was their Protector. Let the believers put their trust in Allah. Allah helped you at Badr when you were weak, so fear [and respect] Allah so that, hopefully, you will be thankful. (Surah Al 'Imran: 121-123)
At the time of our Prophet (saas), many people had no will to sacrifice and were intimidated by hardship and difficulty. This attitude is well-documented in the Qur'an, where Allah encourages people by reminding them that they can be successful only with His help: "… and when you asked the believers: "Is it not enough for you that your Lord reinforced you with three thousand angels, sent down?" (Surah Al 'Imran: 124). But they did not want to sacrifice, and so gave various excuses, hoping that our Prophet (saas) would allow them to stay behind:
(Surat al-Hijr:3)Onları bırak; yesinler, yararlansınlar ve onları (boş) emel oyalayadursun. İlerde bileceklerdir.
(Hicr Suresi, 3)
Some said that their houses were exposed, or that it was too hot, or that they could not afford it. But although they did not have the means, many of our Prophet's (saas) Companions showed their self-sacrificial spirit by joining the battle on foot. Some even wept because they could not accompany him, while others did not sacrifice even though they could, and others hid behind each other and sneaked away from the Muslims: "Allah knows those of you who sneak away. Those who oppose his command should beware of a testing trial coming to them or a painful punishment striking them" (Surat an-Nur: 63). However, the right thing for them to do would have been to show loyalty and faithfulness by sacrificing even when hard-pressed.
Allah tells us that these people were more attached to this world: "Would that there had been more people with a vestige of good among the generations of those who came before you, who forbade corruption in the land, other than the few among them whom We saved. Those who did wrong gladly pursued the life of luxury that they were given and were evildoers" (Surah Hud: 116). In another verse Allah tells us that they had broken their promises:
Yet, they had previously made a contract with Allah that they would never turn their backs. Contracts made with Allah will be asked about. (Surat al-Ahzab: 15)
This situation applies to all times. Some people claiming to have belief might avoid the responsibility of spreading the Qur'an's morality when they come up against the slightest difficulty. Caught up in their own transient worldly interests, they quickly return to thinking about their own problems. Even though they know, like all intelligent individuals with a conscience, that they are responsible for preventing injustice, helping those in pain and those suffering from poverty and oppression, and ending this oppression by showing people the true path, such people think it more sensible to remain on the sidelines and leave this responsibility to other believers.
Allah warns those who know what they should do but do not do it: "Do you order people to devoutness and forget yourselves, when you recite the Book? Will you not use your intellect?" (Surat al-Baqara: 44).
Allah states that the good attitude will, Allah willing, lead a person to salvation in this world and the Hereafter: "O you who believe. Shall I direct you to a transaction that will save you from a painful punishment? It is to believe in Allah and His messenger, and to strive in the way of Allah with your wealth and your selves. That is better for you if you only knew" (Surat as-Saff: 10-11). Allah reminds us that this is better. People without real belief think that it is enough to accept a bit of religion and sacrifice only when it is convenient for them.
In the same way, they may think that it would be better for them to stay as far away as possible from difficulties and inconveniences. But Allah tells us that these people are the losers. By dwelling on their worldly concerns and personal problems, they neglect their responsibility and, later on, will realize that they have occupied themselves with vain concerns and then be overwhelmed by sorrow:
Leave them to eat and enjoy themselves. Let false hope divert them. They will soon know. (Surat al-Hijr: 3)
The kind of morality that will bring salvation in this world and the Hereafter requires people to sacrifice their personal interests and possessions, as well as to live the kind of moral life pleasing to Allah in times of hardship, sickness, and difficulty. But those who know this and, nevertheless, yield to the suggestions of their lower self and pursue their own interests and well-being will be called to account.
Of course it is irrational to jeopardize one's eternal life by not being steadfast in the face of a minor hardship and by being unwilling to sacrifice. People who fully realize this truth and know that Allah always supports those who are faithful to the Qur'an's moral precepts must willingly sacrifice their interests and shoulder their responsibilities.
Furthermore, people must never forget that living according to the Qur'an's morality wins them His love:
Other Excuses for Avoiding Self-Sacrifice
Some people know what living by the Qur'an's morality entails, and yet avoid self-sacrificial acts even though they know that their attitude is wrong. Due to their weak belief, they do not use their conscious will to change their behavior; rather, they place more importance on pleasing people than winning Allah's favor. They do not care that He sees the weakness of their hearts, belief, and conscience, for their goal is to convince others of their sincerity by justifying their behavior and appeasing their own conscience. They seek to give the impression that they sincerely want to be self-sacrificial and take on responsibilities, but that there are many reasons why they cannot do so.
They know that their excuses are false and that they could find a way to sacrifice if they really wanted to. But they suppress their conscience to pursue their own interests, thinking that they will have a comfortable life if only they avoid assuming their responsibilities. But this is impossible.
Their conscience continually reminds them every time they do not please Allah and violate the Qur'an's moral teachings. They know exactly what they are doing and what Allah ttells them to do in the Qur'an. Nevertheless, they ignore their responsibilities, and so will be burdened with a great responsibility in this world and the Hereafter.
Such people go to great lengths to convince others that they really want to assume their proper responsibilities, but for some reason they cannot. Therefore, in those societies where the Qur'an's morality is not practiced, the best way to gain sympathy is generally thought to convince others that one's excuses are valid. Those who actually have such a misguided idea do not measure themselves according to the Qur'an's morality, and so resort to this technique to get what they want. But believers reject this approach, for they consider the Qur'an's moral teachings as their measure in all things. In the Qur'an Allah describes a sincere attitude as one that seeks first to win Allah's favor. For this reason, believers can recognize those who hide behind excuses to avoid acts of self-sacrifice, for their excuses reveal their insincerity and weak belief.
Instead of engaging in a contest of goodness, such people only superficially adopt the Qur'an's moral teachings because, as they often claim, they do not have the strength. They can use this excuse in every aspect of their daily lives, all the while claiming that they are sincere and that their hearts are pure. To convince others, they do not even hesitate to swear in Allah's name: "They will swear by Allah: 'Had we been able to, we would have gone out with you.' They are destroying their own selves. Allah knows that they are lying" (Surat at-Tawba: 42)
And hearkens to (the Command of) its Lord,- and it must needs (do so);- (then will come Home the full reality). O thou man! Verily thou art ever toiling on towards thy Lord- painfully toiling,- but thou shalt meet Him. (Al-Inshiqaq, 5-6)
In one verse, Allah refutes their claim: "Allah does not impose on any self any more than it can stand. For it is what it has earned; against it is what it has brought upon itself" (Surat al-Baqara: 286). The fact that they say the opposite reveals the sickness in their hearts and their intention to avoid responsibility.
This is exactly what happened with Talut (or Saul) and those who followed him when Allah sent him to the people as their ruler and promised to test them with a river. When Talut asked the people not to drink from the river, most of them could not see the purpose in this order, ignored it and fulfilled their desires. Later on, using the excuse mentioned above, they withdrew on the grounds that they did not have the strength to fight alongside Talut. But those who knew that Allah would cause them to prevail, even though they had very little strength, kept their promise and followed Talut:
When Talut marched out with the army, he said: "Allah will test you with a river. Anyone who drinks from it is not with me. But anyone who does not taste it is with me – except for him who merely scoops up a little in his hand." But they drank from it – except for a few of them. Then when he and those who believed had crossed it, they said: "We do not have the strength to face Goliath and his troops today." But those who were sure that they were going to meet Allah said: "How many a small force has triumphed over a much greater one by Allah's permission. Allah is with the steadfast." (Surat al-Baqara: 249)
Those who seek to avoid self-sacrifice sometimes maintain that circumstances forced them into a certain situation against their will. For example:
Those who were left behind were glad to stay behind the messenger of Allah. They did not want to strive with their wealth and themselves in the way of Allah. They said: "Do not go out to fight in the heat." Say: "The Fire of Hell is much hotter, if they only understood." (Surat at-Tawba: 81)
They wanted to hide their insincerity; however, their excuse, which they hoped would be accepted, only showed the degree of their self-deception. Allah says that He will burden an individual only with the amount of responsibility he or she can bear, and that along with the difficulty He will create the ability to endure it. Believers who know that Allah helps and supports His servants never believe that such an excuse is sincere. Just as He created the heat of the day, He also gave these people the opportunity to serve and sacrifice.
Allah can change the temperature or enable people to endure the heat. Those who hide behind insincere excuses know this. Moreover, the fact that other Muslims who face the same circumstances willingly assume their responsibility also shows the insincerity of these people.
Just as they refused to enter the struggle, they encouraged others to follow their example because it was too hot to fight. Others, as the Allah says, referred to service and self-sacrifice as "fitnah." Allah reveals their insincerity:
Among them are there some who say: 'Give me permission to stay. Do not put me to fitnah [trial].' Unquestionably, into fitnah they have fallen. Hell hems in the unbelievers. (Surat at-Tawba: 49)
Another excuse used to convince those around them is that they are occupied with the affairs of this world. Again, some of the people whom our Prophet (saas) called to support the Muslims sought to avoid that responsibility:
And a group of them said: "O people of Yathrib. Your position is untenable, so return." Some of them asked the Prophet to excuse them, saying: "Our houses are exposed," when they were not exposed. They merely wanted to run away. (Surat al-Ahzab: 13)
These people thought that they would suffer hardship, danger, and difficulty if they did what the Prophet (saas) told, and so they tried to make excuses by saying that they were needed at home, where they had important responsibilities. Allah tells us that they were lying, for they were fully aware that He was pleased with the Prophet's call and supports the believers. Allah then says that their overall goal was to avoid responsibility and self-sacrifice.
They use these kinds of excuses for everything imaginable. Believers who know that people are suffering must do what they can to help, for this is part of the Qur'an's morality. But insincere people try to find a way to avoid this responsibility by claiming that they do not have the ability to help, it is the wrong time, another responsibility is more important, they are sick, or they are having financial problems. In fact, they cannot find a way to help because they have no desire to do so. This is the real purpose behind their excuses.
In the meantime, while they try to escape responsibility, the sufferers of oppression are still oppressed and continue to be crushed mercilessly under harsh conditions. But those individuals who do not heed their consciences cannot understand the severity of the situation. Instead of feeling uncomfortable, they regard it as more important to involve themselves with their own worldly concerns. They also deceive themselves into thinking that their view is that of the majority. But they must not forget that everyone will be held accountable in the Hereafter. Allah warns believers not to be influenced by such people: "So be steadfast. Allah's promise is true. Do not let those who have no certainty make you impatient and shake your firmness" (Surat ar-Rum: 60).
Allah also reveals a very important truth: "So fight in the way of Allah – you are only answerable for yourself – and spur on the believers. It may well be that Allah will curb the force of those who do not believe. Allah has greater force and greater power to punish" (Surat an-Nisa': 84)
He can remove every difficulty and hardship that may arise, and so all people who place their trust in Allah can overcome every difficulty with His help. But if they try to escape their responsibilities, they will experience pangs of suffering sent by Allah that only He can relieve. Given this fact, every person must consider these things carefully and then put sincerity and the desire to win His favor above everything else.
Only those are Believers who have believed in Allah and His Messenger, and have never since doubted, but have striven with their belongings and their persons in the Cause of Allah. Such are the sincere ones.. (Surat al-Hujurat, 15)
The Real Reasons for Avoiding Self-Sacrifice
As we saw earlier, those who think that being self-sacrificial is a loss come up with many excuses to exonerate themselves. They know that their excuses are completely insincere, and yet their overall goal is only to convince others and protect their reputation in other people's eyes. Moreover, the believers know this as well, because they use the Qur'an as their guide.
Unbelievers know that they would win Allah's favor by being responsible and self-sacrificial, but they choose to do otherwise because their hearts are filled with doubt and indecision:
What! Are they in doubt about the meeting with their Lord? What! Does He not encompass all things? (Surat al-Fussilat: 54)
They are indeed in grave doubt about it. (Surah Hud: 110)
Only those who do not believe in Allah and the Last Day ask you to excuse them. Their hearts are full of doubt, and in their doubt they waver to and fro.(Surat at-Tawba: 45)
Allah warns people against satan's wiles: "The truth is from your Lord, so on no account be among the doubters" (Surat al-Baqara: 147), and proclaims that those who are not overwhelmed by doubt but, regardless of the current hardship carry on with determination, find favor in His Sight:
The believers are only those who have believed in Allah and His messenger, have had no doubt, and have striven with their wealth and themselves in the way of Allah. They are the ones who are true to their word. (Surat al-Hujurat: 15)
These people doubt the existence of Allah, Judgment Day, and the Hereafter, and consider the worldly interests nearer and easier advantages. They forget that Allah's justice is infinite, that He created everything, and that He helps the believers. Overwhelmed by distrust and anxiety about the future, the unbelievers forget His promise: "As for those who make Allah their friend, and His messenger and those who believe: it is the party of Allah who are victorious" (Surat al-Ma'ida: 56).
One of the main reasons why people try to evade their responsibility and avoid sacrificing their interests when necessary is because they live in error and their hearts are filled with doubt.
In addition, they choose this world's life over the Hereafter: "These people love this fleeting world and have put the thought of a Momentous Day behind their backs" (Surat al-Insan: 27). However, no matter how easy and attainable the world's benefits may seem, those who know the Qur'an also know that the only permanent and enduring life is the Hereafter. But those with weak belief lay more importance on this world, for they cannot overcome their passion for its baubles. They feel some closeness to religious morality and to believers, but consider this world, their relatives, work, business, possessions, and respect to be more important than attaining Allah's approval. They may not openly express this, but their way of life and obsession with this world show the truth:
Say: "If your fathers or sons, brothers or wives, tribe, or any wealth you have acquired or any business you fear may slump, or any house that pleases you are dearer to you than Allah and His messenger and striving in His way, then wait until He brings about His command. Allah does not guide people who are deviators." (Surat at-Tawba: 24)
Those Arabs who remained behind will say to you: "Our wealth and families kept us occupied, so ask forgiveness for us." They say with their tongues what is not in their hearts. Say: "Who can control Allah for you in any way, whether He wants harm for you or wants benefit for you?" Allah is aware of what you do. (Surat al-Fath: 11)
These individuals also put their own interests above winning Allah's favor, for the fundamental insincerity of their belief causes them to believe that pursuing their own worldly interests is the most important thing in life. When they have to deal with a situation, they politely feign interest and utter a few stock phrases. In reality, however, they intend to do nothing about it.
Some people who lived in our Prophet's (saas) time had the same kind of moral understanding:
When a sura is sent down saying: "Believe in Allah and strive together with His messenger," those among them with wealth will ask you to excuse them, saying: "Let us remain with those who stay behind." They are pleased to be with those who stay behind. Their hearts have been stamped, so they do not understand. (Surat at-Tawba: 86-87)
The desert Arabs came with their excuses asking for permission to stay, and those who lied to Allah and His messenger stayed behind. A painful punishment will afflict those who do not believe. (Surat at-Tawba: 90)
This clearly shows that those people, who say that they live to win Allah's favor, are actually more interested in this life than in the Hereafter. Another reason why they avoid self-sacrifice is because they are coward. They forget that Allah is the Ruler of humanity and can create whatever and whenever He wills. Believing that people are independent of Allah and have autonomous power, they are very concerned with others' opinion of them, completely unaware that only Allah can prevent evil and bring them good. And so they try to please other people, thinking that they can either harm or benefit them in some way. But this is a great mistake, for this power belongs only to Allah, Who created every individual and determines their every action. As revealed in the Qur'an:
They will not fight against you all together as a group, except in fortified towns or behind high walls. Their hostility towards each other is intense. They are full of bravado in each other's company. You consider them united, but their hearts are scattered wide, because they are people who do not use their intellect. (Surat al-Hashr: 14)
Their fear lets them sacrifice for and support believers only if their material needs are assured and if they are sure that no one will harm them. Allah reveals several truths to these people, as follows:
Say: "Flight will not benefit you if you try to run away from death or being killed. Then you will only enjoy a short respite." Say: "Who is going to shield you from Allah if He desires evil for you or desires mercy for you?" They will find no one to protect or help them besides Allah. Allah knows the obstructers among you and those who say to their brothers, "Come to us," and who only come to fight a very little and are begrudging toward you. Then when fear comes, you see them looking at you, their eyes rolling like people scared to death. But when fear departs, they flay you with sharp tongues, grasping for wealth. Such people have no belief, and Allah will make their actions come to nothing. That is easy for Allah. (Surat al-Ahzab: 16-19)
Allah says that these people are begrudging and selfish toward believers, that they will not put themselves out, and that when they are afraid they look as if they are scared to death. Furthermore, He says that they have no belief.
Unaware of Allah's infinite power, their fear causes them to deny their resources to solve other people's problems. While they might offer some support, they do not have the courage to sacrifice their interests. For example, the people of many countries could be brought up to work together and to sacrifice for each other in order to help solve problems. In the same way, people act unjustly, oppress others, and cause environments of confusion and terror because they have no fear or respect of Allah. If they were told about the proofs of His existence, the truths of belief, the existence of the Hereafter and the Day of Judgment, many would start following their conscience, a development that would ensure peace and contentment in society. Of course, radio, television, and the press play a major role in getting this message across to the masses.
Conscience demands that such people should not think only about their own advantage, but also of the needs of society. Where people's lives are hard, some people who could help and are aware of the problems refuse to help, for they place winning Allah's approval second and are afraid of being inconvenienced and suffering financial loss.
They withhold their resources because they do not want to be put in a difficult situation or face their disbelieving companions' criticism. Sometimes they do things that exalt His name, make others appreciate belief, and commend good morality, but only under pressure from their conscience and to a very limited degree so that people will not talk about them. In this way they try to placate their conscience while ignoring what will happen to them in the Hereafter. This divided attention, one part directed toward the world and the other toward the Hereafter, may not be enough to attain salvation in the Hereafter, for everyone will be held responsible as to whether or not they did all they could. Allah reveals that:
The hypocrites think that they deceive Allah, but He is deceiving them. When they get up to pray, they get up lazily, showing off to people and only remembering Allah a very little. They vacillate between the two – not joining these or joining those. If Allah misguides someone, you will not find any way for him to go. (Surat an-Nisa': 142-143)
These people also avoid service, self-sacrifice, and responsibility because they live in anxiety about the possibility of becoming poor, losing possessions, spending money, and falling into desperate poverty: "Satan promises you poverty and commands you to avarice. Allah promises you forgiveness from Him and abundance. Allah is All-Encompassing, All-Knowing" (Surat al-Baqara: 268). For all of these reasons, they avoid any act of self-sacrifice.
Allah reminds us that they do not realize how great an advantage their acts of self-sacrifice would be for them in this world and the Hereafter: "What harm would it have done them to have believed in Allah and the Last Day and to have given of what Allah has provided for them? Allah knows everything about them" (Surat an-Nisa': 39). Believing that they have acquired their possessions by their own efforts and that they can protect them and add to them on their own, they forget that Allah, the true Owner of whatever they possess, can give them and withdraw them as He wills.
As we have seen, people do not support believers and avoid their responsibility because of their insincere belief. The weakness of their belief causes them to avoid doing religious service, practicing the Qur'an's morality, and seeking Allah's approval. But according to the Qur'an, anyone who is reluctant to worship Him will suffer grievous pangs:
As for those who believe and do right actions, He will pay them their wages in full and give them increase from His favor. As for those who show disdain and grow arrogant, He will send them a painful punishment. They will not find any protector or helper for themselves besides Allah. (Surat an-Nisa': 173)
In such a situation, believers who know the Qur'an must have the intention to act according to their conscience and practice the Qur'an's moral teachings. If they do this, Allah will both help and support them and will give them the finest reward in both worlds.
6 / total 10
© 1994 Harun Yahya. www.harunyahya.com - info@harunyahya.com | http://www.harunyahya.com/en/books/4011/Self_Sacrifice_In_The_Qurans_Moral_Teachings/chapter/4764/The_Excuse_Of_Personal_Problems | robots: classic
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} | 2,190 | Highlights from Mr. Adnan Oktar’s interview on 27 May 2012
The Evolution Deceit
Highlights from Mr. Adnan Oktar’s interview on 27 May 2012
Enlarge video
A9 TV, 27 May 2012
Surat az-Zukhruf, verse 48
Almighty Allah Says to the people of Pharaoh: “We showed them no Sign which was not greater than the one before it.” Every miracle is greater than the ones that went before it. Allah says that he worked an even greater miracle on each and every occasion. We seized them with punishment so that hopefully they would turn back.” but they did not turn back. That is why, as a nation, as a society, one must be bound to love with a sincere love. If you take Allah away from the world, or the world away from Allah, the result is ruin. Allah is a single whole. One must use the whole world together with Allah, in other words. If you try to use the world without Allah, the world will assault you. It will attack you with an economic crisis, it will depress you and cause you to commit suicide, or your health will be impaired. You will suffer, and everything will become meaningless. Look, the Turkish prime Minister tells people to have more children. There is also a hadith of our Prophet (saas): “Marry and multiply; because the large numbers of the Ummah on the Day of Reckoning will be a source of praise for me.” But people think twice before having children now. “How will I be able to look after them?” People cannot look after themselves, neither materially nor psychologically. Everywhere is full of traps and tribulations. One cannot step outside. Someone who cannot go out unaccompanied himself will say it will be impossible for his children to go out, too. I am having a very bad time, so I had better not have children and inflict the same misery on them, people say. This mutual hatred has to be eliminated for one thing. Once that hatred goes, the burden on the courts will be eased. How many court files are there now? A million? That number would fall to 100. If we had human love, if we had forgiveness and compassion and affection; Otherwise, there will be no end to the tribulations. Everyone is taking everyone else to court at the moment. In many places. We can see that in many people. Hatred is unrestrained.
Pain develops in the soul when there is no love of Allah. But if everyone, society as a whole, were to cling tightly to Allah and loved Him very much, brotherhood, love, affection and compassion would follow immediately. Worldly “isms,” such as communism, fascism and capitalism, would disappear and everyone could live easier. Governments are trying to find a solution using technical means. But they cannot resolve it technically. The public vote governments out, and one scourge just replaces another. Economic troubles follow. It is vitally important to tell people about loving Allah with great fervor. Everyone knows. Economists also know. The reason for this economic crisis ls lack of love of Allah.
I was thinking. There are no artists. I turn on the TV and just see sketches. There are no more theatrical plays. The music you hear today is not really any good. They cannot make fine clothes any more. There has been a huge spiritual collapse. That stems from a deficient love of Allah. Scientists feel no need to do research. They must try to add a very, very tiny bit to what already exists. They cannot make any major discoveries. People’s minds and bodies also seem to have decayed.
Look at the governments of the world. They are all helpless. Take President Obama. U.S. presidents used to be very dignified and impressive. But whoever gets in now is pretty feeble because America has collapsed economically and there is a raging storm of self-destruction. The U.S. Army is literally dissolving away. America sees a large number of suicides every day! People are unable to bear the pain inflicted by irreligion and thus take their own lives. They are still holding out against becoming Muslims. They are still refusing to submit to Allah .
The world thinks that living without Allah is easy. They think there will be no repercussions. But godlessness ruins you. The troubles will drive you crazy. If you do not submit to Allah, if society does not submit to Allah, then you will suffer as if you were in hell. But it would be like paradise if everyone were to submit to Allah.
(I was speaking to a Marxist, and he said, “I am a Marxist, but not an atheist. I believe in Allah. But nobody can come between Allah and me.” How is that possible?)
All right, of course nobody can come between you. There is a well-known law, such a thing is forbidden. A Muslim has an obligation to call you to Allah, the Qur’an and Islam. That is a religious obligation. That idea of coming between you and Allah is demagoguery that was thought up subsequently. It is an irrelevant term dreamed up by satan in order to stop people preaching and Islam spreading across the world. “There is no need for intermediaries?” What does no need for intermediaries mean? Allah sends guides. He sends scholars. He praises scholars in the Qur’an. “Should they not forbid the evil?” He says. “Should they not speak the truth?” He says. But He says that He destroys countries when people do not do that. That causes a huge scourge. If you say, “I do not want any intermediaries,” you are effectively saying, “I reject that verse of the Qur’an.” They are not intermediaries. They are messengers. They reveal Allah’s commandment to you, insha’Allah.
Surat az-Zukhruf 57,59-60
When an example is made of the son of Mary [Jesus] your people laugh uproariously.” Almighty Allah says that people regard Jesus the Messiah as a fit subject for mockery. He is only a slave on whom We bestowed Our blessing and whom We made an example for the tribe of Israel. If We wished We could appoint angels in exchange for you to succeed you on the Earth.
In other words, do not expect an angel, Almighty Allah is saying. “If you were angels, you would inherit, but you are human beings. Since you are human beings, a human being who will succeed you will be coming,” He says.
You look at an electrical socket. Allah manifests Himself in that. You put the plug in, and the fan starts working. You put the plug in and the heater goes on. Two little holes. You put two little bits of metal in the plug. Allah manifests Himself there. What has the electricity got to do with it? It is entirely a natural cause. There is a piece of metal we refer to as a faucet. Allah creates water there. The Prophet Moses (pbuh) produced water from a rock. It is exactly the same kind of miracle. The prophet Moses (pbuh) produced water from rock, whereas in this case it comes from iron. From a reservoir. These are natural causes.
I looked in the mirror. A tiny mirror. Allah produces an image from all directions. It is alive. Like a television screen. The mirror is alive. Allah, Allah! There is movement everywhere. Turn it in another direction and Allah produced another image. There is a glorious manifestation in the mirror. Masha’Allah. Everything is alive. We get up in the morning. Allah washes me right away. He begins feeding me. He prepares various plates full of food. In the same way they asked the Prophet Jesus (pbuh) to send a table from the sky. Allah sent one down. He uses people as His instruments. People imagine things come from factories, or from somewhere. Bread comes from the bakery. But not at all. It is created at that moment. It is created by Allah. Allah feeds things to us morsel by morsel. Bit by bit. He gives us that feeling of fullness and then you are full. But Allah also bestows scourges and sicknesses among all these beauties. That is the secret of the test. And here we must beseech Allah, saying; “O Lord, teach me the full secret of the test and let me not stumble, O Lord. Keep me from skepticism.” You may have a thousand doubts. That will ruin you, May Allah forbid. If Allah chooses, a person may find himself buried under the world. Ruined.
I was praying the other day. “O Lord,” I said. “Cause Islam to reign across the world.” But, when Islam comes to reign across the world, the test will come to an end, may Allah forbid. So there will be no more meaning in remaining in this world. That is why Almighty Allah speaks of seven or nine years after Hazrat Mahdi (pbuh) comes to reign over the world. He will keep Hazrat Mahdi (pbuh) here for nine years at most. He will then immediately raise him to His side because it will be over. There will be nothing left to do. If there is a gift to be made, that is paradise, not this world.
That is why they ask, “Where is Hazrat Mahdi?” Once the global reign has been established, Hazrat Mahdi (pbuh) will die after seven or nine years. The delay will involve extensive merit. A most glorious struggle will have been waged. That is why we must not be uneasy at his coming being delayed. But some foolish people say, “Ah, he is late. So he will not be coming at all. So these hopes are all empty, and we have been deceived.” One verse says that they will say, “The Prophet (our Prophet (saas)_ inspired vain hopes in us, his hopes were all vain.” Then they look and see themselves being brought down in the wake of that reign. That is why we have at least another 10 years to go. Years of troubles and difficulties. The reign will come after that. We will become acquainted with Jesus the Messiah (pbuh) in 10 to12 years.
People may have doubts and think that they will prevent the Prophet Jesus (pbuh) by taking him from his mother and father and hiding them from people. “He has a mother and a father,” they will say. “But they do not say so, so people will think he is the Prophet Jesus (pbuh).” Or they may say, “This person has lost his memory; he most probably has a mother and a father, but he cannot remember them.” So there will be no room left for free will. He himself cannot remember, but he has enormous faith and intelligence. He has a most excellent conscience. Allah says, "He will teach him the Book and Wisdom, and the Torah and the Gospel,” (Surat Al-‘Imran, 48) Which book? The Qur’an. Allah will teach him the Qur’an and its wisdom, the Torah and the Gospel, the wisdom of all three books but the main part of concern to us is the formation of the system of the Mahdi. From what I can see, the system of the Mahdi is making progress, it is making amazing progress.
(In response to an e-mail from a viewer saying, “This secret of matter has been revealed for the first time in human history, including the prophets, in these, the End Times because even the prophets have some fears and sorrows in the Qur’an.” )
We are tested. Every prophet is also tested. I do not only see this about the Prophet Jesus (pbuh) in the Qur’an; it also applies to our own Prophet (saas). He is human and feels sorrow, excitement and fear. He is also tested. Of course there is no detailed description of the essence of matter of the kind I provide. Yes, that is true; but Allah hides it for the best of reasons. We can see clearly from the hadiths that the Companions Hazrat Ali and Hazrat Umar were aware of it. They knew. But our Prophet (saas) only told people who could cope with it, insha’Allah.
(In response to a viewer who asks: “Could you have spoken with Hazrat Hidhir? Or have you ever wondered whether some person or other might be Hazrat Hidhir? Do you have any memories of Hazrat Hidhir?”)
Hazrat Hidhir (pbuh) approaches matters very cleverly. He shapes matters very cleverly. One can never sense his presence. Nothing obvious ever happens. You imagine him to be a normal person. You speak normally with him. You talk as friends. But one of these people you know is Hazrat Hidhir (pbuh). The others do not know he is. Nor do others who join the group. They all imagine he is a normal person. But the person they imagine him to be is actually sitting at home. Hazrat Hidhir (pbuh) has assumed his appearance. He comes in that way. He talks and leaves. Hazrat Hidhir (pbuh) is visible, but in an unusual way.
2012-08-02 11:17:01
© 1994 Harun Yahya. www.harunyahya.com - info@harunyahya.com | http://www.evolutiondeceit.com/en/Highlights-from-Adnan-Oktars-talk-programs/146026/Highlights-from-Mr-Adnan-Oktar%E2%80%99s-interview-on-27-May-2012 | robots: classic
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As'Salaam wa Alaikum wa Rahmtullahi wa Barakatahu
I moved this Blog to Word Press, because it's a lot more simpler and neater, Alhamdulillah. Join me there, Insh'Allah.
Allah emanat Olunuz,
May Allah bless you and your families! Ameen. For the sake of His Beloveds.
Wednesday, July 19, 2006
Hidden Sweetness
(Mevlana Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks)
There's hidden sweetness
in the stomach's emptiness.
We are lutes, no more, no less.
If the soundbox
is stuffed full of anything, no music.
If the brain and the belly are burning clean
with fasting,
every moment a new song comes out of the fire.
The fog clears, and new energy
makes you
run up the steps in front of you.
Be emptier and cry like reed instruments cry.
Emptier, write secrets with the reed pen.
When you're full of food and drink,
an ugly metal
statue sits where your spirit should.
When you fast,
good habits gather
like friends who want to help.
Fasting is Solomon(AS)'s ring. Don't give it
to some illusion and lose your power,
they come back when you fast,
like soldiers appearing
out of the ground,
pennants flying above them.
A table descends to your tents,
Jesus(AS)'s table.
Expect to see it, when you fast,
this table
spread with other food, better than the broth of cabbages.
Sunday, July 16, 2006
The Most Beautiful Man in the World
- (Spring 2006)
Secret Knowledge
Abu Huraira (ra) said:
I have learned directly from Allah's messenger (saw) and I have
memorized prophetic sayings and acquired knowledge that can fill five large bags. By now, I have opened and shared with you only two of them.
If I were to open the third bag, and should you hear what
he said, you would surely stone me to death.
(narrated Qutaiba bin Sa'id)
Quest for the Seal
(Abu Tufail Amir bin Wailah narrated that Salman al-Farsi (ra) said) -
I come from the city of Jai (in Isfahan, Persia). One day, Almighty
Allah inspired my heart to ponder the question, `Who created the heavens and the earth?'
Hence, prompted by such concerns and inner quest, I sought an old
man I knew, who spoke very little and who, out of self-restraint, had kept a distance from the city people. When I reached him, I asked, `What is the best of religions?' He replied, `Why would you want to talk about this subject? Are you seeking a religion other than that of your fathers?' I cautiously answered: `No, I am not, but I would like to know who created the heavens and the earth, and what is the best religion to follow?' The old man said to me, `To my knowledge, only one monk follows the true religion today, and he lives in the city of Mosul, in Iraq.'
Hence, I traveled to Mosul, and I found the monk I was told to meet.
Thereat, I stayed with him, and I worshipped what he worshipped. He was an old man, and he lived on little provisions. He fasted all his days, and he prayed all his nights. Approximately three years later, at his deathbed, I asked him, `You must advise me what to do now, and where to go?' The man replied, `I know of no one in the East who believes and worships what I worship. Go West. Find a monk I once knew and who lives at the edge of the Arabian Peninsula, and give him my regards of peace.'
After the monk died, I traveled to where he told me, and I found the man he described. I conveyed to him the greetings of his brother, and I told him of his death. Thereat, I remained in his company for another three years, and again, at his deathbed, I requested him to guide me where to go after he dies. He replied, `I am not acquainted with any one on this earth today who worships what I worship except for a very old monk who lives in the region of Amoriya, in Philistine, and I am not sure whether he is still alive.'
After the monk died, again I traveled to where I was told, and luckily, I found the man he described to me. Thereat, I stayed with him, and this time, the man was financially comfortable. Sometimes later, when he neared his death, I sought his advice, and he replied, `I am not acquainted with any living person who worships what I worship. However, if you happen to live in a time where a man from the descendants of the House of Abraham (upon whom be peace) will appear, -- and I am not sure whether you will live to meet him or not – I myself have had a strong desire to live to meet him. However, if you should meet him, then follow him, for that is the true way and that is the religion of Allah Almighty. Among his signs is that some of his people will label him a magician, and an insane person, and a prognosticator. He accepts and eats from what is given to him as a gift, and he does not eat from charity; and you will also see the seal of prophethood in-between his shoulder blades.'
Salman continued, `I resided in my place for a while, and one day, a caravan of merchants from Medina crossed out path. I inquired from them, `Who are you?' They replied, `We are merchants. We make a living from trading. However, there appeared a man from among the descendants of Abraham in Mecca, and he migrated to Medina, and the entire city is now under his control. As a result, his people from Mecca have declared war on him and on his followers, so we feared for our livelihood, and therefore, we decided to seek shelter and safety somewhere else.'
I asked, `What are they saying about him?' The merchants replied, `They say he is a magician, a prognosticator, or maybe he is an insane person.' Hearing that I said to myself, `These are his signs.' I further inquired, `Who is the leader of this caravan? Would you please guide me to him?' When I came before the leader of the caravan, I requested him, `Would you please take me to Medina?' He replied, `What would you pay me?' I said, `I have nothing to give you, but if you agree to carry me there, I will be indebted to you, and I will be your slave.' The man accepted the barter and he carried me to Medina. Thereat, he placed me to work for him at a date plantation he owned, and I worked there very hard. I seldom had any food, and I mostly lived on water, just like cattle, until the bones of my back protruded, and I could see my pectoral bones. I did not know Arabic then, and not many people in that city spoke my Persian tongue.
One day an old woman of Persian origin came by the date plantation to get some water. When I spoke to her in my mother tongue, she understood me, and as we chatted a little I asked her, `Do you know that man that appeared lately, and would you please point him out to me?' She replied, `He usually passes by here after the dawn prayers, or sometime in mid-morning.'
Salman continued: The next day, I kept some dates aside and I waited for him. As he passed, I followed him to the mosque, and as he sat amidst his companions, I went there, and I presented him with the dates. Allah's messenger (saw) looked at them and then said to me, `What is this? Is it a charity or a gift?' I understood what he meant, and I made a gesture pointing out that it is a charity. He immediately said, `Give it to these people sitting here.' As I did, I said to myself, `This is one of his signs.' The next morning I brought another measure of dates and placed them before him. Allah's messenger (saw) again inquired, `What is this?' I hastened to say, `A gift!' He (sws) then ate one, and he called his companions to share them with him. He then saw me stealthily attempting to look over his shoulders. He recognized my intention and allowed his cloak to slowly drop below his shoulders, and when I saw what I saw, I became bewildered, and I jumped out of my place, I kissed him all over, and I held tight to him. After I sat there for a moment, Allah's messenger (saw) asked me to relate my story. When I told him what happened, he said to me, `Go and buy back your freedom.'
Salman continued: `When I reached my master, I said to him, `I have
come to buy back my freedom.' He replied, `Yes indeed! I will give you back your freedom for the price of planting one hundred seedlings of date palm trees, and when I verify that they all took roots, and that they are free from disease, you also must bring me the weight of a date pit in gold, and only then you may go free.'
Salman said: I went back to Allah's messenger (saw) and I related to
him what the man said. He replied, `Give him what he asks of you, and also bring me a bucket of water from the well you will use to irrigate the plants.'
I immediately went to the man, and I made the deal with him following the conditions he stipulated. With his permission, I then filled a bucket of water from the central well in the plantation field, and I took it back to Allah's messenger (saw) who in turn prayed over it. Allah's messenger (saw) also asked the companions to collect and to give me the needed one hundred seedlings, and when they did, I went back, and I planted the seedlings.
Salman continued: I swear by Allah that not a single seedling failed
us, and as soon as the man verified that, I went back to Allah's messenger (saw) and told him the same. Allah's messenger (saw)then called upon the companions to bring him a piece of gold of the weight we agreed upon with the man, and again, I immediately went back to the man and placed the piece of gold before him. When the man placed his specified measure on the other scale of the balance, my piece of gold seemed to weigh more, for nothing moved, and the man accepted the barter.
I brought back to Allah's messenger (saw) the date pit that determined the conclusion of the deal, and he looked at it and commented, `I swear by Allah, that even if you had agreed with him to give him the weight of such and such measure of date pits, the piece you gave him would weigh more.'
Salman continued: From that day on, I went to Allah's messenger
(saw) and I stayed in his company until the end.
[Hilyat-e Evliya]
Saturday, July 15, 2006
His Appearance
Scholars debate about when Mahdi (as) will appear and return justice
to the world. Grandsheykh Nazim al-Hakkani el-Kibrisi said,
We do not accept that Allah is disobeyed, and that the Ummat is
tormented, and that the flag of Shaytan continue to be raised for
one, two, or four more years, not even for one day more. Therefore,
every morning we say, "Tonight he will appear" and every night we
say, "tomorrow he will appear.
[Naqshbandi Sufi Tradition]
CNN's Snow Job
As'Salaam wa Alaikum wa Rahmatullahi wa Barakatahu,
Came across this, confirming what we already know about the media bias for Israeli-centric news coverage from CNN, but it's interesting to see this exposed by the liberal media here in the US. May Allah ease the suffering of the innocent and the oppressed, and rid the world of tyranny in all its forms, Ameen. For the sake of our Sheykh.
"I was surprised yesterday afternoon when a Reuters article popped onto my computer screen reporting that 53 Lebanese civilians had been killed by Israeli forces, part of the suddenly chaotic two-front battle Israel's military is fighting in the Middle East. Surprised, because I had been monitoring the day's events on CNN and hadn't heard much about that kind of swelling Lebanese death toll.
Thanks to CNN, I'd learned that Israeli forces had bombed Beirut International Airport and a blockade was in place to cut off Lebanon's ports, that president Bush announced Israel had the right to defend herself, that Hezbollah had fired missiles into the seaside city of Haifa, and that an Israeli woman in Nahariya had been killed amidst the cross-border violence. But I hadn't learned many details about the more than four dozen civilians in Lebanon being killed, a fact that struck me as central to the unfolding story.
Baffled, I made a point of watching CNN's afternoon "Situation Room" with the network's high-profile anchor Wolf Blitzer, who gravely intoned about the "fear of all-out war" in the Middle East. ("Mideast: Brink of War?" read the on-screen graphic.) Indeed, "The Situation Room" chewed on Middle East story almost without interruption. I watched a CNN reporter from Israel file a dispatch, and then a reporter traveling with the president, a reporter from the United Nations, a reporter from Lebanon, an in-studio discussion with the U.S. ambassador to Iraq and then an interview with Republican Sen. Bill Frist. Yet during the first 40 minutes of "The Situation Room," which devoted itself almost exclusively to the escalating Mideast chaos, there was no reference to the fact the Israeli military had killed more than 50 Lebanese civilians. (It wasn't until halfway through the second hour of "The Situation Room" that Blitzer finally clued viewers in.)
Has CNN gotten to the point where it won't report pertinent facts that are essential to putting a story in context? Facts that certainly would have helped viewers understand some of the international criticism Israel was coming under for what the European Union called a "disproportionate" military response to the conflict at hand.
At this point I don't think it's even controversial to suggest the Arab-Israeli conflict is told in the United States mostly through the eyes of Israelis, and that's especially true on cable news channels. American news organizations have more resources in Israel, better sources within the Israeli government and most American viewers likely consider the Israeli's more like 'us.' And if you don't think there's a difference on how the U.S. media cover the warring sides, then try to imagine what the press coverage would have looked like yesterday if 50 Israeli citizens had been killed by the missiles that hit Haifa.
I doubt Wolf Blitzer would have reported on that story for a solid hour and forgotten to give viewers the civilian death toll."
Source: "CNN's Lebanon Problem", The Huffington Post
Thursday, July 13, 2006
Abdur-Rauf al Yamani and Sheykh Mevlana
Bismillah hir Rahman nir Rahim,
Things are beginning to come to a head in the world
as you can probably see. We are truly at the end
of the Ahir-uz-Zaman.
Best thing to do now, is make sure we
are alright in our hearts, and our
connection to Allah is clear and
uncompromised by the weight of the nafs
and this world. Insh'Allah Rahman. Sheikh Mevlana
Nazim's Sheykh - Grand Sheykh
Abdullah Al Faiz Daghestani has spoken
about the events unfolding and about to
unfold during this time. Take a look here-
"The picture above is of Moulana Sheikh Nazim with Sheikh Abdur Rauf al-Yamani. Grandsheikh Abdullah Faiz Dagistani has spoken of Sheikh Abdur Rauf al-Yamani during his time.
The following is the prediction made by Grandsheik Moulana Abdullah Faiz Dagistani about Sheikh Abdur Rauf al-Yamani and it is in page 371 of History and Guidebook of the Saints of the Golden Chain-The Naqshbandi Sufi Way.
China is under the authority of a Great Saint, who will be one of the Greatest Saints in the time of Mahdi (alai) and Easa (alai). His name is Abdur Rauf al-Yamani. Through his influence China will sign an agreement with the West not to use its nuclear weapons. China will split into many different small countries. There will be problems in the Far East, in the Korean Peninsula, and a great power will intervene to stop that conflict. A non-Arab Middle Eastern country will attack the Persian Gulf area, which will put the whole world into fear that the source of petroleum will
be cut off."
Read more at Source
So, Allah shares the knowledge we don't know, with His
beloved ones. Because they are living their lives according
to the knowledge that thay know, Allah is giving them the knowledge,
they don't know. If we do the same, Allah will do the same for us.
Insh'Allah it will become apparent to
those who are sincere and looking with sincere eyes.
May Allah guide us to sincerity and to His
beloved ones, and to make every day better than the last,
according to the Holy Prophet(ASWS)'s advice,
May Allah bless him and his family and
companions. There is surely safety with them.
Ameen, for the sake of our Sheykh.
Wednesday, July 12, 2006
The World Lost Its Compass;The Dirtiness of Nuclear War
Bismillahir Rahmanir Rahim
The World Lost Its Compass;
The Dirtiness of Nuclear War
Sohbet by Sheykh Abdul Kerim el-Hakkani el-Kibrisi
Thursday, 27 RabiThani 1427
May 25, 2006
Osmanli Naks-i'bendi Hakkani Dergah, Siddiki Center, New York.
Medet Ya Seyyidi Ya Sultanul Awliya, Medet.
Alhamdulillah, shukr Allah, Astaghfirullah.
We are asking medet inshaAllah ar-Rahman from our Sheykh to send us something to speak that will benefit us, that will benefit me, you and everyone who listens. We are not good for anything. If they don't send then we cannot speak. What we speak is for ourselves and for those people who are running to find true ways and to live the way of Islam, the way of Truth. This sohbet is for anyone who is thirsty for that. If it's not then everyone should run to live as they like until the angel of death will come. After that no `as you like'. As He likes. After the angel of death comes we will all understand. Those who were before us all understand now. But it's too late for some of them. Those who were living and trying to correct themselves in this life should not worry and those who are trying now should not worry too. Allah is the Most Merciful and the Most Beneficent.
The whole mankind today, from east, west, north and south lost the direction, lost the compass. It doesn't know which side to go anymore and so much problems, miseries and pains and man is running for all kinds of things that the children of Adam has not been created for and staying under the curse and not collecting what is coming for them. The mercy of Allah is raining but they are running to the areas where the curse is raining. For that the whole mankind lost the direction, exception is some handful of people (such as) here and some others in the world. But the general (masses) lost the compass. They lost the direction. Nobody is controlling the wheel except Sheytan driving towards Jahannam.
Our Grandsheykh is saying, "This Sheytan is sitting on a big truck and that truck has a very powerful engine. So many people are behind that truck and Sheytan is driving the truck into the ocean or over a cliff, ready to fall down." Our Sheykh is saying, "We (the Awliya, him and so many like him, there are 124,000) are trying to hold the truck from behind not to go down the cliff, not to go down to the ocean but the physical power that the truck is carrying is pulling every one of us together. So we have to know where to let it go." And they are screaming to those who want safety saying, "Jump down from the truck! Otherwise, the end is deep, going down."
Jumping down from the truck means turning back to the laws of Islam. There is no other way. Leave the ego ways, leave the ways of other teachings, other kinds of governmental teachings (let's put it that way), or from studying in schools that are saying to you, "Enjoy yourself." There is nothing to enjoy in this world. We have not been created to run after to try to enjoy ourselves. Enjoyment is in the hereafter. And we must have discipline to be able to accept the laws of Islam, to put it on ourselves and to start benefiting. All those laws and everything are to teach us to reach to the highest stations anyway, to become Insan-i Kamil, the most perfect one. So it's teaching us slowly how to have better discipline, how to have better Adab, better manners.
Islam first put laws saying, "Forbidden things. Halal and Haram." Haram and Halal, that is, what is for us and what is not for us to have, to eat, to drink and to enjoy. All nations today, Muslim countries too, removed the laws of Allah. They put their own laws. Man's laws. Then later they are saying, "Oh, we are not interfering into religion. Leave as you like." But they are not even leaving that. They are interfering into religion all the time. It's okay in a country to go to open bars, clubs, discotheques and all kinds of wrong places. The government gives them license saying, "These are the borderlines. Live according to that and enjoy as much as you want inside that room. Go crazy if you want. Don't bring it out. Drink as much as you want. But if you are too drunk then don't drive your car. Let somebody bring you home." This is what the governments are saying to people, some governments, especially in the Middle East. And it's okay. It's not illegal. That's legal. You can have bars, you can have clubs and you can have all kinds of things that are speaking only for ego. It's okay.
When you go to those governments to get a license saying, "I accept your secular way also. Let me live according to my religion inside the secular way. I am asking you to give me license to open a dergah and to have ten people, fifteen people, fifty people or a hundred people in the dergah to say `Allah'. We don't like to go to bars, clubs and discotheques to go crazy drinking and getting all these wrong things. We would like to come together in this place to say `Allah' and to jump up and down." Now you are finding all governments saying, "No! We are not giving you permission to do that."
Hmm. So you give permission to a man to have the microphone in his hand… some are not even men that are appearing on television. They look like men but they are not. Some look like women but they are almost naked, appearing on television singing, dancing and making people to admire them, to run after them, on state-run televisions and permission is given to all those wrong things, but they are not giving permission to believers to remember their Lord in their own houses. How are you expecting your government to stand up for a long time? No police government ever lived more than a hundred years. In a hundred years time it came down. History is showing, from the time of Firaun and Namrud to everyone. Meaning, oppressor governments who were pushing people didn't live for long. All these ones are not going to live for long too now.
Ya hu, don't you see? You go to an university and the university has laws saying to you, "You have to come to school at this time, you have to enter to the class at this time, at this time you are going to study, at this time you are going to sleep, at this time you are going to eat, at this time you are going to do that and at this time you are going to do this." Everything has their laws. But when it comes to religion they don't want any laws, they don't want anybody to bother them and they say, "Live your religion by yourself."
(You say,) "Let's have ten people together."
They say, "No! By yourselves."
And Allah is saying, "Become Jamat." So that's how those governments are really favoring and letting religion live among the people.
Alhamdulillah, in America we still have the freedom to live the religion that way. That's why the Awliya Allah are supporting it. They are not supporting the government or the President. They are supporting this government because they are still leaving people to live their own religion the way that their Prophet left to them. They are not oppressing them. That's why the Awliya Allah are praying and so many people are taking the Awliya Allah's praising (let's say) to America or Great Britain and they are thinking that the Awliya Allah are concentrating on that individual whoever is the President for that time or whichever the party is in that time. They are thinking that the Awliya Allah are taking the sides of parties, Republicans or Democrats or whatever more there is. That also shows how close they are and how much they are understanding the teachings of the Awliya Allah. They are definitely supporting this country because we can still sit here and pray as we think our Holy Prophet (alayhi salatu wa salam) left to us and they are not coming to bother us. That's why they are blessed. But you cannot do that in any Muslim country today. Not in Turkey, not in Egypt, not in Morocco, not in Syria, not in Saudi Arabia, not in Iraq, not in Iran, not in Uzbekistan and not in any country.
They are claiming that they are Muslims and they are living according to Islam. According to what Islam? The Islam that you have invented according to what fits to your ego? Or the Islam that the Holy Prophet (alayhi salatu wa salam) came to teach us? That kind of Islam? Or the kind of Islam that you have invented according to your own ego? Yes, they are living the kind of Islam that fits to their ego. That's why they don't have the laws of Allah. They removed the laws of Allah and they put the laws of man and they are screaming that there are terrorists everywhere. Of course. It's not working. Your laws are not working. Put the laws of Allah back on and look how fast it's going to work.
We say to them, "You tried everything. For almost a hundred years you tried everything from Communism, to Fascism, to dictator regimes, to everything. Why not take Islam and try Islam again too a little bit to see what's going to happen." As soon as you say to them `Islam' they start shivering, saying, "These terrorists are coming." Terrorists? If it was up to the Muslims they would not even take a gun in their hand. It's only to protect themselves. Nothing else. And the Sufis never went fighting with any governments too. But when they were under the ruling of the Empire and under the ruling of the Khalifah, they were the first soldiers, always in the front lines. Yes, the Sufis, because they were fighting and defending for the sake of Allah. So they were running in the frontlines. But after the Khilafat came down nowhere will you find the Sufis uprising and fighting. No. Until they came and they approached them here and there in different countries, in Afghanistan and in Chechenistan, and some small groups of people are standing up, alhamdulillahi rabbil alameen. But the majority among them also turned into the wrong areas and they started adopting and taking some teachings of the Wahhabis and they started becoming tyrants.
And I am surprised to hear today from the Muslims that they are supporting and they are saying, "We must have nuclear bombs. The Muslim governments must have nuclear bombs." Let me ask you, what are you going to do with that nuclear bomb? Do you think having nuclear bombs will stop those oppressors on you? It's their weapon. They are going to find something else on you again. So if you have the nuclear bomb then what are you going to do? Are you going to use it on America? Or are you going to use it on Russia? Or China? Or Israel (as they are running non-stop and declaring)? As soon as America gives ultimatum to one country, right away they say, "We are going to hit Israel." What's going to happen when you hit Israel? When you are hitting Israel you are going to hit Lebanon, Jordan and all Muslims countries there too. And half of Israel is Muslims inside. Muslim people are living inside there too. Do you think the atomic bomb is going to separate saying, "This is Muslim and this is not Muslim"? How foolish the Muslims became! And what kind of a war is it then that it is a disgrace to mankind to have such a bad weapon. Even the Generals in America never liked to have that option because they are men with a vision understanding the warfare, and understanding, "This is something very dirty." They don't want that. You are burning everything, man, animals and everything in it. What kind of understanding of Islam do these people have?
Islam is saying to you that if you have a ship at the shore and there are a thousand people there where nine hundred and ninety-nine of them have been found guilty by the court of Islam and they are going to have death penalty, every one of them. They are escaping from that country and nine hundred and ninety-nine people who are in that ship are guilty and they have death penalties on them. There is only one person in that ship who is not guilty but he is just caught up with them there. You cannot sink that ship because there is one innocent sitting among those nine hundred and ninety-nine of them. As man you cannot sink that ship. If Allah wants He is going to do something. But you cannot sink that ship. Allah is not giving permission to Muslims then, saying, "Let that ship go. Think of some other ways to stop that ship." You cannot kill every one of them because there is one innocent, even though nine hundred and ninety-nine of them have death penalties on them.
This is the Islam that Holy Prophet (sws) brought to us and if anybody is trying to get something other than that then they are never going to reach anywhere again. They are leaving the way, they are running away, they are deviating from the ways of the Holy Prophet (alayhi salatu wa salam) and they are screaming saying, "We need help. We need help Ya Rabbbi!" Allah is saying to us, "You need help? Hold on tightly to that Prophet. Then help will reach to you. If you are not holding on tightly to My Prophet then no help is reaching to you."
Wa min Allahu taufiq.
InshaAllah ar-Rahman this much is enough for you and for me.
Transcribed by Yeni Osmanli
Saturday, July 08, 2006
The World is but Shadows
The historian Asmaiy relates the following anecdote:
Lover of the Divine
"Becoming sultan of the world was an empty struggle. I found greatness only in devoting myself to a lover of the Divine."
- Yavuz Sultan Selim [Source: Ilm as-Sadr, Hakikat Yayincilik]
Touch and Go
As'Salaam wa Alaikum wa Rahamtullahi wa Barakatahu,
Was'Salaam wa Alaikum wa Rahmatullahi wa Barakatahu
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} | 1,281 | Courage: Something of the Past
Glad tidings be to the believers who stand firm during the hardships of the life of this world.
Glad tidings be to the men who defend life with dignity and don’t lend an ear to the blame of the blamers.
Would it be fair for me to ask, what happened to courage? Has it become something of the past? Has it disappeared into the pages of history?
Don’t we contemplate over the events of people of the past, in particular, Musa’s encounter with Bani Israel?
Remember when the Children of Israel, along with Musa, stood outside the gates of the holy land and Musa encouraged his people to fight with a promise of victory from Allah.
Allah, the Majestic and Most High, mentions the conversation between the two parties.
Allah reveals Musa’s command to his people when he said, “O my people! enter the holy land which Allah has prescribed for you and turn not on your backs for then you will turn back losers”
Keep in mind that Bani Israel requested from Musa that he invoke his Lord and seek permission to fight but when the order came down from Allah, how did they respond to Musa’s command?
SubhanAllah. Look at their response. They requested permission to fight. It was not only granted to them but it became a command from Allah, but their lack of courage distroyed that nation.
Not only did they refuse to fight, they said to Musa, “O Musa! we shall never enter it so long as they are in it; go therefore you and your Lord, then fight you both while we sit here (and watch)”
May Allah have mercy on Musa for indeed the Children of Israel caused him much pain. With such foolish responses from his people, Musa raised his hands towards the heaven and made a supplication against them. Musa said, “”O my Lord! I have power only over myself and my brother: so separate us from this rebellious people!”
Allah answered the dou’aa of Musa and as a punishment, Bani Israel wonder blindly in the land for 40 years. During this span, Huran (as) passed away. Musa granted permission to the angel of death to take his soul and therefore died outside the holy land without ever getting a chance to enter it with his people. Not to mention, that generation of people who refused to fight had become conquered by death and a new generation took their place.
Allah stands in no need of mankind and due to their lack of courage, they became replaced. A new generation took their place that were stronger, more obedient and possed courage.
As the scholar stated, “every event from last night will repeat itself tomorrow”. History but works in a circle.
Similarly, many men from my time, make supplications that seek their death to come while they’re in a state of sleep. They are cowards exposed through lack of silence. Surely death shall visit each and everyone of us, whether we reside in the East or in the West. While in the darkness of the night or in the open fields covered by the day light. None of us can escape such an event so why then would any seek to find death in their sleep except for the cowards. It would be more suitable for a believer in Allah to seek death while embarking upon the path of the great men of history.
Men like, AbduAllah Ibn Az-Zubair, Az-Zubair Ibn Awaam, Sa’d Ibn Mu’aadh, Mus’ab Ibn Umair, Khalid Ibn Waleed, Jabiir Ibn Abdullah, Khaalid Ibn Sa’iid, Urwah Ibn Amr, Abdullah ibn Jahash and the list can continue for pages. All of these men were firm believers of Allah and processed courage nor did they seek to find death in their sleep.
I am a follower of these men. I embark upon the same path and seek the same reward. Death has been prescribed at an appointed term, therefore courage doesn’t decreases life nor can cowardice extend it.
I’ve dedicated a page from my Poetic Justice on this subject.
It’s apparent,
I’m surrounded from every corner by cowards
Who love the glitter of this world they hide behind walls of emotion
Who accept the deceptions of Western media and take upon false notion
While our people fight to survive another day
Our women getting rapped and married off to the occupiers of our Fore Father’s land
While we live with satisfaction
Despite the fact, our brothers and sisters getting killed
Our hearts feel no pain
While on the other side,
Mothers grieve over the bodies of their innocent dead children
Its time I stand and fulfill the covenant I took
The covenant of Tawheed and standing to defend dignityWhile you sleep with peace
My heart can’t recall the last moment it fell asleep with such ease
I’m over-taken by dreams of battlefield scenes
Some fights victory is granted,
While other times,
Patience is most befitting for those who believe
My destiny got me joining gunfights in a mountain like scenery
And my heart bleeds for peace across Somalia and the Middle East
9 Responses
1. Assalamu alaikum
I tried to send you an email this but I got a ‘delivery failure’ back since your inbox seems to be full…
2. this morning*
3. Really?
My inbox isnt full though but if you want, try sending the email again inshAllah.
4. Nope, still came back. No big deal. It was the email I sent out to the entire newsletter team and contributors with the finished newsletter attached, and out of all the people I forwarded it to I got two (you and a sister) that came back with those notices. What do they have in common? HOTMAIL. Time for you to step up to gmail bro lol
Check out the forums! The newsletter is up, alhamdulillah.
5. Gmail? I actually have a gmail account but gmail aint saying much in my books. First it was, myspace then msn, then hotmail and facebook and what is it now? Gmail? The real question is, what will it be tomorrow? Since everything seems to be changing, I got to stick with my reliable hotmail. Its not an issue of being comfortable with it but rather, loyalty 🙂
6. Reliable? The spam was driving me insane, and I wouldn’t say reliable if you can’t even receive important emails like the one I tried to send not once or twice but three times, mashaAllah. And gmail has this convenient chat in the bottom corner that is so much easier than sending emails sometimes. I made the upgrade from hotmail with no regrets.
But the real question is… did you get my last email? lol
7. Your email? When did you send it?
Actually I got it, thank you very much 🙂
The real question is, now that Im on board, why arent you sharing the newsletter gmail account information? If this was a basketball game and you were on my team, I would say, pass the ROCK and let me jay it!
So Safia, pass the rock wont you?
8. It’s been done 🙂
9. Thanks and you’ve got mail!
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Believers of Imam Hussain A.S
And dear ‘so called perfectionists’ of the society, I am not answerable to anybody for what I write but Allah only. And I write what I feel.
Thoughts burn in my heart when I see elderly people doing obnoxious stuff in the sacred month of Muharram, between the Aashura specialy. People full of knowledge do not see the positivism of the Majalis going around, they never take out minutes to listen any thing to clear their own disturbed thoughts exclaiming things about Shia Sect that mourn over the month.
Instead they try to find out the sarcastic stuff and talk over it then share it over the social media.. Wow, indeed for such people who see the photo shopped photographs put lines over it and post it as “INNOVATION” in Islam. One can clearly recognize if blood is shown with colors or some thing is genuine out there.
I am no scholar but just a believer of Imam Hussain (A.S), I write just when thoughts prove me to think.. Just one thing to ponder upon is that, I will directly say non believers of Imam Hussain A.S are those who instead of mourning upon HIS loss, start blabbing around on others with various statements. Often we listen ” Shia Kafir” those who speak bad about a sect of Islam are the ones who hurt their fellow Muslims exclaiming themselves to be the great one.
In this scenario why do they forget that.
It is stated in QURAN not to hurt.
Since the childhood we listen that deeds of a person will remain with the person who is doing so, it will not affect others in surroundings so why does the living by people are affected by MOURNING and MATAM others do. That should not be and understand that Allah may not ask them that why you were after that fellow to stop mourning.
The thing is do these kind of people do everything as stated in the Holy Book. Do they not lie? Do they not hurt others? Do they behave very well with their relatives? Do they not hurt people by their taunts? Do they not backbite. In short if these people are perfect in practicing the teachings of Islam, they may do so or stop people but when they are not perfect they must work on themselves not to create mess over web as part of the proxy wars.
It is a common thing that when a loved one dies you have no control over yourself. You cry, you behave in a different way because you lose your consciousness and crying or mourning over a loved one is not wrong so people should keep their filthy thoughts to themselves though it be Moharram or some ones death.
When you loose a loved one you start to understand the meaning of mourning of the Karbala more because when you see a death from so close ; you start to feel the pain of those who were martyred by the so called Muslims of that time.
Those who say that crying is wrong over a dead may increase their knowledge as it is not an innovation (.
Quran details the crying of the skies and the earth in the Quran;
• And neither heaven nor earth shed a tear over them: nor were they given a respite (again). (44:29)
So, all must see themselves and stop poking their noses around, because others mourning will not bother you in your grave and you are nobody to work on what others believe and others will never change the religious practice because of anybody..
Simply, who can not feel the pain of Imam Hussain A.S and the love for HIM by his believers should go and read about it instead of asking others to tell them about Imam Hussain A.S. and reading for increasing self knowledge is as well verily stated in Quran.
(96:1 – 5)
Read in the name of your Lord who created. Created man from a clinging substance. Read, and your Lord is the most Generous. Who taught by the pen . Taught man that which he knew not.
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AhlulBayt Academy
Last update07:22:56 AM GMT
Back Insights Religion Religion Remembering Death
Remembering Death
• PDF
Return to Our Lord!Death. Excessive usage of this word, along with "the angel of death", "heaven", "hell", "judgement", and "recompense" will most probably score us a one-way ticket to the local psychiatric institute, compliments of our friends and family. Because death seems like such a horrible topic to discuss with the potential of mentally traumatizing people, many of us wonder what the logic is behind the Holy Qur'an and a vast majority of our scholars constantly reminding us about death. Isn't our religion supposed to give us peace of mind instead of sending shivers down our spine? To understand why Islam places such a great emphasis on remembering death we must first briefly understand what death is.
Medically speaking, it's the time when our hearts stop beating and can no longer support all our organs. It's the time when the body literally switches off and says goodbye to this world. We stop living; there's no more waking up every morning, spending time with family, going to work, and having fun. From the philosophical point of view and the view of the Abrahamic faiths, death is the time when the soul departs from the body. It's the time when God says "time's up", and our test in this world is finally over. It's when we officially embark on the journey to the next world in order to return to the One who gave us life. "How do you deny Allah, and you were dead and He gave you life? Again He will cause you to die and again bring you to life, then you shall be brought back to Him." (2:28)
Almost every day we hear tragic news reports about deaths which have occurred due to freak accidents, murders, old age, illness, or numerous other natural causes. We say: "To Allah We belong, and to Him is our return" (2:156), but let's face it, how many of us actually wholeheartedly believe that we are going to return to our Lord? While we appear to formally acknowledge death, we have become somewhat immune to this reality, and instead, we subconsciously believe that we are eternal beings.
The reason why we are encouraged to be steadfast in the remembrance of our death is because it is directly related with our fear of Allah, and remembering that there is an afterlife reinforces the idea that we are mortal beings. On the spectrum of Muslims who falter when it comes to remembering death, we have two main categories: 1) Those who completely disregard the laws of Halal and Haram as defined by Islam, and 2) those who do follow most of the Islamic laws, yet stumble when it comes to "perfecting" our Islamic practice and etiquette.
The first group of people knowingly and openly commit forbidden acts, while having little if any concern for obeying the commands of Allah. The main reason for such Muslims is that they are surrounded by drugs, alcohol, cheating, gambling, illegitimate relationships, disrespecting parents, and broken families in the society we live in, and they decide to jump on the bandwagon.
Imam Ali (peace be upon him) has said: "He who sells his next life for his present life in this world loses both of them."
As described by our Imam, this first group of people "sell" their next life by completely detaching themselves from the reality that they will be held accountable for what they do. The Holy Qur'an has warned us against being misled by the societies we live in: "Let not the strutting about of the Unbelievers through the land deceive you. Little is it for enjoyment: Their ultimate abode is Hell. What an evil bed (to lie on)!" (3:196-197)
The second group of people are those who make up the majority of the Muslim population. We're the children who eat Halal food but lie to our parents. We're the teenagers who pray on time, but when we're around friends, we skip all religious activities and loosen up on both social and physical forms of Hijab. We're the adults who posses a wide range of religious knowledge and attend mosque every week, yet would rather pay for a holiday halfway across the world when Hajj is still obligatory on us. We're the parents who raise our children saying, "Everything you do must be to seek nearness to Allah", but when it comes to their marriages, we consider superficial things such as wealth and status to be superior to piety and religious practice of their spouses. We're the grandparents who always gave our grandchildren religious classes, but while celebrating their weddings, we'll figure out some way to commit Haram in the name of "fun".
In this second category of believers, the reason why we fulfill most obligatory acts yet are not concerned with doing complete justice to our faith is because we are not entirely fearful of death and Allah. We think, "Oh, it's not that's not as though we do Haram every day." We forget the saying of the Holy Prophet (peace be upon him and his progeny): "Do not look at the minuteness of the sin; rather, look Whom you have sinned against."
So now that we've acknowledged how forgetfulness of death causes us to indulge in the temporary and forbidden pleasures of this world, it's essential for us to bear death in mind in order for us to remain fearful of Allah and to become better people.
Some may find this a bit peculiar, and others may label this as slightly psychotic. However, consider the following practices: sitting in an empty grave for 5 minutes; visiting graveyards; looking at photographs of deceased loved ones; reading the verse of the Holy Qur'an which speak of death; and visiting a dying person. In essence, putting ourselves in such mental and physical environments which remind us of death can be extremely beneficial towards redefining our goals and purpose in this world. It is narrated that as he grew older, one of the four special deputies of the Twelfth Imam (may Allah hasten his reappearance) would sit in a grave and recite one-thirtieth of the Holy Qur'an every single day!
A popular company once arranged for a compulsory mock funeral for all of its employees, in which the friends and families of the "deceased" person were invited to mourn over his/her mock death. Data collected from the mock funeral participants indicated that the employees had become much more determined people which, as a result, profited the company. The families and friends of the employees also disclosed that the mock funeral had transformed their loved ones into much more forgiving, caring, and sincere people, who were concerned about how much good they could do to this world before they died. The employees achieved all this simply because they were reminded of their deaths.
In our capitalist, materialistic society, everyone is concerned with investments and future returns. People have become so absorbed with planning ahead that it's quite normal to find grandparents planning for the education of their unborn grandchildren. So it makes absolutely no sense that we knowingly fail to pre-plan our position in the afterlife, and that we pretend we will be able to escape death and will not have to recompense for our deeds in this world. Remembrance of death will help us fear our Lord. And fearing our Lord will ultimately help us attain heaven in the afterlife: "…for those who fear their Lord are Gardens with rivers flowing beneath; therein are they to dwell (forever), a gift from the presence of Allah; and that which is in the presence of Allah is the best (bliss) for the righteous." (3:198)
Author of this article: Zara Syed
Interesting Reading | http://islamicinsights.com/religion/religion/remembering-death.html | robots: classic
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} | 16,067 | Questions to Ask About Islam
From WikiIslam, the online resource on Islam
Jump to: navigation, search
This page is a list of questions to ask apologists about Islam.
1. The Qur'an says Allah cannot have a son without a consort,[1] yet claims Mary had a son without a consort.[2] Is this not limiting Allah's omnipotence,[3] and why is Mary capable of doing something Allah cannot?
2. Is Allah the god of the Old Testament?
3. 1 of Allah's 99 names translates as the Deceiver.[4] Why would you believe in any such deity?
4. Why does almost every description of Allah also equal non-existence? (i.e. incorporeal, immaterial, ineffable, unfathomable, incomprehensible, etc.)
5. If no one has seen Allah,[5][6] its sex cannot be determined. Why do you still address it[5][6] as a male?
6. Why would Allah have to bribe his followers[7][8] by promising them loot?
7. How can Allah be the Best of Creators[9] if millions of sperms get wasted in trying to fertilize one egg?
1. Would you trust a political party which does not allow ex-members to speak out? If not, why would you trust Islam, and why should anyone convert to a religion which kills[10] apostates and does not[10][11] allow criticism?
2. Why do so many people still leave Islam[12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20] even though they receive death threats for doing so?
3. Why is there "no compulsion" in religion when the punishment for apostasy, both "normal" apostasy and "treason",[21] is death?
1. Classic Arabic is missing vowels and dots. If the Qur'an is the "words of God" only in its original language, why did Allah not reveal it in a language that was fully developed?
2. There are only 150 million native Arabic speakers in the world today.[22] Why did Allah not reveal the Qur'an in a language more widely spoken on earth such as Mandarin[23] (800 million), Spanish[24] (358 million), English[25] (350 million), Hindi[26] (200 million) or Russian[27] (160 million)?
3. If you cannot criticize Islam unless you know Classical Arabic (because your understanding of what Islam is may be erroneous), doesn't that mean the vast majority of Muslims follow and/or propagate a religion they do not understand?
4. Why is Arabic only difficult to understand or translate when a non-Muslim criticizes the Qur'an? And why do Muslims claim critics mis-translate words when it is often their own scholars and their most authoritative Arabic to English dictionaries[4] that confirm otherwise?
5. There are many Arabic dialects such as Egyptian, Gulf, Eastern Arabic, Maghrebi and dozens of others.[28] Which one did Allah want us to use to interpret the Qur'an?
1. Muslims believe that our body parts will testify our sins in the hereafter.[29][30] Is that true for donated body parts as well?
2. If circumcision is a command from Allah, shouldn't it be mentioned in the Qur'an? And why did Allah not create us circumcised if he wants us that way?
3. Why does Allah hate tattoos,[31] and why has he forbidden[32][33] it?
4. Why does Allah curse people[34] for plucking their eyebrows?
1. Muslims always attack the Christian concept of Original sin and the Hindu/Buddhist concept of Karma. So how do you explain innocent children being born with Aids or being born deformed? Is it "Allah's will" to make innocent children suffer? Does he think it’s funny to create Hermaphrodites and Schizophrenics?
2. Why does Islam ban adoption?[35][36] What's so evil about it?
3. Little children may believe in Cinderella talking to birds and mice and stuff. What makes you smarter than a child if you believe that Suleiman, as the Qur'an says,[37] was talking to ants?
4. Why do you say there's no compulsion in religion even though the hadith says[38] you should hit kids who don't pray?
1. Why do some of you claim sex is only allowed with girls who have had their first menses, when the Qur'an allows sex with pre-pubescent[39] girls?
2. Lina Medina (born September 27, 1933, in Ticrapo, Peru), had her menarche at age 8 months.[40] So is it okay to have sex with an 8 month old baby?
3. Is sex between a 53 year old man and a 9 year old girl, immoral or moral?
1. Modern Muslims have religious conflicts with: Hindus in Kashmir; Christians in Nigeria, Egypt, and Bosnia; atheists in Chechnya and China; Baha'is in Iran; Animists in Darfur; Buddhists in Thailand; each other in Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen; Jews in Israel; Why is Islam involved in more sectarian and religious conflicts than any other religion today? In fact, why is Islam the only religion in conflict with every single one of today's major world religions?
2. To this day there is sectarian conflict between Sunnis and Shi'ites in Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen and Pakistan. Did Allah plan this?
3. Why are Muslims often concerned about Palestinian Muslims but not about Iraqis, Yemenis, Sudanese and Pakistanis who get butchered by fellow Muslims?
4. Al-Quds (القُدس Jerusalem) is not once mentioned directly in the Qur'an. So why make such scriptural contentions?
5. Why do Muslims build, or attempt to build, mega mosques in controversial places such as the London Olympic site,[41] the New York ground zero,[42] and outside the Vatican?
6. Why do Muslims so often[43][44][45][46] go on a violent rampage after Friday prayers?
7. If Allah sent angels to help Muhammad defeat the pagans at the Battle of Badr, why did he not send them at larger and more decisive battles where non-Muslims checked the growth of Islam eg. Charles Martel in Poitiers (732), the Hindu Alliance in Rajasthan (738), Hulagu Khan in Baghdad (1258), the Holy League in Lepanto (1571) and the Hapsburgs in Vienna (1683)?
1. Why do some Muslims ridicule the Old Testament rendition of Eve's creation, when the Qu'ran[47][48] also tells us that she was made from Adam, and Sahih hadith[49][50] tell us it was specifically from Adam's rib?
2. Isn't making all women menstruate, suffer pregnancy and become stupid as a punishment for Eve's transgressions in the garden[51] (a view which is confirmed by the Qur'an and sahih hadith)[52] a little sexist? What about Adam? He ate the fruit too.
1. The Qur'an refers to alcohol as an "abomination" and "Satan's handwork",[53] so why does the Qur'an also praise[54] alcohol and emphasize the point[55] that it is something found in heaven?
2. When used in moderation, there are numerous benefits in the consumption of alcohol.[56][57][58][59][60][61][62][63][64][65][66][67] Rather than giving us an outright ban,[53] shouldn't Allah have only prohibited its abuse?
3. The Qur'an encourages people to drink milk[68] and tells us it is something being served in the Muslim Paradise,[69] but if you claim the potential health risk of alcohol was enough to cause its prohibition, why not also ban the drinking of milk which is potentially more harmful due to most of the world's population, past[70] and present,[71][72] not being biologically designed to digest milk?
4. If life is a test, isn't banning alcohol in Muslim countries the same as interfering in Allah's affairs?
5. Why is alcohol based mouthwash forbidden? Can people absorb enough alcohol through the skin to get drunk?
6. Muhammad claimed Zamzam (Islamic holy water) is miraculous and it could heal any disease.[73] So why does it contain arsenic levels three times the legal limit, high levels of nitrate, and other potentially harmful bacteria?[74] Does Allah want to poison his followers?
Flat Earth
1. The Qur'an says the Earth is like a rug.[75][76][77] No one has ever seen a spherical rug. Why did Allah not use the word "Kurah" (Arabic for spherical) before the word "Earth" like all Arabic texts do today?
2. Why is it that every year Muslims on opposite sides of Earth can't agree when Ramadan starts? Did Allah use outdated astronomical calculations because he thought the Earth was flat?
3. The earth is not flat, so why do Muslims pray to the East (or West) when the shortest distance to Mecca is through the Earth (if you want to go through the earth) or through the poles (if you want to travel along the surface)?
4. A Muslim must pray facing Mecca, and to pray with their back to Mecca would be sacrilegious. From a flat-earth viewpoint, this makes sense. But the earth is spherical, so if you pray facing Mecca, you also have your back to Mecca at the same time (and vice-versa). How do you explain this?
5. The closer we get to the North and South poles,[78] the longer our days or nights become. They can eventually extend for up to several months each, making the fourth Pillar of Islam impossible to practice without starving yourself to death. Was Allah unaware of the poles and Eskimos?
1. Is it fair that (according to multiple sahih hadith) on the Day of Resurrection Allah will spare you from hell-fire by allowing you to throw Jews and Christians into hell[79][80][81] instead?
2. Every non-Muslim who died before Islam was "revealed during their time-period/region" is in Hell (this includes Muhammad's parents).[82][83] Why were they never given a chance?
3. After death, non-Muslims will be tortured by a bald snake.[84] Is it the same snake from the Egyptian myths (Apep)?
1. The Ka'aba was destroyed at least twice after Muhammad's death.[85] Why didn't Allah send birds to protect the Ka'aba then?
2. The Black Stone in the Ka'aba has been struck and smashed by a stone fired from a catapult,[86] it has been smeared with excrement,[87] stolen and ransomed by the Qarmatians,[88] and smashed into several fragments.[89][90] Why did Allah not protect this important 'holy' stone from desecration and damage?
3. Why do Muslims follow the pre-Islamic pagan practice of circling the Ka'aba (Tawaf)?
4. Do you think it's strange that Judaism and Christianity (the religions of those who are considered People of the Book) do not practice ritual circumambulation (e.g. circling the Ka'aba) to please God, but pre-Islamic Arab Paganism and Hinduism and Buddhism (religions older than Islam and accused by Islam of “paganism”) do practice ritual circumambulation?
5. Why do you have to circumambulate the Ka'aba seven times?[91] Why not just once? Why not eight or six times? And why only in a counter-clockwise[91] direction?
6. Whenever royalty or important persons come to the Ka'aba, security give them a special place for prayer in the hateem. Why is there such inequality at the Ka'aba?
7. There are hundreds of cleaners at the Ka'aba who regularly clean away pigeon droppings. If the Masjid al-Haram is truly holy, why does Allah allow birds to defile it?
1. Why are men permitted to have four wives[92] but women are only allowed one husband?
2. Why is having four wives permitted but having five wives is forbidden?
3. Why do many Muslim women disagree with their husband getting a second wife even though Allah has allowed up to four wives?
4. Why does Allah allow[93] and even encourage (through Muhammad's example)[94] marriage between cousins? Does he not know it causes genetic disorders[95][96] in offspring?
5. Do you think it’s right that a man can divorce for any reason (by pronounces "talaq" three times)[97] but a woman has to plead her case before a judge?
1. Fifty percent of men worldwide have had extra-marital sex. So, in theory, do half the men on earth deserve to be stoned or lashed?
2. Does Allah really want the children of adulterers to grow up without their parents because they need to be executed?
3. Does Allah really think public whipping is the most enlightened way to deal with those who have sex before marriage?
4. Instead of the outdated and unreliable method of four witnesses to adultery, why not just use DNA samples which non-Muslims invented?
Prophet Muhammad
1. How do you know that the angel Muhammad was talking to was from Allah and was not Satan himself?
2. Michael H. Hart, the Jewish American author of "The 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Persons in History", claims the 2 reasons he decided Muhammad deserved the number 1 spot was because of his success as a warlord,[98] and because he himself wrote the Qur'an and made-up all of Islam's theology and laws.[99] Do you agree with these claims? If not, do you still feel proud of his placing?
3. Do you think it is okay that Muhammad beheaded a whole tribe (Banu Qurayza)[100] as if they were all guilty? Is it morally acceptable that even children with traces of pubic hair[101][102] were killed?
4. Why do some of you condemn an ordinary person for engaging in pedophilia, but when your prophet does it,[103] you make up excuses and even defend his actions?
5. Why does Muhammad's ascension story sound so strikingly similar to Jesus' ascension? Could it have been a copy-cat story?
6. Why is the Qur'an full of verses that say "Muhammad is not crazy"?[104][105][106] Why did so many people accuse Muhammad of being crazy?
7. Since many of Muhammad's own family members did not believe him,[107] why should we?
8. How do you know whether or not Muhammad suffered from schizophrenia, narcissism, or Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder?
9. If Muhammad was illiterate, why does Sahih Hadith such as Bukhari say he used to write letters?[108]
10. The most authentic hadith collections, like Sahih Bukhari,[109][110] Sahih Muslim,[111][112] and Abu Dawud[113][114] confirm that Muhammad fornicated with a 9 year old. So does Tabari.[115][116] So why do some Muslims ignore or deny this?
11. In Islam, Muhammad is given the honor of being the uswa hasana. He is viewed as "the perfect model of conduct for all Muslims," and Allah asserts his morality as being “sublime”.[117] So what crime exactly has Osama bin Laden committed which Muhammad did not?
12. Unlike Muhammad,[103] Osama bin Laden is not a known pedophile. Doesn't this mean that the world's most notorious terrorist is in fact a more moral man than the founder of Islam?
Jesus Christ
1. The Qur'an claims the New Testament is a book given to Jesus.[118] However, in reality, it consists of books by Jesus' followers. Why make such an obvious error?
2. When Allah fooled the Jews (and eventually the Christians) into thinking Jesus was crucified on the cross,[119] was he being a Deceiver?
3. Why did Allah wait 600 years to tell the Christians and Jews that Jesus did not really die on the cross?
4. Instead of simply saying 'Jesus didn't get resurrected', why did Allah not prove Jesus was not resurrected to avoid more than two billion mislead Christians?
5. According to Muslims, Jesus never said he was the son of God. So why is "son of Mary" explicitly added whenever anyone addresses him?[120][121][122][123][124] Are they telling Jesus something he doesn't already know?
6. Why did Allah let Christianity become the world's largest religion if Jesus was meant to be a prophet only for the Children of Israel[125] and Muhammad for all mankind?
Natural Disasters
1. Why does Allah mostly target Muslim majority countries[126] in major earthquakes? If this is a test of faith, doesn't the indiscriminate killing of innocent women and children make him unworthy of worship?
2. While non-Muslims provide most of the aid after a natural disaster, Allah does nothing. Does he abandon his people on purpose and wish to humiliate them?
3. Why doesn't Allah prevent Mosques from being desecrated during earthquakes in Muslim countries?
4. Allah tells you not to take non-Muslims as “friends and protectors”.[127][128][129] So why do Muslims accept aid from non-Muslims?
5. Kashmir is divided between India, Pakistan, and China. Why did Allah destroy the Pakistan-controlled part of Kashmir[130] rather than the Hindu and Buddhist majority regions in the 2005 earthquake?
1. Why do you deny the prophecies of Mirza Ghulam Ahmed, Bahá'u'lláh, and Rashad Khalifa?
2. Islam makes many prophecies about the end of times, but why are none of the modern technologies prophecized?
3. How much of a god is Allah if he sent 128,000 failed prophets before sending us Muhammad with a final message?
4. People such as Nostradamus,[131] Isaac Newton,[132] and Einstein[133] had many prophecies, so were they divinely inspired too?
Rules & Rituals
1. Why can't you simply say in your head "thanks Allah" instead of praying to Allah with gestures that don't make any sense?
2. Why would Allah care about which foot[134] we enter the toilet with, and why does he care about which shoe we put on first?
3. Why does Allah care whether you use even or odd numbers of toilet paper or stones[135][136] in the loo?
4. Why would an omnipotent deity care which hand[137] you use to eat?
5. Why does Allah care whether or not you sleep on your stomach?
6. Why does Allah want you to trim your mustache and grow your beard?[138][139] Why is he preoccupied with such trivial things?
7. Why in Islam is it forbidden to touch a dog but not a rat, when rats are much more dirty?
8. Why does Allah recommend you to dye your hair?[140] Why on earth would an omnipotent deity care what color your hair is?
9. Why does Allah forbid silk for men?[141] Why does he care what clothing material you have on?
10. Why does Allah care what type of clothes (i.e. the ihram) you wear when going on Hajj?
1. If there truly is science in the Qur'an, why didn't Maurice Bucaille[142] convert to Islam?
2. Other religions claim to have scientific miracles too, so wouldn't this mean that the Islamic argument is void?
3. Why do alleged claims of compatibility between the Qur'an and science only come after the scientific discovery is made?
4. If Muslims trust Muhammad, why not use his recommended medicines (mentioned in numerous sahih hadith) such as camel urine[143][144] rather than western products?
5. Muhammad said if you eat seven dates every morning, no poison can harm you.[145][146] Does that include protection against arsenic, cyanide, ricin, and sarin?
6. If the Qur'an and Hadith are full of science (as Muslims claim) why did the owners of these scriptures not invent computers, TVs, spaceships, helicopters, ipods, satellites, birth control pills, vaccination for smallpox, telephones, radios, light bulbs, microchips, CDs, playstations, refrigerators, microwaves, stainless steel, plastic, x-rays, polio-vaccine, anti-biotics, heart-transplants, DNA studies etc?
7. Most claims of scientific achievements made by followers of Islam during the so-called "Golden Age" (for example; all 20 inventions mentioned by Paul Vallely) have been either refuted or shown to have been greatly exaggerated. How do you feel about that?
8. Why doesn't Allah find a way to refute human evolution?
9. Muhammad said that black cumin cures all diseases except death.[147][148] Can it cure AIDS, Polio, Diabetes and Bird Flu among many others?
1. Why do you claim the Bible is corrupt but at the same time proclaim Muhammad is mentioned in the Bible?
2. If you believe only parts of the Bible have been corrupted, how do you differentiate between the good and the bad? Don't you think arbitrarily choosing whatever verses suit your argument is intellectually dishonest?
3. The Qur'an never says the physical scriptures of the previous revelations were corrupted, only their interpretations. So why does the Qur'an contradicts the message of the Bible?
4. Early Islamic scholars such as Ibn al-Layth, Ibn Rabban, Ibn Qutayba, Al-Ya'qubi, Al-Tabari, Al-Baqillani, Al-Mas'udi, and Al-Bukhari[149][150] confirm that the Taurat and Injil were not physically corrupted. So why is belief to the contrary so prevalent among today’s Muslims?
5. Why did Allah not (as most Muslims claim) protect Christianity or Judaism from "corruption"? If he couldn't get it right the first two times, why is Islam any different?
6. If the Taurat and Injil were "perfect" and agreed with today’s Qur'an but are now corrupted, then why did Allah declare "today I have perfected your religion"?[151] Were the previous revelations sent on other days not perfect?
7. If you believe previous scriptures were corrupted because Allah was "testing" humans or he expected humans to look after their scriptures, doesn't that negate his omnipotence?
1. Why does Allah prefer sending scriptures to desert regions of the world?
2. Why does the Qur'an only speak about religions which were prevalent in Arabia at the time of its revelation? Why are there no Dharmic or Taoic religions mentioned?
3. According to many Muslims, literary excellence (of the Qur’an) proves divine inspiration, so was Shakespeare or Virgil divinely inspired too?
4. Why does the Qur'an discuss extinct religions such as Sabians,[152] while ignoring major religions such as Hinduism?
5. Caliph Uthman had all different copies of the Qur'an destroyed,[153] so how do you know that his version is the correct one?
6. Muslims claim no-one can produce a single chapter like the Qur'an, but is there anything extraordinary, for example, about chapter 108[154] and its three short ayahs?
7. Muslims do not know what the Qur'an verse "Alif Lam Mim" means. So what was the point of putting it in the Qur'an?
8. The earliest found Qur'an did not have diacritical marks,[155] so how can you say the Qur'an is uncorrupted?
9. Is it possible to open a random page in the Qur'an and not find a verse of violence in there?
10. If Allah knows everything, why did he make the Qur'an so ambiguous? Did he want Muslims to spend their spare time trying to figure out its meanings?
11. Why does the Qur'an repeat the same things over and over and over? Wouldn’t the space have been better filled by covering fundamental Muslim beliefs such as the Five Pillars or circumcision, neither of which are mentioned in the Qur’an?
12. The Qur'an[156] claims Satan misleads Muslims - so how can we trust Islamic scholars, or indeed any Muslim?
13. The Qur'an says faces will turn black if the person is a sinner, and the face will turn white if the person is not.[157][158] In the light of this, what will happen to black people?
14. Islamic sources,[159][160] including Sahih Hadith,[161] confirm that Muhammad and the early Muslims were fooled by Satan who produced a counterfeit Qur'anic verse that was indistinguishable from the real thing (i.e. the "Satanic Verses" incident). Taking verse 2:23[162] with its "Surah like it" challenge into consideration, isn't the Qur'an discredited by its own criteria?
1. A Muslim male is allowed to have sex with up to four wives,[92] his concubines, his slaves,[163][164] and with POW.[165] How do you feel about your religion permitting men to practice pre-marital sex, adultery, rape, and polygamy? Do you think any of this is moral?
2. Does Allah really want homosexuals to be put to death[166][167][168] for expressing what they feel, often against what they wish they felt?
3. Muslim men are allowed to practice al-'Azl (withdrawing the penis before ejaculation during sexual intercourse) with female slaves and POW.[169][165] What about doing this with male slaves?
1. If people truly have free will why does the Islamic Shari'ah prevent people from executing it?
2. Why is listening to music under most circumstances forbidden in Islam?[170][171][172] Or why can Muslims not agree on its permissibility? Isn't Islam supposed to be clear?
3. People date in order to find out the character of a possible spouse. So why does Allah forbid dating?
4. Why has Allah forbidden taking pictures,[173][174] and why do so many Muslims ignore this command?
5. Why is talking to the non-mahram opposite gender forbidden according to Islam?
6. Why according to Islam should dogs[175] (especially black ones)[176][177] be killed?
7. Why did Allah forbid the playing of chess[178][179] and masturbation? Aren't these things healthy?
8. Why does Allah want Muslims (if not the entire world) to follow 7th[180] century Shari'ah law?
1. If nikah (Islamic "marriage") literally means "sexual intercourse"[181][182][183][184][185][186][187][188][189][190][191][192][193] and the mahr is payment for nikah, what does that make all Muslim women?
2. Women are not permitted to practice polygamy, men are.[92] Women are not permitted to have have pre-marital/extra-marital sex with slaves and POW,[194] men are. Women are not permitted to beat their marital partners, men are.[195] A male inherits twice that of a female[196] And the testimony of a women in court is worth half that of a man's testimony.[197] Considering these rules set out by the Qur'an, how can you possibly claim Islam stands for equality between the sexes?
3. Why can a woman on her period[198] not touch the Qur'an?
4. A woman cannot pray to her creator for a quarter of the time because she is "dirty".[198] How do you feel about that?
5. It has been recorded in several sahih hadith that Muhammad said women should suckle grown men in order to stay in the same house alone with them.[199][200] Is that good advice?
6. Why do some of you claim that naming a surah after Mary (Maryam) is a means of giving her respect if other surahs are named "The Cow", "The Spider", "The Ants", "The Bee", "The Fig", "The War Booty", "Cheating", "Crouching"[201] and so on?
7. Except a few verses for Muhammad's wives, why did Allah not address women directly even once in his entire revelation? Should only men receive orders on issues concerning women?
1. If Hijab and niqab is (Islamically) good for society, why are there so many homosexuals in the Arabian peninsula?
2. Why do Muslim apologists claim the hijab is only cultural when critics point out that it is oppressive to women, but then claim it is a religious obligation when governments attempt to ban it?
3. If women observing hijab is deemed by Islamic logic necessary to prevent a woman arousing lust in a man, why are men also not enjoined to wear a burqa to prevent women and homosexuals from lusting after them?
4. In some tropical countries, the weather is hot and humid, Muslim women who wearing a hijab may feel uncomfortable, especially when doing physical exercises, did Allah know this?
1. Would you accept your husband's right hand possessions (sex slaves) in your home?
2. Why doesn't the Qur'an actually say there are 5 declarations of faith? Did Muslims make these things up?
3. In the 7th century some Arab guy flew on a winged horse to Heaven and was told by God everyone needed to bow towards a cubical in the Saudi desert 5 times. Why should we believe this?
4. Why does Allah love sneezing but hate yawning?[202] Didn't he know germs are spread via sneezing, while the body gets more oxygen when it yawns?
5. Why did Allah turn Sabbath breakers[203][204][205] into monkeys and pigs?
6. Muhammad said that anyone who knows the 99 names of Allah will go to Heaven[206]. Does this apply to non-Muslims who believe Muhammad was a warmongering fraud and a pedophile?
7. Why did Muhammad[207] change Qiblah?
8. Why does Allah not accept[208][209] the prayer of someone who farts?
9. Muslims have to look down when they pray, because looking up towards "Heaven" during prayer will make them go blind.[210][211] Have you or anyone ever witnessed this happening?
10. How come all the Islamic messengers of the Qur'an come from the Middle East? There are still unreached Indigenous people today in Latin America, Africa, Asia and Oceania - is it fair Allah ignores them?
11. Before reading and writing were invented (5000BC), what basis did Allah use to judge the people who died?
12. Fatimah was born 5 years after First Revelation according to Shia sources. Muhammad married Khadijah when he was 25 and she was 40. Muhammad claimed prophet hood when he was 40, therefore Khadijah would have been 60 when she gave birth to Fatimah. Isn't this a miracle?
13. Do you think it's appropriate that slave murderers are custodians of the two holy mosques?[212]
14. Why did Allah make the Islamic holy day Friday, the Jewish holy day Saturday, and the Christian holy day Sunday?
15. There are many monotheistic religions before Islam (such as Judaism, Christianity and Zoroastrianism), and after Islam (such as Yazdânism and Sikhism), so what is wrong with them specifically?
16. Muhammad's father was named Abdallah (meaning Allah's slave). Since Muhammad's father was a pagan, aren't you simply following a modified pagan religion?
17. Pigs, which are in the family Suidae are haaram. Does this prohibition also include the unrelated New World animals such as the Javelina, in the family Peccary? Does this also include related animals such as the Hippos which are in neither family?
18. Why are all angels male?[213] Is this not sexism?
Islamic Sects
These are questions for adherents of the larger, mainstream Islamic sects that are partially accepted by one another.
1. Why didn't Muhammad appoint a leader before his death to avoid Shi'ites and other sects splitting up from Sunnis?
2. Why do some of you try to distance yourself from Salafis (or "Wahhabis") in front of non-Muslims, when they are the most pious Sunni Muslims? Are you ashamed of the Salaf (first 3 generations of Muslims)?
3. Why do you criticize Shi'ites for Mut'ah when Sunnis practice Misyar which is essentially the same thing?
4. If Shi'ites are wrong, why did Allah allow Ali and his Shi'ite army to defeat the Sunnis at three separate battles of Bassorah, Siffin and Nahrawan?
1. If Allah wanted Ali to be the substitute after Muhammad, why did he fail in his plan?
2. Why do some of you slice children's foreheads with a blade on Ashura? Isn't this child abuse?
1. The basis of your faith is that some verses of the Quran contain hidden meanings. What are your opinions on the literal verses about violence, hell (Quran 48:13), cruel and degrading punishments (Quran 5:38), hatred of non-Muslims, misogyny (Quran 4:34) and Judeo-Christian legends?
2. If you oppose literal verses of the Quran and support the peaceful ones, why not declare yourself as a separate religion?
3. What are your opinions about the hadith and if there are none, what do you find praiseworthy in Muhammad?
Non-Islamic Sects
These are questions for adherents of sects/cults that call themselves "Muslim" or accept the validity of the Qur'an and Muhammad's prophethood, but are considered "outside the fold of Islam" due to being as different to Islam as Christianity or Judaism.
1. Which death is more humiliating for a prophet of Islam; being crucified or dying of diarrhea in a public toilet?
2. Why do you claim there are 200 million of you when in reality there are only 10 million Ahmadis worldwide?
3. Considering Ahmadis believe only they are true Muslims, does it surprise you that you've been declared non-Muslims by Muslims the world-over?
1. Two alternative Baha'i organizations have been sued by the Baha'i Faith organization for using the word "Baha'i" to describe their beliefs. That's like the Catholic Church suing Protestants for calling themselves "Christians". Do you agree that this makes your faith look ridiculous and petty?
2. You believe that eventually all people and nations should come under the theocratic rule of the infallibly inspired Baha'i Universal House of Justice. How is this any different than the Caliphate and Shari'ah?
3. In the Kitáb-i-Aqdas (Most Holy Book) Baha'u'llah limits the number of wives to 2, but he had 3 wives. Why believe in such a hypocrite?
4. Bahá'u'lláh was a polygamist who allowed men to have up to 2 wives, so why is polygamy forbidden by Baha'i law?
5. In the Kitáb-i-Aqdas (Most Holy Book) Baha'u'llah commands that a thief should have a visible mark put on his forehead after the third offense. Why do you consider this man to be the greatest Manifestation of God?
6. In the Kitáb-i-Aqdas (Most Holy Book) sodomy is forbidden. Why is this?
7. Being such a new faith, you'd expect it to incorporate many liberal ideals. So why are homosexual relationships forbidden and homosexuality seen as a handicap that should be treated? Was Baha'u'llah a homophobe?
8. Abdu'l Baha and Shoghi Effendi are both infallible, so why can't they decide if Confucius was or was not a Manifestation?
9. You believe all the greatest faiths founded by Manifestations differ only in non-essential aspects of their doctrines. Even a cursory glance at the doctrines of the major world religions will tell you this is false. So why do you believe this?
10. If Baha'u'llah is the apex of all previous Manifestations, why can't he walk on water or split the moon?
11. According to your faith, each Manifestation is more perfect than the previous one, but do you honestly believe Muhammad's teachings are superior to Christ's or Buddha's?
12. Why do you think Muhammad was so great, when his followers are killing you? Doesn't this suggest that there's something wrong with his teachings?
13. Buddha was a monotheist and a prophet?
14. You believe Manifestations are all sinless. Moses, Abraham and others would disagree. Who are we to believe; them or your obscure beliefs?
15. In "Baha'u'llah and the New Era" (official Baha'i text) Abdu'l Baha ("Slave of Baha", the infallible guide and eldest son of Baha'u'llah) stated that the Kingdom of God would be established on earth by 1957. Where is it, and why has this statement been removed from the 1970 republication?
16. Bab declared Mirza Yahya (Baha'u'llah's brother) as his successor and presented Baha'u'llah as an inferior. Why do Baha'is suppress this fact?
17. If Baha'is are so peaceful, why was the faith founded on violence and assassinations between supporters of Mirza Yahya and Baha'u'llah?
18. You believe Christianity was perverted during the first century (as per Shoghi Effendi's claim). Isn't this hypocritical coming from a faith that suppresses source materials and revises the writings of deceased authors in futile attempts to make your beliefs match historical reality?
19. Abdu'l Baha "excommunicated" practically all his closest relatives and deprived them of their income from Baha'u'llah's estate after his fathers death. Do you agree that your infallible guide was a cruel and heartless individual?
20. Based on the example set by the infallible Abdu'l Baha, Covenant-breakers (heretics and apostates) are often treated unkindly and ostracized by other Baha'is. So what makes your faith any better than mainstream Islam?
1. Why do you deny the hadith? Is it because you are ashamed of your prophet?
2. Does it bother you that even without the hadith, the Qur'an sanctions pedophilia, domestic abuse, and many other crimes? Shouldn't you embrace your apostasy and get rid of the Qur'an?
3. Why do some of you accept the hadiths that make Muhammad look good and reject the ones that make him look bad? Do you enjoy being intellectually dishonest?
4. The historical evidence for Muhammad is found in the hadith and sirat. If you do not accept these sources, how do you know your prophet ever existed?
5. If you reject the hadith, you lose the whole context and order of the Qur'anic revelations. So is there no compulsion in religion or do you have to slay the idolaters wherever you find them?
6. Why do you believe the Qur'an is the uncorrupted word of God, when the narrators of corrupted hadith are the same people who passed down the Qur'an?
7. The Qur'an never explains how to offer salat. Who taught you how to pray?
8. The Qur'an says there should be 3 daily prayers. Who told you to pray 5 times?
9. The Qur'an mentions Abu Lahab. Without referencing "corrupted" hadith, please tell us who is he and why does Allah hate him?
10. Is it upsetting knowing that most Muslims think you follow an obscure cult and that you're a non-Muslim?
11. One can be a Muslim their entire life without ever meeting a "Qur'anist". So why are there so many of you on the net?
12. Why accuse the Sunnis and Shi'ites, who've been following hadith for 1000+ years, of innovation, when it's you who's the innovator?
13. What did Muhammad look like? How many wives did he have and what were their names? What were the names of his children? How old was he when he first received his prophethood? When and how did he die? Do you even know anything about your prophet?
14. Why do you accept the revelations given to someone who you know nothing about?
15. Did you know that Rashad Khalifa was a lying pedophile and rapist?
16. If you don't accept the history behind the compilation of the Qur'an, what makes it different from any other poorly written Medieval text? How do you know that (like The True Furqan) it's not an old parody?
See Also
• A version of this page is also available in the following languages: Spanish. For additional languages, see the sidebar on the left.
External Links
1. "To Him is due the primal origin of the heavens and the earth: How can He have a son when He hath no consort? He created all things, and He hath full knowledge of all things." - Quran 6:101
2. "She said: "How shall I have a son, seeing that no man has touched me, and I am not unchaste?" He said: "So (it will be): Thy Lord saith, 'that is easy for Me: and (We wish) to appoint him as a Sign unto men and a Mercy from Us':It is a matter (so) decreed." - Qur'an 19:20-21
3. Note that Omnipotence (from Latin: Omni Potens: "all power") means unlimited power. So an omnipotent deity should be capable of doing absolutely anything. For example; if Allah cannot use the toilet, vomit, bleed or father children, it doesn’t mean humans are superior to him, but it does mean he is not an omnipotent deity.
4. 4.0 4.1 For example; Harun Yahya includes Al-Makir in his listing of Allah's 99 names (Names of Allah/ No. 16 (Al-Makir)). He in this instance mistranslates it to mean "Planner", but more correctly translates the same word in the same verse elsewhere on his site (The School of Yusuf - Harun Yahya). Lane's Lexicon for Makr and the Hans Wehr dictionary both confirm the meaning of the term to be "Deceiver". Dr. Jamal Badawi even admits that makir is a negative word with negative connotations
5. 5.0 5.1 "And it was not (vouchsafed) to any mortal that Allah should speak to him unless (it be) by revelation or from behind a veil, or (that) He sendeth a messenger to reveal what He will by His leave. Lo! He is Exalted, Wise." - Quran 42:51
6. 6.0 6.1 " Such is Allah, your Lord. There is no Allah save Him, the Creator of all things, so worship Him. And He taketh care of all things. Vision comprehendeth Him not, but He comprehendeth (all) vision. He is the Subtile, the Aware." - Qur'an 6:102-103
7. "Allah promiseth you much booty that ye will capture, and hath given you this in advance, and hath withheld men's hands from you, that it may be a token for the believers, and that He may guide you on a right path." - Quran 48:20
8. "And know that whatever ye take as spoils of war, lo! a fifth thereof is for Allah, and for the messenger and for the kinsman (who hath need) and orphans and the needy and the wayfarer, if ye believe in Allah and that which We revealed unto Our slave on the Day of Discrimination, the day when the two armies met. And Allah is Able to do all things." - Quran 8:41
9. Quran 23:14 "Then We made the seed a clot, then We made the clot a lump of flesh, then We made (in) the lump of flesh bones, then We clothed the bones with flesh, then We caused it to grow into another creation, so blessed be Allah, the best of the creators."
10. 10.0 10.1 Some of the rulings on apostasy and apostates - Islam Q&A, Fatwa No. 14231
11. Islam's view towards Freedom of Speech - Caliphate Online, April 2009
12. Muslims converts face ostracism in France - Zee News, February 6, 2007
13. According to Shaykh Ahmed Katani, in Africa, 6 million Muslims convert to Christianity every year: (English Translation | Arabic)
14. Iran: Parliament to discuss death penalty for converts who leave Islam - AKI, March 19, 2008
15. Damir Ahmad - Proselytization Eats Away At Muslim Majority In Kyrgyzstan - IslamOnline, June 26, 2004
16. Elizabeth Kendal - Authorities Consider Countering Christian Mission - Religious Liberty Monitoring, June 30, 2004
17. 2 million ethnic Muslims adopted baptism in Russia while only 2,5 thousand Russians converted to Islam - expert - Interfax, November 1, 2005
18. Anthony Browne - Muslim apostates cast out and at risk from faith and family Muslim apostates cast out and at risk from faith and family - The Sunday Times, February 5, 2005
19. According to research carried out by the respected Pakistani-born American Muslim Dr. Ilyas Ba-Yunus (1932 - 2007), 75% of new Muslim converts in the US leave Islam within a few years. Listen to the clip detailing this research (listen on Youtube)
20. Tom Coghlan - Afghan court resists Karzai's overture to spare Christian's life - The Telegraph, March 26, 2006
21. "The saheeh Sunnah indicates that it is essential to put the apostate to death. [Quotes Al-Bukhaari (6922), Al-Bukhaari (6484), and Muslim (1676)] The general meaning of these ahaadeeth indicates that it is essential to put the apostate to death whether he is waging war on Islam (muhaarib) or not. The view that the apostate who is to be put to death is the one who is waging war on Islam (muhaarib) only is contrary to these ahaadeeth. The Prophet (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him) said that the reason why he should be put to death is his apostasy, not his waging war against Islam... Apostasy is of two types: ordinary apostasy and extreme apostasy, for which execution is prescribed. In both cases there is evidence that it is essential to execute the apostate... " - Some of the rulings on apostasy and apostates - Islam Q&A, Fatwa No. 14231
22. Dictionary/ Arabic - MSN Encarta, accessed December 27, 2010
23. Dictionary/ Modern Standard Chinese - MSN Encarta, accessed December 27, 2010
24. Dictionary/ Spanish - MSN Encarta, accessed December 27, 2010
25. Dictionary/ English - MSN Encarta, accessed December 27, 2010
26. Dictionary/ Hindi - MSN Encarta, accessed December 27, 2010
27. Dictionary/ Russian - MSN Encarta, accessed December 27, 2010
28. Documentation for ISO 639 identifier: ara - Summer Institute of Linguistics International
29. "Nay, I swear by the Day of Resurrection; Nay, I swear by the accusing soul (that this Scripture is true). Thinketh man that We shall not assemble his bones? Yea, verily. We are Able to restore his very fingers! But man would fain deny what is before him. He asketh: When will be this Day of Resurrection? But when sight is confounded And the moon is eclipsed And sun and moon are united, On that day man will cry: Whither to flee! Alas! No refuge! Unto thy Lord is the recourse that day. On that day man is told the tale of that which he hath sent before and left behind. Oh, but man is a telling witness against himself, Although he tender his excuses." - Qur'an 75:1-15
30. Qiyamah - Definition - WordIQ, accessed December 27, 2010
31. "Narrated 'Abdullah: "Allah has cursed those women who practice tattooing and those who get themselves tattooed, and those who remove their face hairs, and those who create a space between their teeth artificially to look beautiful, and such women as change the features created by Allah. Why then should I not curse those whom the Prophet has cursed? And that is in Allah's Book. i.e. His Saying: 'And what the Apostle gives you take it and what he forbids you abstain (from it).' (59.7)" - Sahih Bukhari 7:72:815
32. "Narrated 'Aun bin Abu Juhaifa: "My father bought a slave who practiced the profession of cupping. (My father broke the slave's instruments of cupping). I asked my father why he had done so. He replied, 'The Prophet forbade the acceptance of the price of a dog or blood, and also forbade the profession of tattooing, getting tattooed and receiving or giving Riba, (usury), and cursed the picture-makers." - Sahih Bukhari 3:34:299
33. "Narrated Abu Huraira: "Allah's Apostle said, 'The evil eye is a fact,' and he forbade tattooing." - Sahih Bukhari 7:72:827
34. "It was narrated that 'Abdulleh said: "The Messenger of Allah cursed the woman who does tattoos and the one who has them done, and those who pluck their eyebrows and file their teeth for the purpose of beautification, and those who change the creation of Allah."..." - Sunan Ibn Majah 9:1989:1
35. ""God did not make your adopted son as your own sons. To declare them so is your empty claim. God's word is righteous and constitutes true guidance."" - Quran 33:4
36. Ekram Ibrahim - Orphanage day puts adoption in spotlight - Al-Masry Al-Youm, April 1, 2010
37. "Till, when they reached the Valley of the Ants, an ant exclaimed: O ants! Enter your dwellings lest Solomon and his armies crush you, unperceiving. And (Solomon) smiled, laughing at her speech, and said: My Lord, arouse me to be thankful for Thy favour wherewith Thou hast favoured me and my parents, and to do good that shall be pleasing unto Thee, and include me in (the number of) Thy righteous slaves." - Qur'an 27:18-19
38. "Narrated As-Saburah: The Prophet (peace be upon him) said: Command a boy to pray when he reaches the age of seven years. When he becomes ten years old, then beat him for prayer." - Sunan Abu Dawud 2:494
39. According to the Qur'an, one can marry and have sexual intercourse with a child who has not yet reached her menses. In Quran 65:4, the Qur'an addresses divorce and how long one should wait for remarriage after the divorce of females who are too old or too young to menstruate, in Arabic called iddah (the stipulated waiting period). So we are told in this verse normally women should wait three monthly periods, but if she's too old or too young to menstruate then you should simply measure by three moon phases. From Quran 33:49 it is understood that the Iddah is required only if sexual contact has occurred within the marriage. If a woman is not touched by her husband, she should not have to observe any waiting period at all. Hence for a child who has not yet reached her menses having to observe the Iddah must mean that sexual intercourse had already taken place within her previous marriage. For further details, see: Pedophilia in the Qur'an
40. Six decades later, world’s youngest mother awaits aid - The Telegraph, August 27, 2002
41. Nick Collins - Plans to build super-mosque at Olympic site blocked - The Telegraph, January 18, 2010
42. Daniel Bates - Ailing Ground Zero heroes slam embattled Obama over mosque as New York takes stand against president - The Daily Mail, August 19, 2010
43. Violent race riot flared after mosque chief urged Muslims to confront right-wing 'English Defence League' protesters - The Daily Mail, September 7, 2009
44. "...November 30, 2007 in Khartoum Sudan. Ten thousand Muslims carrying swords, knives, and sticks protest, after Friday prayers, calling for the execution of a British teacher who was convicted of insulting Islam. She had allowed her students to name a teddy bear Muhammad...." - Muhammad Teddy Bear Blasphemy Case
45. "...Sheikh Tobah, Imam of the village of Shimi 170 KM south of Giza, called during Muslim Friday prayers for Jihad against Christians living there. As a result the Christian Copts living in the village were assaulted over two consecutive days. Eleven Copts were hospitalized and many Coptic youths were arrested. The assaults began a couple of hours after the Sheikhs incitement...." - Muslim Cleric Calls for Jihad, Coptic Christians Attacked in Egypt - AINA, August 14, 2010
46. "...[In response to a planned international LGBT conference in Surabaya] A 150-strong mob attacked the lobby of the hotel after Friday morning prayers and refused to leave until the police and hotel management would guarantee that the event was cancelled. In the evening, the mob conducted a floor-by-floor sweep of the hotel, going to the rooms of the 150 conference participants from 14 countries to make sure that they had left. An organizer told Gay City News how he was repeatedly punched by one of the agitators in the hotel lobby for refusing to turn over ILGA's list of conference participants...." - Glad to be gay in Indonesia - Megawati Wijaya, Asia Times, September 23, 2010
48. "He it is Who did create you from a single soul, and therefrom did make his mate that he might take rest in her. And when he covered her she bore a light burden, and she passed (unnoticed) with it, but when it became heavy they cried unto Allah, their Lord, saying: If thou givest unto us aright we shall be of the thankful." - Quran 7:189
49. "Narrated Abu Huraira: The Prophet said, "Whoever believes in Allah and the Last Day should not hurt (trouble) his neighbor. And I advise you to take care of the women, for they are created from a rib and the most crooked portion of the rib is its upper part; if you try to straighten it, it will break, and if you leave it, it will remain crooked, so I urge you to take care of the women."" - Sahih Bukhari 7:62:114
50. "Abu Huraira (Allah be pleased with him) reported: Woman has been created from a rib and will in no way be straightened for you; so if you wish to benefit by her, benefit by her while crookedness remains in her. And if you attempt to straighten her, you will break her, and breaking her is divorcing her." - Sahih Muslim 8:3467
51. "His Lord called out to him: Adam, is it from Me that you are fleeing? Adam replied: No, my Lord, but I feel shame before You. When God asked what had caused his trouble, he replied: Eve, My Lord. Whereupon God said: Now it is My obligation to make her bleed once every month, as she made this tree bleed. I also must make her stupid, although I created her intelligent (halimah), and must make her suffer pregnancy. Ibn Zayd continued: Were it not for the affliction that affected Eve, the women of this world wound not menstruate, and they would be intelligent and, when pregnant, give birth easily." - History of al-Tabari, New York: State University of New York Press, 1989, Vol. 1, pp. 280-281
52. Note that this belief is consistent and complimentary to teachings found in the Qur'an and Sahih hadith, and that these views are held by contemporary scholars as well as the classical scholars that they quote. For example, in Sahih Bukhari 1:6:301 Muhammad references Quran 2:282 (which talks of women erring) when he asks women, "Is not the evidence of two women equal to the witness of one man? ... This is the deficiency in her intelligence." He then goes on to say, "Isn't it true that a woman can neither pray nor fast during her menses? ... This is the deficiency in her religion." Thus confirming the Tabari text that says today all women menstruate (are deficient in religion) and are created stupid (deficient in intelligence). Also in a lecture delivered by Saudi cleric Abd Al-Aziz Al-Fawzan, which aired on Al-Majd TV (June 11, 2007), he responds to the criticism made by 'enemies' of Islam against Muhammad's "women are deficient" statement by confirming the account found in Tabari by stating, "It has shown that the twisted nature of women stems from their very creation. This is how Allah wanted woman to be. Therefore, the husband must adapt himself to her and be patient with her. He should not give her too many things to do, or things that she is incapable of doing. He should not make her do anything that is contrary to her nature, and to the way she was created by Allah. In addition, he should turn a blind eye to her mistakes, he should tolerate her slips and errors, and put up with all the silly ignorant things she might say, because this constitutes part of the nature of her creation."
53. 53.0 53.1 "O ye who believe! Intoxicants and gambling, (dedication of) stones, and (divination by) arrows, are an abomination,- of Satan's handwork: eschew such (abomination), that ye may prosper." - Qur'an 5:90-91
54. "And in the earth are tracts (diverse though) neighbouring, and gardens of vines and fields sown with corn, and palm trees - growing out of single roots or otherwise: watered with the same water, yet some of them We make more excellent than others to eat. Behold, verily in these things there are signs for those who understand!" - Quran 13:4
55. "(Here is) a Parable of the Garden which the righteous are promised: in it are rivers of water incorruptible; rivers of milk of which the taste never changes; rivers of wine, a joy to those who drink; and rivers of honey pure and clear. In it there are for them all kinds of fruits; and Grace from their Lord. (Can those in such Bliss) be compared to such as shall dwell for ever in the Fire, and be given, to drink, boiling water, so that it cuts up their bowels (to pieces)?" - Quran 47:15
56. Charles J. Holahan, Kathleen K. Schutte, Penny L. Brennan, Carole K. Holahan, Bernice S. Moos, Rudolf H. Moos - Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research - August 24, 2010, Copyright © 2010 by the Research Society on Alcoholism
57. John Cloud - Why Do Heavy Drinkers Outlive Nondrinkers? - TIME, August 30, 2010
58. Satoyo Ikehara, MSc; Hiroyasu Iso, MD; Hideaki Toyoshima, MD; Chigusa Date, PhD; Akio Yamamoto; Shogo Kikuchi, MD; Takaaki Kondo, MD; Yoshiyuki Watanabe, MD; Akio Koizumi, MD; Yasuhiko Wada, MD; Yutaka Inaba, MD; Akiko Tamakoshi - Alcohol Consumption and Mortality From Stroke and Coronary Heart Disease Among Japanese Men and Women - The Japan Collaborative Cohort Study, July 10, 2008, © 2008 American Heart Association, Inc.
59. Umed A. Ajani, MBBS, MPH; J. Michael Gaziano, MD, MPH; Paulo A. Lotufo, MD, DrPH; Simin Liu, MD, ScD; Charles H. Hennekens, MD, DrPH; Julie E. Buring, ScD; JoAnn E. Manson, MD, DrPH - Alcohol Consumption and Risk of Coronary Heart Disease by Diabetes Status - the Division of Preventive Medicine (U.A.A., J.M.G., P.A.L., S.L., J.E.B., J.E.M.), Channing Laboratory (J.E.M.), and Cardiovascular Division (J.M.G.), Department of Medicine, Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston, Mass; the Department of Epidemiology (J.E.B., J.E.M.) and Department of Nutrition (S.L.), Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, Mass; and Massachusetts Veterans Epidemiology Research and Information Center (J.M.G.), Veterans Affairs Medical Center, Brockton/West Roxbury, Mass. Dr Hennekens is visiting Professor of Medicine, and Epidemiology and Public Health at the University of Miami School of Medicine., © 2000 American Heart Association, Inc.
60. Caren G. Solomon, MD, MPH; Frank B. Hu, MD, PhD; Meir J. Stampfer, MD, DrPH; Graham A. Colditz, MBBS, DrPH; Frank E. Speizer, MD; Eric B. Rimm, ScD; Walter C. Willett, MD, DrPH; JoAnn E. Manson, MD, DrPH - Moderate Alcohol Consumption and Risk of Coronary Heart Disease Among Women With Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus - the Division of Women’s Health (C.G.S.), Channing Laboratory (F.B.H., M.J.S., G.A.C., F.E.S., E.B.R., W.C.W., J.E.M.), Division of Preventive Medicine (J.E.M.), Department of Medicine, Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the Departments of Nutrition (F.B.H., M.J.S., E.B.R., W.C.W.) and Epidemiology (M.J.S., G.A.C., E.B.R., W.C.W., J.E.M.), Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, Mass., © 2000 American Heart Association, Inc.
61. Amy Norton - Moderate drinking linked to lower diabetes risk - Reuters, April 27, 2010
62. Megan Brooks - Beer for brain injury? Maybe - Reuters, Archives of Surgery, September 2009
63. Denise Mann - Study: Alcohol may fight rheumatoid arthritis - CNN, July 27, 2010
64. Ben Leach - Beer could stop bones going brittle - The Telegraph, August 12, 2009
65. Skogen JC, Harvey SB, Henderson M, Stordal E, Mykletun A. - Anxiety and depression among abstainers and low-level alcohol consumers. The Nord-Trøndelag Health Study - Psychiatric Clinic, Stord DPS, Helse Fonna HF, Norway, September 2009
66. John Cloud - Why Nondrinkers May Be More Depressed - TIME, October 06, 2009
67. Shannon Proudfoot - Odd beer break could be good for teenage girls: Study - Canwest News Service, accessed September 1, 2010
68. "And verily in cattle (too) will ye find an instructive sign. From what is within their bodies between excretions and blood, We produce, for your drink, milk, pure and agreeable to those who drink it." - Quran 16:66
70. Nikhil Swaminathan - Not Milk? Neolithic Europeans Couldn't Stomach the Stuff - Scientific American, February 27, 2007
71. Lactase Deficiency: The World Pattern Today - T. Gilat, Israel J Med Sci (1979), 15:369, PMID: 582170
72. Shanti Rangwani - White Poison: The Horrors of Milk - AlterNet, December 3, 2001
73. S. H. A. Careem - The miracle of ZamZam - Sunday Observer, January 30, 2005
74. Guy Lynn - Contaminated Zam Zam holy water from Mecca sold in UK - BBC News, May 5, 2011
75. "And Allah has made the earth for you as a carpet (spread out)," - Quran 71:19
76. "He Who has, made for you the earth like a carpet spread out; has enabled you to go about therein by roads (and channels); and has sent down water from the sky." With it have We produced diverse pairs of plants each separate from the others." - Quran 20:53
77. "And the earth We have spread out (like a carpet); set thereon mountains firm and immovable; and produced therein all kinds of things in due balance." - Quran 15:19
78. For further details, see: The Ramadan Pole Paradox
79. "Abu Musa' reported that Allah's Messenger (may peace be upon him) said: When it will be the Day of Resurrection Allah would deliver to every Muslim a Jew or a Christian and say: That is your rescue from Hell-Fire." - Sahih Muslim 37:6665
80. "Abu Burda reported on the authority of his father that Allah's Apostle (may peace be upon him) said: No Muslim would die but Allah would admit in his stead a Jew or a Christian in Hell-Fire. 'Umar b. Abd al-'Aziz took an oath: By One besides Whom there is no god but He, thrice that his father had narrated that to him from Allah's Messenger (may peace be upon him)." - Sahih Muslim 37:6666, See also: Sahih Muslim 37:6667
81. "Abu Burda reported Allah's Messenger (may peace be upon him) as saying: There would come people amongst the Muslims on the Day of Resurrection with as heavy sins as a mountain, and Allah would forgive them and He would place in their stead the Jews and the Christians. (As far as I think), Abu Raub said: I do not know as to who is in doubt. Abu Burda said: I narrated it to 'Umar b. 'Abd al-'Aziz, whereupon he said: Was it your father who narrated it to you from Allah's Apostle (may peace be upon him)? I said: Yes." - Sahih Muslim 37:6668
82. "Abu Huraira reported: The Apostle of Allah (may peace be upon him) visited the grave of his mother and he wept, and moved others around him to tears, and said: I sought permission from my Lord to beg forgiveness for her but it was not granted to me, and I sought permission to visit her grave and it was granted to me. So visit the graves, for that makes you mindful of death." - Sahih Muslim 4:2130
83. "Anas reported: Verily, a person said: Messenger of Allah, where is my father? He said: (He) is in the Fire. When he turned away, he (the Holy Prophet) called him and said: Verily my father and your father are in the Fire." - Sahih Muslim 1:398
84. The poisonous bald-headed male snake – is it an unseen matter? - IslamWeb, Fatwa No : 2106, March 1, 2010
85. S.M.R. Shabbar - Story of the Holy Ka’aba And its People/ Ka’aba The House Of Allah - Published by Muhammadi Trust of Great Britain
86. Hırka-i Saadet Dairesi; Hilmi Aydın(2004) - The sacred trusts: Pavilion of the Sacred Relics, Topkapı Palace Museum, Istanbul - Tughra Books, ISBN 9781932099720
87. Burton, Richard Francis (1856) - Personal narrative of a pilgrimage to El-Madinah and Meccah - G. P. Putnam & Co., p. 394
88. Francis E. Peters (1994) - Mecca: a literary history of the Muslim Holy Land - Princeton University Press, pp. 125–126, ISBN 9780691032672
89. Cyril Glasse - New Encyclopedia of Islam: A Revised Edition of the Concise Encyclopedia of Islam (p. 245) - Rowman Altamira, 2001, ISBN 0759101906
90. Black Stone of Mecca - Encyclopædia Britannica, 2007
91. 91.0 91.1 Ruqaiyyah Waris Maqsood - Islam (World Faiths) - Teach Yourself Books; First British Edition, 1994, (p. 76), ISBN 0-340-60901-X
93. "Prohibited to you (For marriage) are:- Your mothers, daughters, sisters; father's sisters, Mother's sisters; brother's daughters, sister's daughters; foster-mothers (Who gave you suck), foster-sisters; your wives' mothers; your step-daughters under your guardianship, born of your wives to whom ye have gone in,- no prohibition if ye have not gone in;- (Those who have been) wives of your sons proceeding from your loins; and two sisters in wedlock at one and the same time, except for what is past; for Allah is Oft-forgiving, Most Merciful;" - Quran 4:23
94. Muhammad himself married cousins, as he did with Zaynab bint Jahsh, who was not only the daughter of Umaimah bint Abd al-Muttalib, one of his father's sisters, but was also divorced from a marriage with Muhammad's adopted son, Zayd ibn Haritha. - Maududi (1967), Tafhimul Quran, Chapter Al Ahzab
95. A. H. Bittles and M. L. Black - Consanguinity, human evolution, and complex diseases – PNAS, June 25, 2009
96. Alan H. Bittles - The Role and Significance of Consanguinity as a Demographic Variable - JSTOR
97. "Talaq is the term used to mean divorce in accordance with Islamic rules. Under traditional Islamic Law a bare Talaq divorce takes place when the husband pronounces three times “I divorce you”. Such a pronouncement has the effect of dissolving the marriage instantly." - The Validity of Talaq Divorce in the UK - Shahzea Tahir, Woolley & Co family law, accessed January 28, 2012
98. "Muhammad (unlike Jesus) was a secular as well as a religious leader. In fact, as the driving force behind the Arab conquests, he may well rank as the most influential political leader of all time. Of many important historical events, one might say that they were inevitable and would have occurred even without the particular political leader who guided them. For example, the South American colonies would probably have won their independence from Spain even if Simon Bolivar had never lived. But this cannot be said of the Arab conquests. Nothing similar had occurred before Muhammad, and there is no reason to believe that the conquests would have been achieved without him. The only comparable conquests in human history are those of the Mongols in the thirteenth century, which were primarily due to the influence of Genghis Khan." - The 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Persons in History - Michael H. Hart, Citadel Publishing, 2000, ISBN 9780806513508
99. "St. Paul was the main developer of Christian theology, its principal proselytizer, and the author of a large portion of the New Testament. Muhammad, however, was responsible for both the theology of Islam and its main ethical and moral principles. In addition, he played the key role in proselytizing the new faith, and in establishing the religious practices of Islam. Moreover, he is the author of the Moslem holy scriptures, the Koran, a collection of certain of Muhammad's insights that he believed had been directly revealed to him by Allah. Most of these utterances were copied more or less faithfully during Muhammad's lifetime and were collected together in authoritative form not long after his death. The Koran therefore, closely represents Muhammad's ideas and teachings and to a considerable extent his exact words." - The 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Persons in History - Michael H. Hart, Citadel Publishing, 2000, ISBN 9780806513508
101. "The Messenger of God had commanded that all of them who had reached puberty should be killed." - The History of Al-Tabari: The Victory of Islam, translated by Michael. F. State University of New York Press, Albany 1997, Volume 8. page. 38
102. "Narrated Atiyyah al-Qurazi: I was among the captives of Banu Qurayzah. They (the Companions) examined us, and those who had begun to grow hair (pubes) were killed, and those who had not were not killed. I was among those who had not grown hair." - Sunan Abu Dawud 38:4390
103. 103.0 103.1 According to the most stringent clinical definition of pedophilia, the DSM-IV-TR: A. Over a period of at least six months, recurrent, intense sexually arousing fantasies, sexual urges, or behaviors involving sexual activity with a prepubescent child or children (generally age 13 years or younger). B. The person has acted on these sexual urges, or the sexual urges or fantasies caused marked distress or interpersonal difficulty. C. The person is at least age 16 years and at least 5 years older than the child or children in Criterion A. (This does not include an individual in late adolescence involved in an ongoing sexual relationship with a 12- or 13-year-old). Muhammad was engaged to Aisha when she was only 6 year old and he was 51, and consummated the marriage while she was still pre-pubescent, aged 9 lunar years old. Thus he fulfilled all three requirements needed for a positive diagnosis. For further details, see Aisha's Age of Consummation
104. "Say (unto them, O Muhammad): I exhort you unto one thing only: that ye awake, for Allah's sake, by twos and singly, and then reflect: There is no madness in your comrade. He is naught else than a warner unto you in face of a terrific doom." - Quran 34:46
105. "And your comrade is not mad." - Quran 81:22
106. "Or (why is not) treasure thrown down unto him, or why hath he not a paradise from whence to eat? And the evil-doers say: Ye are but following a man bewitched." - Quran 25:8
108. Sahih Bukhari 1:3:65
109. "Narrated 'Aisha: that the Prophet married her when she was six years old and he consummated his marriage when she was nine years old, and then she remained with him for nine years (i.e., till his death)." - Sahih Bukhari 7:62:64
110. "Narrated 'Aisha: that the Prophet married her when she was six years old and he consummated his marriage when she was nine years old. Hisham said: I have been informed that 'Aisha remained with the Prophet for nine years (i.e. till his death)." what you know of the Quran (by heart)'" - Sahih Bukhari 7:62:65
111. "'A'isha (Allah be pleased with her) reported: Allah's Apostle (may peace be upon him) married me when I was six years old, and I was admitted to his house when I was nine years old." - Sahih Muslim 8:3310
112. "'A'isha (Allah be pleased with her) reported: Allah's Messenger (may peace be upon him) married me when I was six years old, and I was admitted to his house at the age of nine..." - Sahih Muslim 8:3309
113. "Aisha said, "The Apostle of Allah married me when I was seven years old." (The narrator Sulaiman said: "Or six years."). "He had intercourse with me when I was 9 years old." - Sunan Abu Dawud 2:2116
114. "Narrated Aisha, Ummul Mu'minin: "The Apostle of Allah (peace be upon him) married me when I was seven or six. When we came to Medina, some women came. according to Bishr's version: Umm Ruman came to me when I was swinging. They took me, made me prepared and decorated me. I was then brought to the Apostle of Allah (peace be upon him), and he took up cohabitation with me when I was nine. She halted me at the door, and I burst into laughter."" - Sunan Abu Dawud 41:4915
115. "She [Aisha] replied, "The angel brought down my likeness; the Messenger of God married me when I was seven; my marriage was consummated when I was nine; he married me when I was a virgin" - Tabari, Volume 7, Page 7
116. "The Messenger of God consummated his marriage with me [Aisha] in my house when I was nine years old." - al-Tabari Volume 9 p. 130-131
117. "And most surely you conform (yourself) to sublime morality." - Quran 68:4
118. "And in their footsteps We sent Jesus the son of Mary, confirming the Law that had come before him: We sent him the Gospel: therein was guidance and light, and confirmation of the Law that had come before him: a guidance and an admonition to those who fear Allah. " - Quran 5:46
119. "And their saying: Surely we have killed the Messiah, Isa son of Marium, the messenger of Allah; and they did not kill him nor did they crucify him, but it appeared to them so (like Isa) and most surely those who differ therein are only in a doubt about it; they have no knowledge respecting it, but only follow a conjecture, and they killed him not for sure. Nay! Allah took him up to Himself; and Allah is Mighty, Wise. " - Qur'an 4:157-158
120. "Behold! the disciples, said: "O Jesus the son of Mary! can thy Lord send down to us a table set (with viands) from heaven?" Said Jesus: "Fear Allah, if ye have faith."" - Quran 5:112
121. "Then will Allah say: "O jesus the son of Mary! Recount My favour to thee and to thy mother." - Quran 5:110
122. "And behold! Allah will say: "O jesus the son of Mary!" - Quran 5:116
123. "Behold! the angels said: "O Mary! Allah giveth thee glad tidings of a Word from Him: his name will be Christ jesus, the son of Mary, held in honour in this world and the Hereafter and of (the company of) those nearest to Allah. " - Quran 3:45
124. "That they said (in boast), "We killed Christ jesus the son of Mary, the Messenger of Allah." - Quran 4:157
125. "And remember, Jesus, the son of Mary, said: "O Children of Israel! I am the messenger of Allah (sent) to you, confirming the Law (which came) before me, and giving Glad Tidings of a Messenger to come after me, whose name shall be Ahmad." But when he came to them with Clear Signs, they said, "this is evident sorcery!"" - Quran 61:6
126. (Out of the 10 most deadly earthquakes in the last 50 years, 6 of the 8 countries affected were populated by a Muslim majority.) Peter Hough - Understanding Global Security - Published by Routledge; 2 edition, 21 April 2008, ISBN: 978-0415421423
128. "O you who believe! do not take the unbelievers for friends rather than the believers; do you desire that you should give to Allah a manifest proof against yourselves?" - Quran 4:144
130. 2005 Kashmir Earthquake Case Study - Scienceray, April 20, 2009
131. Nostradamus - Propheties Online
132. Stephen D. Snobelen - Statement on the date 2060 -, March 2003
133. Aidan Maconachy - Vanishing Bee Colonies, Doomsday Scenarios and Sunspots -,
134. Sunnah of Going to the Bathroom (Toilet) - Zikr
135. "Narrated Abu Huraira: The Prophet said, "Whoever performs ablution should clean his nose with water by putting the water in it and then blowing it out, and whoever cleans his private parts with stones should do it with odd number of stones."" - Sahih Bukhari 1:4:162
136. "Abu Huraira reported Allah's Apostle (may peace be upon him) as saying: When anyone wipes himself with pebbles (after answering the call of nature) he must make use of an odd number and when any one of you performs ablution he must snuff in his nose water and then clean it." - Sahih Muslim 2:458
137. "Ibn Umar reported Allah's Messenger (may peace be upon him) as saying: When any one of you intends to eat (meal), he should eat with his right hand. and when he (intends) to drink he should drink with his right hand, for the Satan eats with his left hand and drinks with his left hand." - Sahih Muslim 23:5008
138. "Ibn Umar said: The Messenger of Allah (may peace be opon him) said: Act against the polytheists, trim closely the moustache and grow beard." - Sahih Muslim 2:500
139. "Abu Huraira reported: The Messenger of Allah (may peace be upon him) said: Trim closely the moustache, and grow beard, and thus act against the fire-worshippers." - Sahih Muslim 2:501
140. "Narrated Abu Huraira : The Prophet said, "Jews and Christians do not dye their hair so you should do the opposite of what they do." - Sahih Bukhari 7:72:786
141. "Narrated 'Abdullah bin Umar: Umar bought a silk cloak from the market, took it to Allah's Apostle and said, "O Allah's Apostle! Take it and adorn yourself with it during the 'Id and when the delegations visit you." Allah's Apostle (p.b.u.h) replied, "This dress is for those who have no share (in the Hereafter)." After a long period Allah's Apostle (p.b.u.h) sent to Umar a cloak of silk brocade. Umar came to Allah's Apostle (p.b.u.h) with the cloak and said, "O Allah's Apostle! You said that this dress was for those who had no share (in the Hereafter); yet you have sent me this cloak." Allah's Apostle said to him, "Sell it and fulfill your needs by it."" - Sahih Bukhari 2:15:69, See also: Sahih Bukhari 3:47:782, and Sahih Bukhari 8:73:104
142. Is Dr. Maurice Bucaille a Muslim? - Answering Islam
143. "Narrated Anas:Some people from the tribe of 'Ukl came to the Prophet and embraced Islam. The climate of Medina did not suit them, so the Prophet ordered them to go to the (herd of milch) camels of charity and to drink, their milk and urine (as a medicine)." - Sahih Bukhari 8:82:794
144. "Anas b. Malik reported that some people belonging (to the tribe) of 'Uraina came to Allah's Messenger (may peace be upon him) at Medina, but they found its climate uncongenial. So Allah's Messenger (may peace be upon him) said to them: If you so like, you may go to the camels of Sadaqa and drink their milk and urine. They did so and were all right." - Sahih Muslim 16:4130
145. "Narrated Sad: Allah's Apostle said, "He who eats seven 'Ajwa dates every morning, will not be affected by poison or magic on the day he eats them."" - Sahih Bukhari 7:65:356
146. "Narrated Saud: The Prophet said, "If somebody takes some 'Ajwa dates every morning, he will not be effected by poison or magic on that day till night."" - Sahih Bukhari 7:65:663
147. "Narrated Khalid bin Sad: We went out and Ghalib bin Abjar was accompanying us. He fell ill on the way and when we arrived at Medina he was still sick. Ibn Abi 'Atiq came to visit him and said to us, "Treat him with black cumin. Take five or seven seeds and crush them (mix the powder with oil) and drop the resulting mixture into both nostrils, for 'Aisha has narrated to me that she heard the Prophet saying, 'This black cumin is healing for all diseases except As-Sam.' Aisha said, 'What is As-Sam?' He said, 'Death."" - Sahih Bukhari 7:71:591
148. "Narrated Abu Huraira: I heard Allah's Apostle saying, "There is healing in black cumin for all diseases except death."" - Sahih Bukhari 7:71:592
149. Camilla Adang (1996), Muslim Writers on Judaism & the Hebrew Bible from Ibn Rabban to Ibn Hazm, Leiden: Brill. ISBN 90-04-10034-2.
150. G. Parrinder, Jesus in the Qur'an, Faber and Faber, London 1965; Dutch translation, Ten Have, Baarn 1978, p. 124.
151. "Forbidden unto you (for food) are carrion and blood and swineflesh, and that which hath been dedicated unto any other than Allah, and the strangled, and the dead through beating, and the dead through falling from a height, and that which hath been killed by (the goring of) horns, and the devoured of wild beasts, saving that which ye make lawful (by the death-stroke), and that which hath been immolated unto idols. And (forbidden is it) that ye swear by the divining arrows. This is an abomination. This day are those who disbelieve in despair of (ever harming) your religion; so fear them not, fear Me! This day have I perfected your religion for you and completed My favour unto you, and have chosen for you as religion al-Islam. Whoso is forced by hunger, not by will, to sin: (for him) lo! Allah is Forgiving, Merciful." - Quran 5:3
152. "Those who believe (in the Qur'an), and those who follow the Jewish (scriptures), and the Christians and the Sabians,- any who believe in Allah and the Last Day, and work righteousness, shall have their reward with their Lord; on them shall be no fear, nor shall they grieve." - Quran 2:62
153. "Narrated Anas bin Malik: Hudhaifa bin Al-Yaman came to Uthman at the time when the people of Sham and the people of Iraq were Waging war to conquer Arminya and Adharbijan. Hudhaifa was afraid of their (the people of Sham and Iraq) differences in the recitation of the Qur'an, so he said to 'Uthman, "O chief of the Believers! Save this nation before they differ about the Book (Quran) as Jews and the Christians did before." So 'Uthman sent a message to Hafsa saying, "Send us the manuscripts of the Qur'an so that we may compile the Qur'anic materials in perfect copies and return the manuscripts to you." Hafsa sent it to 'Uthman. 'Uthman then ordered Zaid bin Thabit, 'Abdullah bin AzZubair, Said bin Al-As and 'AbdurRahman bin Harith bin Hisham to rewrite the manuscripts in perfect copies. 'Uthman said to the three Quraishi men, "In case you disagree with Zaid bin Thabit on any point in the Qur'an, then write it in the dialect of Quraish, the Qur'an was revealed in their tongue." They did so, and when they had written many copies, 'Uthman returned the original manuscripts to Hafsa. 'Uthman sent to every Muslim province one copy of what they had copied, and ordered that all the other Qur'anic materials, whether written in fragmentary manuscripts or whole copies, be burnt. Said bin Thabit added, "A Verse from Surat Ahzab was missed by me when we copied the Qur'an and I used to hear Allah's Apostle reciting it. So we searched for it and found it with Khuzaima bin Thabit Al-Ansari. (That Verse was): 'Among the Believers are men who have been true in their covenant with Allah.' (33.23)" - Sahih Bukhari 6:61:510
154. "Lo! We have given thee Abundance; So pray unto thy Lord, and sacrifice. Lo! it is thy insulter (and not thou) who is without posterity." - Quran 108:1-3
155. Samuel Green - The Different Arabic Versions of the Qur'an - Answering Islam, July 16, 2010
156. "He said: Now, because Thou hast sent me astray, verily I shall lurk in ambush for them on Thy Right Path." - Quran 7:16
157. "On the day when (some) faces shall turn white and (some) faces shall turn black; then as to those whose faces turn black: Did you disbelieve after your believing? Taste therefore the chastisement because you disbelieved." - Quran 3:106
158. "And on the day of resurrection you shall see those who lied against Allah; their faces shall be blackened. Is there not in hell an abode for the proud?" - Quran 39:60
159. Al-Tabari (838? – 923 A.D.), The History of al-Tabari (Ta’rikh al-rusul wa’l-muluk), Vol. VI: Muhammad at Mecca, pp. 107-112. Translated by W. M. Watt and M.V. McDonald, State University of New York Press, Albany, NY, 1988, ISBN: 0-88706-707-7, pp. 107-112.
160. Ibn Ishaq, The Life of Muhammad: A Translation of Ishaq's Sirat Rasul Allah, Translated by A. Guillaume, Oxford University Press, Oxford, England, (Re-issued in Karachi, Pakistan, 1967, 13th impression, 1998) 1955, p. 146-148.
161. Sahih Bukhari 6:60:385 states, "Narrated Ibn Abbas: The Prophet performed a prostration when he finished reciting Surat-an-Najm, and all the Muslims and pagans and Jinns and human beings prostrated along with him." Since in today's Qur'an, the Pagans' goddesses are attacked in that particular Surah, it would only make sense if the account of the Satanic Verses incident were true.
162. "And if you are in doubt as to that which We have revealed to Our servant, then produce a chapter like it and call on your witnesses besides Allah if you are truthful. " - Quran 2:23
163. "And who guard their modesty - Save from their wives or the (slaves) that their right hands possess, for then they are not blameworthy, But whoso craveth beyond that, such are transgressors" - Qur'an 23:5-7
164. "And those who preserve their chastity Save with their wives and those whom their right hands possess, for thus they are not blameworthy;" - Qur'an 70:29-30
165. 165.0 165.1 "Abu Sa'id al-Khudri (Allah be pleased with him) reported: We took women captives, and we wanted to do 'azl with them. We then asked Allah's Messenger (may peace be upon him) about it, and he said to us: Verily you do it, verily you do it, verily you do it, but the soul which has to be born until the Day of judgment must be born." - Sahih Muslim 8:3373
166. "Narated By Abdullah ibn Abbas : The Prophet (peace be upon him) said: If you find anyone doing as Lot's people did, kill the one who does it, and the one to whom it is done." - Sunan Abu Dawud 38:4447
167. "Narated By Abdullah ibn Abbas : If a man who is not married is seized committing sodomy, he will be stoned to death." - Sunan Abu Dawud 38:4448
168. Sheikh Muhammed Salih Al-Munajjid - Can those who have committed homosexual acts be forgiven, and is it permissible for such a person to get married? - Islam Q&A, Fatwa No. 5177
169. "Jabir (Allah be pleased with him) reported that a man came to Allah's Messenger (may peace be upon him) and said: I have a slave-girl who is our servant and she carries water for us and I have intercourse with her, but I do not want her to conceive. He said: Practise 'azl, if you so like, but what is decreed for her will come to her. The person stayed back (for some time) and then came and said: The girl has become pregnant, whereupon he said: I told you what was decreed for her would come to her." - Sahih Muslim 8:3383
170. "Narrated Abu 'Amir or Abu Malik Al-Ash'ari: that he heard the Prophet saying, "From among my followers there will be some people who will consider illegal sexual intercourse, the wearing of silk, the drinking of alcoholic drinks and the use of musical instruments, as lawful. And there will be some people who will stay near the side of a mountain and in the evening their shepherd will come to them with their sheep and ask them for something, but they will say to him, 'Return to us tomorrow.' Allah will destroy them during the night and will let the mountain fall on them, and He will transform the rest of them into monkeys and pigs and they will remain so till the Day of Resurrection." - Sahih Bukhari 7:69:494v
171. Music is Haram - The Muslim Women
172. Shariffa Carlo - Music - Islam Awakening
173. "Narrated Said bin Abu Al-Hasan: While I was with Ibn 'Abbas a man came and said, "O father of 'Abbas! My sustenance is from my manual profession and I make these pictures." Ibn 'Abbas said, "I will tell you only what I heard from Allah's Apostle . I heard him saying, ' Whoever makes a picture will be punished by Allah till he puts life in it, and he will never be able to put life in it.' " Hearing this, that man heaved a sigh and his face turned pale. Ibn 'Abbas said to him, "What a pity! If you insist on making pictures I advise you to make pictures of trees and any other unanimated objects."" - Sahih Bukhari 3:34:428
174. "We were with Masruq at the house of Yasar bin Numair. Masruq saw pictures on his terrace and said, "I heard 'Abdullah saying that he heard the Prophet saying, "'The people who will receive the severest punishment from Allah will be the picture makers."" - Sahih Bukhari 7:72:834
175. "Maimuna reported that one morning Allah's Messenger (may peace be upon him) was silent with grief. Maimuna said: Allah's Messenger, I find a change in your mood today. Allah's Messenger (may peace be upon him) said: Gabriel had promised me that he would meet me tonight, but he did not meet me. By Allah, he never broke his promises, and Allah's Messenger (may peace be upon him) spent the day in this sad (mood). Then it occurred to him that there had been a puppy under their cot. He commanded and it was turned out. He then took some water in his hand and sprinkled it at that place. When it was evening Gabriel met him and he said to him: you promised me that you would meet me the previous night. He said: Yes, but we do not enter a house in which there is a dog or a picture. Then on that very morning he commanded the killing of the dogs until he announced that the dog kept for the orchards should also be killed, but he spared the dog meant for the protection of extensive fields (or big gardens)." - Sahih Muslim 24:5248
176. "Narrated Jabir ibn Abdullah: The Prophet of Allah (peace be upon him) ordered to kill dogs, and we were even killing a dog which a woman brought with her from the desert. Afterwards he forbade to kill them, saying: Confine yourselves to the type which is black." - Sahih Muslim 16:2840
177. "Narrated Abdullah ibn Mughaffal: The Prophet (peace be upon him) said: Were dogs not a species of creature I should command that they all be killed; but kill every pure black one." - Sahih Muslim 16:2839
178. "Buraida reported on the authority of his father that Allah's Apostle (may peace be upon him) said: He who played chess is like one who dyed his hand with the flesh and blood of swine. " - Sahih Muslim 28:5612
179. "Yahya related to me from Malik from Nafi from Abdullah ibn Umar that when he found one of his family playing dice he beat him and destroyed the dice. Yahya said that he heard Malik say, "There is no good in chess, and he disapproved of it." Yahya said, "I heard him disapprove of playing it and other worthless games. He recited this ayat, 'What is there after the truth except going the wrong way.' " (Sura l0 ayat 32)." - Al-Muwatta 52:7
180. Muhammad was born in 570/571 AD (6th century) but did not have a "revelation" until about the age of 40 in the year 610 AD (7th century).
181. Cyril Glasse, The New Encyclopedia of Islam: Third Edition, Altamira, 2001
182. Francis J. Steingass, English-Arabic Dictionary: For the Use of Both Travellers and Students, W.H. Allen, 1882
183. Federico Corriente, A Dictionary of Andalusi Arabic, BRILL, 1997, p. 539
184. Dennis Roberts, Islam, A concise introduction, Harper & Row, 1982, p. 143
185. Ziba Mir-Hosseini, Marriage on trial: Islamic family law in Iran and Morocco, I.B.Tauris, 2001, p. 20
186. Vincent J. Cornell (2007), Voices of life: family, home, and society, p. 59 (Marriage in Islam by Nargis Virani).
187. Charles Mwalimu, The Nigerian Legal System: Public Law, Peter Lang, 2005, p. 542
188. Vincent J. Cornell (2007), Vol. 5, Voices of Change, pp. 85-113 (Islam and Gender Justice, by Ziba Mir-Hosseini).
189. Kelly Dawn Askin, Dorean M. Koenig, Women and international human rights law: vol.3, Transnational Pub, 2008
190. Oussama Arabi, Studies in Modern Islamic Law and Jurisprudence, BRILL, 2001, p. 150
191. The Risala of 'Abdullah ibn Abi Zayd al-Qayrawani (310/922 - 386/996) A Treatise on Maliki Fiqh (Including commentary from ath-Thamr ad-Dani by al-Azhari) Ch. 32
192. Ronak Husni, Daniel L. Newman, Muslim women in law and society: annotated translation of al-Tahir al Haddad al-Ṭāhir Ḥaddād, p. 182
193. Islamic Marriage (Nikaah) Handbook for Young Muslims, Muslim Wedding and Marriage Guide, World Islamic Network
194. Sayyid Abul Ala Maududi - Tafhim al-Qur'an - Quran 23:1-11, Footnote 7 #2
196. "Allah chargeth you concerning (the provision for) your children: to the male the equivalent of the portion of two females, and if there be women more than two, then theirs is two-thirds of the inheritance, and if there be one (only) then the half. And to each of his parents a sixth of the inheritance, if he have a son; and if he have no son and his parents are his heirs, then to his mother appertaineth the third; and if he have brethren, then to his mother appertaineth the sixth, after any legacy he may have bequeathed, or debt (hath been paid). Your parents and your children: Ye know not which of them is nearer unto you in usefulness. It is an injunction from Allah. Lo! Allah is Knower, Wise." - Quran 4:11
197. "O ye who believe! When ye contract a debt for a fixed term, record it in writing. Let a scribe record it in writing between you in (terms of) equity. No scribe should refuse to write as Allah hath taught him, so let him write, and let him who incurreth the debt dictate, and let him observe his duty to Allah his Lord, and diminish naught thereof. But if he who oweth the debt is of low understanding, or weak, or unable himself to dictate, then let the guardian of his interests dictate in (terms of) equity. And call to witness, from among your men, two witnesses. And if two men be not (at hand) then a man and two women, of such as ye approve as witnesses, so that if the one erreth (through forgetfulness) the other will remember. And the witnesses must not refuse when they are summoned. Be not averse to writing down (the contract) whether it be small or great, with (record of) the term thereof. That is more equitable in the sight of Allah and more sure for testimony, and the best way of avoiding doubt between you; save only in the case when it is actual merchandise which ye transfer among yourselves from hand to hand. In that case it is no sin for you if ye write it not. And have witnesses when ye sell one to another, and let no harm be done to scribe or witness. If ye do (harm to them) lo! it is a sin in you. Observe your duty to Allah. Allah is teaching you. And Allah is knower of all things." - Quran 2:282
198. 198.0 198.1 Sheikh Muhammed Salih Al-Munajjid - Reading Qur’aan during menses - Islam Q&A, Fatwa No. 2564
199. "'A'isha (Allah be pleased with her) reported that Salim, the freed slave of Abu Hadhaifa, lived with him and his family in their house. She (i. e. the daughter of Suhail came to Allah's Apostle (may peace be upon him) and said: Salim has attained (puberty) as men attain, and he understands what they understand, and he enters our house freely, I, however, perceive that something (rankles) in the heart of Abu Hudhaifa, whereupon Allah's Apostle (may peace be upon him) said to her: Suckle him and you would become unlawful for him, and (the rankling) which Abu Hudhaifa feels in his heart will disappear. She returned and said: So I suckled him, and what (was there) in the heart of Abu Hudhaifa disappeared." - Sahih Muslim 8:3425
200. "It was narrated that 'Aishah said: “Sahlah bint Suhail came to the Prophet and said: 'O Messenger of Allah, I see signs of displeasure on the face of Abu Hudhaifah when Salim enters upon me.” The Prophet said: “Breastfed him.” She said: “How can I breastfeed him when he is a grown man? The Messenger of Allah smiled and said: “I know that he is a grown man.” So she did that, then she came to the Prophet and said: “I have never seen any signs of displeasure on the face of Abu Hudhayfah after that.” And he was present at (the battle of) Badr. (Sahih)" - Sunan Ibn Majah 3:9:1943
201. "The Surahs of the Qur'an", USC-MSA, Compendium of Muslim Texts, accessed February 6, 2014 (archived),
202. "Narrated Abu Huraira: The Prophet said, "Allah loves sneezing but dislikes yawning; so if anyone of you sneezes and then praises Allah, every Muslim who hears him (praising Allah) has to say Tashmit to him. But as regards yawning, it is from Satan, so if one of you yawns, he should try his best to stop it, for when anyone of you yawns, Satan laughs at him." - Sahih Bukhari 8:73:245
203. "And you know well the story of those among you who broke Sabbath. We said to them: "Be apes—despised and hated by all. Thus We made their end a warning to the people of their time and succeeding generation, and an admonition for God-fearing people." - Quran 2:65
205. "So when they took pride in that which they had been forbidden, We said unto them: Be ye apes despised and loathed!" - Quran 7:166
206. "Narrated Abu Huraira: Allah's Apostle said, "Allah has ninety-nine names, i.e. one-hundred minus one, and whoever knows them will go to Paradise." (Please see Hadith No. 419 Vol. 8)" - Sahih Bukhari 3:50:894
207. "The foolish of the people will say: What hath turned them from the qiblah which they formerly observed? Say: Unto Allah belong the East and the West. He guideth whom He will unto a straight path." - Quran 2:142
208. "Narrated Abu Huraira: The Prophet said, "Allah does not accept prayer of anyone of you if he does Hadath (passes wind) till he performs the ablution (anew)." " - Sahih Bukhari 9:86:86
209. "Narrated Ali ibn Talq: The Apostle of Allah (peace be upon him) said: When any of you breaks wind during the prayer, he should turn away and perform ablution and repeat the prayer." - Sunan Abu Dawud 1:205
210. "Jabir b. Samura reported: The Messenger of Allah (may peace be upon him) said: The people who lift their eyes towards the sky in Prayer should avoid it or they would lose their eyesight." - Sahih Muslim 4:862
211. "Abu Huraira reported: People should avoid lifting their eyes towards the sky while supplicating in prayer, otherwise their eyes would be snatched away." - Sahih Muslim 4:863
212. Gay Saudi prince found guilty of 'sadistic' murder - The Independent, October 19, 2010
213. In these verses, the Quran stresses that angels cannot be female: (1) "And they make the angels, who are the slaves of the Beneficent, females. Did they witness their creation? Their testimony will be recorded and they will be questioned." Quran 43:19 (2) "Those who believe not in the Hereafter, name the angels with female names. But they have no knowledge therein." Quran 53:27 (3) "Then ask them whether your Lord has daughters and they have sons. Or did We create the angels females while they were witnesses? Now surely it is of their own lie that they say:"Quran 37:149 | https://wikiislam.net/index.php?title=Questions_to_Ask_About_Islam&stable=1 | isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2019-35
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Refuting The Hadith Defender Book
8) The Qur’an says that we must obey Allah and the Messenger (Surah 3:31-32,132; Surah 4:13-14, 59, 61, 64, 69, 80; Surah 24:56).
There are two separate commands here. One is to obey Allah and the other is to obey the Prophet. In order to obey someone, he would need to issue a command. So if we want to obey Allah we have to do so by reading the commands of Allah in the Quran and adhering to them. If we want to obey the Prophet then we have to do so by reading the commands of the Prophet (peace be upon him) in the authentic hadith and adhere to them. Or is there another way?
Some hadith rejecters claim that the command to obey the Prophet (peace be upon him) was only in regard to his contemporaries. However, there is no evidence for these claims. The Quran is supposed to benefit all of mankind. How do we benefit from this command especially since there are several verses regarding it?
A. Some other hadith rejecters claim that “obeying the Messenger” means to obey the message that he came with. So basically to “obey the messenger” means to follow the Qur’an. However, this is a weak argument because the Qur’an clearly separates obeying the Qur’an and the Messenger:
Surah 4:61 When it is said to them: ” Come to what God hath revealed, and to the Apostle”: Thou seest the Hypocrites avert their faces from thee in disgust. Notice that it is said to the disbelievers to come to what God has revealed (Qur’an) AND to the Messenger. So people are to come to two different things for guidance, not only one.
Behold, the most abused verse to support the traditionalist view on Islam.
Obey God and obey the messenger is simply OBEY THE MESSAGE, that is the revealation or scripture delivered.
To indicate that obey God is obey Qur’an while obey messenger is obey hadith is fallacy, a violation of Qur’anic principle of monotheism. One God, one Law. Muhammad is not another authority or law giver beside God. Obey the messenger is technically obey God. The only reason why “obey the messenger” is mentioned after “obey God” is because the latter is a vague command. Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians and Pagans at that time all claimed to be obeying God(although they were actually obeying conjectures), to clarify what “obey God” imply, “obey the messenger” is mentioned. Thus, explaining that obedience to God is obedience to the messenger calling them, not the conjectures and man made doctrines attributed to God.
A. The words after “and” are not always distinct from the words before this conjunction. Here is a sample;
Quran 21:48
And We had already given Moses and Aaron the criterion AND a light AND a reminder for the righteous.
Going by Bassam ‘s logic, three different items were given to Moses here. But we know what Moses had recieved is the criterion, the Torah. Light and reminder are just other synonyms clarifying what the Torah is. Likewise, the conjunction doesn’t make ‘obey the messenger’ separate from obeying God. It is just another word clarifying what ‘obey God’ is.
Next, Bassam bore us with a lengthy article of Dr. Shafaat who certainly haven’t seen the above interpretation of “obey the messenger”. At a point Dr. Shafaat remind us that Hadith is mandatory because Quran 4:65 permit the Prophet to judge our affairs. How could the Dr. forget that 40 verses ahead, God revealed that the standard for Prophet ‘s judgement is still the Qur’an, not his wishes or initiative required to be collected as Hadith.
Also note that according to Bassam, hadith to be obeyed are the authentic hadith. But there is no consensus among the ulamas on the authentic and unauthentic hadith. The ulamas classification of hadith as authentic or unauthentic hugely depended on their time, place, ideology and feelings towards the narrators. Some hadith rejected by Salafi scholars like Ibn Tamiyyah were accepted by other Sunni or Shiite scholars and vice versa.
For instance, some orthodox scholars today reject the hadith on death for apostasy as weak while others support it as sound.
9) It says in the Qu’ran (Surah 33:21) that we have the Messenger as a good example to follow. How would we know his example without the traditions to turn to?
According to their own sanctified traditions, Muhammad was reported by Aisha to be Qur’an in practice. This added to the fact that the Prophet was ordered to live according to the Qur’an is enough to convince the traditionalist of his fallacy. Therefore, the Prophet got his example from the Qur’an. To repeat these examples, all you need is to follow the Prophet ‘s guide; The Qur’an.
Thereafter, Bassam gets us Dr. Shafaat again. The latter goes on and on insisting that unlike Abraham, whose examples were spelt out(Qur’an 60:4-6), Muhammad ‘s weren’t and so we need to learn them from hadith.
This verse(33:21) is sandwiched by verses discussing a war. Even if Muhammad ‘s examples weren’t given, could they be anything other than perseverence, courage, faith in God and moderation on the battle ground. These are qualities already enjoined in the Qur’an. And besides, even if we badly have to learn about the Prophet ‘s examples verbatin, does these explain the existence of large volumes of non-battle ground related hadith?
Later on Dr. Shafaat cites 7:158 as a clear indication to follow the messenger as in the hadith. Dr. Shafaat has neglected the context of ‘follow’, interpreting it to mean everything the messenger said or did. Comm’ on, follow a messenger is to follow his message, not picking everything from his words and acts, intruding in his private life as hadith reporters have done to Muhammad.
Books that report that the Prophet committed pedophilia, engaged in slave trade and concubines, killed his critics, slaughtered Jewish men, enslaving their women and children can’t be source of examples for believers. Go to the Qur’an and ponder. You won’t find even the need to read beautiful examples of the Prophet in hadith books to live like the Prophet.
10) We have different forms of reciting the Qur’an, which means that certain letters are taken away from the word or pronounced differently. Through authentic hadith, we know that these were accepted forms of reading approved by the Prophet (peace be upon him). But without hadith, how would we know this? Using the Qur’an alone, if I see that there are different forms of recitation then I would think that there is more than one Qur’an and I wouldn’t know which one is correct.
No, you don’t need hadith for that. Qur’an was originally written with only consonants and no vocalization mark. So, the pronunciation may vary among readers but what matters is the message, the Quranic text is uniform and untampered.
11) In Surah 2:221, God forbids us to marry polytheist women. Yet in Surah 5:5, God says that we can marry the believing women and the chaste women from the People of the Book. This is a clear differentiation between believing women and People of the Book. You can’t have a believing person today from the People of the Book who is not a Muslim. So if God were talking about the believing women from the People of the Book then He wouldn’t have differentiated the “believing women” phrase from them. Furthermore, the believing people from the People of the Book were the ones who truly followed the teachings of Jesus and Moses, which are lost today. So by using the Quran alone, how do I know which verse was revealed first? Did Surah 2:221 come first and then God sent down Surah 5:5 making an exception or did God send down Surah 5:5 first and then send Surah 2:221 by completely prohibiting us from marrying the women from the People of the Book?
Qur’an 2:221 and 5:51 are mutually exclusive, no need bothering on which came first and which modify the others.
2:221 stands, polytheists or idolators are prohibited in marriage for muslims. These are people who believe in multiple gods, sculptures or inanimate items etc. However 5:51 stands distinct. The Qur’an never use Polytheist and People of the Book interchangeably. The People of the Book may have some idolatry doctrines as even some muslims do. But for the fact that they have the scriptures, believe in the messengers and unity of God, they cannot be classed entirely as polytheists and so they remain lawful in marriage to muslims. If the tampering of their scriptures has any consequence on this, God would have mentioned it, after all the Gospel and the Torah had been distorted even before the Qur’an came.
Then again it is possible to have believers from among the people of the Book who are not muslims today. Bassam has no evidence for to state otherwise, if he hasn’t met any, that doesn’t mean they are extinct. That is why the Qur’an didn’t condemn all of them, it even cite for us the characters of the true ones(3:113-115). We can still meet them today, even if they aren’t common.
12) Surah 24, verse 31 says “And say to the believing women that they should lower their gaze and guard their modesty; that they should not display their beauty and ornaments except what (must ordinarily) appear thereof” What exactly is this part that “appears thereof”?
A. Some will try to argue back by saying that “what appear thereof” is referring to seductive parts of a women’s body. However, some men may be seduced by a woman’s fingernails and face. Does this mean that she must cover them as well? This is subjective. Where is the objective standard to follow regarding such a law?
As a woman, upon dressing up and covering your sexually attractive parts like bosom, groin, thighs and backside, any part beyond these that may appear are the parts that appear thereof. The traditionalist assumed that ‘zinatahunna’ is the whole body, so when ‘appear thereof’ comes in, they are puzzle; “which part appear thereof after all the body has been covered fully?’. “Zinatahunna” can be revealed to children without sexual knowledge and male servants without libido. So, zinatahunna has to be parts of the body with sexual elements and not the whole body. Once you dress up, covering these parts, the part may be revealed like head, neck, hand, arm, shin, feet are the parts that ‘appear thereof’. These aren’t sexual parts.
Does the Hadith clearly explain ‘appear thereof’? i highly doubt it. One Hadith often narrated by scholars imply that only hands and face may appear while another hadith informs that the women covered their faces when Qur’an 24:31 was revealed. Hence, the Hadith does not clarify the matter at all.
A. There are always norms and there exist anomalies. We all know seductive parts of our bodies. If a man is seduced or sexually attracted to a woman ‘s face or fingers then he either lowers his gaze or get psychological help. As we would not cover children from head to toes because some men are seduced by children, we ‘ll not have women do the same because some men are seduced by a simple face.
13) If the Quran is so easy to understand on our own, then why did Allah have some Muslims staying behind in Madinah in order to become very well versed in religion, while the others go out to the battlefield so that they can then come back to be taught (Surah 9:122)? Indeed, if we can all just simply read the Qur’an and be equal in knowledge and understanding then what is the point of having people specialize in it in order to teach us? Why would this require so much time?
A. Some Quranites might argue back that people could specialize in Qur’an more than others, yet this does not justify that there are other sources besides the Qur’an to refer to.
B. They would also argue that if one reads the Qur’an on his own then that would be enough because it is easy to understand and that those who specialize in it are only gaining extra knowledge that is not significant. However, this is not the impression given by the verse:
Surah 9:122 It is not possible for the believers to go forth all together. Why, then, does not a party from every section of them go forth that they may become well-versed in religion, and that they may warn their people when they return to them, so that they may guard against evil.
Here we see that one purpose that the party of Muslims that stayed behind in order to master the religion was to make sure that they warn their people and help them guard against evil. This would not be necessary if anyone could just read the Qur’an on their own. No, there must be more details (e.g. detailed issues of prayer, zakah, fasting etc.) that must be communicated to the Muslims in order to ensure that they practice their religion properly and this is not to be found in the Qur’an. For if it was, then anyone can have the time to refer to it and this would not require specialization, for any lay man would then be able to accomplish this task.
The writer get it wrong because he doesn’t understand the verse properly.
The Qur’an is easy to understand but you won’t understand everything in just a day. The more you read, the more you learn from it.
Those going to war are going to be preoccupied with no time to study. Instead of everyone going to war and forgetting learning, the Qur’an demand some stay behind to study and update the fighters once they return. This is no indication that the Qur’an is hard to understand and readers require the liturgy of hadith, hadith commentary, tafsir, usul, fiqh, tawhid e.t.c. A book requiring all these is a complicated, non user friendly book. How can such a book emphasize repeatedly of its ease to be understood(54:17, 22, 37, 40)?
14) Allah says in the Qur’an (Surah 75:19) that the Qur’an will be recited. But then in the verse right after (verse 20) it is also said that the Qur’an will be explained. If the Qur’an is self-explanatory then the only thing that needs to be done is reciting it out. However, in verse 19 the function of reciting is done and then in the verse right after, the function of explaining is done. Clearly these are two different tasks, which mean that reading the Qur’an alone would not give you the full explanation required. It has to be explained through some other source. What is that other source?
And [mention] the Day when We will resurrect among every nation a witness over them from themselves. And We will bring you, [O Muhammad], as a witness over your nation. And We have sent down to you the Book as explanation for all things and as guidance and mercy and good tidings for the Muslims.(Qur’an 16:89).
But the Qur’an itself is an explanation(12:111, 16:89). Which mean it explains itself. It was revealed periodically. Some verses were brief on a subject while other verses were broader. Thus, the latter verses explain the former verses. This is what God mean by the Qur’an will be explained, not that another literature explaining it will be revealed distinctly.
For instance after explaining divorce and inheritance to us(2:236-241), the next verse says;
God thus explains His revealations for you, that you may understand(2:242).
Several other verses(2:266 3:103) has that sentence, indicating that within the Book itself, its explanations are found.
The Hadith books do not explain the Qur’an. Under Book of Tafsir, Sahih Bukhari for instance, has barely more than half of Qur’an chapters explained. Didn’t Bukhari seek understanding the other chapters? Why aren’t they found in his collection.
You may get few ideas helpful ideas from the Hadith book that may aid you understand some Qur’anic verses BUT to pick the Hadith books as a guide to the Qur’an will lead you even further from it. Even orthodox scholars and translators like Muhammad Asad commented that the best interpretation of the Qur’an is via the Qur’an. Nothing else.
That brings us to the end, it has been a lengthy piece. I hope i have clarified most of the misconceptions. Peace be with you.
3 thoughts on “Refuting The Hadith Defender Book
1. It appears that Qur’anties are only threading religion. There is different btw knowing and threading religion. Islam is practical and natural…. not just written essay. Prophet(saw) was not just reading Qur’an top his followers. He practicalized it( tradition). Qur’anite only wish top create confusion.
2. Welcome, Eric. It would be better we focus on the article, learning your opinion on it. What you have just mentioned is off the scope of this article
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} | 807 | Knowledge of Arabic is not sufficient for understanding the Qur’aan:
From what has been stated previously, it becomes clear that there is no way for anyone, even if he be a scholar of the Arabic Language and its disciplines, to understand the noble Qur’aan, without seeking assistance in that from the Prophet’s Sunnah in speech and action. This is since he will never be more knowledgeable of the language than the Companions of the Prophet, those who the Qur’aan was revealed to in their language. And (at that time) the language was not blemished with the errors of the non-Arabs and the slang of the common people, but in spite of that, they still erred in understanding these previously mentioned ayaat, when they relied on their knowledge of the language only.
So based on this, it is obvious that whenever a person is knowledgeable of the Sunnah, he will be more likely to understand the Qur’aan and extract rulings from it, than someone who is ignorant about it. So how about the one who doesn’t rely on it or reference it at all? This is why from the principles that have been agreed upon by the people of knowledge is: to interpret the Qur’aan with the Qur’aan and the Sunnah,1 and then the sayings of the Companions, etc.
From this, we become aware of the misguidance of the scholars of rhetoric, past and present, and their opposition to the Salaf, in their Creed, not to mention their rulings. And it is their remoteness from the Sunnah and their knowledge of it, and their making their intellects and desires as judges for themselves with regard to the verses concerning Allaah’s Attributes. What is better than what has been stated in Sharh Al- ‘Aqeedah At-Tahaawiyyah [of Ibn Abil-‘Izz Al-Hanafee] (pg. 212, 4th Edition):
“How can someone who didn’t learn from the Book and the Sunnah, but rather just learned it from the views of so and so, speak about the fundaments of the Religion! And if he claims that he is taking it from the Book of Allaah, then he is not taking the interpretation of the Book of Allaah from the ahaadeeth of the Messenger. He doesn’t look into it (i.e. the Sunnah), nor does he look at what the Companions or those who succeeded them in goodness said, which has been conveyed to us by way of reliable narrators chosen by the critics (i.e. hadeeth scholars). For indeed, they did not convey the arrangement of the Qur’aan only, but rather they conveyed the arrangement as well as the meanings. They would not learn the Qur’aan like the children do (today), rather they would learn it along with its meanings. And whoever does not follow their path, then he is speaking based on his opinion. And whoever speaks from his opinion, and from what he thinks Allaah’s Religion is, not getting that from the Book, he is in fact sinning (!), even if he may be correct. Whereas whoever takes from the Book and the Sunnah, he is rewarded even if he errs. However, if he is correct, his reward is multiplied.”
Then he said (pg. 217):
“So it is an obligation to completely submit to the Messenger صلى الله عليه وسلم, follow his orders, and meet his reports with acceptance and firm belief, without contradicting that by false notions that we consider “reasonable” or that constitute a misconception and doubt. Or that we put before it the views of men and the rubbish held in their minds. So we must single the Prophet صلى الله عليه وسلم out with regard to making him the judge, submitting to him, obeying him and complying with him, just as we single out the One who sent him in worship, humility, submissiveness, repentance and reliance (to Him).”
In summary: It is an obligation upon all of the Muslims to not differentiate between the Qur’aan and the Sunnah, with regard to the obligation of accepting both of them together and establishing Laws based on both of them. Indeed this is the guarantee that will prevent them from drifting to the right and the left, and from returning to deviation.
This is as the Prophet صلى الله عليه وسلم clearly stated:
“I have left two things for you, which you will never go astray so long as you adhere to them: The Book of Allaah and my Sunnah. These two will never separate from one another until they return to the Fountain.”
[Reported by Maalik and Al-Haakim with a sound chain of narration]
[1] We do not say as is the custom amongst many of the people of knowledge: “We interpret the Qur’aan by the Qur’aan if there is no trace of it in the Sunnah, then we interpret it by the Sunnah.” This is due to what we will explain later on in the end of this treatise, when speaking about the (weak) hadeeth of Mu’aadh bin Jabal radhi Allaahu anhu. | https://maktabahuthaymeen.wordpress.com/2016/07/14/knowledge-of-arabic-is-not-sufficient-for-understanding-the-quraan/ | robots: classic
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} | 881 | Shiite allegation about verse 24:35
Fatwa No: 339766
• Fatwa Date:1-3-2017 - Jumaadaa Al-Aakhir 3, 1438
• Rating:
Assalaamu alaykum. I mistakenly found the following Shiite claims on the “distortion” of the Quran from a Sunni source:
“We read in Tafseer Ibn Abi Hatim, Volume 8 page 2595:
Ali bin Al-Hussain narrated from Nasr bin 'Ali, from his father, from Shebl bin Abaad, from Qays bin Saad, from Attaa', from Ibn 'Abbaas: {Allaah is the light of the heavens and the earth; a likeness of His light is as a niche.} He said, ‘This is a mistake by the scribe, He (Allaah) is greater than to be his light as a niche.’ He said (that it should be), ‘{A likeness of the believer's light is as a niche.} According to Imam Ibn Hajr Al-Asqalani’s Taqrib Al-Tahdib Ali bin Al-Hussain bin Ibrahim Al-Ameri is ‘Seduq’ and Nasr bin Ali al-Jahdhami is ‘Thiqah Thabt’, whereas Ali bin Nasr, Shebl bin Abbad, Qays bin Saad Al-Makki, and Atta bin Rabah are ‘Thiqah’.”
Please, how can one explain that this narration casts no doubt on the authenticity of the Quran given that the so-called “mistake” still exists in our Quran today?
First of all, you should know that these people do not cease to search for ways to undermine the Quran, as they believe that the Quran is distorted, and they accuse those who transmitted it to us and reported the Sunnah of the Prophet sallallaahu `alayhi wa sallam ( may Allaah exalt his mention ) to us of Kufr (disbelief).
The purpose of their mention of this narration from Ibn ‘Abbaas may Allaah be pleased with him or other narrations by the Companions is to confuse the laymen of Ahlus-Sunnah; this misconception may affect some people because of their lack of knowledge and, as a result, they fall into this trap. Therefore, one must avoid accessing their websites unless one has profound knowledge (in order to not be affected by their misconceptions). Ash-Shaatibi may Allaah have mercy upon him said in Al-I’tisaam, “Al-Baaji narrated, 'Maalik said that it used to be said, 'Do not lend your ear to someone whose heart is astray, as you do not know which misconception he would spell into it.''
Secondly, Allah promised to protect this Quran from any distortion or alteration; Allah says (what means): {Falsehood cannot approach it from before it or from behind it; [it is] a revelation from a [Lord Who is] Wise and Praiseworthy.} [Quran 41:42]
Al-Baghawi reported in his Tafseer (exegesis), quoting Az-Zajjaaj, “It means that this Book is preserved from any addition or deletion...
Thirdly, what you quoted from Ibn Hajar may Allaah have mercy upon him that he authenticated the narrators of this hadeeth does not necessarily mean that this hadeeth is authentic, as there may be, for example, an interruption between one narrator and another and he did not hear it from him, so the hadeeth or the statement of the Companion would be weak due to the interruption. For example Al-Haythami may Allaah have mercy upon him said in Majma’ Az-Zawaa’id, while commenting on one of the ahaadeeth, “The rest of its narrators are trustworthy, but Khaalid ibn Ma'daan has never heard from Mu'aath.
Also, As-Suyooti may Allaah have mercy upon him reported in Al-Itqaan from Ibn Al-Anbaari that he held the opinion that this narration from Ibn 'Abbaas is weak, and he opposed it with another narration.
Fourthly, even if we were to presume that this statement (of Ibn 'Abbaas) was authentic, it is impossible that there was a mistake at this place from the scribe and that it remained written as such in the Mus-haf (the written text of the Quran) and that the Muslim nation transmitted it generation after generation from the era of the Prophet sallallaahu `alayhi wa sallam ( may Allaah exalt his mention ) until the present day. Al-Qurtubi may Allaah have mercy upon him said in his Tafseer, while clarifying a context similar to this one which was said to be a mistake from the scribe:
If this were a mistake (a word that is written wrongly), then those who taught the Quran from among the Companions of the Prophet sallallaahu `alayhi wa sallam ( may Allaah exalt his mention ) to their students from the Muslims would not have taught it with that mistake; rather, they would have corrected it with their tongue, and they would have taught the Muslims in a correct manner, and the fact that the Muslims have transmitted this orally in an identical form to that which is written is a clear-cut evidence that this is correct and has no errors and that this was not a mistake by the scribe...”
Ibn Taymiyyah may Allaah have mercy upon him reported the same thing.
Fifthly, even if we also were to presume that that statement was authentic, some scholars interpreted that the saying of Ibn 'Abbaas meant the mistake in making the choice and what is more appropriate of the seven letters (ways of reading) in which the Quran was revealed) to gather the people around it, and not that what is written is an error that does not belong in the Quran. This was also reported by As-Suyooti may Allaah have mercy upon him. For more benefit, please refer to fatwa 82974.
Allah knows best.
Related Fatwa | https://fatwa.islamweb.net/en/fatwa/339766/shiite-allegation-about-verse-2435 | isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2019-43
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1) Your Name
2) Your City, State, Country Name
Thursday, December 1, 2011
Bid’ah According to the Understanding of Traditional Islam
The linguistic meaning of Bid’ah is anything new the previously did not exist. The Shari’ah terminology however means anything that has been introduced into the beliefs and actions of the Muslims that is in direct opposition to the Qur’an or the Sunnah, or anything that distorts the Sunnah or claims to be better than the Sunnah.
The Prophet ﷺ has cautioned us against us against any innovation [Bid'ah] that opposes the Qur’an or the Sunnah in the following two Ahaadeeth:
The Holy Prophet ﷺ said:
The Holy Prophet ﷺ also said:
“Every innovation is misguidance” [2]
These two Ahadeethth should be understood as every innovation introduced into the Islamic creed is misguidance. This is due to the fact that nobody can enlighten us more than the last Messenger ﷺ did. He was the last Prophet and the religion of all the Prophets was completed with him ﷺ. Allah (سبحانه وتعالى)says in the Qur’an:
The Prophet ﷺ taught us all we need to know about Allah (سبحانه وتعالى), and he also taught us our limits. Nobody can take away from what was revealed to him, nor can they add anything to it. Every creedal formulation unknown to the Prophet ﷺ and his Companions that was later introduced is in the fire. This is confirmed from hadeeth of Mu’aawiyah Bin Abu Sufyaan (رضي الله عنه) who narrated that the Messenger of Allah ﷺ said:
“Those people of the book who came before you split into seventy two sects, and soon this religion [Islam] will split into seventy-three sects. Seventy-two of them will be in the fire and one will be in Paradise, and that is the Jamaa’ah” [4]
In a hadith of similar import, the Holy Prophet ﷺ was asked who are the saved group? The Holy Prophet ﷺ responded:
“Those who are upon that which me and my companions are upon today” [5]
Those that departed from the Ahl us-Sunnah wal-Jamaa’ah only did so because they invented new beliefs. Creedal innovations must be avoided at all costs. One must always seek and then adhere to the known position of the Ahl us-Sunnah wal-Jamaa’ah.
There are also innovations of actions, however this is to be treated separately as some innovated actions have been encouraged if they are beneficial and do not contradict the Shari’ah at any point.
Imaam Shaafi’s (رحمه الله) understanding of the hadeeth[6] “Every innovation is misguidance [Kulla Bid'ah dalaalah] is enough to demonstrate this point. He said:
“There are two types of Innovation [bid'ah]: the praiseworthy and the blameworthy. Whatever is accordance with the Sunnah is praiseworthy and whatever vies with it is blameworthy…The new matters are of two: Whatever differs with the book of Allah, the Sunnah, the Athaar, or the Ijmaa’a, then that is an innovation of misguidance [bid'at ul-Dalaalah] and whatever new matter from amongst that which is good and does not differ with anything from that [Qur'an, Sunnah, AthaarIjmaa'a] then it is a new matter that is not blameworthy” [7]
Ibn ‘Abd us-Salaam (رحمه الله), a Shaafi’ scholar wrote in his Qawaa’id:
“Innovation is of five types:
1. Al-Waajibah: Such as the study of ‘Arabic syntax which helps to understand the speech of Allah and His Messenger because the preservation of the Shari’ah is obligatory [waajib] and nothing comes to us except by that being from the foremost rank of the waajib. Such is the much needed explanation of what is difficult to understand, the codification of the science of Fiqh [Usul ul-Fiqh] and working to distinguish between the authentic and rejected traditions.
2. Al-Muharramah: Whatever opposes the Sunnah such as the false innovated beliefs introduced by the Qadariyah, Murji’ah, and the Mushaabihah [and any other astray sect that has innovated something into the creed]
3. Al-Mandub: Every excellent goodness that was not established during the lifetime of the Holy Prophet [for example], the gathering for the Taraweeh prayers, the building of schools, spiritual retreats, speeches regarding the praiseworthy aspects of tassawuf… and anything else done purely seeking the Face of Allah.
4. Al-Mubah: Such as the shaking of hands after the Fajr and ‘Asr prayers, having an abundance of assorted foods, drinks, clothes, and a wide house…
5. However some of the mentioned Mubah things can also fall into the 5th category which is disliked [Makruh] or even not preferred [Khilaaf ul-Awlaa]” [8]
Imaam Abu Bakr al-Aajuri (رحمه الله), the great Shaafa’i scholar said in his Kitaab us-Shari’ah:
“Innovations [in the Creed] are misguidance, being that which opposes the Book and the Sunnah, and differs from the statements of the true believers.” [9]
Imaam ‘Abdur Rahmaan Ibn al-Jawzi [rahimhahullahTablees Iblees said in hisTablees Iblees:
“Bid’ah…refers to something which did not exist and was then invented. And, in most cases, innovations conflict with divine law by implying a need for human additions or deletions. Even an invented practice which did not contradict the Sharee’ah or imply any change was disliked by the majority of early scholars. They used to avoid any innovation, even though some types were allowable…It is thus, clear that that the early generation of Muslims cautiously avoided all innovations which even had the remotest connection to the religion for fear of changing the religion to the slightest degree. However, there were some new practices which did not contradict the Sharee’ah or change it; these practices were allowed” [10]
We can deduce from the given evidences that there are two types of bid’ah, praiseworthy and blameworthy. Let us now look at some praiseworthy innovations that have served great benefits for this Ummah.
One such innovation was the compilation of the Qur’an into the form of a book as done by Zaid ibn Thabit (رضي الله عنه), upon the suggestion of ‘Umar (رضي الله عنه), and command of Abu Bakr (رضي الله عنه). Even though Abu Bakr (رضي الله عنه) was hesitant out of fear because this was something the Prophet ﷺ did not do, ‘Umar (رضي الله عنه) encouraged Abu Bakr (رضي الله عنه) By Allah, it is good”. [11]
Another example of good innovation was the gathering together of the people to pray twenty units of Taraaweeh prayers behind one Imaam in the month ofRamadaan [12]. This was done by ‘Umar (رضي الله عنه) after he had noticed that the people had their own separate group prayers throughout the Masjid. Rather than have a divided Jamaa’ah reciting the Qur’an all at the same time, he knew it would be best to unify them behind one Imaam and one recitation. It was even said, “This is an excellent innovation”. [13]
The Issue of Milaad un-Nabi [the Birth of the Prophet ﷺ
One innovation which is often attacked as being a bid’ah of deviation is theMilaad un-Nabi [the act of celebrating the birth of the Prophet ﷺ]. It cannot be considered as a bid’ah that opposes the Qur’an and the Sunnah as it has been proven [by scholars such as Imaam as-Suyuti] that it has roots in the Shari’ah as it is considered an act of loving the Holy Prophet ﷺMany people mistake this event as celebrating the Prophet’s ﷺ birthday and upon this folly they wrongfully equate the celebration with the western tradition of celebrating birthdays. However, what the believers are doing is celebrating the birth and the life of the Holy Prophet ﷺ and they are simply rejoicing in the fact that Allah has sent him as a mercy to the universe. In such a pure intention, one will indeed find merits.
Imaam Ibn Taymiyah (رحمه الله) attested to this fact when he said:
“…Likewise, what people have innovated by analogy with the Christians who celebrate the birth of Jesus (عليه السلام), or out of love for the Prophet (صلى الله عليه وسلم), and to honor him, may Allah reward them for this love and effort. Not for the innovation itself [but the love for the Prophet]…To celebrate and honor the birth of the Prophet (صلى الله عليه وسلمtaking it as a honored season, as some people are doing, is good and in it there is a great reward, because of their good intentions in respecting the Prophet (صلى الله عليه وسلم)[14]
It is the opinion of Imaam Ibn Taymiyah (رحمه الله) that there is great reward in celebrating the Holy Prophet’s ﷺ birth, as it is an act of honoring him. Imaam Ibn Taymiyah (رحمه الله) is not alone in this opinion. Imaam Ibn Rajab al-Hanbali(رحمه الله) in his Lata’if al-Ma’arif [15] strongly encouraged people to gather in the month of Rabi` al-Awwal to learn about the Holy Prophet’s ﷺbirth and life. Therefore, in the Shari’ah, the celebration of the Holy Prophet’s ﷺ birth falls under the category of praiseworthy Bid’ah, as is recommended [mandub].
However, a word of caution concerning a danger that poses as a threat to the unity of the Muslims of today. This danger is the misuse of what is initially a well intended beautiful celebration, downgraded to a judgmental criterion to mete out the “true believers” from the “hypocrites”, the “Sunni Muslims” from the “deviants” where somebody who does not partake in the celebration is wrote of as a deviant. This is wrong due to the fact the Prophet ﷺ, the Sahaabah, and the Tabi’een never practiced the Milaad in the form we find it today. The celebration of the Holy Prophet’s ﷺ birth must not be made obligatory, or anyway binding upon the Muslims.
Let us take a lesson from history and Allah’s (سبحانه وتعالى) Speech in which He said:
“We sent after them, Our Messengers, and we sent Jesus, the son of Mary. We gave him the Injeel and We placed compassion and mercy in the hearts of those who followed him. They have innovated Monasticism. We did not make it obligatory upon them. They invented it to please Allah thereby, but they did not observe it with right observance. We gave those who believe from amongst them their reward, but many from them were rebellious sinners” [16]
The first and foremost exegete, Ibn Abbas (رضي الله عنه) has this to say in regards to this verse:
“The Christians built monasteries and cloisters to escape the persecution of Paul, the Jew. Allah did not make monasticism obligatory upon them. They did not innovate it but to seek the pleasure of Allah and had Allah enjoined it upon them they would not been able to give it’s due. Allah will reward the monks who did not contradict the religion of Jesus double for their faith and worship. Twenty Four of these monks resided in Yemen and when they heard of the Prophet they believed in him and joined his religion. However many of the monks were disbelievers, vying against the religion of Jesus” [17]
The quoted ayah from the Qur’an along with the explanation of Ibn Abbas (رضي الله عنه) shows us that Allah (سبحانه وتعالى) does indeed reward people for good innovation, however, when they start making it obligatory as something that has to be done in the religion then this becomes a punishable offense. Therefore anybody who celebrates the birth of the Holy Prophet ﷺ must do so with a pure intention of loving the Prophet ﷺ and should not make this binding upon other people.
[1] Saheeh al-Bukhaari, vol. 5, hadeeth no. 2697, Saheeh Muslim vol. 6, hadeeth no. 1718
[2] Sunan Abu Dawud, Kitaab us-Sunnah hadeeth no. 4607
[3] Surat ul-Maa’idah (5), ayah. 3
[4] Sunan Abu Dawud, Kitaab us Sunnah hadeeth no. 4597
[5] Tirmidhi hadeeth no. 2129
[6] You will tend to find that those that oppose this statement often fire back merely saying “the alleged statement of Imaam ash-Shaafi [Rahimahullah]’” without any shred of evidence to suggest that the statement of Imaam ash-Shaafi’ is fabricated, etc. They simply think they can refute the position of Imaam ash-Shaafi’ by peppering it with the description of being “alleged”. In-fact it is them that are doing the “alleging” – making allegations that scholars such as Imaam Ibn Hajar al-Asqalaani and the isnaad he quoted from contains a liar. Where are their proofs for such an implicit allegation?
[7] Fath ul-Baari, vol. 13, Kitaab us Sunnah, pp 370-372 Also mentioned by Imaam Ibn Rajab al-Hanbali is his Jami’ al-‘Ulum wal-Hikaam, commentary to hadeeth no. 28.
[8] Fath ul-Baari, vol. 13, Kitaab us Sunnah, pp 370-372
[9] The true believers referred to are the Imaams of the Muslims such as Imaam Maalik, Imaam Shaafi’, Sufyaan at-Thawri, Imaam al- Awzaa’i, Ibn al-Mubarak, Imaam Ahmad bin Hanbal, al-Qaasin bin Salaam and whoever followed their way” See Kitaab ash-Shari’ah, vol. 1, p. 236
[10] Tablees Iblees, translated by Bilal Philips, p.21-23, al-Hidaayah Publishing. Arabic Edition, see p. 37 onwards What can we deduce from this statement?
1. Innovations conflict with divine law in most cases, but not in all cases.
2. Innovations that did not conflict with divine law were disliked, although not forbidden.
3. They were disliked by the majority of the Salaf, indicating that some from amongst the Salaf actually opined innovations that did not conflict with divine law as good [bid’ah hasanaah].
4. It is solely the choice of an individual Muslim to avoid “bid’ah hasanaah” as this is a valid position and there is also merit in avoiding innovations for the sake of Allah, a Muslim should not feel bound to practice such and such due to the customs of his people.
5. Those innovations that did not contradict the Shari’ah in any form or fashion were allowed, not forbidden.
6. When confronted with any practice seemingly new, we should ask ourselves “how does it contradict the Shari’ah?
[11] Saheeh al-Bukhaari, English translation, vol. 6, hadeeth no. 509
[12] There is no dispute in the fact that there are twenty units for the Taraaweeh, for Imaam Muwaffaq ud-Deen has pointed out in his al-Mughni that the Sahaabah are in consensus about it. Those who go against the Ijmaa’a are not considered to be from the Ahl us-Sunnah wal-Jamaa’ah as they violate the consensus and rebel against the Khalifah ‘Umar (رضي الله عنه)
[13] Saheeh al-Bukhaari, English Translation, vol. 3, hadeeth no. 227. Those who opine that the hadeeth “every bid’ah is misguidance” - kulla bid’ah dalaalah – is in its most absolute sense argue that ‘Umar’s [radiyAllahu anhu] statement “ni’imatul bida’atu hadhihi - This is an excellent innovation” refers to a linguistic innovation and is not really an innovation due to the fact it has roots in the Shari’ah. Our answer to this: Firstly, this argument negates the “Kullu - every” because if “kullu – every” is to be understood in its most absolute sense then the Prophet sal Allahu ‘alayhi wasallam would have also been speaking about such “linguistic bid’ahs”. Secondly, this very same argument of “linguistic bid’ah” can be used to permit Milaad un-Nabi as this also has its origins in the Shari’ah and thus returns to it. The Salafis usage of “linguistic bid’ah” is therefore fallacious, nothing more than a semantic somersault in which the feet land on the very same surface they sprung from. For the traditional correct understanding of linguistic bid’ah refer to Imaam Ibn Rajab al-Hanbali’s commentary hadeeth no. 28 in his Jami’ al-‘Ulum wal-Hikaam, who gives a fair, just and balanced understanding of how linguistic bid’ah should be understood, especially given the fact he quotes from the sources that some misguided Muslims would have us believe to be fabricated, etc.
[14] Iqtidaa al-Siraat ul-Mustaqeem, pgs. 294 – 297
[15] See Ibn Rajab al-Hanbali’s Lata’if al-Ma’arif, pp158-216
[16] Surat ul-Hadeed (57) ayah 27
[17] See Tanweer ul-Miqbaas [Tafseer Ibn Abbas] | http://mrehan15.blogspot.com/2011/12/bidah-according-to-understanding-of.html | robots: classic
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Imam ibn Rajab al-Hanbali’s (r.a.) Understanding of Bid’ah
بِسۡمِ ٱللهِ ٱلرَّحۡمَـٰنِ ٱلرَّحِيمِ
The following is taken from “Imam ibn Rajab al-Hanbali’s (r.a.) Understanding of Bid’ah”.
Imam Zayn ad-Din ‘Abd ar-Rahman ibn Ahmad ibn ‘Abd ar-Rahman, known as Rajab, ibn al-Hasan ibn Muhammad ibn Abi al-Barakah Mas’ud al-Baghdadi ad-Dimashqi al-Hanbali (r.a.) is best known as the author of Jami’ al-’Ulum wa al-Hikam“The Compendium of Knowledge and Wisdom”.
Rajab was the nickname of his grandfather, ‘Abd ar-Rahman, perhaps because he was born in that month. Born in Baghdad, Imam ibn Rajab (r.a.) learned much from his father, who himself was a great scholar, and then studied in Egypt and Damascus where he settled down until he passed away. Among his eminent teachers were Imam Abu al-Fath Muhammad ibn Muhammad ibn Ibrahim al-Mayduni (r.a.), Shaykh Muhammad ibn Isma’il al-Khabbaz (r.a.), Imam Ibrahim ibn Dawud al-‘Aththar (r.a.), Shaykh Abu al-Haram al-Qalanisi (r.a.), and Imam ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyyah (r.a.). He was a colleague of the famous ahadits expert, Imam Abu al-Fadhl al-‘Iraqi (r.a.). He devoted himself to the subject until he became an expert in all the sciences related to ahadits. He then taught ahadits and fiqh according the Hanbali school in the Jami’ Bani Umayyah and other seats of learning in Damascus. His famous students include scholars like Imam Abu al-Fadhl Ahmad ibn Naswr ibn Ahmad (r.a.), the Mufti of Egypt, and Imam Dawud ibn Sulayman al-Mawswili (r.a.).
He was a leading scholar of the Hanbali school. His work, al-Qawa’id al-Kubra fi al-Furu’ is clear evidence of his expertise in fiqh, demonstrating an extreme, even exhaustive knowledge of the intricacies of detailed fiqh issues. He was known for piety and righteousness. His sermons were considered most effective, full of blessing and beneficial. People of all schools were unanimous as to his quality, and hearts of the people were full of love for him. He was not involved in any worldly business, nor did he visit people of material position. He wrote a detailed twenty volume scholarly commentary on the Sunan at-Tirmidzi, a commentary on part of Swahih al-Bukhari, a supplement to Thabaqat al-Hanabilah, al-Latha’if fi Wasa’if al-Ayyam, and Bayyan Fadhl ‘Ilm as-Salaf ‘ala al-Khalaf.
Among his best known most referenced works is Jami’ al-‘Ulum wa al-Hikam, the commentary on al-Arba’un of Imam an-Nawawi (r.a.). He added eight ahadits to the original forty-two and commented in detail on all of these fifty ahadits. This commentary discusses all aspects of the ahadits, the chain of narrations, the narrators and the text. Imam ibn Hajar al-‘Asqalani (r.a.) said, ‘’He was a great expert in the sciences of ahadits – the historical accounts of narrators, the chains of narrations, and meaning of the text.”
He was appellated al-Baghdadi due to his place of birth, al-Hanbali due to his madzhab and ad-Dimashqi due to his place of residence and death. His kunya was Abu al-Faraj, and his nickname was ibn Rajab, which was the nickname of his grandfather. He was born in Baghdad in 736 AH and was raised by a knowledgeable family, firmly rooted in knowledge, nobility and righteousness. His father played the greatest role in directing him towards the beneficial knowledge. Imam ibn Rajab (r.a.) was deeply attached to the works of Imam ibn Taymiyyah (r.a.), for he would issue legal rulings according to them and would constantly reference his books. This is since he served as a student under Imam ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyyah (r.a.). But in spite of this, he was not a blind follower or a fanatical adherent to his teacher. Rather, he would review, authenticate, verify and follow the evidences. Imam ibn Rajab (r.a.) passed away in Ramadhan, 795 AH in Damascus.
Imam ibn Rajab al-Hanbali (r.a.) wrote under hadits 28 of his Jam’i, regarding the Holy Prophet’s (s.a.w.) saying, “Beware of newly introduced matters, for every innovation is a straying,” the following commentary below.
It is a warning to the community against following innovated new matters. He emphasised that with his words, “every innovation is a straying.” What is meant by innovation are those things which are newly introduced having no source in the shari’ah to proof them. As for whatever has a source in the shari’ah thereby proving it, then it is not an innovation in the shari’ah, even though it might linguistically be an innovation.
There is in Swahih Muslim from Jabir (r.a.) that the Prophet (s.a.w.) used to say in his khuthbah, “The best discourse is the Book of Allah, and the best guidance is the guidance of Muhammad, and the worst of affairs are those which are newly introduced, for every innovation is an error.” So his saying , “Every innovation is a straying,” is one of the examples of concise and yet comprehensive speech which omits nothing, and it is one of the tremendous principles of the Diyn, closely resembling, “Whoever introduces into this affair of ours that which is not of it, then it is rejected.”
Every person who introduces something and ascribes it to the Diyn without having any source in the Diyn to refer back to, then that is an error, and the Diyn is free of it, whether it is in the articles of iman, deeds or words, outward or inward. As for those things in the sayings of the right-acting first generations where they regard some innovations as good, that is only with respect to what are innovations in the linguistic sense, but not in the shari’ah.
An example of that is the saying of ‘Umar (r.a.) when he had united people to stand in tarawih in Ramadhan behind a single imam in the mosque, and then he came in behind them while they were praying and said, “What an excellent innovation this is!” It is also narrated that he said, “If this is an innovation, then what an excellent innovation!”
It is narrated that Ubayy ibn Ka’b (r.a.) said to him, “This did not use to happen,” and ‘Umar (r.a.) said, “I know, but it is good,” meaning that this action was not done in this way before that time, but it has sources in the shari’ah from which it is derived, for example that the Prophet (s.a.w.) used to urge people to stand in prayer in Ramadhan, and stimulate people’s desire to do it, and people, in his time, used to stand in prayer in the mosque in different groups and individually, and he prayed with his companions in Ramadhan more than one night, and then stopped doing that, giving as the reason that he feared that it would be made obligatory for them and that they would be incapable of undertaking it, but there was no fear of this that it would be regarded as an obligation after him.
It has also been narrated of him that he used to stand in prayer with his companions in the uneven nights among the last ten. Another source is that he commanded us to follow the sunnah of the Khulafah who took the right way, and this has become the sunnah of his Khulafah who took the right way since people unanimously agreed about it in the times of ‘Umar (r.a.), ‘Utsman (r.a.) and ‘Ali (k.w.).
Another example of that is the first call to prayer on the Juma’ah which ‘Utsman (r.a.) added because of people’s need of it and which ‘Ali (k.w.) affirmed, and which has become the continued practice of the Muslims. It has been narrated that ibn ‘Umar (r.a.) said, “It is an innovation,” but it is very likely that he meant the same as his father meant about standing for prayer in Ramadhan in jama’ah.
There is similarly, the compilation of the muswhaf, the written copies of the Qur’an, in one book about which Zayd ibn Tsabit (r.a.) was hesitant, saying to Abu Bakr (r.a.) and ‘Umar (r.a.), “How can the two of you do something which the Prophet (s.a.w.) did not do?” Then he came to realise that it was a matter of benefit, maswlahah, and he agreed to compile it. The Prophet (s.a.w.) had commanded that Revelation should be written down, and there is no difference in writing it down separately in different places or collectively in one book, and on the contrary, gathering it all together in one is more expedient and useful.
Similar to that is ‘Utsman’s (r.a.) having united the community on one muswhaf copy of the Qur’an and his ordering the destruction of whatever disagreed with it from fear of the community’s division into groups. ‘Ali (k.w.) and most of the companions regarded it as a good act, and that was truly a matter of benefit.
Similarly there is the fight against the people who refused to pay the zakat. ‘Umar (r.a.) and others were hesitant and in doubt about it until Abu Bakr (r.a.) explained to him the source in the shari’ah from which it is derived, and so the people agreed with him about that.
Similarly, there is giving discourses, and we have seen previously the saying of Ghadif ibn al-Harits (r.a.) that it is an innovation, but al-Hasan (r.a.) said, “Discoursing is an innovation, and an excellent innovation. How many a supplication is answered, need fulfilled, and brother benefitted.” These people only meant that it was an innovation in the form of gathering people together for it at a specific time, because the Prophet (s.a.w.) did not have a specific time to discourse to his companions other than the regular khuthab during the Juma’ah and ‘Iyd prayers, and otherwise he would only remind them occasionally or when something happened which necessitated that he should remind them.
Then later the companions reached a consensus that a specific time should be fixed for it, as we have seen previously that ibn Mas’ud (r.a.) used to remind his people every Thursday. There is in Swahih al-Bukhari that ibn ‘Abbas (r.a.) said, “Give discourse to people once a week, but if you refuse to do so little then twice, and if you do more, then three times, but do not tire people.” There is in the Musnad that ‘Aishah (r.a.) advised the discoursers of the people of Madina in a similar fashion.
It is narrated that she said to ‘Ubayd ibn ‘Umayr (r.a.), “Give discourse to the people one day, and leave them alone one day; do not tire them.”
It is narrated that ‘Umar ibn ‘Abd al-‘Aziz (r.a.) told the man who gave discourse to do so once every three days. It is narrated that he said, “Give people some rest and do not make it too heavy for them, and avoid discourse on Saturday and Tuesday.”
Imam Abu Nu’aym (r.a.) narrated with his chain of transmission from Shaykh Ibrahim ibn al-Junayd (r.a.) that he said, “I heard ash-Shafi’i saying, ‘There are two types of innovation: praiseworthy and blameworthy innovations. That which accords with the sunnah is praiseworthy. That which contradicts the sunnah is blameworthy’”
And he sought to prove it by the saying of ‘Umar (r.a.), “What an excellent innovation it is!” What Imam ash-Shafi’i (r.a.) meant is that which we have mentioned before, that blameworthy innovation is that which has no source in the shari’ah from which it is derived, and it is unqualified innovation in the shari’ah.
As for praiseworthy innovation, it is that which is in accordance with the sunnah, meaning that which has a source in the sunnah from which it is derived, and it is only an innovation in the linguistic sense rather than in the sense of the shari’ah since it accords with the sunnah. Other words have been narrated from Imam ash-Shafi’i (r.a.) in explanation of this, that he said, “There are two types of newly introduced matters: that which is introduced which is contrary to the Book and the sunnah, or to a tradition [from someone among the right-acting first generations] or something on which there is consensus, then this innovation is an error. That which is newly introduced of good actions and which does not contradict any of the above, then this newly introduced matter is not blameworthy.”
Many of the matters which were newly introduced and had not previously existed, the people of knowledge disagreed as to whether or not they were good innovations until they referred back to the sunnah, for example, writing down ahadits, which ‘Umar (r.a.) and a group of the companions forbade, but for which the majority gave license seeking proof for that from ahadits from the sunnah. Another example is writing the explanation of the ahadits and of the Qur’an, of which some people among the people of knowledge disapprove and for which many allowed license.
Another example is the recording of views concerning what is halal and haram and the like, and in going to lengths in discussing behaviour and acts of the hearts, which have not been narrated of any of the companions and followers, and the majority of which Imam Ahmad (r.a.) disapproved. In these times in which we are so far away from the knowledge’s and sciences of the right-acting first generations, it is called for specifically that we should detail everything of that that has been transmitted from them so that we can distinguish what science and knowledge existed in their time from that which was originated after them, so that the Sunnah can be clearly known from innovation.
It is authentically transmitted that ibn Mas’ud (r.a.) said, “You have got up this morning in the natural condition, and you will introduce matters and matters will be introduced for you. Whenever you see a newly introduced matter you must take to the original guidance.” ibn Mas’ud (r.a.) said this in the time of the Khulafah ar-Rashidin.
Shaykh ibn Mahdi (r.a.) narrated that Imam Malik (r.a.) said, “There were none of these erroneous opinions in the time of the Prophet, Abu Bakr, ‘Umar and ‘Utsman,” as if Imam Malik (r.a.) was indicating by ‘erroneous opinions’ the divisions that originated in the source matters of the Diyn such as the Khawarij, the Shi’ah, the Murji’ah and the likes, of those who spoke declaring some of the Muslims to be kuffar, and regarded it as permissible to shed their blood and seize their property, or thinking that they would be eternally in the Fire, or regarded the elite of this community as deviants, or on the contrary claiming that acts of disobedience do not harm their doers, or that none of the people of tawhid would enter the Fire.
Worse than that is what has been introduced of speaking concerning the acts of Allah (s.w.t.), Exalted is He, such as His Universal and Specific Decree, which those Qadariyyah, proponents of free will, who deny do so, claiming that by that they are purifying Allah (s.w.t.) from the ascription of tyrannical injustice. Worse than that is that which has been introduced of speaking about the essence of Allah (s.w.t.) and His Attributes, of those matters about which the Prophet (s.a.w.) his companions and their followers in good actions were silent. Some people negated and denied a great deal of that which is in the Book and the sunnah about that, and they claimed that they do that in order to purify Allah (s.w.t.) of those things which intellects require Him to be purified. They claimed that the necessary consequences of that are impossible for Allah (s.w.t.).
There are also people who were not content with establishing Him firmly until they established that which is thought to be inseparable from Him with respect to Created beings. And on these inseparable items, both in negation and affirmation, the first of this community followed the course of remaining silent about them. One of the things which was introduced into this community after the age of the companions and the followers was discussion about halal and haram purely from personal opinion, and rejection of a great deal of that which is in the sunnah concerning that because it contradicts thinking and intellectual analogical reasoning.
One of the things which originated after that was discussion of the reality, ‘aqidah, concerning taste, dzawq, and unveiling, kashf, and the claim that the ‘aqidah negates the shari’ah, and that gnosis, ma’rifah, alone is sufficient along with love, and that there is no need for deeds which are a veil, or that only the common people need the shari’ah, all of which is often connected to discussion of the essence and the attributes in a way which is known absolutely to contradict the Book and the sunnah and the consensus of the right-acting first generations of the community, and Allah (s.w.t.) Guides whomever He Wills to a straight path. And Allah (s.w.t.) and His Messenger (s.a.w.) Know best.
1. Salaam. Thank you. For the great post.
I am finding your meaning hard to parse in the sentence below. Is a preposition missing before the second "Him", or is the second "Him" unnecessary?
"There are also people who were not content with establishing Him firmly until they established firmly by establishing Him that which is thought that it is inseparable from Him with respect to created beings, and on these inseparable items, both in negation and affirmation, the first of this community followed the course of remaining silent about them. "
1. Wa as-Salaam,
Thank yo for bringing it to my attention. I have since corrected it and made it easier to read.
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} | 723 | The Weakness of the Hadeeth about Placing the Hands below the Navel
Author: Imaam Muhammad Naasir-ud-Deen al-Albaanee
Source: Irwaa' al-Ghaleel (353) and Ahkaam al-Janaa'iz ( p. 118)
Published: Sunday 2nd August, 2015
Abu Daawood (756), Daaraqutni (107), Baihaqi (2/310), Ahmad in his son ‘Abdullaah's Masaa'il (62/2) and also in Zawaa'id al-Musnad (1/110), and Ibn Abi Shaiba (1/156/1) transmitted:
‘an ‘Abd ar-Rahmaan ibn Ishaaq ‘an Ziyaad ibn Zaid as-Siwaa'i ‘an Abu Juhaifah ‘an ‘Ali (radi-Allaahu ‘anhu), who said,
"It is from the Sunnah during the prayer to place one palm on the other, below the navel."
This is a da‘eef (weak) sanad due to ‘Abd ar-Rahmaan ibn Ishaaq (al-Waasiti al-Koofi), who is weak (see below). On top of that, it has idtiraab (shakiness) in it, for he has narrated it:
1. once ‘an Ziyad ‘an Abu Juhaifa ‘an ‘Ali (as above);
2. once ‘an Nu‘man ibn Sa‘d‘an ‘Ali (transmitted by Daaraqutni and Baihaqi); and
3. once ‘an Siyaas Abul Hakam ‘an Abu Waa'il, who said, "Abu Hurairah said: It is from the Sunnah ..." (transmitted by Abu Dawood [758] and Daaraqutni).
The Weakness of ‘Abd Ar-Rahmaan Ibn Ishaaq Al-Koofi in the Eyes of the Imaams of Hadeeth
1. Abu Daawood said,
"I heard Ahmad ibn Hanbal declaring ‘Abd ar-Rahmaan ibn Ishaaq al-Koofi da‘eef (weak)."
[This is why Imaam Ahmad did not accept this hadeeth of his, for his son ‘Abdullaah said, "I saw that when praying, my father placed his hands, one on the other, above the navel."]
2. Nawawi said in Majmoo‘ (3/313), and also in Sharh Saheeh Muslim and elsewhere,
"They (the scholars of hadeeth) agree in declaring this hadeeth weak, because it is a narration of ‘Abd ar-Rahmaan ibn Ishaaq al-Waasiti, who is a da‘eef (weak) narrator, as agreed upon by the Imaams of Jarh and Ta‘deel (Authentication and Disparagement of reporters)."
3. Zayla‘i said in Nasb ar-Raayah (1/314),
"Baihaqi said in al-Ma‘rifah: ‘Its isnaad is not firm, for it is a unique narration of ‘Abd ar-Rahmaan ibn Ishaaq al-Waasiti, who is matrook (abandoned)'."
4. Ibn Hajar said in Fath al-Baari (2/186),
"It is a weak hadeeth."
What further points to its weakness is that contrary to it has been narrated on the authority of ‘Ali with a better isnaad: the hadeeth of Ibn Jareer al-Dabbi ‘an his father, who said,
"I saw ‘Ali (radi-Allaahu ‘anhu) holding his left arm with his right on the wrist, above the navel"
This isnaad is a candidate for the rank of hasan; Baihaqi (1/301) firmly designated it to be hasan, and Bukhaari (1/301) designated it with certainty while giving it in an abridged, ta‘leeq form.
What is authentic from the Prophet (صلى الله علیه وسلم) with respect to the position of the hands is that they should be on the chest; there are many ahaadeeth about this, among them is one on the authority of Taawoos, who said,
"The Messenger of Allaah (صلى الله علیه وسلم) used to place his right arm on his left arm, and clasp them firmly on his chest during prayer" - transmitted by Abu Daawood (759) with a saheeh isnaad.
Although this is mursal, it is enough as proof for all scholars, with all their various opinions regarding the Mursal Hadeeth, since it is saheeh as a mursal isnaad and has also been related as mawsool in many narrations; hence, it is valid as proof for all. Some of the supporting narrations are as follows:
1. From Waa'il ibn Hujr:
"That he saw the Prophet (صلى الله علیه وسلم) put his right hand upon his left and placed them upon his chest."
Reported by Ibn Khuzaimah in his Saheeh (Nasb ar-Raayah, 1/314) and reported by Baihaqi in his Sunan (2/30) with two chains of narration which support each other.
2. From Qabeesah ibn Hulb, from his father who said:
"I saw the Prophet (صلى الله علیه وسلم), leave [after completing the Prayer] from his right and his left, and I saw him place this upon his chest - Yahyaa (Ibn Sa'eed) described the right (hand) upon the left above the joint."
Reported by Ahmad (5/226) with a chain of narrators who are of the standard set by Muslim except for Qabeesah, but he is declared reliable by 'Ijli and Ibn Hibbaan; however, no one narrates from him except Simaak ibn Harb about whom Ibn al-Madeeni and Nasaa'i say: "Unknown" and Ibn Hajar says in Taqreeb: "He is ‘Maqbool' [i.e. acceptable only if supported]." The hadeeth of one such as him are hasan as supporting narrations, and therefore Tirmidhi said after quoting the part of this hadeeth concerning taking the left hand with the right, "It is a hasan hadeeth."
So these are three ahaadeeth which show that the Sunnah is to place the hands on the chest, and one who comes across them will not doubt that together they are sufficient to prove this.
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f:144 - Joining Taraweeh in Ruku
Country : Aliyabad,
Name : Muhammad Rafe
Question: It is commonly seen in Taraweeh that youngsters wait until the Imam goes into Ruku and then join the Salaat? Is this correct?
Answer: It is Mustahab (Commendable) to join the Salaat immediately after the first Takbir (Takbir Tahrima). As given in Bada'i Us Sana'i, Vol. 1, Pg No. 467 and in Fatawa A'alamgiri, Vol. 1 Pg No. 68.
Only out of laziness, waiting until the Imam to perform Ruku even after the Salaat starts is Makruh (Undesirable). It is given in Durre Mukhtaar, Vol. 1 Pg No. 523:
Translation: To be lazy in Salaat is the sign of the hypocrites (Munafiqin).
Allah (Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala) says in the Holy Quran:
And when they stand up for Prayer, they do it sluggishly, (simply) for showing off to the people. And they (also) remember Allah but little. Surah Nisa (4:142)
A Momin (true believer) should not refrain from following the practices of the hypocrites. On the other hand, Allah Ta'ala saves the person from the fire of Hell the person who joins the Salaat immediately along with Takbir Tahrima:
Translation: It has been narrated on the authority of Hadhrat Anas Bin Malik (May Allah be well pleased with him) that the Holy Prophet (Sallallahu alaihi wa sallam) said: Whoever offers congregational Salaat with the first Takbir for 40 days, 2 deliverances are written for that person:
1. Deliverance from hell
2. Deliverance from hypocrisy. (Jame’ Tirmidhi, Hadith No. 241)
As given in Durre Mukhtaar, Kitab Us Salaat; Bada‘i Us Sana‘i and in Fatawa A’alamgiri, Kitab Us Salaat.
And Allah (Subhanahu Wa Ta’ala) knows best.
Mufti Syed Ziauddin Naqshbandi Qadri
[Shaykh ul Fiqh, Jamia Nizamia,
Founder-Director, Abul Hasanaat Islamic Research Center]
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Miftah-ul-Janna (Booklet for way to Paradise)
2– To use miswâk,
2– To use miswâk, (which is a twig from a tree called erâq.) [1] 3– To wear clean clothes. 4– Tebkîr, [which means to go to the mosque early for Friday prayer. During the (era called) Zamân-i-Se’âdet, (i.e. the blessed time of felicity during which the Best of Mankind, Rasûlullah ‘sall- Allâhu ’alaihi wa sallam’, and his earliest four Khalîfas, Hadrat Abû Bakr and Hadrat ’Umar and Hadrat ’Uthmân and Hadrat ’Alî ‘radiy-Allâhu ’anhum ajma’în’ lived,) the Sahâba ‘radiy- Allâhu ta’âlâ ’anhum ajma’în’ would not disperse after morning prayer (on Friday); they would disperse after Friday prayer. What this Ummat, (i.e. Muslims,) neglected first, was the behaviour that is sunnat and which is termed tebkîr.] 5– To make a ghusl, (which is explained in the fourth chapter of the fourth fascicle of Endless Bliss.) 6– To pronounce the benediction called Salawât, (which is pronounced over the blessed soul of our Prophet ‘sall-Allâhu ta’âlâ ’alaihi wa sallam’ and which reads as follows: “Allâhumma salli ’alâ sayyidinâ Muhammadin wa ’alâ [âlihi wa sahbihi] ajma’în.”) The are five makrûhs to be avoided on Friday: 1– To make salâm, (i.e. to greet as prescribed by Islam,) as the khatîb makes the khutba. (Greetings prescribed by Islam are explained in detail in the sixty-second chapter of the third fascicle of Endless Bliss.) 2– To read (or recite) the Qur’ân al-kerîm (as the imâm makes the khutba). 3– To say, “Yerhamukallah,” to a person who sneezes (and then says, “Al-hamd-u-li-llah,”) (as the imâm makes the khutba.) 4– To eat and drink (during Friday prayer and its khutba). 5– To commit an act that is makrûh. [An act of makrûh, for instance, is the khatîb’s making a rather long speech in the name of khutba.] After the first azân of Friday, which is performed (called) on [1] Please see the thirteenth paragraph under the heading, ‘Adabs of ablution’ in the second chapter of the fourth fascicle of Endless Bliss, or enter Google and type the word ‘miswâk’ to see how Islam taught us, more than fourteen hundred years ago, how to take care of our teeth, mouth, and alimentary canal. – 164 –
the minaret, (which in turn is outside [of] the mosque,) the khatîb performs the initial sunnat of the Friday prayer near the minbar. Thereafter he comes before the minbar, says a short prayer, standing in the Qibla direction, mounts the minbar, sits with his face towards the jamâ’at, and listens to the second azân. Thereafter he stands up and begins to perform the khutba. [People called Wahhâbîs are not in the Madhhab of Ahl assunna. They are without a certain madhhab. They are called Wahhâbîs or Nejdîs. Wahhâbîsm was founded by British conspirators. They established it by using an ignoble and ignorant man of religion from Nejd and named Muhammad the son of ’Abd-ul-wahhâb. They call non-wahhâbî Muslims disbelievers in their books. They write that it is permissible to kill those nonwahhabite people and to seize their wives, daughters and possessions as ghanîmat. Lavishly bribing ignorant and lâmadhhabî men of religion to collusion, they mould them into wahhâbîs and send them to wahhâbî centers called Râbita-t-ul ’âlam-il-islâmî and which they established in countries the world over. Dubbing their anti-Islamic publications ‘Fatwâs issued by universal unity of Islamic scholars’, they spread them over all Muslim countries. During the yearly season of pilgrimage they hand them out gratis to hadjis (Muslim pilgrims). In one of their writings it says: “It is farz for women to perform Friday prayer.” They use force to send women out for Friday prayer. They perform namâz in mixed groups where men and women perform the same namâz in jamâ’at. It says in another one of their publications: “Khutbas of Friday and ’Iyd should be read in a language intelligible to (the Muslims making up) the jamâ’at. It should not be read in the Arabic language.” True Islamic scholars in Muslim countries disprove such fatwâs of theirs by adducing proof-texts. Some of these true confutations are the fatwâs issued by the scholars of Ahl as-Sunnat in various parts of India. For instance, ’Allâma hibr-un-nihrir wa-l-fehhâma sâhib-ut-taqrîr wat-tahrîr Mawlânâ Muhammad Temîmî bin Muhammad Madrasî ‘nevver-Allâhu merqadehu’, Muftî of Madras, states as follows: It is makrûh to perform, (i.e. to read, recite or say,) the khutba in a language other than Arabic or to perform it both in Arabic or in its translation in another language. It is wâjib to perform the entire khutba in the Arabic language. For, Rasûlullah ‘sall-Allâhu ’alaihi wa sallam’ performed all his khutbas in the Arabic language. It is stated in the chapter dealing with namâzes of ’Iyd of the book entitled Bahr-ur-râsiq: “Nâfila (supererogatory namâzes, – 165 –
Ramadan Guide
Seadet-i Ebediyye - Endless Bliss Fourth Fascicle
O Son !
Seadet-i Ebediyye - Endless Bliss Fifth Fascicle
Seadet-i Ebediyye - Endless Bliss Sixth Fascicle
Seadet-i Ebediyye - Endless Bliss Second Fascicle
Seadet-i Ebediyye - Endless Bliss First Fascicle
Seadet-i Ebediyye - Endless Bliss Third Fascicle
The Rising and the Hereafter
Answer to an Enemy of Islam
Ethics of Islam
The Sunni Path
Belief and Islam
Pitfalls in the Quest for Knowledge - IslamBasics
Sahaba - The Blessed
Could Not Answer
Islam and Christianity
Confessions of a British Spy and British Enmity Against Islam
Why Did They Become Muslims
Documents of the Right Word
5-Endless Bliss Fifth Fascicle - Hakikat Kitabevi
MAJLIS VOL 20 NO 09.pub - The Majlis
Islamic Extremism in the Context of Globalism - Radical Middle Way
THE PILLARS OF ISLAM - Mouassa Islamic association | https://www.yumpu.com/en/document/view/59875369/miftah-ul-janna-booklet-for-way-to-paradise/165 | robots: classic
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} | 857 | The features of distinction in changing the Qiblah
بتاريخ : Jun 14 2011 09:04:06
The change of the qiblah remains a distinctive event in the history of the Islamic call and in the march of building the Muslim state as well. The Messenger (peace be upon him) was eager to change the Qiblah from Al Aqsa Mosque to the House of his father Abraham (peace be upon him) in Makkah.
Allah (may He be Exalted) says: "Verily, We have seen the turning of your (Muhammad's peace be upon him) face towards the heaven. Surely, We shall turn you to a Qiblah (prayer direction) that shall please you, so turn your face in the direction of Al-Masjid-Al-Harâm (the sanctuary at Makkah). And wheresoever you people are, turn your faces (in prayer) in that direction. Certainly, the people who were given the Scripture (i.e. Jews and the Christians) know well that, that (your turning towards the direction of the Ka'bah at Makkah in prayers) is the truth from their Lord. And Allâh is not unaware of what they do." [Surat Al Baqarah: 144].
Thus, after sixteen or seventeen months after Hijrah the Qiblah has been changed which means: after almost three and half years from the imposition of Salah during the Journey of Isra' (Night Journey) and Mi`raj (ascension to Heaven).
Muslims remained during these three years performing Salah facing Bayt Al-Maqdis (Palestine) which was a Qiblah for the Jews. And perhaps Allah (may He be Glorified and Exalted) predestined that to test the believers in the truthfulness of their faith and to reveal the falsehood of the Jews as events happened thereafter.
Muslims offered Salah facing Bayt Al-Maqdis (Palestine) in obedience to the command of their lord (Glory be to Him). As for the Jews, they considered that an attempt from Prophet (peace be upon him) to draw near them and obtain legitimacy for himself; thus Satan decorated things for them to please them and said: he followed our Qiblah and soon he shall follow our religion.
The Jews thought that the Prophet (peace be upon him) can be like them and betray the trust of his Lord (Glory be to Him) disobey His Commands, write the book with his own hand, then would say: this is from Allah as they have done. They imagined and thought but their illusions and imaginations have gone with the wind and became disappointed. The Prophet (peace be upon him) offered Salah facing Bayt Al-Maqdis in obedience to his Lord and when he fasted `Ashura' (the tenth day of Muharam), it was not for the sake of the Jews, but he said: "We are more entitled with Moses than them." Moses (Peace be upon him) adopted the religion of Islam exactly as the Prophet (peace be upon him), hence came the change of the Qiblah.
not as an accidental event in history but as a partition between the Muslim nation.
and previous nations, especially, the Jews who deviated and altered the divine books.
The event of changing the Qiblah came to establish the principle of "distinction" which means: dictation of the Muslim nation from others in everything:
in the message, legislation and method, morals and attitudes, and before everything distinction in concept and belief. The event exceeded the limits of time to reach our age. The Messenger (peace be upon him) said: "You shall follows the traditions of those who were before you a span by span, an arm length by an arm length, even if they were to enter the hole of a lizard, you shall do as they did. They said:O Messenger Allah, the Jews and the Christians? The Prophet" who?" meaning: "Who else?" Allah (may He be Exalted) knew their intentions and informed His Messenger (peace be upon him) that many of the Muslim nation in the periods of their weakness and the fall of their civilization shall be dissolved in the civilizations that gained victory over them no matter whether these civilizations are materialists or non-Muslim.
Therefore, the Messenger (peace be upon him) informed us about that future case to avoid. Indeed, the features of dissolution and non-distinction are many among Muslims which you may see in their abstention from the language of the Qur'an and their attachment with foreign languages to the detriment of the Arabic language.
The problem is not in keenness of learning the English language or others, because in the time of our weakness it became the language of science and civilization, but the problem is in our alienation from our mother tongue to the extent that the names of shops were written in foreign languages and the daily life language became full of foreign words.
Moreover, an individual's status is measured by the number of foreign words he or she uses. We also see the features of dissolution in the color and style of clothes, because the strange appearances such as the trousers that are not well tied and others moved quickly to us from the West and did not find but warm welcoming from many youth, whereas the voices which deny these weird appearances have become lower step by step like our habit in the time of weakness along with many features. Indeed, the nations which want to rise should have distinction as a fundamental component of its civilizational and developmental project.
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} | 1,873 | Thursday, December 18, 2008
Islam which means ‘peace’ or ‘submission’ to the will of Allah, is the fastest growing religion in the world-second after Christianity in population, with more than 1.2 billion adherents worldwide and an estimated 5 million residing in the U.S. and growing. A monotheistic religion that has its roots in the Middle East especially in the City of Mecca in Saudi Arabia where it initially originated, majority of followers are concentrated in the Middle East, Africa, in Central Asia, Africa, and in Indonesia with a population of about 200 million with a further 120 million found in India. Islam can be traced back to the religions of Adam and Abraham and is prophesied as a continuation of Judaism and Christianity with Moses and Jesus enjoying higher statuses.
Muslims, adherents of Islam, abide by the Quran and the Sunna-traditions of Prophet Muhammad-both written in the Arabic script. Thus, Islam is a supranational religion-meaning a religion that transcends borders through missionary activities and religious propagation. Islam has been described as “the misunderstood religion” by the West despite being closest in proximity. It is nearer to the West ideologically and geographically. Previously, the West referred to Islam as “Mohammedanism”-a connotation that caused a chorus of disapproval among Muslims who believe that Muhammad was a mouthpiece of Allah, a warner, and a teacher who was sent to deliver a message from the Almighty Allah who is the Creator, Cherisher, and Sustainer of the Heavens and the Earth.
Muslims worship Allah who has no gender, no partner, no associate or helper in His affairs, and who is established on the “Throne of Authority” known as “Arsh” and reclines on a “Kursi” or seat. Islamic belief is centered on the principle of believe in Allah, the angels, the revealed books, the prophets, and the existence of the Day of Judgment.
Muslims believe Adam was the first prophet and the first man created by Allah. He was then followed by a succession of prophets including Abraham, Ishmael, Isaac, Noah, David, Solomon, Jonah, Zachariah, Moses, Jesus, and many others without making any distinction between them with Muhammad being the last of the prophets or “the Seal of the Prophets.” Muhammad (peace and blessings be upon him) was born in Mecca in 570 C.E. in the “Year of the Elephant” at a time when Arabia was embroiled in antagonism, brigandage, male chauvinism, idol worship, nihilism, gambling and addiction to alcohol. In this period of time known as “Ayamul Jahiliya” in Arabic which translates to “the Era of Ignorance”, there was the absence of law and order and girls were buried alive. It fell in an era when the Kaaba housed 360 idols (one for every day of the lunar year) worshiped by the tribes of Arabia; it was a period of turmoil and paganism and fire worshiping was widespread in the surrounding sphere of influences ruled by ruthless emperors and dangerous feudal warlords.
This year was named the “Year of the Elephant” because, the Viceroy of the Abyssinian Negus in Yemen, Abraha Al- Ashram, incensed by the presence of the Kaaba and its veneration by the Arabian tribes, embarked on a sacrilegious war assisted by thirteen elephants. Earlier, Abraha constructed a colossal temple in Yemen to serve as a substitute of the Kaaba after its total obliteration by his army. Abraha left his power base in Yemen heavily armed with the intention of bringing the forces of Arabia under his supreme command. Consequently, Abraha’s ill-fated show aggression ended in a debacle as divine punishment befell the warring army when a flock of birds known as “Ababeel” rained flaming brimstones that totally annihilated them with the exception of an elephant known as “Mahmud” who disobeyed the command of demolishing the Kaaba. Abraha and his army perished in the surroundings of the Kaaba without fulfilling their distorted designs and outlandish prophesy.
Muhammad was a posthumous child as he never saw his father. While in the care of Halima, an Arab woman who cared for him in his early years, a strange incident happened when an angel split his chest open, removed his heart, washed it in Zamzam (water well near the Kaaba) water and then replaced it. This incident signified the purification of his heart and the removal of all evil. After this incident, Muhammad was returned to his mother, Amina, who then died when he was six and his grandfather, when he was eight. After all these childhood agonies, Muhammad was nurtured by his powerful protector, erudite, and brave uncle Abu Talib. At the age of twenty five, Muhammad married Khadija, a woman with extraordinary business aptitude, veracity, and nobility and who was forty years old at that time. At that time, caravans of merchants traversed the Arabian Peninsula to as far as Syria creating heavy routes between the major cities and the well fortified domains of the Persian and Byzantine Empires, bringing in assortment of goods that proliferated the Arabian markets with food, clothing, and other necessities that boosted tribal demagoguery and hegemony over the less fortunate in the land of the Arabs swollen with pride.
With rampant incredulity in the social fabric of that time, the termination of religious belief due to general human disobedience, and dissatisfaction with the spiritual guidance that existed and the dissipation of adherence to morality, there was need for heavenly intervention. A glimmer of hope started enveloping over Arabia when Muhammad, who was regarded as “The Highly Praised”, “The True”, “The Upright”, and “The Trustworthy One”, progressed into meditation and solitude in a well known cave within Mount Hira in the vicinity of Mecca. Therefore, on the first Night of Power (Leilatul Qadr), when Muhammad had attained age forty, Archangel Gabriel instructed him to: “Proclaim!” and he responded by saying:” I am not a proclaimer.” Thereupon the Angel pressed him harder and harder every time the prophet failed to proclaim until the third time when he was instructed to:
“Proclaim in the name of the Lord who created!
Created man from a clot of blood.
Proclaim: Your Lord is the most Generous,
Who teaches by the pen;
Teaches man what he knew not.” (Qur’an 96:1-3)
It was Khadija, his lovely wife, who turned out to be the first to embrace Muhammad’s teachings as she turned all his burdens into light. Thus, began a chain of revelations that led to the completion of the Qur’an in a period spanning twenty three years in an atmosphere of ridicule, pinpricks of laughter, petty insults and hoots of mockery. Muhammad preached equality of races before the Lord, led an administration that was a blend of justice and mercy, and created a superb statecraft that united a five heterogeneous society, in the City of Medina-three of which were Jews, into a solid and organized confederacy. In 622, Muhammad, preceded by an entourage of migrants, settled in Yathrib, also known as Medinat-al-Nabi (City of the Prophet) later changing name simply to Medina, “the city.” However, as was established by the Lord, Muhammad departed the world in A.D.632 (10 A.H. after the Hijra) with almost all of Arabia under his command.
The ensuing years saw the expansion of Islam under the rightly-guided Caliphs: Abu-Bakr, Omar, Othman, and Ali. Driven by religious passion and absolute heroism in the battleground, the Islamic Caliphate finally reached Palestine, Armenia, Persia, Syria, Iraq, North Africa, and Spain finally crossing into the Pyrenees in France. The Battle of Tours under Charles Martel in 1733 halted the penetration of Muslim forces to their desired destinations otherwise the entire West would have been under Islamic rule today.
The Five Pillars of Islam
For one to be part of the Islamic community it is a requirement upon the sane and the able-bodied, male and female, to declare with honesty and assurance, the ‘creed’ or ‘shahada’ (profession of faith)- which is the fundamental obligation before one can be called a Muslim. “There is no god but Allah and Muhammad is His Messenger” is the first testimony of faith.
The second pillar of Islam is ‘Salat’ or Prayer which requires a continuous observation of the five daily obligatory prayers that fall under the basic requirements. These daily prayers are to be strictly observed at certain timings of the day in congregations inside of a mosque or in solitude at home or at work during the hours of dawn, at noon, in mid-afternoon, at sundown and at night. Regardless of where one is located in the world, these prayers are compulsory until death. All Muslims turn their faces toward the Kaaba in Mecca whether performing obligatory or supererogatory prayers. Also, the faces of the dead must be directed toward Mecca at burial. It has been proven beyond reasonable doubt that prayers inculcate compassion and honesty, guard mental and body health, increase cleanliness and hygienic adherence, and deter evil inclinations.
The third pillar of Islam is alms giving also known as Zakat and it is a form of social interdependence where the wealthy give a share of their wealth to the needy so as to eliminate poverty, destitution, and other factors that may be an obstacle to the welfare of the Muslim community and the world at large. A financially able Muslim is required to give away 2.5% of his/her wealth in charity every year in the month of Zakat. Also, Muslims are encouraged to contribute or donate to mosques, charity organizations, to the wayfarers, the orphans, and to the insolvent on a continuous basis. There are several verses in the Quran that exhort Muslims to donate as this act carries a great reward before Allah. Thus, ‘Zakat’ equally applies to the ruler of the state and the income generating able-bodied laborer regardless of age, gender, national origin, or race.
The fourth pillar of Islam is to fast (Sawm) thirty days in the month of Ramadan. This is the month the Holy Quran was revealed to Prophet Muhammad by Allah. In this month, Muslims abstain from food, drinks, smoking, vulgar language, and sexual intercourse with partners during daytime. It begins at dawn and runs up to sunset when Muslims break their fast with dates, water, and other available edible foods.
The fifth pillar of Islam calls for financially able Muslims to perform the once-in-a-lifetime ‘Hajj’ or pilgrimage to Mecca. This act is a continuation of the tradition of Prophet Abraham. Muslims from all walks of life converge on to Mecca and then onto Medina in Saudi Arabia to give thanks to the creator and Sustainer of the universe and also to show gratitude and acknowledge His Oneness. The Hajj is considered the largest social gathering according to universal consensus.
Compassion and Social Justice.
Besides the five pillars of Islam, Muslims have other obligations to Allah and to humankind. Compassion and social justice is outlined in a system of laws known as ‘Shariah’ which requires the wealthy to donate generously to the poor so that no stomach sleeps hungry.
The most misunderstood concept about Islam is the term ‘Jihad’ which has caused great uproar in the world. It generally means a rigorous fight against all sorts of discrimination. The first and foremost requirement of a Muslim is to wage war against one’s own prejudice, transgression, and constraint before looking at the social evils that bedevil others. Listening to the kind words of those endowed with knowledge as they rehearse and interpret the authentic verses of the Holy Quran will best alleviate the wrong misconceptions about Islamic monotheism.
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} | 1,005 | ummah of muhammad - An Overview
In Muhammad's previous years in Mecca, a delegation from Medina from its twelve essential clans invited him to be a neutral outsider to Medina to serve as the Main arbitrator for the entire Local community.[9][ten] There were fighting in Medina involving mostly its pagan and Jewish inhabitants for approximately 100 decades right before 620. The recurring slaughters and disagreements about the ensuing claims, In particular after the Struggle of Bu'ath where all the clans were concerned, produced it apparent to them which the tribal conceptions of blood feud and an eye fixed for an eye were no more workable Except there was just one person With all the authority to adjudicate in disputed situations.
Zoroastrianism, the ancient pre-Islamic religion of Iran that survives there in isolated locations and, far more…
Listed here in these valuable files, it is possible to glimpse the authentic beginnings of a movement that might thrive, in hardly twenty years, in prostrating equally the Roman along with the Persian Empires".[22] Importance of ummah[edit]
For the final thirteen hundreds of years Muslims were being the superpower of the planet. Khilafat-e-Uthmania (Ottoman Empire) was a thorn from the eyes of anti Islam forces. They wanted to destroy this Islamic Empire at any Expense. They were being making an attempt for the final thirteen hundreds of years to damage it but didn't triumph. These forces noticed the change in concentrate of Muslim scholars and took comprehensive advantage of it. They planted an exceedingly risky seed of nationalism amid Muslims. Muslims started out battling in opposition to their own personal Muslim brothers due to the fact either they were not from the exact location or they have been Talking a special language. When the Muslim superpower, Ottoman empire (Khilafat-e-Uthmania) was fighting against the eu colonial powers, the English, the Dutch, the French, the Italians, and so on.. at the same time they'd to defend on their own from their unique Muslim brothers for the reason that Ottoman forces have been TURKS and were not local. To generate Despise for TURKS the nearby so known as scholars of Islam utilized faith in an effort to get support from all neighborhood Muslims.
, rid the shrine of its pagan idols, recognized the Meccans conversion to Islam, and absorbed them into his new polity. By the point Muhammad died in 632 CE, quite a few tribes and clans of your Arabian Peninsula had either been incorporated into the growing ummah
Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahab Established a new sect in Islam named Wahabism. The ideology of Wahabism was centered on the beliefs of Khwarij. Basically, the Wahabism was a revival of Khwarjism. Two extremely important factors performed important part during the success of Wahabism. 1st, the Makkah and Madinah equally metropolitan areas ended up in the Charge of Wahabi Imams who employed The 2 holy mosques to distribute their ideology on around the globe foundation. They preached on the pilgrims as well as guests of these two holy towns. Muslims who did not know that the Wahabism is a product with the destruction of Ottoman Empire think about the Imams of both of these holy mosques as sacred people and adopted whatever they preached. On the flip side the prosperity of oil while in the Arabian Peninsula brought work alternatives for around the world Muslims and non-Muslims. When Muslims went to work within the location they considered that the entire inhabitants in the Holy Land are true followers of Islam.
) transpired was selected the initial calendar year of your Islamic lunar calendar. It ummah of prophet muhammad marks the founding in the ummah
*e" that has !een considered as the pioneer for people which include +andhi" saysG EThe fantastic Islam's Prophet is deserved to !eing revered and honored. *is faith will pervade the entire world as a result of its arrangement Using the knowledge and intellect.Washington Irving" the merican consul in ;suffering and author states that Eall 2ur'an's verses are ,rm and brimming with material. ;o there is no consoling document availa!le. HarlMar:" initially a +erman politician" philosopher and a revolutionary character" in 68th century right after being familiar with the Prophet's identity deeply e:pressesGEMuhammad was the man who rose with the iron will amongst individuals that worship idles. *e invited them to monotheism and plant the immortality of psych of their souls. ;o don't just he should !
But when a person can take the term during the broader sense, it may additionally signify that all the individuals on whom Prophet Mohamed (saws) was sent as being the Messenger of Allah will be the Ummah of Mohamed (saws); whether they considered in him or not.
This ihram comprised of two unstitched white sheets. The Prophet then led the way recited the Talbiyah for Hajj, which was recurring by all his followers.
This website is for people today of varied faiths who seek to comprehend Islam and Muslims. It includes a great deal of transient, however instructive posts about different components of Islam. New content are included just about every week. Also, it options Are living Support by means of chat.
There has come to you a messenger from amongst you, he finds it difficult to bear your hardships. He is at any time keen in your case also to the believers He's type and merciful. Quran [9:128]
The battle concerning HAQ (ideal) and BAATIL (Improper) has usually been Section of human history. Started off from Hadhrat Adam (May perhaps Allah’s peace be on him) this struggle remains happening. The forces of evil have never accepted the reality of Islam and they've usually applied their wicked tips on how to destroy this Reality (HAQ).
How can this be an indication of advancement? When the animals in the jungle are ashamed to dedicate the things they do as well as the bare individuals in Africa and its forests truly feel too humiliated. If nakedness was an proof of progression, then the bare people today of the African jungle could be the most advanced!
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} | 2,039 | I tried to get the difference from different sources but couldn't get the correct answer.
I want to know: What is the difference between Shia and Sunni Islam?
• 3
Hi! Welcome to Islam.SE. There's some articles online, e.g. TheEconomist and About.com, which may be useful. Are you able to elaborate on what you know? This would give an answerer a starting point for answering the question. – Rebecca J. Stones Feb 1 '17 at 12:14
There are different ways of approaching this question and in every case much can be said about the differences between the Sunnis and Shias. Standard answers usually start by highlight the difference over who must've succeeded the Prophet, Abu Bakr or Ali ibn Abi Talib and finish by naming some key differences in rituals. But below are some qualitative elaborations that you could see as coming from a Shia perspective.
Shias believe that for Islam to have been preserved authentically and implemented properly until realization of the promise of a universal Utopian Islamic society, the Ummah (the Islamic community) must have had continued to be ruled by Divine saints after the passing of Prophet of Islam. So it was imperative for a wise God to appoint a successor to the Prophet on the same basis that He inspired the Prophet in the first place. Sunnis don't recognize this necessity for the Divine appointment of the successor and believe that the fallible Ummah knew better how to rule itself thereafter because the Book of Allah and the Sunnah (that is the collection of sayings and guidelines) of the Prophet as established during his lifetime were sufficient guides. Umar, the companion who brokered and supported Abu Bakr's caliphate after the passing of the Holy Prophet, apparently invoked the same idea when he declined Prophet's request on his deathbed for writing a spiritual will by saying that "Allah's book is sufficient for us."
Shias to the contrary argue that, first, the ideas and incidents pertaining to the doctrine of Divine succession are mentioned in the Quran itself. Secondly, when Quran is the central guide for Muslims, it can be interpreted in many ways and it contains profound truths that are not evident to average and fallible Muslims. Hence the need for God-supported saints, who Shias identify with Imams of the "Ahl al-Bayt" (People of the House of the Prophet) starting from Ali ibn abi Talib, who carry on the theoretical and practical elaboration of Divine truths for Muslims after passing of the Holy Prophet.
But in absence of this infallible interpretative and leadership function after the Prophet, Muslims left to their own devices could fall into all sorts of wrong beliefs and mistakes while thinking that they are following the Quran and the Sunnah.
For Shia, the political and later theological disputes that befell the Islamic Ummah after the passing of the Prophet is a testimony to importance of rightful succession as decreed by Allah and the Prophet.
An example of this wisdom finds a rhetorical expression in the Battle of Seffin when Ali and his army of average Muslims had to fight against a rebellious cunning governor, named Muawiya -- who claimed to be fighting Ali on a just Islamic cause. Muawiya when saw himself almost defeated resorted to a deceptive scheme. He ordered his army to raise the copies of Quran on their spears in order to undermine the faith of Ali's soldiers who then saw themselves fighting against an army that symbolically associated itself with paper copies of the Quran. The Ali's army ultimately wavered despite Ali's urge to continue the war when he cried "I'm the talking Quran!" implying that the army of Muawiya were only associating themselves with some inked papers when violating its content and spirit, whereas Ali was the one who was acting and speaking according to the true spirit of the Holy Scripture.
Sunnis however tend to view this and other wars that erupted between the former companions of the Prophet as having been just honest mistakes; that the warring Sahaba didn't harbor any mischief but only acted according to their own interpretation of Islam! But Shias argue that the very idea that companions of the Prophet may have meant good but acted so evil is itself a testimony to the necessity of infallible authority after the Holy Prophet for genuine commitment to Islam.
Later on Ali also had to fight another righteous-looking army in the Battle of Nahrawan: the so-called Khawarij, a group of "puritanical" Muslims who could recite the entire Quran from the heart and had their foreheads' skin darkened as a result of long prostrations during worship, declared aggressive war on anyone who they viewed as having deviated from Islam. Most Khawarij used to be in Ali's army during the Siffin and the same people who forced Ali into ceasefire and peace treaty with Muawiya but had now "repented" after seeing Muawiyah for his true colors. But to make up for this grave mistake they now declared war on both Muawiyah and Ali by arguing that "there is no rule except for Allah" citing a Quranic verse in support of an anarchic state, rejecting the idea of caliphate altogether. To this another recurring resort to Quranic legitimacy, Ali's response was: "That's a true word, but meant wrongly. Rule (that is institution of law) is only for Allah but they are taking "rule" as "government" meaning that there's no government except by Allah. But governance is inevitable for the Ummah be it righteous or unrighteous" explaining how anarchy is impossible.
Ultimately, Shias believe that Imams of the Ahl al-Bayt in contrast to other fallible Muslims, embodied the qualities of a perfect man. They were perfect in wisdom, faith, courage, compassion as they all had been raised by a perfect man in a pure household, starting from Ali ibn Abi Talib, who was raised from childhood under Prophet's oversight and fully inherited Prophet's Divine knowledge, to the next Imams who were all born to and raised by an infallible saint inheriting the accumulated knowledge and virtues of the Prophet and the intervening Imams.
But Shias believe that the Imams of the Ahl al-Bayt were not received positively by the community from the beginning. As a result of jealousy or ignorance or both, their unique virtues were denied and their status was ignored. This was partly due the original introduction of Islam into an uncivilized pagan society many of its influential members resisted Islam until they had the means to fight it. In the Quran, verses that rebuke Muslims for their hypocrisy, fear and wavering support for the Prophet are ample, whereas the traditions that Shia consider to be authentic paint Ali as a specially revered, unwavering and consistent comrade of the Prophet from the beginning of his ministry to the last. This unique personality they think invoked the jealousy and dissatisfaction of many of the "companions" of the Prophet including even some of his wives. They tended to view Prophet's special respect for the young Ali and appointing him as his successor as influenced by some sort of a tribal preference on the part of the Prophet. Indeed even in his last days Prophet had stressful times when he wanted to publicly declare Ali as his successor on his return from the Last Pilgrimage. But Allah, according to Shia narrative of the incident at Ghadir Khumm, ensured the Prophet protection from his malicious companions.
But despite the declaration at Ghadir, the fears of the Prophet ultimately came true when the succession of Ali was not realized as a result of the schemes of some of his companions. Ultimately Ali like many other notable companions was forced into a belated admission of the outcome of the Saqifa assembly which declared Abu Bakr as the caliph. During the coming years, Ali had to endure a lot of pain and sadness not just for injustices committed against himself and his family due to his resistance against the de facto caliph but more importantly at the grave deviation that affected the Ummah of the Last Prophet. In a moving sermon during his belated halfhearted caliphcy 25 years after the passing of the Prophet, he described his conditions during the years as "that of a man who had a stick in the eye and a bone fragment in the throat" witnessing the injustices of the time.
Shias believe that the marginalization of the Imams of the Ahl al-Bayt as true perfect representatives of Islam culminated in the Battle of Karbala, where Ali's grandson Hussein and his small band of family and companions were slaughtered by the Yazdi's army after rejecting his illegitimate tyrannical rule. Hussein's heroic sacrifice is credited for having spelled the doom of the Ummayad dynasty by exposing their savage character to the Muslim Ummah and for only partially rehabilitating true Islam from their grave deviations. But except for the short transitional period between the Umayyad and Abbasid dynasties, the political atmosphere continued to be tough and repressive towards Imams of the Ahl Al-Bayt and their Shias (i.e. supporters) until Allah had to order the last Imam, Hujjat ibn al-Hassan, al-Mahdi, into a long occultation to be protected until his return in the End Time for the restoration of a promised global Utopian society of virtue on Earth. This is in contrast to Sunnis who don't identify any particular person with the Promised Mahdi that is foretold in their own sources. Shias also hold that during the period of occultation of the Promised Mahdi, the task of leading the community of believers is assumed via proxy by their religious scholars.
Finally Shias consider their Imams to posses knowledge of esoteric aspects of faith (as reflected in unique themes of their particular hadiths books), to have supernatural abilities, to receive a particular form of Divine inspiration distinct from Prophet revelation, to have the power of intercession, and to both directly and indirectly guide their faithful followers to face the tough challenges of the period of occultation. But many Sunnis especially the Wahhabis tend to view these beliefs to be heretical. However many Sunnis also tend to show reverence for the Imams of Ahl al-Bayt due to their recognition of historical evidences that point to their remarkable knowledge and piety in their times as well as shared Prophetic hadiths that urge respect for his family members. However they don't regard them as having any central religious authority and status as do the Shias.
• 1
Comments for downvotes appreciated! – infatuated Feb 1 '17 at 18:35
• 1
Nice answer @infatuated. You have a great knowledge in history. – Santanu Debnath Sep 28 '17 at 11:17
All the Muslims agree that Allah is One, Muhammad (SAW) is His last Prophet, the Qur’an is His last Book for mankind, and that one day
The second issue has root into the first one. The Shi’a bound themselves to refer to Ahlul-Bayt for deriving the Sunnah of Prophet (S). They do this in conformity with the order of the Prophet reported in the authentic Sunni and Shi’i collections of traditions beside what the Qur’an attests to their perfect purity.
Ammar Ibn Yasir, Miqdad, Abdurrahman Ibn Owf were among those who were not consulted nor even informed of. Even Umar confessed to the fact that the election of Abu Bakr was without consultation of Muslims. (See sahih al-Bukhari, Arabic-English, Tradition 8.817)
Source for further reading
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We no longer maintain this blog. Please visit for new articles
Why I am not a Salafi
I received an anonymous question on our Islamic Art and Quotes tumblr asking if I am a Salafi Muslim. The answer is: No I am not. Those of them who fear Allah and the last day and always strive to do good are my beloved friends.
I believe that Islam is bigger than Salafism, Sufism, and any other sect or group. The goal of Islam is Allah, and there are many roads to Him SWT.
I don't belong to any group. I call myself Orthodox, meaning that I follow the Quran and the Sunnah, but I don't have any historical allegiances and don't care about the historical rivalries between the various groups.
I am with everyone who loves and fears Allah and works for the Hereafter. My biggest mentors are the prophets, peace be upon them, and I identify most with them, since the Quran is my main source of guidance. Islam is even bigger than the Islam that Prophet Muhammad, may the peace and blessings of Allah be upon him, brought to us. Islam encompasses all true religion. The Quran, for example, calls Prophet Lut and his family "Muslims".
The various groups and sects are tools that the sincere Muslim can use to get closer to Allah. The goal is Allah. Sectarianism distracts from Allah.
Indeed, those who have divided their religion and become sects - you are not [associated] with them in anything. Their affair is only [left] to Allah ; then He will inform them about what they used to do. [Quran 6:159]
Most sects were created with good intentions. To get closer to Allah. To get closer to true Islam and revive the religion among people. But...good intentions don't guarantee good results. Once you have created a clearly defined group with "us" and "them", all inside the same religion, you have immediately created division and sectarianism.
I love and respect people belonging to various sects and ideologies, sometimes opposing one another. A sincere believer can find the right path regardless of where he comes from and what group he was born into.
Thus, for example, I love and respect all of these people, though often I may disagree with some of them: al-Hasan al-Basri and the rest of the early Salaf; Ibn Taymiyyah; Ibn al-Qayyim; ibn al-Jawzi; Abu Hanifah; Imam Malik; Imam ash-Shafi`i; Imam Abu Hamed al-Ghazali; Rumi; the Azhari sheikhs Yusuf al-Qaradhawi, Muhammad al-Ghazali, and Ahmad Mustafa al-Maraghi; Imam Muhammad Abduh and his students; Imam Sa`eed an-Nursi (from Turkey) and his students; Imam Hasan al-Banna and his students; Sayyid Qutb; Muhammad Qutb; Dr. Ali Shari`ati (from Iran and Shiite, but doesn't hold any of the popular Shiite beliefs that Sunnis dislike), Dr. Nasir Subhani; Ibn al-Uthaymeen, Muhammad Salih al-Munajjid, Yasmin Mogahed; Tariq Ramadan; Yasir Qadhi.
What also separates me from Salafism is that I believe the goal of the Sunnah is the Quran, and the goal of the Quran is Allah. The Sunnah is not a goal in itself. The Sunnah is meant to create a fertile environment in which the seeds of the Quran can grow. The Quran is the goal, and arguing and bickering over the Sunnah when ignoring the Quran is completely against everything the Sunnah is for. To me having or not having a beard, for example, is the very least of a Muslim's concerns. Fear Allah and the last day, and do good deeds, this is our concern.
Islam is a matter of the heart. The sects invariably move attention away from the heart to appearances and judging people, is he or she for us or against us?
If a person reads the Quran often, fears Allah and the last day, and always strives to do good, then what right do I have to judge him for belonging or not belonging to a particular sect?
This is not to say that I hold Utopian ideas like love is all we need and regardless of what you do if your heart is good then you're fine. I am not Sufi because it focuses only on particular attributes of Allah and ignores others, to create a beautiful version of Islam, filled with love and kindness, but extremely prone to creating human beings who do not fear Allah the way He deserves to be feared, and who, focusing only on Allah's mercy, forget that His punishment is severe and that they will be judged.
Salafism, on the other hand, is prone to making one forget that Allah is the most kind and most forgiving, and to making one focus only on His punishments and making Allah appear as a hardhearted and exacting micro-manager. It also often demands inhuman amounts of strength and willpower from the person, which can cause desperation and hopelessness. The prophets mentioned in the Quran are a lot more human than the ideal that Salafism seems to ask of us. They cared about the dunya and prayed for it (Prophet Ibrahim and Zakaria praying for children, Yaqub being attached to the love of his son and going blind in crying so often for him, Sulaiman asking to be a king). Many Salafis would look down on you if you show such behaviors, behaviors that the prophets showed. Prophet Ibrahim asked Allah to make Makkah a prosperous city. Some Salafis would say you should be too worried about the Hereafter to care about worldly things. But Prophet Ibrahim cared. And Prophet Muhammad, may the peace and blessings of All be upon him, cared so much about the worldly life that his ardent prayers for winning the battle of Badr (a worldly goal) are famous. And when his son or wife died he cried.
Islam doesn't ask us to be automatons worshiping Allah and caring nothing for anything else. Islam tells us to enjoy life's blessings, and strive for both the worldly life and the Hereafter. Islam asks us to unite dream and day (the Hereafter and the worldly life), not to throw away the worldly life.
For this reason to me the Quranic prophets, in their humanity and weakness, are better guided than many of today's Salafis.
True Islam is larger than any sect or group and the smart Muslim will use the good and useful from every sect to get closer to Allah. Salafi literature reminds me not to get lazy in worship, and Sufi literature reminds me, when I fail, not to forget that Allah is most kind and forgiving.
Allah has 99 attributes, many of them seemingly contradictory, and any sect that focuses only on some of His attributes and ignores others is likely to create an inaccurate version of Islam. These sects often work for some people and do a lot of good, but pure Islam itself is better; devoted to serving Allah, focusing on the Quran, too concerned with Allah's judgment to judge others, not hung up on appearances, not concerned with differences but with similarities with others, sincere, forgiving, and non-exclusionary. | http://www.quranclub.net/2013/04/why-i-am-not-salafi.html | robots: classic
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} | 158 | Q: What is the position of Zakat in respect to Islam?
A: Zakat is the third pillar of Islam.
This is understood from the prophetic tradition narrated by ‘Abdullah ‘ibn ‘Umar ibn Al-Khattab (may Allah be pleased with them) who said: I heard the Messenger of Allah (Allah’s blessings and salutations be upon him) say:
“Islam has been built on five [pillars]: testifying that there is no god but Allah and that Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah, performing the prayers, paying Zakat, making pilgrimage to the House, and fasting in Ramadan.” (Sahih al-Bukhari & Sahih Muslim)
These pillars are the foundation of Islam; without the presence of these pillars, Islam is non-existent at a macro and micro level. Thus, Zakat plays a huge role in establishing Islam in the lives of individuals and the community, by resourcing them in such a way that barriers to ongoing faithfulness at both an individual and collective level are reduced or removed altogether.
And Allah knows best!
Mufti Faraz Adam | https://help.nzf.org.uk/en/article/what-is-the-position-of-zakat-in-respect-to-islam-ikjou1/ | isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2019-47
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Prophet Muhammad
Shuroot As Salat (Conditions Of Prayer)
Conditions are the prerequisites of the salaah, they are outside the salaah. There are nine conditions to prayer and they are :
Five Pillars Of Islam
Islam is built upon five pillars. These are the foundations of the Religion.
Tawheed (Oneness Of Allah)
There are various sects that when asked about tawheed they say they believe in it and that they do not do shirk with Allah. This may sound good but their understand is greatly lacking knowledge and understanding. | http://www.salafipedia.com/ | isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2019-30
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With the advent of technology and leading to shortages of time and other resources, religion is becoming less of something very important. Where ISLAM is not just any religion as it is the best to follow among all the existing and The Holy Book “Quran” is the divine source of guidance
For the entire mankind and this is where you are advised that do not ignore such a revelation by True God, Allah (SWT) and there is no doubt that Quran provides the very minute details for you to understand and make the best out of your understanding whether its science or Shariah law
In the Quran chapter 2:38, it is stated as such: 'We said: Get ye down all from here; and if, as is sure, there comes to you guidance from Me, whosoever follows My guidance on them shall be no fear, nor shall they grieve' (2:38).
The plaintiff used the following ayahs from the Quran to argue that to convert from Islam to other religions is allowed in Islam: “Let there be no compulsion in religion” (Surah Al-Baqarah 2:256).
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Qur’an 9:123O you who believe! fight those of the unbelievers who are near to you and let them find in you hardness.
I don’t know how many of you really care to understand the implications of Islam’s desire to reign supreme over the whole of the World, but I can tell you that you should be concerned. However dry the discussions of religious scripture may seem to you, having a fundamental understanding of the differences between Islam and Christianity is now becoming very important—even if you claim to be atheist or agnostic.
Liberty and Christianity are nearly synonymous in that one is ‘free’ to accept God and the choice is your own without apparent consequence. Islam, on the other hand, is an Arabic word which means ‘submission.’ Islam is a theocracy—religion and law are one in the same and must be imposed; in other words, you do not have a choice and, if you do not submit, then you will likely be found guilty of blasphemy and can be put to death. Muslims claim that Islam reigns supreme to all other religions and they offer no exceptions, no alternative, no sympathy and no mercy.
I hope you find the time to give this matter the attention it deserves because, just like Progressivism, Islam installs itself incrementally. Those of you who have read my previous articles are aware that Sharia is Islamic law and I have explained that there simply is no way to install a theocratic agenda within the structure of our United States Constitution.
I have yet to hear any Muslim offer proof of Islam’s superior authority and or qualifications other than: “it is written in the Qur’an and therefore it is divine.” I think that is an awfully thin argument to make when the penalty for disagreement is death. Islam claims that Christianity has been corrupted and that Islam can be the only true religion, yet the roots of Christianity precede Islam by well over a millennium. We can trace the translations of the Gospel back through time, in multiple languages and find very few alterations to the Bible. This is documented historical fact, with documented archeological evidence that Muslims are want to destroy!
Finally, Islam proclaims the celebration of death, while Christianity celebrates fruits of life. If you are an atheist or agnostic, a Christian will pray for your enlightenment in hopes that you will open your heart to seek out a relationship with God. According to the Qur’an, it is the Muslim’s duty to kill you.
“Whoever changed his Islamic religion, then kill him.”
– Muhammad
Now, I understand that many Muslims would be unwilling to take another person’s life simply because they believe differently, but that is what the Qur’an directs them to do. Jihadists worldwide justify their violent actions against the nonbelievers on that authority as prescribed in the Qur’an.
Egypt: New constitution denies freedom of speech and equality of rights for women, omits ban on slavery
Here we have more tools for self-education of the issue. Excerpts from battle in the ‘arena of ideas’
Sami Zaatari vs. David Wood: Is Islam a Threat to Society?
Turkey’s President calls on West to “curb” criticism of Islam
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A Muslim professor discusses “moderate Muslims.”
His definition of this term should be read very carefully. Also notice that he includes the head of the Muslim Brotherhood in Europe, Tariq Ramadan, as one of this group.
China has its problems with jihad. And then there were the bus bombings.
A Muslim doctor on how to take over an American hospital and make it a Muslim one.
Dhimmitude at the Washington Post.
Debating About Islam
Once you know something about Islam and try to talk to others, you may find yourself in a debate. Here are some of the “standards”.
Everyone from Muslims to atheists uses this. The implication is that Arabic is a unique language that can’t be translated and therefore, how could you know what you are talking about? First, the Koran claims to be a universal message for all humanity for all times. If the message is universal, then it must be able to be understood by all. If the message cannot be understood by everybody, then by definition it is not universal. So, which is it?
Another thing to consider is that over half of the Koran is about Kafirs and politics. Do you really think that a political message about a Kafir cannot be understood by the Kafir? If so, what is that message that cannot be understood?
It must be made clear which Arabic is being spoken about. The Arabic of the Koran is classical Arabic which is about as similar to modern Arabic as the English of Chaucer and Beowulf is similar to modern English. Said in another way, not even a modern Arab can read classical Arabic. It is estimated that fewer than a thousand scholars who read classical Arabic can compose a paragraph on a random topic.
And what about the nearly billion Muslims who don’t even understand modern Arabic? If it is necessary to understand classical Arabic to understand what the Koran is about, then how can those billion non-Arabic-speaking Muslims understand the Koran? And if they cannot understand the Koran how can they be Muslims?
Ask the person who presents the argument if they have any opinions about the doctrine of Christianity. Then ask them if they read Hebrew, Aramaic or Biblical Greek? If they do not read those languages how can they form an opinion about something they have to read in translation? Of course they can read it and form an opinion, the same way we can read and understand the Koran.
A secondary question is why would anyone want to believe that the Koran couldn’t be understood? What is the purpose of believing that out of all the books in the world, why would there be one that cannot be translated?
The Koran is only 18% of the total doctrine. Would the questioner believe that the other 82% of the doctrine not be understood as well?
This response usually comes after some grim facts are given about Islam. This is probably the most common response from non-Christians. The best response is to ask if they have a reason that they don’t want to talk about Islam, since they want to change the subject. The average person knows next to nothing about Islam and sometimes this gambit is merely a way to steer the conversation into a familiar ground.
They are just trying to prove that Islam is not any worse than Christianity. At this point, welcome the chance to compare the two. Choose the ground of comparison. The best place to start is the founders. Compare Mohammed to Christ. The other good comparison is in ethics. Compare Islam’s dualistic ethics to unitary Golden Rule ethics.
Another version of this is that the person will compare some failed Christian to a “good” Muslim they know at work. It is fairly useless to do personal comparisons. How do you choose which Muslim out of 1.5 billion Muslims and which Christian do you choose out of a couple billion Christians?
A variation on the “Well, the Christians did …” is “What about the Crusades”? This is the time to say you welcome a comparison of the Crusades to jihad. Start with the question of why the Crusades were needed. Islāmic jihad caused the invasion of the Middle East. The Crusades were a response to a cry for help by the tortured and oppressed Christians in their native land. Did the Christians do some very wrong things? Yes, but notice that the Crusades have been over nearly a thousand years. Jihad is active today. And while we are at it, why do academic libraries have many books on the Crusades, which lasted only 200 years, and so few on jihad, which has lasted 1400 years? The West has analyzed the Crusades forever and has never analyzed jihad.
Why is the Muslim your friend knows the only Muslim out of 1.5 billion that makes him the expert on Islam? Remember, the average Muslim knows very little about the doctrine of Islam. Why? Because, historically the imams have acted as the high priests of Islam and they have never made the doctrine simple to understand. That is one way they keep their prestige and power.
But once you know something about the doctrine, you can say that you know also know a Muslim, and his name is Mohammed, and what you say comes from the Sunna. In short, your Muslim, Mohammed, can beat your friend’s Muslim on any issue of doctrine. If the Muslim your friend knows says something about Islam that agrees with Mohammed, then it is right. If what he says contradicts Mohammed, then he is wrong. So this Muslim your friend knows is either wrong or redundant, but never more right than Mohammed.
Probably so. What does that prove about Islam? He may follow the Golden Rule and not Islam. That is, he may be a poor Muslim and a good person.
Now is the time to explain about the Islam of Mecca and the Islam of Medina and which one is the more powerful. It is also time to explain about dualism and how Islam always has two faces.
Stay with doctrine and history of Islam, never get personal and talk about an individual Muslim. Actually, there is one way to talk about any Muslim, show how what they do and say follows the doctrine.
Besides, you know this Muslim and his name is Mohammed. Don’t talk about “Muslims,” talk about Mohammed.
If you are quoting the Koran or the Sunna, then it is the real Islam, by definition. The Koran and the Sunna are Islam, the real Islam. All other Islam, such as is found in the media, is the false Islam. There is only one real Islam, the doctrine of Islam.
This comes after you have revealed some horrific part of the doctrine. What do Muslims call themselves? The believers. What do they believe? The Koran and the Sunna. They say that is what they believe. Really believe.
This is a restating of, “I know this Muslim and he is good man.” He may be a poor Muslim and a good man who follows the Golden Rule.
But, the statement shows that there is no understanding of the duality of Islam. The Koran has both violence and tolerance against the Kafirs. Today in America the power of Islam is just getting started, so Islam is still weak. When Mohammed was weak in Mecca, he did not kill anybody. Islam is still in the first phase of jihad here.
But the Koran says that one Muslim can beat two Kafirs. It also says that Islam must be the dominant political system. So when Muslims reach a third of the population (that makes it 2 to 1), they will be in the full stage of Medina and violence becomes a standard operation. But even then, we know from the Sira, that many Muslims just don’t have the stomach for the violence. The Sira shows that Muslims can support jihad many ways, besides personal violence. The “peaceful” Muslim you know is commanded to give money to Islāmic charities and the charities give the money to the actual fighters.
Look at the violence in the Old Testament. It has two qualities—local and temporary. None of the violence is commanded to be global and eternal. In each case the violence is directed in a political struggle and when it was over it was over.
The violence in the Trilogy is for all Muslims, in all places and for all time. Jihad is to stop only when every kaffir submits. Look at Mohammed, the perfect example. He was involved with violence until the day he died. And on his deathbed he directed eternal violence against the Kafirs when he said in his last breath: “Let there be neither Christian or Jew left in Arabia.”
The Sira records that when Islam committed violence, it attracted new followers. As Osama bin Laden says: “People like a winning horse.” After 9/11 in the US, new followers joined Islam. Communism was a political system that preached, promised and delivered violence and it attracted many people. Many people love violence. Have you never paid any attention to Hollywood? Violence is piled upon violence and people line up to see it.
Islam is growing rapidly. but most of the growth can be attributed to high birth rates, not conversion. Islam’s growth in Kafir countries is due to immigration, not conversion.
Read Part Two!
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} | 951 | The cover of this week’s Time magazine is timely: “Is America Islamophobic?: What the anti-mosque uproar tells us about how the U.S. regards Muslims.”
On p. 24, the cover story explains why some Americans wrongly believe that Islam supports violence: “Since most terrorist attacks are conducted by Muslims and in the name of their faith, Islam must be a violent creed. Passages of the Koran taken out of context are brandished as evidence that Islam requires believers to kill or convert all others” (emphasis mine).
Taken out of context? The Koran does not tell a developing story, as does the Bible, but arranges its chapters by length, from larger to smaller. So unlike the Bible, where it is inappropriate to pull a verse from Leviticus to say that Christians shouldn’t eat Gulf coast shrimp (God gave us common sense for that), there is no such context in the Koran. How can you take something out of context that doesn’t have a context?
When it comes to violence in the Koran, the defining issue is not context but the Muslim reader. Radical Muslims read the Koran literally and come away thinking that Allah commands them to conquer the world. Liberal Muslims reinterpret these troubling passages to accommodate their religion to the modern age of rationality (see Peter Riddell and Peter Cotterell, Islam in Context, p. 182-94). I am a conservative, traditional Christian, so I am inclined to think that traditional Muslims are reading the Koran as it was intended to be read. I believe that they are more faithful Muslims, though I am more thankful for the liberals.
If the media wants to have a constructive dialogue, let’s talk about the difference between conservatives and liberals. But don’t pretend that the problem is that Christian conservatives “brandish” (there’s a scary word) verses that we have wrenched from some non-existent context.
Add yours →
1. Well put! I don’t get into this issue very much, but when you look at the countries governed by Sharia law and the thousands of acts of terrorism around the world every year done in the name of Islam, you start to get apprehensive that Islam is a peaceful religion. The Muslims who are peaceful are only peaceful because they are ignoring, re-interpreting, or misunderstanding the actual teachings of Islam. I believe the majority of Muslims are peaceful and I realize that only a fraction of Islam has been involved in taking people’s lives, but the religion itself is not a peaceful religion.
I think your last point about being a conservative, traditional Christian is interesting. I would imagine that there are a lot of people who are “more thankful for the liberals” in Christianity as well. I’m also conservative so I understand that not everyone appreciates my view that Jesus is the only way to a relationship with God. The difference is, I don’t strap on a bomb and take my own life and the life of others because of my beliefs. So, again I agree with you that the media just doesn’t get religion and need to reframe the dialogue. I don’t see it happening any time soon.
2. I have difficulty reconciling those “champions of women’s rights” who pose the question if America may be Islamophobic. As usual, it’s about votes and not conviction.
3. I actually wrote a long essay on Islam a while back that came to the conclusion that while Islam is not a religion of peace, it can be a peaceful religion. (found here:
Many of my friends lambasted me as intolerant and misunderstanding Islam. Of course, when I asked them to show how anything I said was historically wrong, I was simply met with more criticism.
Why do you think these traditionally liberal magazines who hate all things Christian bend over backwards for Muslims? They go out of their way to show that evangelical Christians are a threat (biggest threat posed by evangelical community? More corny bumper stickers), but then use the same amount of fervor to show that Islam isn’t violent. I don’t get it.
4. I bet if someone posted the entire Koran on the web with all of the controversial passages highlighted it would change the minds of many and they would see Islam for what it really is.
5. Thanks, Mike.
My concern in this is not so much as an American, but as a follower of Jesus, of God’s kingdom. How are we to approach this? And I mean in a way that can facilitate our mission to Muslims. I think while truth needs to be exposed, we need to do so as those seeking to live out the gospel we are called to proclaim. Which may mean something like loving our enemies, and wanting to avoid alienating them over their religion, while at the same time being open about our own faith.
On the context issue, I keep putting off reading a translation of the Qu’ran which I have. I need to do so. Though it differs from scripture, can we really say that we can’t read a passage out of context? Don’t we have each passage to the entire text? Or do they all really stand on their own. If so it would not seem one unified text, but maybe some disparate ones. (?)
Well, you’ve got me really wanting to read it now, with all the news and controversy. Not sure I’ll have much more of an opinion on this, though, when I’m finished.
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A pastor in Florida wants to celebrate the 9/11 anniversary of the Muslim attacks on the World Trade Centers by burning the Quran. Reactions to this have come in from all over the world, and the great majority of them condemn his plan. Why? Because they know of the violent reaction that Muslims will most likely produce. In all the articles I read about this, there was a faint appeal to what is "decent." But the main concern was Muslim retaliation. Think about this, when the US military burned Bibles belonging to American soldiers serving in Afghanistan, there was no outcry.1 Why is that? It is because the Bible teaches that Christians are to be peaceful whenever possible. But the Quran, on the other hand, teaches violence.
• The Qur'an tells Muslims to kill and go to war to fight for Islam: Surah 2:191; 2:193; 3:118; 4:75, 76; 5:33, 8:12; 8:65; 9:5; 9:73, 123; 33:60-62.
• Allah urges killing: " . . . the hypocrites and those in whose hearts is a disease and the agitators in the city do not desist . . . ... 61Cursed: wherever they are found they shall be seized and murdered, a (horrible) murdering. 62(Such has been) the course of Allah with respect to those who have gone before; and you shall not find any change in the course of Allah" (Quran 33:60-62).
• Allah loves those who fight for him. "Truly Allah loves those who fight in His Cause in battle array, as if they were a solid cemented structure" (Surah 61:4).
So, is the news media around the world concerned about burning the Quran based on morality, religious truth, and tolerance? Or is it because the world is very familiar with the violent nature of Islam? Consider these quotes:
1. "A spokesman for the Taliban in Afghanistan tells CNN: "If in Florida they were to burn the Quran, we will target any Christians, even if they are innocent, because the Quran is our holy book and we do not want someone to burn our holy book."2
2. Petraeus spoke Wednesday with Afghan President Karzai about the matter, according to a military spokesman Col. Erik Gunhus. "They both agreed that burning of a Quran would undermine our effort in Afghanistan, jeopardize the safety of coalition troopers and civilians," Gunhus said, and would "create problems for our Afghan partners . . . as it likely would be Afghan police and soldiers who would have to deal with any large demonstrations."3
3. It is the duty of Muslims to react," said Mohammad Mukhtar, a cleric and candidate for the Afghan parliament in the Sept. 18 election. "When their holy book Quran gets burned in public, then there is nothing left. If this happens, I think the first and most important reaction will be that wherever Americans are seen, they will be killed. No matter where they will be in the world they will be killed."4
Only time will tell to what extent the violence, if any, is perpetrated by Muslims upon Christians all over the world for something they have not done or of which they may even disapprove. But the Muslim threats before, and the unfortunate retaliations after the Quran burning, should be a very strong warning to all of us that at the heart of Islam is a violent, highly intolerant, bigoted5 religious system.
I must ask, will the Muslims in their Islamic countries decry the burning of the Bible when it happens? Of course not. If Muslims burned the Bible in Iran, Saudi Arabia, or any other Muslim dominated country, would Christians who happen to live there be safe in protesting? Hardly. The hypocrisy and incredible bigotry of the Islamic world is obvious to all who don't hide behind political correctness.
We do not want to see anyone injured. We believe that peace is a better way to persuade than violence. But we believe this because that is what the Bible teaches us, in particular the New Testament. This is why Muslims want Christian-based freedoms for them while they are in the United States. It makes it easier for them to exist, to spread Islam, and then when they are strong enough, to start making demands. But, would anyone expect those same Muslims to work for equal freedoms for Christians in their Muslim dominated societies? I for one would expect Hell to freeze over before such an event ever took place.
Is Islam a good religion? No, it is not. It seeks the domination of the world and the imposition of Sharia Law. It cannot stand in harmony with the United States Constitution, and it seeks to destroy all political and social systems not in agreement with Quranic principles.
I am not sure about the wisdom of burning the Quran. It is probably a bad idea given the volitale reactions we've seen from Muslims in the past who regularly threaten people with death for what they perceive are highly offensive actions. Still, I wholeheartedly agree with the right to express religious freedom.
Finally, there is at least one good thing resulting from this whole incident dealing with burning of the Quran. It is that more and more people are being made aware, yet again, of the violent and intolerant nature of Islam.
The pastor in Florida, Rev. Terry Jones, stated he would not burn the Quran. I think this was a wise move on his part not because he doesn't have the right to do so but because of the irrational Muslims everywhere who would kill innocent people, especially Christians, all over the world if Mr. Jones would have burned the Quran. Wake up! Muslims know they can use the sword and the threat of the sword to get their way. We peaceful people seek peace. The Muslims use this desire to push their agenda.
• 1. http://www.onenewsnow.com/Security/Default.aspx?id=516980
• 2. http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2010/09/09/quran-burning-reaction-pours-in-from-around-the-world/
• 3. http://www.newsmax.com/Headline/Quran-Burning-clinton-bloomberg/2010/09/08/id/369616
• 4. ibid.
• 5. Bigotry is "stubborn and complete intolerance of any creed, belief, or opinion that differs from one's own," (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/bigotry). | https://carm.org/burning-quran | robots: classic
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} | 825 | Drinking a cup of coffee and voicing an opinion, Quintessentially American
There are some things, which are mutually exclusive in their current state. A truth & a lie. A Christian & an Atheist. An American & an Obama supporter. IF you were to mutate the American, I suppose they could exist as an Obama supporter, however the principles of Socialism contradict the Rights enumerated in the Constitution, so there is no way a "loyal American" could ever support a "Socialist president", therefore it becomes an oxymoron.
Saturday, September 11, 2010
God Bless America, Rid Her of Islamic Fascist
Today, nine years ago, Americans learned the truth about Islam and Muslims. President Bush said they hated us because we were free.
He was wrong. They hate us because we are not Muslims and especially because we are Christians...for the most part.
As long as we remain not Muslims and as long as we remain Christian, we will be hated and terrorized.
A pastor of a small church recently stirred the global poop-pot by announcing he would burn the Qur'an on 9/11 as a statement. The Muslim world almost had a collective heart attack. I truly wish they had all had a physical heart attack.
The American military had to burn American bibles in Afghanistan for fear of reprisals from those Islamic bastards.
Now we can't exercise our 1st Amendment Right to freedom of expression, including protest in our own country because of these Islamic bastards of Satan, however, THEY can do whatever they want, wherever they want, because the whole world is scared of them and what will happen....yet the world allows Iran to build a nuclear weapon.
In 2007 "...Muslim gunmen used rocket-propeled grenades (RPGs) to blow through the doors of the church and school, before burning Bibles and destroying every cross they could get their hands on." -- Christians in Gaza Fear for Their Lives as Muslims Burn Bibles and Destroy Crosses and that is OK but Americans can't burn a Qur'an in their own country, in their own town?
The repeating chant of the Muslims worldwide to to kill all infidels, kill anyone not a Muslim.
"Islam does not differentiate between civilians and military (targets) but rather distinguishes between Muslims and infidels ..." -- 2005, Al Qaeda’s Zarqawi backs killing civilian ‘infidels’
Now given this outlook by the Islamic Bastards of Satan, do you REALLY believe any high ranking, self-respecting Muslim would ever state the desire to have an infidel as a leader or to say their holy prayers? Of course not! They behead infidels, not ask them to give the prayers, yet we are to believe that is exactly what has come to pass.
“The coming Eid would expectedly be observed on 9/11, this a golden opportunity for President Obama to offer Eid prayers at Ground Zero and become Amir-ul-Momineen or Caliph of Muslims. In this way, all the problems of Muslim World would be solved,” he thought.
Durrani argued that Muslim World was in “dire need” of a Caliph and the distinguished slot of Caliphate would earn President Obama the exemplary titles of what he termed, “Mullah Barrack Hussain Obama” or “Allama Obama.” -- Minister wants Obama to become Ameer-ul-Momineen
This, more than any thing else, should open the self-imposed blindness of the Obama supporters to see, there is a Muslim in the White House.
You say, "So what? America was founded on religious tolerance."
I say you are correct however, this religion as made it a holy dictate, a holy mission, it is ordained by that Qur'an we can't burn as false heretical propaganda, that Muslims are to convert non-believers (that would be you and I) and if they refuse, kill them. Period. End of story. No tolerance. No religious freedom. No America as we know it.
And we have a Muslim, who by definition believes this way. All one has to do is stop listening to his words and watch his actions to see the truth.
Even as early as Sept 11, 2009 many Americans could see the mistake voters had made by electing this person.
Faye Parrish wrote an detailed and very telling article titled An Open Letter to President Obama on the Occasion of 9/11 and while it is too long to copy here, her message is that the American people have noticed what he has and hasn't done. I can only imagine what she would add to it given Obama's support of Black Panthers against Republican voters and how he has treated Arizona.
No...on this day, Sept 11th, America remembers what Islam is all about, the families of those beheaded remember what Islam is all about and voters will remember what is happening in their country in Nov 2012.
1. Excellent well written piece my friend and on the nails, will be cross posting at www.dangersofallah.com Thanks, J.C.
2. Thats the stupidest shit I have ever read are you retarded that does not even make sense "Islamic bastards of satan"? You uneducated douchebag go get a hobby blogging is clearly not for you | http://overmycoffeecup.blogspot.com/2010/09/god-bless-america-rid-her-of-islamic.html | robots: classic
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1. ah the politics of fear... i missed it
2. I heard Al Qaeda is on Al Qaeda's own shit list.
It doesn't take a brain surgeon to figure out that when Canada sent in troops to Afganistan that it would become a target. Your own source carries a related article in how Canada is a "soft" target and why such is the case.
It has nothing to do with not having enough mosques, but if you're in a hurry to get a mosque on every street corner out there, please make sure they don't all look the same.
3. Maybe we can set up some Mosques in the backrooms of some our strip joints.
4. "ah the politics of fear... i missed it"
From Jihad Steve
So I guess speed limits and seatbelt laws are just "the politics of fear"
why do we need air traffic controllers? What are we... pussies?
5. If you fuckers would quit speaking Canadian.....
6. anonymous - I take it from your deep analysis of the politics of fear that it is impossible, in your mind, for the government to prey upon the fears of its citizens to accomplish its own political objectives?
And is making such a point akin to challenging "air traffic controllers"???
7. ""ah the politics of fear... i missed it"
From Jihad Steve
why do we need air traffic controllers? What are we... pussies? "
*LOL* Well done.
8. Bacon: I too am awaiting a Muslim protest against Musim violence. I won't hold my breath.
9. What is the reason that there are no Muslim protests against Muslim violence?
Do those Muslims that may have the ability to reason, maybe even have a conscience, fear the reprisals if they did protest. Or are there very few Muslims who are actually opposed to Islamic terrorism?
Fear of reprisals from a small and insignificant cabal of extremists hiding under rocks in Waziristan? That doesn't make any sense.
Muslims are opposed to terrorism; that much is true. Spreading Islam by the sword is not considered "terrorism," but rather an "opening" of the world to Islam; or futuhat.
Something BEAJ said in the body of the post really stuck out at me:
It may sound like a joke to us, but it's a reality to them. I've been reading a lot of Quranic commentary and Islamic jurisprudence as of late and one of the conceits I've come across is this: Muslims do not make war. Muslims are forced into war by the infidels' resistance to accept Islam.
The process of da 'wa is a peaceful one. You are invited to become a Muslim. It is your refusal to become a Muslim that forces the Muslims to war against you. Since the world's religion must be Islam and all its peoples must be Muslims, anyone who doesn't accept the call to Islam is considered a rebel.
So when BEAJ says they're upset at us because we haven't done everything to make Canada an Islamic polity, unfortunately, he is right. Islam cannot exist apart from its mission to convert the whole world; unless, of course, Muslims reject the pronouncements of Muhammad, the hadith and over 1400 years of jurisprudence. Good luck with that.
11. Selfishness, pure simple selfishness - that's why Muslims do not protest.
With all due respect - there have been demonstrations post 9/11, not very many, but there has been an outcry on their part. Muslims in North America and oh, hell, all over Europe are in a constant state of fear as well. Yeah, say what you want about well, if they'd just... They have more pressing issues, like keeping their jobs, fighting discrimination, and self defense.
12. Pimpette, you forgot about the pressing issues about cartoon protests.
13. No, Bacon, I didn't. I clearly stated that there have been demonstrations and outcry post 9/11. Me thinks I have it all covered - lol.
All kidding aside, did you have protesters in Canada. I don't remember there being any here in the states.
14. dt devereaux - please post the Quranic verses in which you are speaking of. I'm sure you have no problem explaining the time such verse was delivered through introductions to the verse at hand and the interpretation of the verse via footnotes, as you have been "studying" Quranic verses and I'm sure you have an authorized version of the Quran at hand.
Hear that? Easily assauging the West's Islamophobia by renouncing "terrorism" and proving that Islam does not inherently promote violence against non-Muslims is NOT a pressing issue for our so-called "moderate" Muslims. They'd rather spend their time fighting "discrimation" rather than showing a legitimately distrustful populance that grounds for such scrutiny are unwarranted. With groups like CAIR speaking for Muslims, I can't say that I'm convinced that this is a matter of priority as much as one of dissimulation.
With Muslims being catered to at every juncture--whether it's toilets in British prisons being altered so they don't face Mecca or police being prevented from conducting raids on Muslim suspects during prayer time; authorities in Australia making "cultural" execptions for domestic abuse cases involving Muslims; mandatory Islamic studies for students in some American public schools; a media and a government that bends over backward to remind us that Islam is a religion of peace; and our right to freedom of speech and a free press being being taken sacrificed to Muslim sensibilities I'm not sure what Muslims have to fear. They certainly have nothing to fear from a tiny minority of extremists, right? I guess they have more important things to do rather than turning in those suspicious fellows who live and pray along side of them.
Britain is still suffering from the scant information they've been able to piece together about London bomings. It looks like a large population of Muslims in Britain are either too frightened of boogeyman or they just have better things to do -- like fighting the dirty looks they get from not cooperating with the authorities who are trying to find more information about the individuals who slaughtered 50 of their fellow citizens. (But I guess they'd have to consider them "fellow citizens" instead of unclean infidels, wouldn't they?)
And as BEAJ pointed out, sending millions of people to the streets threatening to unleash new Holocausts against Europe and America is hardly a productive use of time; nor does it make them look like anything other than a hostile foreign element that has no problem imposing their will--and their laws--on everyone else, provided they have the numbers to do it and a sufficient number of spineless non-Muslims, fearing that their embassies and printing presses will be burned to the ground, let them.
16. Commentpimpette,
Suras 2, 9, and 48 come to mind as chapters which contain instructions for violence against the un-believers. You may also reference history which, from the time of Muhammad, through the first 450 years of unprovoked Islamic conquests after Muhammad’s death and the spread of Islamic influence, by the sword, across the Middle East, the West and the Indian subcontinent thereafter, is replete with ample documentation published by Muslim jurists and Caliphs as to the Quranic inspiration and justification of their deeds. If you’re not up to the scholarship, you needn’t look any further than pronouncements made by Islamic leaders, be they Khomeini, Sistani, Gaddafi, bin Laden or Zarqawi, which all reference the Quran, the hadith and the example of Muhammad as legitimizing their viewpoints, and moreover, their justification killing and subjugating non-Muslims. Unless they’re talking about a different Quran I’m not aware of. (What the hell makes you so damn arrogant as to tell these people that they’re interpreting their religion wrong?)
And no, I do not have any problem explaining the relevance the time in which these verses were written and how that applies to them today. First, however, I must point out that you first ask me to point out these verses which purport to incite violence against non-Muslims, then, as a safety, knowing I just might know what I’m talking about, seek to diffuse their meaning by implying they’re out of date or not applicable to today. Make up your mind. Which is it? This is like when an apologist claims that Islam is not inherently violent then, in the next breath, says that Christianity is violent too. Well, which is it?
As to your question, I’d refer you to Quranic verse 9:29 and Sayyid Qutb’s commentary on it; it specifically relates to the issue of whether or not such a verse is relevant to today. Oh, and Qutb is only one of the most influential Islamic thinkers of modern times; quite precise and the literalist and quite brilliant, I must admit (but I’m sure you know better than he.) Though the verse 9:29 was written at the outset of a particular campaign, the fact that the call to Islam is timeless necessarily means the pronouncements therein are likewise timeless. Islam cannot exist in perpetuity with any other religious system; and jihad is the means to establish Islam’s unequivocal superiority over the world. If Muslims do not strive to fulfill those commandments, the whole is Islam is false (now try telling 1.5 billion people they’re full of it.)
These are not my words. I’m not making this stuff up. What I have over you, however, is the humility and open-mindedness to admit that not everyone thinks the way that I do. There’s a wealth of information at your disposal and I suggest you start seeking the answers to these questions yourself rather than arrogantly dismissing other peoples’ assertions outright without ever having done any of this “studying” yourself; you who know more about Islam than the people who practice it; you who seem to profess a certain amnesia or willful ignorance not just of the history of Islam, but with how it is practiced today. Unless YOU can name me an Islamic country that isn't hostile to non-Muslims and that doesn't justify its complete depravity with the Quran, hadith and examples of Muhammad, you should be quiet.
17. D. T. Devareaux - your big mistake was talking to a bunch of atheists who could find the same crap in every other religious book.
There's nothing wrong with critisizing RELIGIONS, but when make it sound like most religions are fine, but this one really sucks, you sound like a bigot.
And frankly, Im tired of hearing how noble a thing it is to trash Islam.
And anyways, good fucking luck convincing all the worlds Muslims their religion is a terrorist religion. If your strategy to deal with Islam is to convince us that 1.5 bn people who follow Islam cannot coexist with us, then what the fuck are we supposed to do, nuke the Middle East, and commit the same atrocities against Arabs as was done against Jews? Is that your MASTER plan?
You sit here saying "Islam cannot exist in perpetuity with any other religious system" and then suggest that end of the day, anything but the utter destruction of Islamic society is what you'll be satisfied with.
I mean gosh, what OTHER solution is there but to kill all Muslims if you find them so detestable? They sure as hell won't conver to the Xianity, or Buddhism, even though that would make you real happy! You can feel some of the atheists some of the time, but you can't fool all of the atheists all of the time.
18. lol... you can feel atheists too... but I meant to say "fool"
19. d.t. devareaux - when's the last time you were nearly run off the road because someone took offense to the scarved child in your passenger seat? I'm sorry, but I remember level headed friends running out to buy guns after 9/11. I remember conversations with people in which I felt the need to call my muslim friends and beg them to be careful. I still to this day can not believe the rage some people feel towards muslims. Yes, they need to worry, kind of like the Jews needed to worry before the Holocaust happened - yes, even that started out with a hate campaign, my friend, I believe caricatures were of the earliest forms of that campaign.
why don't you just simply answer the question instead of arguing arguments that haven't come up yet? It sure took you a lot of words to not answer a question. Why? What's with the preemptive strike?
Sayyid Qutb's commentary???? You bring up a man who is known as a RADICAL?? A man who had once been a secular muslim that they suspect had turned to extremism after being jailed and tortured and watched many of his friends tortured. Yes, the man was once brilliant. His ideas were appealing to citizens of third world countries, geez, I wonder why. His views on government and his vision of a socialist Islamic eutopia I'm sure sounded wonderful to thier poor lives.
His COMMENTARY on the Quran is highly criticised. It is not even a Quran - it is his PERSONAL opinion/commentary on the matter.
Traditional and modern scholars shy away from his works and use different Qurans.
Yes - he is definately the father of Fundamentalist Islam, but now let's talk about how do we set these people straight and get them back to the Islam that once was in the not so long ago past - pre-1967.
Also, sweetie, what you have over me is nothing. You think you have humility and open-mindedness? All I did was ask you to quote the verse and provide the time frame in which the verse was conveyed and the footnotes from an AUTHORIZED version of the Q'uran. What your open mind brought to the table was the father of fundamental Islam. Thank you so very much for the open-mind. Beautiful.
Now, let's talk about humility. Anyone who has humility doesn't point out that they have humility. End point.
Unless I can name an Islamic country that isn't hostile to non-muslims, I should be quiet????? FUUUUUUUUUUUCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCKKKKKKKKKKKKKKK YOOOOOOOOOOOOOUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU!
How's that for quiet.
You couldn't even do what was requested of you in a polite manner.
20. Steve, I guess since we can't beat em, we might as well join em. Are you a full fledged Muslim yet?, if you aren't I'm sure you are thinking about going Cat Stevens very soon.
DT, excellent comments. Very insightful and right to the point. I get it, so do my intelligent readers here I'm sure.
I also think Pimpette wants you.
21. Bacon - as usual, your reason is beyond reproach. You may wish to enroll in a logic class, if you have the time. Your arguments have devolved into name calling and fallacious rebuttles of my arguments.
You haven't addressed my main point which is that if you see Islam as incompatible with the world, based on the Qur'an, what do you intend to do?
You can't have Islam without the Qur'an, and so what do we do? Kill them all? is that your master plan?
22. Steve, first point, you are intellectually dishonest. I asked one question 3 times, and you refused to answer. You cherry pick points, and you make retarded inferences and conclusions based on your Arab controlled mindset.
Now, I am not talking about genocide. Again, I say defense. Until they wake up and reform.
Why is it on the onus of those whose innocents get attacked to be the good guys and bend? You have the same attitude with Hamas and the Palestinians as you do about suicide bombers. You have no concept of reality. Points made are completely lost on you.
Zionist Jordan destroyed you on your blog with common sense. But as usual it goes Whoooooooooooosh, right over your pea brain.
What is the point of debating you. You are a moron. Really.
DT made phenomenal points here. Pimpette spun them, but you ignore them, Jihad Steve the Dhimmiwit.
23. At 5' 2 1/2", yes, I'm a spinner, but not that kind of spinner!
Bacon, you just don't get it - this is just no damn better than the fucking nazi versions of the Talmud.
Thanks for stooping that low, people.
24. your defense is based on the notion that they are a dangerous, vile, and otherwise worthless race of people. you're a fucking racist. so stop name calling me a muslim just because it is apparently the worst thing you can call someone you jerk.
i feel sorry for the atheists that get sucked up in your ideology of hate. how hypocritical of you.
25. Pimpette, I get it. And no, I don't give much too much emphasis on the ugliness in any bible, and give people more credit than that....mostly.
Steve, again, you are putting words in my mouth, at least you are a consistant imbecile. Seriously Steve, you must love getting your ass kicked, because I don't see too many people who agree with you. You've been completely slammed and had your arguments destroyed, yet you keep coming back for more.
26. Bacon, I'm sorry, but when you say that someone made phenomenal points and those points were a bunch of bs, you contradict yourself and thereby give the appearance of being a bigot.
You give far to much credit and credence to the fear factor commentators, hell, you've turned into one yourself.
You wanna see another Holocaust this time upon the Muslims, keep at it, it's not too far off - but remember that you will have contributed to it. Geez, and I thought that religion had the deed to all evil.
Good night, sweet dreams!
27. Pimpette, he made excellent points. You asked for an example, he gave you an example.
He also brought up a point that Muslims have their priorities out of order. The fact noise was made over cartoons and very little noise over terror is ever made, is proof that either, Muslims are OK with terror or they don't realize what they need to do to improve their image and while doing so, they wouldn't have to worry so much about persecution.
The fact is that their silence is equated with acceptance of terror.
Sorry, but that is just the facts.
28. "I don't see too many people who agree with you."
If you were the only zionist in a room, would that make Israel an illegitimate state?
your atheism is your only redeemingly quality. other than that, you're a twisted individual.
29. Keep dodging and making stuff up Jihad Steve. You are as transparent as a 3 dollar bill. Did you right your congressman about Darfur yet?
30. you can call me Jihad steve all you want, it just proves to me that those words are meaningless to you. I have never harmed an innocent Israeli, I've never even fired a gun, I suppose to you anybody who opposes the oppression of minorities is a jihadi. I wonder, if I were defending blacks, would you call me nigger steve?
31. You are a terror apologist with no feasible solution except to accept dhimmitude(and don't spin me and worry about my answer).
That makes you Jihad Steve the Dhimmiwit.
32. bro, I have no once said any terrorist attack was ever justified not once. I know as well as you do the things that have happened in the name of Islam, including the gang rape of Mukhtari Mai in Pakistan, including thousands dead on 9-11. I don't make any fucking apologies for that.
I am just not as interested in you in the easy answer, which is that they are inbred morons who practice a terrorist religion. You make a feasible solution impossible with that attitude.
You say the same insults OVER and OVER to me because you think that you can accomplish with repetition what you can't establish with argumentation. You've proven next to nothing, except that you're a racist.
33. You have it is ass backwards. Example Hamas, they state that they will not stop terrorizing Israel until Israel stops existing. They are the ones who make a feasible solution impossible.
What you call racism is me just analyzing the guts of why terrorism exists, it has nothing to do with a solution, it is an observation based on facts.
34. "Thank you Liberal Moonbats, for allowing terror cells to grow in Canada."
Oh, it was the Liberals eh? Conservatives in the States didn't seem to help stop terror cells from growing there. And by the way CSIS shouldn't be making politically charged announcements - that just stinks. I'd rather my country's spy agency stick to spying instead of meddling in domestic political affairs so hypersensitive anti-liberals don't get into a tizzy every time someone says the word "terrorism".
35. Saskboy, when I say Liberal moonbats, I'm not talking about the Canadian polical party.
Although the Libs are way more terror cell friendly with their policies here than the PC's seem to be, but for an example of Liberal Moonbat see Steves posts.
36. This comment has been removed because it linked to malicious content. Learn more.
37. I've already read it. Zionist Jordan and I destroyed you in the comment section. Jordan's points seem to go right over your head. You are a true idiot. I can't help insulting you by the way. I think your IQ is dropping with each post you make.
38. Not a bad logo, even Muslims themselves would be better off without (today's) Islam!
39. Look at pathetic Jordan, no matter how much they ("moderates" my ass)hate the Jews they are still not "Halal" enough in Hamas butchers' eyes.
40. Use the little L then, unless you're talking about the Liberal party of Canada, or starting a sentence about your "liberal mooonbats".
41. I asked for an example and no such example was given. I asked him to QUOTE the verses WITH introductions and footnotes FROM an AUTHORIZED Quran. He failed.
All he did was to bring to attention an extremists commentaries on the Quran - an OPINION. MOST of the Islamic scholars and acedemics do not follow these commenteries and use more traditional texts.
You're starting to sound like hdoff with the whole, if you do this, then you wouldn't have to feel afraid of persecution.
HEY DUMBFUCK - Why should any group have to fear persecution? Why should jews have been persecuted during WWII? There were political reasons for that - beyond the whole new world order thing. Did they deserve to die because they were jews?
But, once again, here you go a whole web page dedicated to condemnations of terrorist attacks:
I've used a few of the links from their on the mb, I realize that you need a refresher course.
42. I remember that link. Out of 1.5 billion Muslims, I'm sure there are a few that denounce terrorist acts. Try finding Muslims condemning suicide bombings in Israel. I know it can be done, but you really have to search for sincerity.
43. Really? That's the reason? You really have to search for sincerity?
go ahead and search it yourself:
it's not due to lack of it or sincerity - it's due to the lack of it being news - it doesn't make for attentions getting news.
44. What percentage of Muslims do you think are completely against suicide bombings of innocent Israelis?
45. I'd like to say I have an answer for you, but I don't. Polls show in 9 different countries that in general those muslims ranged in the teens and up in favor of suicide bombings in defense of Islam.
Now, how honestly those questions were answered - is another question alltogether.
I'd give you an I think, but that would be neither here nor there.
How many of your fellow bloggers do you think would be happy to see a mass extermination of Muslims take place? How many do you think would answer that question in complete honesty, without the ego of their character influencing the answer or without worrying about what the correct answer may be? You will never know if things are being said to be pc or to be intimidating, neither being truth.
46. I would like to think that the majority of anti-Islamics would prefer seeing the Muslim world change and openly show they are compatible with the West. Whether you think they Muslims are or not doesn't matter, perception is what it is all about, and going nuts over cartoons and not going nuts over terrorist acts is not good for Muslim PR.
47. So you believe that one needs to live by the same values that you set for yourself in order for them to be .... and just what would I use to finish this off with?
Would you say that if the Muslims do not start to adhere to your values that the muslims should be exterminated? Let's not talk about what you'd/they'd like to see, let's talk about if you/they don't see that.
48. You don't get it. Perceived Muslim values is that they want to make the world Muslim.
Either they should change this perception, or they should stay in Muslim countries. Real simple.
49. That's what you think. YOU BELIEVE that those are muslim values.
I would say that the ones that believe this are staying in Muslim countries - sleepers excluded (which I'm sure is a .something percent of a countries muslim residents/citizens.
This is from your post: Thank you Liberal Moonbats, for allowing terror cells to grow in Canada. Until there is a Mosque on every street corner, us Canadians will have to watch our backs.
Because of terror cells? You think these terror cells want a Mosque on every corner? Bacon - they want your country out of theirs - that is the point to why Canada is now probable for terrorist attacks. No more, no less. Nice spin, though. Very good attempt.
50. "Probable"? Wow. Terrorist attacks have been officially considered far more than just probable in the States for the last five years, and yet not a single one has happenned. Could we try not panicking for a change? I have full confidence in RCMP's ability to do its job. And, yes, I do take the Toronto subway.
51. Leo, if I still lived in Toronto I would still be taking the subway too.
But don't think the RCMP is going to be able to prevent a terrorist attack. Although I respect them, that is asking a lot. | http://baconeatingatheistjew.blogspot.com/2006/05/culture-of-hate-expected-to-blow-up.html | robots: classic
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} | 4,668 | JihadWatch Wants to Destroy Mecca and Medina (Updated)
Disclaimer: The title remains as long as Spencer doesn’t moderate the comments.
JihadWatch commenters, you know those lovable bunch who want to execute the Mooslims are at it again. This time Fabio, who calls himself the most “politically incorrect” blogger on Islam wants Mecca and Medina destroyed (hat tip to all those who sent this in):
This is from a post on Feb.13 titled “Algeria shuts down internet and Facebook as protests mount” posted by Robert Spencer. It is still up. Right under Fabio another commenter named “Bhobby” echoes his intentions. This is just one more instance in a litany of genocidal and maniacal anti-Muslim postings on JihadWatch.
For those who can’t make it out it reads:
Fabio K. Juliano: Furthermore, I opine that Mecca and Medina Must be Destroyed.
Bhobby: I second you motion, Fabio: Mecca et Medina delenda sunt.
Update: Spencer and co. have moderated Fabio’s comment but kept Bhobby’s.
80 thoughts on “JihadWatch Wants to Destroy Mecca and Medina (Updated)
1. Of course, JW could retort that comments in no way represent official JW policy etc., but then the hypocrisy abounds. Does anyone remember when Spencer himself took Mosizzle’s comment out of context to imply something entirely different, maligning Loonwatch with it.
• @Dawood,
Certainly. Considering the posts from Roland Shirk it wouldn’t be too much off the mark.
However as you mentioned JW took the post from Mosizzle and castigated Spencerwatch for it without distinction, if I recall. This goes to show the blatant double standards.
• I certainly don’t think we should do the same. Perhaps you should add “Jihadwatch commenter wants to destroy Mecca and Medina” in the title.
Considering that LWer Haroon’s comments were deleted and Fabio’s weren’t clearly demonstrates that the moderator (Marisol or Shirk) has a clear bias against Muslims.
• Come on Mooneye, perhaps you can post a disclaimer or change the title into “JihadWatch Fans want to Destroy Mecca and Medina”.
2. Interesting. Must be a slow news day.
Did you catch the rally at the Synagogue in Tunisia?
Who do you think has more to fear and from whom? Tunisian Jews from the general public or American/Western Muslims from Fabio?
• It’s not just Fabio who wants to commit genocide against/ discriminate Muslims, but Spencer, Geller, Shirk, Fitzgerald, and even you (who thinks Muslims are “horrible people” who should be ethnically cleansed from Turkey). Just becuase your’s and others’ words haven’t materialized into actions doesn’t mean we should oppose Islamophobia.
As for Tunisia, yeah it’s probably worst. But that doesn’t justify your bigotry and death wish against Zakariya and the Turkish people.
• At least your not denying you carte blanche condemnation of all Muslims nad desire to ethnically cleanse Turkey.
The list of comments that prove your enormous hatred of Muslims is long and one could fill a book with them. That’s the difference between you and us: we don’t support violence against Jews in Tunisia but you’re okay with celebrating the deaths of innocent Muslims.
• But don’t worry, the more the loons post the deeper they dig themselves in shitholes. I’m sure you and other loons will showcase your hatred tommorow and will continue to do so forever. Everyday, one can see on JihadWatch hateful comments demanding that Muslims be killed, deported, and “at your feet” because otherwise they’ll be “at your throat”. Some comments get deleted in an attempt at damage control, like one that demanded Muslims get forced abortions and another that declared that Muslims aren’t humans.
Notwithstanding the undoubtedly disgusting things said at JihadWatch, you’ll continue to be okay with the hate site. The fact that you come here to bash Muslims says more about yourself than the targets of your hatred.
3. You should go tell your co-religionists in Tunisia that what they’re doing is unacceptable.
It speaks volumes that you’re on the internet playing keyboard warriors against fat, balding, middle aged men (your caricaturization), than against very real and openly expressed displays of hatred that take place every day in the Muslim world without so much as an eyelash batted by the Left, Muslims in the West or Muslims in the Muslim world.
• “You should go tell your co-religionists in Tunisia that what they’re doing is unacceptable.”
Are we to be held responsible for their actions? If I come across a protester here, and who tries to justify what is going on, then I will tell him. But if you want all Muslims to take responsibility for every bad thing done by a few of them, then perhaps I can expect you to pop down to Bhobby and Fabio’s house and explain to them that they’re interpreting the Western way of life wrongly, that they have misunderstood JihadWatch’s aim and most of all, assure all the “Leftist-Mooslims” here that JihadWatch is a Website of Peace™.
For some reason, a whole lot of people seem to be misunderstanding the Website of Peace™.
• “It speaks volumes that you’re on the internet playing keyboard warriors against fat, balding, middle aged men (your caricaturization)”
Generalisations are all the rage at JihadWatch. So it is only fair that we assume all JWers look like this:
“than against very real and openly expressed displays of hatred that take place every day in the Muslim world ”
Wow. Just wow. So you say that we have never condemned any of the acts of “jihadi” violence that takes place nearly every day around the world, or the honour killings, or stonings. In fact, I remember on a certain thread that you asked me whether I approved of harsh 7th Century punishments, and you were stunned into silence by my response where I stated I don’t approve of someone doing that today. Numerous times we have condemned the violence against non-Muslims in the Muslim world, but you ignore our beliefs about the issue and instead start pointless arguments. I always try to get us all to agree on something, but you don’t want to agree. According to His Royal Highness Roland Shirk, I can only ever be “at your feet or at your throat”.
You were just shocked that we’re not bearded mullahs posting out of some cave in North-West Pakistan. Then you probably just dismissed it as taqiyya and continued your life as normal.
• Speaking of the Taqiyya libel, good ol’ Anhi accused you of Taqiyya on JihadWatch just the other day.
There are two kinds of loons, those motived by bigotry (Bob) and those motivated by stupidity (Anhi).
Funny thing is that millions of Muslims have already fought against terrorism and have condemned terrorism and other forms of violence directed against non-Muslims—from Salafis and Deobandis to liberal Muslims like Reza Aslan, Ironically, despite their noble efforts, they’ve been relentless attacked by Islamophobes for daring to be Muslim. Sorry Bob, but loons like you are the last to be telling Muslims to fight against terrorism.
BTW, when in Pakistan I actually end up defending the United States from groundless accusations.
• “BTW, when in Pakistan I actually end up defending the United States from groundless accusations.”
Same. It seems wherever in the Muslim world you go, everyone is very up to date about the bad stuff the UK has done to Muslims. I aim to assure them that whilst they have done some bad things, they are only motivated by fear and bigotry, but on the whole Europe is very welcoming to Muslims.
Moments later a newsflash comes in detailing how Muslims have been banned from making minarets in Switzerland…
• Above the root cause of Islamophobia is displayed: too many brown people really bug chauvinists.
• Maybe you should read some JihadWatch, because Shirk wants to restrict legal immigration notwithstanding of a potential immigrant’s religion (again, too many brown people). Also, most those “small groups” you alluded to are made up of individuals that share your [bigoted] views on life and non-white, non-Christians. I wouldn’t be surprised if you sympathized with their views, considering your past comments regarding Abraham Lincoln and the Confederacy, as well as your use of the epithet “Ay-rab” and defenset of the racist Florida Church for using the N-word (according to you, Latinoes can use the N-word but the most oppressed member of Western society, the White man, cannot).
• Oh yeah, and I forgot to mention that Bob wants to discriminate against Muslims outside the country, because apparently he thinks that’s Constitutional and American (discriminating evil, Mooslim foriegners).
• Sorry Bob, but you have no idea what you’re talking about. You haven’t been to Pakistan or any Muslim-majority country for that matter. I reckon that you’re so obsessed with you paranoid world-view that you haven’t even met a Muslim. Again, I’ve already addressed your use of incidents thousands of miles away to justify your own bigotry—if you distance yourself from the genocidal writers and fans of JihadWatch (as well as your own bigoted comments and views) then you can expect to be taken seriously.
• It’s fallacious to compare a third-world, poverty-stricken, bomb-torn, largely illiterate country with an incompetent government surrounded Afghanistan, Iran, China, and India to modern, moderate Britain and simultaneously use it to justify the death wishes quite a few (i.e. most) JihadWatch fans have against Muslims.
• Pakistanis are understandably puzzled at the blatant Western hypocrisy when the West pressures them to improve the rights of minorities, whilst it bans Muslims from constructing minarets, bans them from wearing niqabs, bans them from having Halal food, as well as the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They are also confused as to why modern, democratic Britain has seen a surge in support for the BNP(and they hate all non-British people, wishing to deport all of them as soon as it gets into power). If it is Islamic terrorism to blame, then why are people voting the BNP which wants to kick out Blacks, Sikhs and Hindus.
However, Pakistanis were quite amazed at Obama’s decision to support the “Ground Zero Mega-Mosquestrocity”, proving Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf’s theory that America’s decision is being watched by the world’s Muslims and is a chance for America to show them how “religious tolerance” works. It definitely put an end to a lot of people’s random assertion that America is at war with Islam. However, soon after, America launched more attacks on Pakistani land, and public opinion went back to where it was before.
• Since we’re on the topic of that big, bad mosque in NY…I hate to break it to ya Bob but Spencer’s asking for more money again.
“Please send contributions, no matter how small. (But big is very good, too!) Contribute via Paypal to director@jihadwatch.org (tax-deductible) or to writeatlas@aol.com.”
Maybe it’s time to retire the loony Roland Shirk?
• America has to ‘prove’ herself to the Muslim world.
Very strange.
I’d say most of the non-Muslim population of the world would like Muslims to start ‘proving’ themselves to the world.
No, wait, that would be Islamophobic or something.
• “America has to ‘prove’ herself to the Muslim world.”
Indeed. Perhaps it can start by lasting a decade without interfering in a Muslim countries affairs, propping up dictators or downright invading them.
No. That is not Islamophobic but has been said by numerous Muslim scholars themselves — that we need to get our act together so people stop looking at us in a funny way every time we board a plane. Many recognised that the extremists within Islam are to blame for some of the stereotypes of Muslims that exist today, but that still doesn’t excuse those loons who still believe in them.
Okay, what do Turks need to do in order for you not to ethnically cleanse their entire country? What will convince your JW buddies to give up their genocidal anti-Muslim fantasies? The fact is nothing will—it will be dismissed as “taqiyya”.
“Very strange”
Yes, Islamophobic loons are indeed very strange. No matter what Muslims do, they’ll always hate them.
• *what do Turks need to do in order to for you to give up your desire to…
LOL–you’re not ethnically cleansing Turkey, although I’m sure you’d love to.
• I think laws the force minorities to go vegetarian or import their meat from New Zealand, or laws that prevent Muslim women from putting a piece of cloth over their faces, or laws that forbid Muslims from building an architectural feature are pretty discriminatory.
Obviously there is not much comparison between the treatment of minorities between the two countries.
But then again, why should there be? Pakistan is a third world, illiterate, poorly governed country (Pakistanis have no problem describing their country in these terms) and Western countries are enlightened, secular, democratic, modern and ‘civilised’. You would expect the West to show us pesky Mooslims how it’s really done…
• Saudi Arabia is a modern nations, with a largely literate population.
Pakistan is only so intolerant thanks to the fact of Western influence in India.
Interestingly, India has the same history as Pakistan but is nowhere near as fanatical – there aren’t Hindu Indian communities in Britain or the United States where extremism is rife, etc.
Blaming socio-economic factors for every issue involving religious fanaticism becomes less convincing after each time.
• You ignored my point that you cannot justify intolerance in Europe by comparing it with a country on the other side of the world.
“Pakistan is only so intolerant thanks to the fact of Western influence in India.”
Stupid conclusion. Pakistan was founded Jinnah, a Muslim lawyer who was educated in Britain and lived there. He returned to India on the invitation of Gandhi to lead the Muslim league.
Jinnah was committed to a secular Pakistan. He made it quite clear that “Pakistan is NOT going to be a theocratic State – to be ruled by priests with a divine mission.”. A democracy, inspired by Islamic values, an Islamic democracy, where everybody is free to believe what they wish, would be implemented instead. A theocracy was clearly dismissed by the Jinnah.
Our “Founding Father” was as committed to separation of Church and State as yours.
Too bad US-backed dictators had to ruin the fun.
Yes, and it has aWestern-backed government hated by Bin Laden—I’m sure that has nothing to do with terrorism despite what the aforementioned terrorist and his buddies explicitly say.
India has the same history as Pakistan!? LOL—did India have a large part of its country split off partly because the actions of its rival? Is India being bombed every day by both Muslims and Westerners? India can get away with numerous war crimes in Kashmir without a word from Western nations but Pakistani blasphemy laws are used by loons to bash Muslims across the head day in and day out—and that’s despite the fact that the loons themselves have advocated far worse discriminatory laws and support discriminatory laws already in the books. Apart from your ridiculous assertion, you forget to mention that there are extremist Hindu groups in India that have been responsible for actual violence against Muslims.
It could also be mentioned that Robert Spencer has openly expressed support for at least one of these groups.
Socio-economic factors combined with geopolitical factors are the root causes of terrorism. There’s a reason why the vast majority of Islamic scholars have condemned Bin Laden et al.
But this is all aside the point: how does something that happens thousands of miles away justify anti-Mulims bigotry?
• “Interestingly, India has the same history as Pakistan but is nowhere near as fanatical ”
Obviously, you know nothing about South Asia. Hindu extremists assassinated Gandhi, so that wasn’t really a great start. India has in the past struggled to contain Sikh separatist terrorists and is now battling against the growing Naxalite insurgency, Hindu extremiand groups and of course, the Lashkar-I-Tayyiba. At least Pakistan’s terrorists come from one group.
You also forget that a minority of members of the Indian Sikh diaspora supported the Khalistan cause. One Sikh extremist was able to take down an Air India flight from Canada.
Generally, Pakistan has just been unlucky. An early military coup ended the democracy founded by Jinnah. It only went downhill from there…
• Right, so the actions of a few sign wielding Mooslims justifies the BNP kicking out anyone with even a slight tan from the British Isles and back to “wherever the bloody hell they came from”.
“But really, are your Muslim friends in Pakistan unaware of general attitudes towards non-Muslims in Pakistan and believe Pakistani society as being more tolerant than British?”
No. They were equally shocked at the Gojra riots and the attacks on the Ahmadis. It was at that point that numerous liberal Muslim bloggers from DAWN news and other places recommended a secular government, based on the civilised West, in order to ensure everyone’s rights were respected as there clearly was an intolerance problem. Indeed, this secular government was the one chosen by Jinnah, a Western educated Mooslim, but US-backed dictator Zia made sure that a bizarre mix of Western and Islamic laws would be introduced in order to confuse everyone into forgetting he came in by force and executed the popularly elected Prime Minister.
A lot of Pakistanis idolise European government. Some love it so much they claim that the welfare state and other government institutions were first invented by Muslims! Take that as a compliment!
• Funny how Bob is sooo offended by Mooslim holding signs but is perfectly okay with his genocidal buddies over at JihadWatch. Hypocrite much, eh Bob?
I’ve already discussed this key difference between JW clowns such as yourself and Loonwatchers: you support similarly bigoted rhetoric while we don’t.
• I love how you characterize this as just some people holding signs?
Gone are the days when LW featured a story of some elderly German who held a sign outside mosque or something and was featured as an Islamophobe.
Good grief, LW would wet the bed if this ever happened outside a Mosque here in the States.
Btw, anyone want to translate the comments of the protesters for me? I know what Allahu Akbar means, but I’m reading on Jawa report that our friendly sign holders said a bit more than that.
• I think you’ve misunderstood our issue with the “signs”. You have a tendency to use people holding signs as representative of the opinion of all Muslims.
The people holding the signs are still bad, that part is obvious. A fool holds up a sign saying “Freedom Go To Hell” does not count as proof that Islam is a fascist religion, obviously. But I think you’re getting things confused. We were talking about the London protest.
As for the Tunisia protest, all I see are the “Khilafah” flags probably from Hizb-ut-Tahrir, the organisation that openly supports the clash of civilisations theory and wouldn’t mind an all out war. Loons. But it seems a key part of their recruitment involves convincing the Muslims that the West hates them and their faith. A long time ago this would have been difficult. But you can thank peaceful old Spencer. Because his books, amongst numerous others from various loons, are regularly used by HUT to convince people to join their cause. They have to convince Muslims that life for them in Western countries is impossible because everyone hates them and so they must mass migrate to the Middle East and then force the imposition of a Global Khilafah.
Spencer is helping them.
He was shown to be a bit nutty. He set up a mosque watch committee and tried to intimidate people going into the mosque and was dedicated to causing conflict but ultimately it was seen how his looniness might have something to do with his age. But the key difference between this situation and your misuse of sign holding Muslims, is that no one collectively blamed the German people for his actions.
• You probably should have informed your Muslim friends in Pakistan that British Muslims are much more intolerant, according to polls, than non-Muslim British citizens are.
Now, why do you propose that is?
• Yes, and most Republicans are racist, according to a recent poll.
You also conveniently avoided addressing the fact that you yourself hold extremist, intolerent views.
• Answer my question first. Does your belief that British Muslims are more intolerant justify the intolerance of British non-Muslims?
• Meh, I can see now why Bob would get ‘IP banned’. He really has nothing more to offer than irrelavent tu quoque to deflect from the genocidal views held by like-minded individuals at JW. And his own of course; as shown by his inability to to answer questions about them.
• Yeah, it’s been going on like this for quite some time too. He demands that we answer questions–which we do–but outright refuses to even consider ours’. He’s quite the hypocrite.
• If Loonwatch was like Marisol from JW, then JihadBob would have been totally banned from day 1, as I was.
Yet JihadBob has been posting here for a few months.
• Technically JB and Ahni are nothing more than common trolls. Remind me the last time either of them addressed, and tried to counter the main point of an article? Case in point. Instead what you have is Bob here indirectly defending genocide.
• Yes Bob, we’ve already discussed how you like to point to others in order to avoid confronting your own bigotry. Believe me, it’s getting tiresome.
4. Wow, overnight almost 60 comments, and most of them responding to Bob trying to shift the topic away from the actual facts of the article at hand, without even saying a single thing regarding the JW comments. Absolutely ridiculous.
Does anyone remember when Bob would actually try to post information from sources and construct an argument? He’s gone way downhill from there in recent months, and is now nothing but a common troll doing nothing but tu quoque which is what JWers always lambaste Muslims for doing.
• Not to mention that when I do come into an argument with facts and such, my posts are ignored and I’m swamped swatting at three different posters who all think they’ve ‘got’ me on different aspects of my posts that they’ve nitpicked.
Good grief.
• So you admit that you’ve offered nothing but tu quoque arguments today? And the last part of your comment is projection, plain and simple.
• I can’t speak for any other commenter here, but my posts have ignored your “facts”? Hardly. I can bring up countless examples to the contrary. Here’s just a few:
– Your claim that the LRA was influenced by Islam in no small way. I proceeded to trace every single academic article cited in your “source” (which was Wikipedia), none of which gave any conclusive details regarding this relationship, besides vague, non-cited assertions.
– Your “citing” of the ‘translating jihad’ fatwa, which was mistranslated, selective, and entirely unscholarly in its work. This I proceeded to translate and rebut point by point.
– Do I need to also go back to when we discussed Sira-Maghazi, Muslim history, the tafsir of specific verses and all those other issues you ran away from only to try and use again later on other threads? This included your selective use of Montgomery Watt as a “source”, and other related issues.
As far as having multiple posters to deal with, such is the nature of the game. You put your ideas out on a public forum – and one which is pretty much 100% against your own thought no less! – and you’re going to get responses from other posters. It’s like if I or others went to Jihadwatch; I wouldn’t expect any less from an online forum!
So what’s the big deal?
None of this changes the fact that you’ve gone from making “points” to engaging in tu quoque, ad hominem and other types of argumentative fallacies in recent months.
5. bob, if u think ure having a rough time, why dont u go back to jihadwatch and see what im going through:
heres some excerpts of ur freedom-loving peaceful collaborators, in response to my posts:
That’s not crap… it is real… and we know Muslim orcs use evil arts to grow…
Those poor, poor persecuted beard growers! When will they ever get a break?
Defending Islam should be against the law – on a footing @ par w/ terrorism!
And even if you can triple the total number of Muslims, how are they going to fight? Throw camel turds? Bore us to death chanting nashids? Make us laugh so hard that we die from asphyxiation?
You got it. It is always so with Islam. Muslims conquer a country, kill the unbelievers, rape the women, sell the children into slavery, use up all the natural resources, turn the land into desert and then look for a new kuffar country to invade.
Hey Arab-pretending-that-you-are-not-Arab (and too bad you can’t charge me with insulting your Arabness, as you would in your native Erdoganistan), here’s some info on your so-called starving nazistinians, which tears down the house of cards of this fallacious anti-Israel, leftist and mahoundian baseless narrative.
Mahoundian troll.
I guess that’s what makes you a moderate… you only wish for non-Muslims to be killed by your hardcore brothers in the ummah. You’re not actually willing to do Islam’s dirty work yourself.
Why does anyone engage this SAFUKK OOZGUE character?? Clearly, muslim or not, he/she/it is morally, logically and intellectually retarded… as well as socially inept.
You’re one sick hating bastard. Go **** yourself, you creep.
You hater, you racist, you bigot, you muslim.
and u think ure having a hard time???
6. “Update: Spencer and co. have moderated Fabio’s comment but kept Bhobby’s.”
I think Spencer is hoping Muslims don’t understand Latin. But he wasn’t counting on Muslims being able to use the Internet.
The fact that it has been moderated proves that they must be browsing Spencerwatch, and their silence about this site, despite the fact that they get angry at every negative news article against them, proves that they are scared of SW, and have no way of refuting the stuff at this site.
• I just find it distasteful that they moderate to “appear” to be taking an interest in controlling the spread of hate (though surely only after many complaints – it’s been a number of days now), yet leave the Latin in there. It’s kind of like stopping someone punching to the head, but allowing a kick to the nether-regions, thinking no one will notice it.
Although it once again shows their modus operandi for all to see.
7. Pingback: Catholic Fascist Robert Spencer Defends Genocidal Bigots « The Age of Blasphemy
8. Im a muslim and how can anyone even think of destroying the sacred Mecca Madina …
do these people have a dead wish or something ?? Bunch of idiots :p
9. Destroying Mecca and Medina would achieve so much though. Especially if they are destroyed using nuclear missiles, as that would wipe out a bunch of scum bag muslims at the same time.
It gets my vote
• Please check yourself into the nearest mental hospital. Delighting in the murder of millions of people is not normal.
We’re all humans, and we all have a right to live happily. If there’s nutjobs like you who want to nuke everything running around freely, then there will be chaos. So please do us all a favour and get yourself treated.
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} | 10,503 | Raped and Ransacked in the Muslim World
Pages: 1 2
Consider the very latest from the Muslim world:
Pages: 1 2
• Old Bob
For God's sake, let's get about developing our every natural energy resource so that at some near date we can separate ourselves from these awful people. Boycott them. Isolate them. Confine them to their sand pits. Let them fester in their own hate and barbarity. Think of it, grown men, looked up to as “religious” leaders, advocating sexual slavery of children. They are not just wrong, they are sick. To permit entry to our country by anyone who associates in any way with that despicable creed to is to betray our political, cultural, and religious heritage. We bring no credit to ourselves or to our country by permitting onto our shores those who embrace intolerance and oppression. Why should we even consider permitting a monster like Abu Ishaq al-Huwaini to live within a thousand miles of an American child.
• jasonz
to heck with alternate energy, lets just kill every man, woman and child over there…nuke the whole thing and take their oil. i was mecca mosques to be converted into bbq rib joints and gay strip clubs hahahaha
• kafirman
"Let me be perfectly clear. The US is not, and will never be at war with Islam." Barry Soetero
When will a Republican stand up and openly question the wisdom in granting 501(c)3 tax-exempt status–under religious auspices–to an Islamic group?
• sharpsrifle
Well, Barry might not be at war with them, but they sure as hell are (and have been) at war with us!
Suffering the existence of this Stone Age cult of Arab supremacy is proving to be the death of a civilization which has taken 5,000 years to build! Why we didn't just level and annihilate mohammedan cities and "religious" sites is a mystery to me…perhaps if they were stomped into the dirt and denied the West's technology, they might be less of a threat.
Well, we know THAT ain't gonna happen because the left and the stupid (often one and the same) would want to "help" the poor little barbarians…and then they'd be back, more vicious than ever. Islam is an ideology of pure evil! And until we on the right can shed our fear of PC shunning and SPEAK THE TRUTH, islam will ALWAYS be an existential threat not just to the United States, but to western civilization as a whole!
• Gerald
True the U.S. is not at war with Islam,but Islam has been at war with all mankind since its founding.
• kafir4life
Mr. Huwaini is what I would call an authentic muslim, pious, knowledgable about islam, studied in the koran. He's the sort of muslim where I receive the bulk of my islamic education. He is the measure that muslims use to determine their deen.
We kafir have a choice where we get our islamic information. And this fellow sure knows what he's taking about. Here's one of the conclusions I've reached regarding the superiority of islam. It's not. Here's another. It's a gutter cult practiced by disgusting sub-humans. And one more. There is nothing redeeming about islam and its adherents. And another. Mohamat, the inventor of islam isn't so much a "prophet" as a dickless wonder that could only get women via rape (much like today's muslim "men").
There's more, but I have to head over to the oval mosque, and pinch a mohamat.
• davarino
That is awsome my friend. I almost shat a mohamat myself from laughing so hard.
Yes, it is clear from the picture above, that these ugly bastards have to enslave women in order to have sex, cause …… damn they be ugly. Plus they are subhuman.
• MargaretSanger
• StephenD
That's a hell of a legacy name you give yourself. Shall we now refer to you as a "superior race" seeker? After all, the "founder" of Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger was a believer in Eugenics and favored restricting the "right" to have children to those of superior intellect and finances. Here is one small quote from her:"It is a vicious cycle; ignorance breeds poverty and poverty breeds ignorance. There is only one cure for both, and that is to stop breeding these things. Stop bringing to birth children whose inheritance cannot be one of health or intelligence. Stop bringing into the world children whose parents cannot provide for them."Do you hold to this? Would you too advocate that those of a "lesser intellect" or a sufferer of a medical malady be restricted from having children as your name sake did? She was really quit a fool. Perhaps you have chosen a name befitting after all.
• MRobs
What race are the adherents of Islam? Islam is not a race you moron – it is a totalitarian political system bent on overtaking the world and killing anyone who does not adhere to it. Davarino is not a racist but you certainly are an idiot. Maybe the Islamists will chop your head off first.
• Gerald
No the Islamists will chop off her clit first
• William_Z
Margaret Sanger was racist
• true nuff
Margaret Sanger had it right. The planet has waaaay to many humans. Keeping babies with horrible disabilities alive via technology is cruel AND inhuman. Birthing them when you know what their condition will result in pain is not only cruel, it's evil. Allowing people to have more than, I'll be generous, 4 children, should be criminal. Poor people having babies they can't afford is pathetic, adopt a dog.
• William_Z
Margaret Sanger and other racists have all sorts of excuses, because they see the unfit everywhere.
• William_Z
Yeah, those 'poor people' they're all 'pathetic’, but I thank God George Washington Carver was born before people like you and Margaret Sanger showed up.
Being born poor, and growing up uneducated you’d have him murdered in the womb, which is pathetic and racist.
• Devita
You, a woman, stand offended by these men, who may not be willing to die to preserve your honor as a woman, but will if they are pushed?
That is exactly what will happen if muslims get their way, unless of course you have bought into the idea that a woman can defend herself against a slobbering mob of interbred (yes, they marry FIRST COUSINS, AND EVEN UNCLES) hyper-sexed insane trolls.
Sorry, if this offends, but REAL men would never think to do such disgusting things like screw dead people and animals when they can’t find live ones of either gender, have sex with goats, donkeys, or other livestock, or babies of both genders.
So good luck with that one. Let me know how that appeasement thing goes when you’re being sold at the market, ok?
• dirtybird
He would look better with a "Pearl necklace".
• ahmadnb
You are dead WRONG.
I am a better Muslim than he is and don't agree with him at all. If I had my way, I would have him shaved and paraded through town with a PERVERT sign hanging from his neck. Then I'd throw him into prison to be made into Big Bad Bubba's b*tch.
I don't need some half-literate bearded Mullah to teach me about the Qur'an and Islamic history. What he's proposing here is completely contradictory to what I know about Islam, the Qur'an and Islamic history.
• fmobler
I have no reason to doubt that you are sincere about your disagreements with this mullah. But you are still part of the problem. This man has a large following. He is not excoriated in Arab press, not ostracized by other Muslim clergy. Moreover, he indeed cites the very Koran and hadiths you claim to understand better than he.
If you are serious when you say that you don't need a half-literate bearded (your insult, not mine) Mullah, to teach you about the Qu'ran and Islamic history, then you should reconsider following your half-literate, bearded prophet.
Please look at what Islam claims, on its own first principles, not based on your well-meaning cultural affinity. I know many Muslims who, like you, are decent folks. But this doesn't mean they, or you, can square your personal decency with the facts about Mohamed, the history of Islam or the ethical claims of the religion. It is time for you, I suppose a Muslim of genuine good will, to reject this religion that is utterly at odds with your own humanity.
• ahmadnb
Give me a better alternative to Islam. And you don't really seem to know diddly squat about Islamic history or how to look at things in proper perspective. I don't need lectures from anyone about Islamic history…I know my history well. And I can recognize one who is learned, and can tell easily when one is definitely not (but may think that he or she is).
• tanstaafl
The only "religion" where rape is sacred.
• http://elderabusehelp.org Ray
It's going to be interesting when Sharia law comes to the U.S. to see how Americans adapt especially the left. how will they justifiy it? they will problabloy say the women brought it upon themselves! " Islam Respect it." Barry Soetero
• jacob
• jacob
About this "Women bring it upon themselves", with all due respect I have for women,
maintaining that they are the only thing that makes this rotten life worth living and
that with them is hell sometimes and without them is worst, I must recognize there
is some truth in that statement. I've seen girls wearing cutoff pants so short that
half their cheeks shows and to me at 80 and having seen more than I should have,
is nauseating but I wouldn't guarantee it would to some other people and there is
your answer….
True, merchandise not shown is merchandise not sold but there has to be a limit
to everything
• aspacia
Talk about hyperbole! Women wearing Victorian garb, and burkas have been raped. Rape is about control, not sex. It is about an insecure man wanting to control a woman.
• sumsrent
You're wrong.
Islam does not mean "peace"… it means "submission".
In fact… those "serial killers" that you call Christians aren't motivated to kill in the name of their religion.
Big difference.
Dhimmitude: the Islamic system of subjugating and governing populations conquered by jihad wars, encompassing all of the demographic, ethnic, and religious aspects of the political system. This includes slavery!
Margaret… you have a lot to learn…
• tim heekin
Margaret Sanger………your screen name sort of says it all but you should know "islam" means "submission" and has nothing to do with "peace"
• MargaretSanger
Are you saying that it's okay to hate brown people?
• sumsrent
It's not "hate" or "racist" when they really ARE trying to kill you.
• Light
Oh my God are you for real? We are talking about a so called Religion Of Peace and what that REALLY means and you throw in your tired old Lib playbook crap about RACE. What this country needs is to weed out morons like you and send them all to the MidEast. You libs make me sick to me stomach, it's NOT important what the offense is, that matters very little to you. It's the color of the offender that interests you. I'll answer your stupid petty, trite little question, LIB. Yes it's OK to hate brown people…..if they rape, behead, blowup, mutilate other human beings. It's OK to hate WHITE people if they do the same. You are a simplistic piece work.
• elktwinmomma
Are you saying ALL muslims are brown???????? Now that is racist!
• tagalog
It's OK to hate anyone you want to hate. When you interact with the rest of the world, you have to treat everyone equally. You don't have to like them, but you have to do business with them. Just like Booker T. Washington said.
• William_Z
To 'color code' people the way you do is racist.
• Philip_Daniel
Wait a second…are Bosnians brown people? How about Albanians? Cherkessians? Chechens? These are all WHITE CAUCASIAN MUSLIMS, and many have blonde hair and blue eyes.
Alen Islamovic
Notice his Slavic surname (ending in -ic), his dirty blond hair and fair skin.
This is Ramzan Kadyrov, a Chechen — notice his white skin and Auburn hair. He also has blue eyes.
• Bob Akbar
Gee Whiz Margaret I thought you were using satire because you were saying such stupid things but now I see you actually meant it. Wow!
• pagegl
Do you have reading comprehension problems? Nothing in the statement by tim even begins to suggest any sort of hate. It's a simple statement of fact. I guess only in the leftist mind can stating a simple fact be interpreted as hateful. As Bugs would say "What a maroon…"
• Devita
It is not okay to hate anyone. Hate the sin, not the sinner. As far as brown people, aren’t we all shades of brown. I don’t know too many people who would fit the description “White.” Like in the total absence of color. White hair, white eyes, white teeth, white lips, white skin, white body, no color to them at all! Never met one of those kind in this world, EVER!.
Now, that we’re beyond this stupidity as all true racists continually bring up the same lame question, “It’s okay to hate brown people?” when they can’t think of anything better as a real mean retort.
Lets start with the truth:
Since we are all shades of brown, that includes BLACK people, a beautiful dark chocolate brown; Asian people, a golden pale yellow with a slight tinge of brown; and lest we forget Native Americans, or American Indians, a tinge of brown mixed in firy golden red, we can now stop talking racism.
Next, we can talk political systems:
Theirs a political system is based on fear, cowardice, and subjugation through forced ignorance, polygamy, and one religion.
Western political system is based on boldness, heroism, and freedom through tempered education and marriage of one man to one woman, with many religions.
I could go on forever, but I think you get the point. Where these people worship whatever thing that is vile, debasing, and dehumanizing, with the total intent of mass subjugation to the dictates of a few old pedophiliac sado-masochist homosexual perverts and ours based on individual freedoms says it all about why these vile things need to be removed from the face of the earth before they do to us what they have managed to do to some of the earliest mathematical geniuses of their own – murder and replaced with morons who do not have enough brain cells to get in out of a sandstorm.
• BobSmith101
You might in Montana. Don’t try it in Mecca.
You don’t believe me? Ask any Muslim!
Read it all at: http://islamsfatalflaw.blogspot.com/
• Bob Akbar
It wont be long and theyll get you in Montana too.
• dirtybird
You surely know that serial killers are numerical outliers, while radical Muslims number in the hundreds of millions. You also, I'm sure, are aware that Islam does not mean "peace", unless you are talking about a version of peace akin to Pax Romana, peace under Roman rule. No, Islam means "submission".
• MRobs
Margaret – Obviously the gene pool you came from needs to be culled. Islam means submission moron not peace. All killer terrorists are muslims not white men. They are even to stupid to realize that they end up killing more muslims then anthing else. At least they are inadvertenly culling their own gene pool.
• tagalog
Most serial killers in the West, i.e., the ones you know about since you are a Westerner with your eyes on Western affairs, are white Christians. But not all. There are, after all, the Atlanta Child Murderer and Aileen Wuornos. Many serial killers don't have any religious belief at all, so we can't know if they're Christians or something else. I bet many of them are atheists.
• f16
Islam means submission. Most serial killers are white Christians? Not. Serial killers by definition have abjured Christianity. Oh yes, those fellows who rammed the Trade Center and Pentagon, they were Christians?
• ajnn
huh ? how did serial-killers enter this discussion?
are not serial-killers criminals energetically gtracked down, prosecuted, and jailed in civilized places?
how is this similar to the appproved and abetted bestiality described in this article committed by orthodox muslims ?
in this 'margaret sanger' (a eugenics proponant) our decrepit educational system strikes again.
• LindaRivera
Muslim immigrants in the UK publicly declare they want the wives of Danish men. Europe and the UK eager for Muslim conquest and the destruction of civilization respond by continuing to take in large numbers of the foot soldiers of Allah. Our nations face a nightmarish future if this is not stopped!
Violent Muslim Protest Outside the Danish Embassy in London (February 3, 2006). Ferocious screams:
"Death to you, by god."
We want Danish blood."
"May they bomb Denmark! So we can invade their country! And take their wives as war booty!"
Threats are made against Jews: "The army of Mohammad is coming for you." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qoMeUcC_M20
• Stephen_Brady
You beat me to this post. The more the "margaret sangers" of the world are ignored, the more desperate they will become. Then they shall show their complete lack of morality for all to see.
The result: Decency wins.
• Supreme_Galooty
Islam means Peace? Margaret Sanger means stupid.
• sharpsrifle
"Peace"? Have you ever read the unholy koran, Maggie? Mohammed wasn't about peace, he was about sex, murder and forceable acqusition of property, AKA theft. If you think rape, beheadings, murder, child rape, slavery and territorial conquest are peace, I dread to think what your conception of violence is.
"Islam" means "submission"…as in "submit or die." No wonder we can't make any headway against these troglodytes…we have people who still believe that happy-happy-joy-joy-kumbaya crap about the poow widdwe muswims. The enemy is to be destroyed, not apologized for…and those on the left who make excuses for barbarism are either fools, traitors or both.
• Devita
Can you imagine Iran having the actual capability of using an atomic bomb on a nation, like England, or France. Of course telling the “true believers” in their native tongue to flee the city because they intend to destroy it and the non-muslims who speak arabic ignoring the warning?
What would they do after the country’s center of power was destroyed, row over and walk through the streets as conquerors, raping and killing those still alive, but dying from radiation poisoning?
Let that sink in for a moment and you can see why Israel wants to blow these murdering half-human trolls out of existence. This is the way every single western country in the world should feel. It’s like living in the Hobbit story. The evil from the East rising to destroy middle earth and the elves fleeing across the sea into the West.
• generalissimo
Name one person that Jesus Christ killed: Go!
Now, should I remind you of the battle of the trench in which prophet wannabe mohammad personally decapitated between 600 to 900 jews. Never, since muhammad fled to Medinna has islam been "peace". it's been war, persecution and oppression. He started his charlatain career playing the peaceful guru, but because he really lacked anything special, being that he could not perform miracles and was too avaracious to be trusted, he decided to try the more imperious generalissimo role (never mind my namesake) and became the prophet of war. It payed out; why would he go back to pretending he was all warm and fuzzy about mankind?
• ahmadnb
Muhammad ordered the men of Quraiza to be beheaded for their treachery. It was a form of punishment that God Himself ordered the Israelites to carry out against their enemies…and He actually went further than Muhammad did. Jericho, anyone? Don't believe me? Read the Bible. Book of Deuteronomy. Among others. I remember my Bible lessons from childhood pretty well.
• xyzlatin
The Christian bible is the New Testament (as the name implies).
• ahmadnb
So now we're just supposed to brush away the Old Testament? Forget what's in it? Brush it aside, except for the parts we like? How convenient…
I'll quote a well-known Christian revert to Judaism (her Jewish ancestors in Spain were forced to "convert" to Christianity by the Spanish Inquisition, a truly "Christian" movement): "Christianity is a Hellenized version of Judaism". In my opinion, she is mostly correct. Before Paul preached Christianity to European audiences, it was essentially Judaism but with several of the old strictures gone, and with the recognition that Jesus had been, indeed, the Messiah. But one can never disregard the Commandments of God given to the prophets of Israel. Or the mass slaughter that God ordered against the enemies the Israelites. With the advent of the Israelites, several Middle Eastern peoples completely disappeared from history.So if you're going to harp on what Muhammad did to ONE Jewish tribe over a period of 24 hours, it weighs pretty lightly over what the Israelites and their prophets committed against their pagan neighbors over a period of several centuries.
• ahmadnb
The Jewish revert's name is Yaffa DaCosta and her writings used to be published in http://www.WorldNetDaily.com.
• aspacia
My point is that Judaism and Christianity's God called to the annihilation of certain group; Islam calls for the annihilation of all infidels like me and my brethren.
Look, I do not care if you worship a rock, I really don't, however do not threaten me in the name of faith or for any other reason. Remember, you are dealing will freedom loving, gun toting people, those, according to history, eventually defeat the intolerant, totalitarians.
• ahmadnb
Who's threatening who here? Do I sound like I'm threatening you?
I happen to be a freedom-loving individual myself. I can't carry a gun 'cause I'm not allowed to due to my residency status, but I hope that'll change in a years' time. And please don't lecture me on freedom…the country of my parents fought a bloody war of liberation for 9 months shortly before I was born. Pres. Nixon and his administration sided with and armed our enemies in that struggle (This was back in 1971), and lost big time. Many Americans were on our side. And gues who Nixon sided with? A bunch of Mullahs, that's who. Nixon took that defeat personally and never seems to have gotten over it. As for my people, we have been warning you guys of the dangers that these Mullahs pose to you, but none of you listened, until 9-11 took place. And now you're going to lump the likes of me with the Mullahs, the same ones that you armed, financed and trained over many decades against us??? Please.
I welcome the fact that the US has finally decided to kick the Mullah's butts. But the US has been wishy-washy in this regard, at the best.
• aspacia
Ok, I give. We were focused on Nam, the Treaty with China, the date you cite is after operation Ajax. Do you mean Saddam? The Taliban aid was during the 80's. We have never been really close with Syria. There has never been a huge revolt in Arabia. Libya has only recently been taken off our sanctions list.
I give, what country.
Oh, you said you are a devout Muslim, but love freedom. Do you reject Sharia Law?
• aspacia
Chuckle, Christianity was very intolerant, and heretics were burned alive and tortured 500 or so years ago, then came the Enlightenment. My problem with Islam is that numerous Muslim call for my destruction, because I will not be made a second class citizen as most females have always been in any civilization. God help any man who attempts to control this feminist, and God thankfully gave me a strong, secure man who does not try to do so.
• ahmadnb
If any "Muslim" calls for your destruction, refer them to ME. I will deal with them accordingly…don't worry, I won't break any laws of the land. I'm not that kind of person. Just direct them to this forum so you can see any exchange that takes place between me and them.
• aspacia
So do I. What chapter and verse?
• ahmadnb
Book of Joshua, Chapter 10:
• ahmadnb
• aspacia
Again, where does Christianity and Judaism call for the annihilation of all infidels as Islam does, and still preaches in the Middle-East? I often peruse MEMRI, Palestinian Media Watch, and Middle-Eastern media, and even the so called educated moderated like Joseph Massad have zero balance regarding Israel and Jews.
• ahmadnb
Where does Islam call for the annhiliation of "infidels"?? According to the Qur'an, Jews, Christians, as well as people from other religious beliefs can still attain Paradise in the Hereafter under certain conditions without converting to Islam beforehand. And if this was the case, there would have been absolutely no non-Muslims in ANY of the Muslim lands in the Middle East, and this is not the case.
This Muslim has Jewish friends and is pro-Israel. Israel's destruction (God forbid) will not make things any better or easier for the Palestinians. But it sure would make things a lot worse for them.
• ahmadnb
At least, that's MY interpretation of what the Qur'an said…it was clear to me.
• aspacia
In most of the Middle-East, non-Muslims are forced to pay the jizia (sp) and cannot build or repair places of worship.
I must prepare for work, but Jihad Watch has the Qu'ran and hadiths on his site. These were take from the USC.edu website before it was scrubbed of its more violent Suras.
• aspacia
Here is the link: http://www.jihadwatch.org/cgi-sys/cgiwrap/br0nc0s
Extremist Islamist circles believe that these infidels must be fought by means of Jihad – and some feel that, in the context of Jihad, weapons of mass destruction may be used to annihilate them. They find support for their ideology in Islamic sources, such as Qur'anic verses, Hadiths from the Prophet Muhammad, and Shari'a.
With all respect to Carmon, in calling for jihad against Jews and Christians, radical Muslims are not departing as sharply as he suggests from traditional Islamic theology. After all, Sura 9:29 of the Qur'an commands Muslims to fight against the People of the Book until they convert to Islam or submit as inferiors under Islamic rule: "Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, nor acknowledge the religion of Truth, (even if they are) of the People of the Book, until they pay the Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued." Nor is this an isolated verse. As I show in Onward Muslim Soldiers, it is just one foundation of an elaborate theological and legal system that gives Jews and Christians the protected but inferior status that Carmon mentions only after they have been fought and subdued. This status does not, as he seems to assume, give them an exemption from being fought.
• ahmadnb
• aspacia
True enough, and the killing of one group by another for land and resources will always continue; the human condition has never changed. I do have a problem with the fact Islam has not progressed since 1400; and Christianity and Judaism have. Remember, Muslims have been exposed to modern thought, and often have been repelled by it. One Muslim was appalled that Queen Elizabeth was seen in public with "bare, naked legs."
There is a huge culture clash. I realize that the burka was used long before Islam and is for protection, as is most Middle-Eastern attire, but currently it is used as a weapon of suppression and misogyny.
• ahmadnb
Actually Islam progressed a lot for the 1st 300-500 years, and then stopped, then went backwards.
As far as Queen Elizabeth's legs are concerned, take a trip to St. Augustine, FL. North America's oldest European house still stands there. The ladies' mirror had a special mirror low to the floor; it was designed to ensure that a lady's ankles were not exposed. I found this out from the guide there and was stunned by it. Last time I checked, no Muslims ever lived in that house.
• aspacia
True, during the first 300-500 years of Islam.
My point is this is a modern day Muslim, not a person from the colonial period. There were many restriction on women, we could not vote, own property, our near male relative controlled us, but that has changed. We have been able to own property and have not been legally controlled by our nearest male relative for a long time, but have only recently achieve economic civil rights starting with the 1960's protests.
• ahmadnb
43And Joshua returned, and all Israel with him, unto the camp to Gilgal.
• ahmadnb
Need I go on? That was just one example. There are others.
• aspacia
According to Islamic true; according to other Jewish history, not true.
Hum, are you a Muslim convert?
• Ghostwriter
"You go to the market and buy her…" That has to be one of the most appalling statements I've ever read. And to Margaret Sanger,did you even read that quote? Most civilized people would condemn that statement in a heartbeat. That's the sort of thing we're up against. Do you really want something like that in this country?
• generalissimo
resume taking your meds. Take at least a bottle of oils per day. That way you may some day elevate your intellectual capacity to that of, say, a moron, and then there's hope for dialogue with you. As it is, your mendacity just kills the fun of a reasonable debate with arguments based on facts.
• BH206L3
Buy stock in H+K, Colt, FN, and ATK. Seems to me that in the end we are going to have to crush these people and I mean crush them. The Idea that you can just go and buy a woman and do what eve you want when ever you want is reason enough to shoot every last one of them.
• RiverFred
Read the Qur'an , there are instructions on how to rape woman.
• jasonz
that section is particulary soft for wiping my ass i found hahah i urge everyone to grab a koran and read it to learn how muslims are and then use it as tp…its avail in 2 ply now i heard
• ahmadnb
What verses? Please quote them. I haven't seen any…and I have read a reliable translation of the Qur'an multiple times cover to cover.
• Python
Margaret I'm sorry but I'd have to disagree with that comment. It may be the case in America but in the Middle East there are thousands of murders by muslims every single day and a huge percentage of those are against non-muslims. In Southern Indonesia there is at least 50 per month mostly beheadings by muslims. In Denmark according to stats released this last couple of weeks, 100% of rapes in the last 5 years have been by muslims against women of all religions. We must deal with this issue as it is. We must not pretend that it is ONLY radicals when the very books that this most odious of belief systems are based on specifically demand the deaths or subjagation of all non-muslims. We can pretend all we like but the reality is that we have a problem as bad if not worse than communism or nazi-ism.
• Python
Margaret- Our media avoids telling us the truth because we have allowed our laws and our leaders to become so PC that it has crippled us and "Tolerance' has made us accept anything. When once we said "Enough" we now justify as cultural and misunderstanding on our part. We are in trouble and NEED to recognise it. We owe it to our children whom if they do not submit, will be slaughtered in their thousands by the followers of Islam.
• Aurelius
MargaretSanger said: "Don't hate. Islam means Peace. Christians are in no position to say anything."
What an ignorant, lazy and foolish person!
Islam means submission to the Meccan Moon god Allah. MuhamMad was nothing but a rapist, a paedophile, a thief and a terrorist. Check the 1400 history of Islam, the Sira and the Hadith.
• RobHoey
and sanger was no saint herself. she was very disgusting
• Sam B.
The seven Noahide Laws were intended for all mankind, among which proscription against murder and theft. These were the early roots of the Decalogue, the Ten Commandments. And since the sons of Mohamed (I won't inclufe women since they are mostly chatels) break these laws, they are sinners in the eyes of GOd. They are evil, or to put it bluntly, they are emissaries of Satan who pretend their ideology is a religion, but it is really a rationalization for the basest instincts–murder, rape, slavery. I suspect that many Muslims by birth, would speak up against the savagery and barbarism of their "teligion" were it not fot he fear of being slaughtered. Satan comes in many forms. That;s his, Satan's– MO–serpent, the beauteous Helen of Troy, that evil looking bitch in The Passion of Christ. Margaret Sanger is a child who may somedfay grow up–but it might be too late. People scoffed at Hitler–a joke I'm WWII vet, still kickin', tho not for long–and for me it's Groundhog day…This generation is asleep.
• ahmadnb
Good grief, we have a wannabe scholar of history here.
Chattels? The wives of Muhammad are held in high regard by ALL Muslims, particularly Sunnis (I am a Sunni). Aisha, the youngest wife, led her own army into battle!
As for your allegations of "savagery" this was not a charge made against Muslims at the time…they were far more merciful when it came to dealing with the vanquished at each turn. Wars have always been brutal…and God put forth specific limits to what the Muslims could and could not do. Their enemies, on the other hand, acted with disgusting brutality in a way the the Muslims refused to…as was the case when the Muslims were defeated at Mt. Uhud.
I know Satan. You won't know him if he stood in front of you. He has already blinded you. He's laughing at you.
• Sam B.
What was objectionable to my pro-Western <pro-Christian, anti-Mohamed, Satanic evil?
• jasonz
and we allow muslims to live because??? seriously! if we think that jesus is somehow gonna miricle their butts and stop them then you deserve to be raped slaves. we need to quit screwing around. we need to wipe islam out. slaves have no nobility and it s no honor dying because you are too stupid to defend yourself. islam must me destroyed…muslims MUST be killed. there is no reason or logic to not do it. this is how it works folks. sorry if it and i dont meet muster. but i would rather kill and die a free man, then live as a muslim slave. and if 'god' is gonna do something to stop them he better hurry up cuz i have no need of a useless god who wont even let me defend myself. death to islam!
• ahmadnb
What sanitarium did you escape from?
• jasonz
really? no islam means SUBMISSION. geez woman are you that blind. you have video of a prominent leader in ISLAM talking about how its ok to rape and murder. did that part escape you? of course you are named sanger a racist woman who thought people different than her should be eliminated. tell you what. put a pic of you on here then when your peaceful muslims dont need the useful idiots like you anymore and put you in their sex slave aution and rape you we will no not to help because they are 'peacfully raping you" woman you are too stupid to live no wonder you need the govt contolling your moronic self.
• ahmadnb
He's popular? How is it then that I never even HEARD of him? Where do you dig these fools up from? And why is it that you don't bring up those among us that can soundly contradict his so-called claims?
• fmobler
Let's here it. Contradict him — I think you mean refute him, but OK.
I don't know if he is popular, but it wasn't hard to found him on islamtube, for example. Also he has 38 audio lectures on another cite that seems to be independent of islamtube. Some of your co-religionists think he needs an forum.
As for why you haven't heard of a 'popular' Saudi cleric, I can't say. I am pretty sure there are lots of popular Christian preachers that I've never heard of.
• ahmadnb
So much for offensive Jihad. The following is a translation of Qur'anic verses:
[2:190] Fight in the way of Allah against those who fight against you, but begin not hostilities. Lo! Allah loveth not aggressors.
[2:192] But if they desist, then lo! Allah is Forgiving, Merciful.
[2:193] And fight them until persecution is no more, and religion is for Allah. But if they desist, then let there be no hostility except against wrong-doers.
• fmobler
[4:89] Have no unbelieving friends. Kill the unbelievers wherever you find them.What abrogates what?—
• ahmadnb
And, of course, so much for having your way with women. Check this out from the Qur'an:
[4:22] And marry not those women whom your fathers married, except what hath already happened (of that nature) in the past. Lo! it was ever lewdness and abomination, and an evil way.
[4:23] Forbidden unto you are your mothers, and your daughters, and your sisters, and your father's sisters, and your mother's sisters, and your brother's daughters and your sister's daughters, and your foster-mothers, and your foster-sisters, and your mothers-in-law, and your step-daughters who are under your protection (born) of your women unto whom ye have gone in – but if ye have not gone in unto them, then it is no sin for you (to marry their daughters) – and the wives of your sons who (spring) from your own loins. And (it is forbidden unto you) that ye should have two sisters together, except what hath already happened (of that nature) in the past. Lo! Allah is ever Forgiving, Merciful.
[4:26] Allah would explain to you and guide you by the examples of those who were before you, and would turn to you in mercy. Allah is Knower, Wise.
[4:27] And Allah would turn to you in mercy; but those who follow vain desires would have you go tremendously astray.
• fmobler
Thanks. You are the first to actually try to refute the cleric on Koranic grounds. I certainly believe your sincerity that you deeply oppose the things you said you oppose in another msg. This is not suprising to me. I know quite a few Muslims who feel the same way. But please read [4:24] again. The part about being permitted to marry your slaves is not easy to square with what I suppose is your genuine support of human rights.As for you not being afraid of being harmed for leaving Islam (also mentioned in another msg), that seems to be your fear, not mine, since I never mentioned it. But since you bring it up, how do you interpret the following? <p style=”color: rgb(0, 0, 0);”> Bukhari (52:260) – “…The Prophet said, 'If somebody (a Muslim) discards his religion, kill him.' ” <p style=”color: rgb(0, 0, 0);”> <p style=”color: rgb(0, 0, 0);”> Bukhari (83:37) – “Allah's Apostle never killed anyone except in one of the following three situations: (1) A person who killed somebody unjustly, was killed (in Qisas,) (2) a married person who committed illegal sexual intercourse and (3) a man who fought against Allah and His Apostle and deserted Islam and became an apostate.” <p style=”color: rgb(0, 0, 0);”> <p style=”color: rgb(0, 0, 0);”> Bukhari (84:57) – “[In the words of] Allah's Apostle, 'Whoever changed his Islamic religion, then kill him.'” <p style=”color: rgb(0, 0, 0);”> <p style=”color: rgb(0, 0, 0);”> Bukhari (89:271) – A man who embraces Islam, then reverts to Judaism is to be killed according to “the verdict of Allah and his apostle.” <p style=”color: rgb(0, 0, 0);”> <p style=”color: rgb(0, 0, 0);”> Bukhari (84:58) – “There was a fettered man beside Abu Muisa. Mu'adh asked, 'Who is this (man)?' Abu Muisa said, 'He was a Jew and became a Muslim and then reverted back to Judaism.' Then Abu Muisa requested Mu'adh to sit down but Mu'adh said, 'I will not sit down till he has been killed. This is the judgment of Allah and His Apostle (for such cases) and repeated it thrice.' Then Abu Musa ordered that the man be killed, and he was killed. Abu Musa added, 'Then we discussed the night prayers'” <p style=”color: rgb(0, 0, 0);”> <p style=”color: rgb(0, 0, 0);”> Bukhari (84:64-65) – “Allah's Apostle: 'During the last days there will appear some young foolish people who will say the best words but their faith will not go beyond their throats (i.e. they will have no faith) and will go out from (leave) their religion as an arrow goes out of the game. So, wherever you find them, kill them, for whoever kills them shall have reward on the Day of Resurrection.'” <p style=”color: rgb(0, 0, 0);”> <p style=”color: rgb(0, 0, 0);”> —
• ahmadnb
As far as Qur'an 4:24 is concerned, marriage is a mutual pact and cannot be forced on anyone. There was one case where, in the aftermath of Quraiza, Muhammad took a Jewish woman captive. She ended up converting to Islam. Muhammad offered her marriage to him, and she refused. Muhammad then simply let her go free.
I am not afraid of my fellow humans. I fear God only. I have more to fear from my fellow Muslims for being a strong Muslim AND being politically conservative/libertarian, pro-Israel as well as pro-GWB and anti-<censored for a good reason, trust me>. In fact, a good friend of mine left Islam back in 1993 when we went to college together (the move did not surprise me, since he wasn't a good Muslim anyway). He then tried to convert me to Christianity repeatedly but I always shot down his arguments. I figured that he won't remain a "good Christian" for long, based on what I knew about him, and I was right. Now he doesn't believe in Christianity, either.
• fmobler
Three points.[1] Your self-censorship is confusing and only makes the reader wonder what you do in fact fear.[2] I do not see how anything you said addresses the issue: Verse 4:24 includes the phrase “except what your right hand possesses.” You mention the highly disputed fate of Rayhana as some kind of counter-example about coercion, but don't bother to mention that she was a victim of the slaughter of her kin folk at Mohamed's hand (at least his direction). No matter what happened later, she was not under his influence by her own free will. Killing all of ones male kin seems pretty coercive from the git-go.[3] I am really not sure what point you are trying to make with your friend. I thought it was a story about your tolerance. Then it turned into a story about what a bad Muslim/Christian the guy is. I'm confused.—
• ahmadnb
As far as the Hadiths go, I have always been suspicious of them. These were written down over 100 years afer Muhammad had passed on. During his lifetime and after his death, it was FORBIDDEN to write them down. The 2nd Caliph, Omar caught some men writing it down and had them arrested. Muhammad didn't want them confused with the Qur'an and in no way wanted Muslims to substitute Qur'anic verses with his own personal sayings. His fears were justified…a lot of Muslims do just that. The one sure way to declare a verse of the Hadith to be false and therefore not authentic is to compare it with what is in the Qur'an. Thus I have strong reasons to believe that the Hadiths you quoted here are invalid, even though a lot of Muslims would argue otherwise.
• fmobler
Are you suspicious of all the biographies of Mohamed? If not, please tell me how you determine which stories to retain and which to disgard. If so, then how can you can rely on his claims to be a prophet? Either way, why do you suppose his earliest biographers (Muslims, every one) include stories of deeply disturbing behavior, such as ordering murders, taking slaves, telling his followers to take slaves and steal after killing the men, etc? The most reliable early biographies, by his own followers, do not make him out to be a decent human being.On another point: Since you seem keen to stress your conservative bona fides, what to you make of verse 4:11? May I assume you are male? —
• ahmadnb
I have no reason to abandon Islam. And I'm not afraid that "Muslims" might come after me if I do…I have, after all, committed a much more grave sin than to leave Islam.
I am strongly religious but also strongly pro-Western. I switched from being a lefty to the right back in 1994 here in the USA. I supported George W. Bush's policies, but he was rather soft. I recognized Israel's right to exist within secure borders back in 1987, and abandoned support of the Palestinian right to self rule completely back in 2006; I switched to being pro-Israel and supported their war against Hezbollah. I refused to support the Afghan Mujahideen in the 1980s as I believed that they were a bunch of deranged Mullahs…and I was partially right. I opposed Hamas since 1987 because they wanted Israel destroyed.
All this not in spite of being a Muslim, but because of my strong belief in the message of the Qur'an.
• Mustaffa Moohammed
Wow America, where have you been. We give asylum to all muslims. Any that overstay a visa , reach a border or get across illegally. Sure they keep some in the news that are deported but the vast majority stay and receive extremely good welfare benefits for this class. Christians on the other hand must do years of paperwork, get turned around at the border or when arrested are sent out. When America must open it's borders, arms and love towards ALL Christians from persecuted countries, we instead let our islamic bureaucracy give them the finger. BHO supports all islamic ideals even when detrimental to American interests. To murder non-muzlims is the highest calling of a muzlim and BHO does his part. Sure it is shaded and buried under media hype, but it is there and obvious.
Demand that the borders open for all persecuted Christians from Iraq, Iran, Saudi, Egypt and so on. An extremely easy test will guarantee that no muzlims wear dresses and slip in. Make them swear allegiance to Biblical values and swear that moohammed is a liar, pedophile, and they wish him to live forever in hell. Not so drastic when you balance their religious beliefs that we ALL MUST die, be child sex slaves or be slaves.
• Sayitaintso
This is why this religion needs to be outlawed and the Muslims done away with. They are basically animals.
• aspacia
No, all free people should be allowed the freedom of faith as long as they do not impose on others.
• sayitaintso
This is nothing but a false religion spawned by Satan. Mohammed basically tooks parts of the Jewish text and the Bible and rewrote it to look like him. This is Satan at work.
• green p
Satan hates all things of God. So if the Jews are his chosen people , then who do you think Satan persecutes and hates most. If Judism and Christianity are God's religions, then what do you think the corruption of them are… ISLAM. What religion says turn the other cheek, and say "let he who is without sin cast the first stone", and which cuts your head off because you drew a cartoon. Islam is Satan's religious response to God.
• Maria
Who is Margaret S? Is she muslim or she is on their payroll? Or she stupid and not able to see reality? It is statistic that Muslims killed Muslims much more than any other ethnics/religious groups at all. Did "Margaret" heard about Muslims women "honor killing"? Or about "honor raping" their own family member girl who "betrayed family honour"? How about killing gays: it is shari'at law. List is endless…Muslims blow up themselves not only in Christians, Jewish, Buddists or Hindy states but even in Muslim countries: in Turkey, in Egypt, Indonesia, etc. People like "Margaret" either Muslims agents on thier payroll or deranged helpful Idiots.
• fmobler
Let's have a little lesson in statistics, shall we. Others have already pointed out the multiple category errors you make, so I won't repeat that. Let's just work on the numbers.
By "most serial killers" you must mean "most serial killers in America" since there is no reasonable way to get numbers for the entire planet. I'm even willing to ignore the obvious fact that your "most" is not based on actual data. So, suppose we grant you that the claim is true (it is not, but again, others have done a good job of pointing that out). Here is you statistical error: we should expect most ice cream lovers, most cat haters, most broccoli farmers, to be "white Christians." In short, by your faulty understanding of the words "white" and "Christian", most Americans with any characteristic you like will turn out to be "white Christians." This tells us nothing.
If you were (a) to correct the silly errors of conflating "Christian" with "being raised in America" and (b) to take a sample world-wide, you would come to a completely different conclusion. Inconvenient for you, I know. Sorry for hating on you by pointing out a glaring deficiency in your analytic skills.
Do you have the slightest idea of what the incident of serial murder is in, say, Canada, Mexico, Viet Nam, India, Morocco? No. So how do you claim that most are white Christians. I can commit the exact same fallacy as you have by boldly claiming that most serial killers world-wide are not white and are not Christian. Again. This tells us nothing.
Now, let's expand the definitions a little (you have played that game, so I suppose I can too). Margaret Sanger was not a Christian (she was white, so I suppose she is just half-evil in your book). She is one of the chief architects of the eugenics movement which was documentably the justification for thousands of forced sterilizations, secret experiments on African Americans (Tuskegee, being the most famous), forced abortions and so on. Many African Americans who know the history regard the eugenics theoreticians lie Sanger to be mass murderers. Now, admittedly they weren't "serial killers" simply because they found that serial killing is inefficient. Better to parallelize the process.
Again, widening our scope beyond the parochial American context (not that I'd accuse you of jingoism), the history of mass murder makes it clear that, in shear numbers, atheists win the body count.
Then again, perhaps you are being more subtle than I credit you. Perhaps you are accusing white Christians of being too stupid to realize that serial killing is a bad route to the history books. If someone wants to be remembered, she is better off starting a anti-Christian political movement that promises to rid the world of its inferiors and pests.*
* I follow the current guidelines on non-sexist language by alternating between "she" and "he". Sorry it was her turn to be insulted.
• Sheila
Folks, after reading Margaret Sanger's posts, I've come to the conclusion he (yes, he) is just baiting. He doesn't believe half of what he wrote, he's just trying to get a rise out of everybody. Ignore him, and he'll get his pleasures lesewhere.
• Sheila
Oops, that's elsewhere.
• Diane
ahmadnb -We don’t get these fools,Islam creates them by the millions.We are waiting for your contradictions.Feel free to demonstrate with any proof you can find.Your other comment is a bit garbled but:”It was a form of punishment that God Himself ordered the Israelites to carry out against their enemies” if god said it then you should have no problem with the results.Is there any record that exists to demonstrate a masacre in Jericho that exceeds enslaving,forced conversions and raping of thousands of women and children and beheading all Jewish males old enough to have pubic hair?How does this pertain to this article about a fanatical freak? Islam is a political,sexist,racist entity hiding behind religion.
Muslims held Vlad Dracul II as a political prisoner when he was a child.They forced Islam on him and trained him as a warrior ,he used that training in future battles and revenge-called impalement.Muslims kidnapped children and forced them to convert and fight.:The Mamluks were mainly ethnic Circassians and Turks who had been captured as slaves then recruited into the army fighting on behalf of the Islamic empire.Jannisaries were kidnapped boys from the Balkans.The vast majority of todays muslims are descendants of slaves,forced conversions and prisoners. Stop the reviisionism and lies.
Lastly:”We have a religion, message, morals and principals that we want to carry to the people as God ordered us,”
Who do you think you are?
What country that you have invaded has invited you to immigrate,revise their laws and teach your beliefs too?
Who do you think you are to deem your god and religion superior?
Who do you think you are to move into countries and abuse the social systems,educational system,demand your choice of lifestyle and commit endless crimes?
The world does not care what your god or Muhammad said.Only your people do,if anyone wants to join they will go to the middle east.Believe in anything you want but stop pushing it on others.If you immigrate then adapt.You eat,wear,work and obey laws like the natural born citizens.You are not superior,special or blessed.
Muslims are the most disrespectful,rude,pushy,self-righteous,hypocritical,deranged cultists i have met.Your historically false,criminal supporting,pre-historic religious laws used to degraded and subjugate people are not acceptable in evolving,free socities.
• Tasmanian Man
the fact is these scum need to be exterminated ad hoc, report from the Police cheif in Norway that in the last 5 years every, yes every case of rape before the courts has seen a muslim man charged with the crime. its time to stop beating around the bush and exterminate these extremist scumbagsthroughout the western world.
• aspacia
Do you mean all extremists? Do you mean all Muslims? Be careful.
• RobHoey
and I don't mean to pee in your soup but Islam does not mean "peace" it means "submission." It is not a religion of peace as anyone who has read the koran and hadith will assert. you are obviously practicing taqiyya, which is lying for the sake of islam–a religion that hates Jews, loves a pedophile fake prophet, and is the most intolerant religion of the world. Peace? You're a joke
• GuyMacher
Please cite the New Testament verse condoning murder. Islam means submission not peace. Your Arabic is obviously in need of more schooling.
• aspacia
LMFAO. Not so in the Middle-East where it is santioned to be a serial murderer of nonMuslims or Muslims of the wrong sect.
Islam means submission. Oh, and Sanger was a eugenic proponent like Hitler.
• David
Islam does not mean peace. It is obvious you have no clue on the Arabic script, and are parrotting wishful Islamic or Western apologists. it means "surrender" (pure and simple) i.e., (or else die.) Salaam is Peace, the opposite of what the so-called prophet preached.
No amount of sugar coating by Islamic thinkers can change that. The so called "prophet" meant business. He killed anyone who did not surrender to Islam. Or he had the tribes of infidels plundered, raped and destroyed. Look at Sadaam, Asaad, Ghadaafi, they follow Islam very well!
• generalissimo
Oh yeah! If violence is the only thing they understand, violence should be the only thing they get. Quick and simple, no trial or jury, no spending taxpayers' money. They are as unworthy of consideration as trash or faeces, just flush them down and be done with it. We cannot fight these people with human rights, freedom of speech for only certain groups, "debates" in which their religious representatives refuse to participate and an anti-american political class absolutely bent on running America back to the Dark Ages it never dwelt in.
If we were still in WWII, would there be any political correct madness, soiling our worldview and clarity of purpose? NO! We win, they lose, that's the deal. No matter what it takes. This is one in which the ends DO justify the means!
• aspacia
Be specific! There are many patriotic U.S. Muslims like Jasser.
• GracieZG
Surely you see the satire in "Margaret Sanger" pronouncing you a racist. The sense of humor is a bit dry, but it's there all the same. | http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/raymond-ibrahim/raped-and-ransacked-in-the-muslim-world-2/ | robots: classic
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Monday, January 19, 2015
Suppose Islam Had a Holocaust and No One Noticed
While Western newspapers were debating whether or not to reprint the Mohammed cartoons, in Nigeria as many as 2,000 people were massacred by the Islamic State in Nigeria, also known as Boko Haram, in what is being called the deadliest attack by the Muslim group to date.
Survivors described the Islamic State setting up efficient killing teams and massacring everyone
while shouting “Allahu Akbar”. "For five kilometers (three miles), I kept stepping on dead bodies until I reached Malam Karanti village, which was also deserted and burnt," one survivor said.
There’s a word for that. It’s genocide.
The Islamic State in Nigeria had reportedly managed to kill 2,000 people last year. This year they did it in one week. But we don’t pay much attention to what happens in Nigeria unless there’s a hashtag. No one has yet thought up a clever hashtag for the murder of 2,000 people. #Bringbackourdead doesn’t really work.
The Islamic State’s next target is Maiduguri, the largest city in Borno with a population of over a million. Known as the “Home of Peace”, if Maiduguri falls, the death toll will be horrific.
The Catholic Archbishop, Ignatius Kaigama, warned that the killing wouldn’t stop in Nigeria. “It's going to expand. It will get to Europe and elsewhere.”
Of course it already has, but not on the same scale.
“We will conquer Europe one day. It is not a question of (if) we will conquer Europe, just a matter of when that will happen,” an Islamic State spokesman had warned. “The Europeans need to know that when we come, it will not be in a nice way. It will be with our weapons.”
“Those who do not convert to Islam or pay the Islamic tax will be killed.”
Imagine that the burning towns and villages aren’t in Nigeria or Syria. Imagine them in France or Sweden. It’s not that great of a leap from armed cells carrying out attacks to a militia capturing entire towns and villages. They’re different phases in the same conflict.
Al Qaeda in Iraq went from a terror group carrying out suicide bombings to running a state in a decade. So did Hamas in Israel. There are already zones in Europe under the control of unofficial Sharia police. France has fewer Muslims than Nigeria and a more stable government with professional police and military forces. These two factors are the only ones keeping Islamic genocide at bay.
The massacres in France were carried out by the same types of men and movements responsible for the killings in Nigeria and Iraq. They just aren’t organized enough and still lack the numbers to conduct the same large scale genocide that they are already carrying out in Nigeria, Syria and Iraq.
Two Islamic States, one in Nigeria and another in Iraq/Syria, are engaged in genocide. Obama delayed responding to ISIS until it was already engaged in genocide and was moving on Baghdad. His people have done everything possible to avoid responding to the Boko Haram genocide in Nigeria.
The usual excuses are there. The central governments are compromised, incompetent and corrupt. The only possible solution is political. The real issue is poverty. Meanwhile the killing and the denial go on.
The foreign policy infrastructure, the human rights NGOs and the self-important scribblers who presume to tell the world what is important in the pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post have fought hard to avoid connecting the killings by the Islamic State in Nigeria to the killings by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. And they have fought hardest of all to avoid connecting these killings to the thousands murdered in the streets of New York and the latest bodies strewn about Paris. The killings can be connected with three simple words; global Islamic genocide.
The European intellectuals of the last century were too fixated on their vision of a better world to understand what was happening in Germany and Japan. And what had to be done about it. While they dreamed of a world government that would do away with war, the killing had already begun.
The intellectuals of this century are equally unwilling to take their attention away from microfinance, climate change and world government to see the beginnings of a worldwide Holocaust underway.
Genocide isn’t new to Africa or the Middle East so they put it down to local tribal conflicts. Terrorism isn’t new to America or Europe, so they blame political extremism. Like the elephant and the blind men who touched its trunk and thought it was a snake, they respond to the local manifestation of Islamic genocide by seeing a familiar local phenomenon; tribal war, political extremism or minority problems.
And anyone who sees the big picture is instantly denounced as an Islamophobe. But what if the Muslim genocide of Hindus and Buddhists in Asia and the Muslim genocide of Christians and Jews in the Middle East are part of the same phenomenon?
What if the Islamic State killers in Nigeria who shout “Allahu Akbar” during their massacres share a motive with the 9/11 hijackers who were told to “shout 'Allahu Akbar,' because this strikes fear in the hearts of the non-believers”?
What if a common bloody thread of Koran verses runs through the massacres of non-Muslims in the Philippines and Kenya, in Israel and Australia, in France and China, in Thailand and Syria?
What if the acts of terror on the evening news are not random events, workplace violence, mental illness and political extremism, but the beginning of another global Islamic genocide?
The rise of Islam was not based on faith, but on mass murder.
Within a few centuries of the time that Mohammed had ordered the ethnic cleansing of Jews and Christians from the Arabian Peninsula, the massacre of millions of Christians, Jews, Hindus and Buddhists was underway across the Middle East through India and as far as Afghanistan.
The Islamic Holocaust was the greatest act of mass murder in human history. And it is still taking place today over a thousand years later.
The decay of the Roman Empire created an opening for the Islamic conquests. As Western civilization, which plays much the same role as the Roman Empire did in tying parts of the world together, falls, a new wave of Islamic conquest and genocide is underway.
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it," George Santayana wrote.
It would be a terrible thing indeed if we were condemned to repeat the mass murder of hundreds of millions and the eradication of entire civilizations under the black flag of the Jihad because we refused to remember the past or acknowledge the present. Because we were too afraid of being called Islamophobic to speak out for the dead around the world.
It would be a terrible thing if the Nigerian village of today were to become a Swedish village tomorrow. It would be an even worse thing if the Muslim conquests of India were to be repeated in Europe.
Genocide is an ugly word.
It’s a word that we have come to associate with villages in Africa or with old concentration camps in Europe. We don’t think of it as something that can happen to us or to our children.
But we should.
The Islamic wars from Nigeria to Israel, from Iraq to Kashmir, are genocidal. Israel may become the first Western country to suffer Islamic genocide, but it will not be the last. 9/11 was the first Islamic mass murder of thousands of Americans, but it will not be the last.
In the face of genocide, our first duty is to warn the world.
The Counterjihad is a war for our survival. It is our resistance to global Islamic genocide.
1. Anonymous19/1/15
It wasn't that long ago that there was going to be zero tolerance for genocide. We weren't going to ask why. We were all going to denounce it when we saw it.
It wasn't that long ago that the liberal Jewish community was in a lather about Kosovo. Genocide there simply couldn't be permitted. We would stop it first and ask for a political solution later. Bombing was fine. Military action needed. We would not stay still!
The same urgency is no longer found. Now we have to understand it all. It went from Never Again to Never Jump to Conclusions. I wonder if the stances were due to the needs of their political masters. Actually I don't. I know it was.
1. Anonymous20/1/15
Our intellectual elite teach us to have respect and tolerance for all cultures - why shouldn't we respect genocide or ritual beheadings if they constitute legitimate long-held cultural practices in non-Western communities?
2. It's too late to look up the specifics, but the gist is that the British were trying to end the practice of killing the wives of men who had died by throwing the women on the funeral pyres. It was argued by the Indians that this was a tradition of their culture. The governor replied that by all means they should abide by their culture and traditions, but that it was his culture's tradition to hang everyone involved with murdering a woman by burning her to death. The British prevailed.
3. Anonymous21/1/15
2. Clearly, some outsiders are terrorizing the world in order to discredit the Religion of Peace.
3. Apparently Obama is stopping Samantha Power from now applying the Obligation To Protect law concerning the present Nigerian massacre committed by Muslims, while at one time she was so eager to activate it against Israel when that country was fighting Hamas in self-defense.
4. Muslims are being massacred by these terrorists wayyyy before they terrorized on 9/11
1. Anonymous20/1/15
After 9/11 we should have exterminated them.
2. If by "terrorists" you mean the various autocratic kleptocracies that constitute the Muslim world, I'm with you.
5. Anonymous19/1/15
This article is a pretense of cleverness but cloaked in prejudice.To the author:
There is no argument from me on the the lack of intervention regarding Muslim extremists, however it is ridiculous to claim the islamic faith has set the record for genocide. European countries have won they battle hands down. Let's see between colonization, slavery, missionaries/Catholic church, and more, Europe wins by a landslide. It always amazes me how easily Europeans forget their contributions to the instability that is currently playing out. It was European colonization and the post world war 2 land grab that created much of this tension. It was euro centricity and it's history of prejudice against all things non white and/or Christian that has helped to create a deep resentment in others. This article further perpetuates that euro centric mindset. It's unfortunate and terrorism is unacceptable however the idea that it must be stopped not for the sake of all but because it may soon be in Europe or america is terrible. Side note/quick history lesson Muhammed never ordered an ethnic cleansing. In fact islam spread so quickly because it was so tolerant. Do a little research before printing. And before you play the I'm an islamic sympathizer or Muslim, I'm ex military and Catholic. I'm also well educated, studying economics and political science at an ivy league institution. I am no subject matter expert but have at least book and real life experience to support my claims. People like you just add to problem rather than the solution. You are prejudiced and attempting to mask your fear with good intentions. But when declare that islamic terror is bad in Africa but worse if it happens in Europe your agenda becomes transparent. You need to take a long look in the mirror.
1. "I'm also well educated, studying economics and political science at an ivy league institution." which explains why you parrot lefty nonsense without a lick of truth in it. You havent read either the koran or the bible and your so-called history is ridiculous. Everything is the fault of the west and christianity, and yet that is the only civilization which has brought wealth and longer life to billions. Why not walk your talk and go live in a muslim paradise, get your health care and dental work there too. Go play a concert for the villagers in Syria, then we can watch youtube as your instruments are smashed and you are defenestrated.
2. Anonymous20/1/15
No. Don't just count the last century, go back to the start of Islam. Take a look at Indian sub-continent, Persia, large swaths of Africa and Europe. I think you're suffering from more than a little bias yourself.
3. You are correct in that the Europeans committed a number of horrible genocides—one of the worst was the King of Belgium exterminating millions of people in the Belgian Congo. Perhaps the Euros were simply more efficient than the Muslims (I don't know). Certainly the Americans did much to exterminate the indigenous folks in North America, though it wasn't really because of race, but because they wanted to steal the land.
I am completely unpersuaded that Islam spread quickly because it was tolerant, unless by tolerant one means "you can keep your life if you swear allegiance to us and pay us tribute". I suppose it's better than simply getting killed, though, some might disagree on this point, however.
The difference here is that Europeans and Americans, among others, look at the Muslims as though most Muslims were actually in the 21st century and should behave as though they are in the 21st century. Unfortunately, it seems that (a) a large fraction of Muslims are stuck in a pre-19th century viewpoint, and (b) the Islamic "Reformation, which many westerners hope will come to pass, is actually happening under our eyes, and it seeks to "reform" Islam into its 7th-century roots.
4. MarkJ20/1/15
The 13 young Muslim boys slaughtered by ISIS in Mosul the other day for watching a TV football match were not immediately available to respond to your idiotic posts.
5. Thank you Mark J
6. So, the bad guys get a freebie?
I always love arguments like this for a number of reasons. Let's pick your idiotic claim apart:
1. Colonization. You mean like Muslims conquering northern Africa? How about the Mughal conquest of India? The conquest by the Ottomans of Constantinople followed immediately by attacks into the heart of Europe, which culminated in the siege of Vienna?
Hell, several Mongol warlords (who were highly expansionist) converted to Islam, including Genghis Khan's grandson. Between all of that, Islam did some tremendous killing throughout the entire period you're discussing.
2. Slavery. You clearly don't know the history of either the Ottoman Empire or the Mamluk Empire. The Mamluk's were actual slave soldiers that eventually became so powerful they took over what had previously been the Ayyubid Empire. They reigned in Egypt after this conquest until the Ottomans conquered them, and the whole time the Mamluks replenished their military by taking children as slaves and raising them to be soldiers. The Ottoman's, meanwhile, had a corps of elite troops called Janissaries who were Christian children that were kidnapped, converted to Islam, and raised to be slave soldiers. The Ottomans also staffed their galleys with slaves and were involved in the African slave trade.
3. Missionaries/Catholic Church. You'll get no complaints from me if you call the Catholic Church horrible. However, you should probably look up some of the stuff that was done in the Middle East in the name of Allah before desperately trying to claim the Catholic Church was somehow original in its depravity.
Try to educate yourself in this subject before holding court next time, and I won't have to show up and embarrass you.
8. Anonymous20/1/15
Yeah, all that slaughter that happened so long ago that nobody alive today ever met someone alive then really doesn't mean a thing to me.
Today, right now, the people who want to kill me, have declared that they want to and WILL kill me, are muslims. As a non-believer who thinks that their prophet is a misogynistic pedophile, their "holy" book demands I be killed (if for no other reason than I just insulted their prophet). I am amongst the billions of people that they have claimed to want to kill or enslave. As long as that is the case, I'm going to continue to advocate that we kill them before they succeed in killing us. Anyone who doesn't understand that muslims are working towards a stated goal is either an idiot who, for some reason, refuses to believe it when someone claims that they wish to kill infidels and then DOES it really means what they say, or is a willing enabler (and is on my "kill them first" list).
9. I think it's rich calling Sultan Knish, a Jew, "euro centric". Jews, at least if they know history, know too well the flaws of Europe. However, the sins and crimes of Europeans don't change the fact that Islam has been waging an imperial war of conquest for 14 centuries.
6. Anonymous19/1/15
And when, not if, they get nuclear weapons, just what country do we bomb in retaliation when they wipe out an American city?
Pray to God I'm wrong......
1. Well, what country will it be? Inquiring minds wish to know...
I certainly do not know. Saudi Arabians attacked the U.S. on 09/11/2001, but we certainly did not eradicate Saudi Arabia.
7. Anonymous19/1/15
This article is one opinion and factually inaccurate.
8. Anonymous19/1/15
We should fight back now i know i wood fight for my freedom till the death sow lets not let it get to that they have no respect for life sow why should we give them respect animals thats all they are
9. Peace is the absence of war. As long as war is unseen, of course.
10. Just a common 'tater20/1/15
Your points are so clear and articulate. However, the people reading your column are most likely aware of the not so new, ongoing holocaust. The problem with doing something about this are multiple. The governments involved are inept, incompetent, and corrupt. Including ours. The Benghazi and IRS scandals are good examples, as well as the bumbling wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The burning villages are already occurring in the no go enclaves in France, Italy, and Sweden. The MSM, Hollywood celebrities, and politicians all assure us, this is not Islam. The response from so-called moderates is remarkable for its absence.
I had no idea that we had so many theologians and scholars that have studied Islamic history, culture, and theology. In Arabic no less, I presume. Actually it is probably OPEC oil money buying vetoes for keystone (along with some railroad stock), OPEC princes with stock portfolios that include MSM holdings, and just plain stupidity/gullibility/attention seeking by pseudo-intellectual hacks that perpetuate this cover up.
But, it is all there to be seen by everyone. However, just as in the lead up to WWII, people see what they want, believe what they want, and do what they want. Facts not withstanding. In other words, here we go again, but this time, where are the allies that are willing and able to fight?
11. Was the United Nations ever able to define genocide? B/c the claim was that they were not able to do anything unless it was genocide and they first had to define genocide. Just wondering if enough people have been slaughtered yet to have an actual definition.
1. I believe the UN defines genocide as any defensive action undertaken by the Israeli government.....
12. "And anyone who sees the big picture is instantly denounced as an Islamophobe."
Those who accuse us of being "Islamophobic" are denying the truth. I have a tactic that I use against others in argumentation and debate where I use their own logic against them. I turn the tables on them with their own logic and principles. I applied this against one who claimed that I'm Islamophobic, and said that he is phobic regarding the TRUTH. Truthophobia? Well, that's what it is, but truthophobia doesn't sound official and so doesn't have much impact. (As if "Islamophobia" is an official psychological disorder!) But whaddya know, I just looked it up on the net and it turns out that there is an official psychological disorder which afflicts people who are quite literally phobic when hearing or speaking the truth. The label for this is alethophobia (n.)and is an abnormal fear of the truth. It's time we call a spade a spade: they are phobic of the stark and obvious truth that Islam is out to make us submit. Alethophobia is a ramapant psychological disorder in the west and it's about time we throw this fact into their faces. If they can call us "Islamophobic" then we should fight back in kind and call them "alethophobic".
13. Anonymous20/1/15
Great contribution by Rabelad
(plural alethophobias)
A crippling fear of truth.
The inability to accept unflattering facts about your nation, religion, culture, ethnic group, or yourself
The word for Islam and its apologists was there all along.
14. Anonymous20/1/15
If you haven't read or re-read Wretchard's, "The Three Conjectures" you should. It is Muslims, not non-Muslims, who will pay the ultimate price.
15. Anonymous, your "Ivy League" education explains everything about your post.
1. Anonymous20/1/15
Yeah, I like how he's 'ex-military and Catholic" too! Snort! Perhaps he can tell us why the Sikh religion was founded if he's so educated...Universities today only indoctrinate students into the Leftist cults of loathing for Western Civilization, multiculturalism and demonizing whites. Remember when the Left ranted against the demonization of whole peoples, regarding it as a necessary first step towards genocide? To those who hate the color of their skin or their civilizational heritage, I hope I live long enough to see you get your comeuppance.
16. I find it interesting that the loathsome Samantha Powers, who claims to adhere to a strict anti-genocide position, and who has advocated the invasion of Israel by U.S. forces in order to "halt the genocide in the West Bank and Gaza", has, to my knowledge, said absolutely nothing about the slaughter in Nigeria.
17. Anonymous20/1/15
Actually communism and its assorted forms wins hands down as they killed more in one century than everyone else combined. Islam has always been a religion of conquest so the authors point is a great one that you will soon see this in Europe unless it is countered. Islam would have already taken over Europe if they had not been stopped in France by Charles Martel.
1. Anonymous20/1/15
Both Communism and Nazism had "force multipliers" in tanks, automatic weapons, grenades, a police state, media, etc. Yes, both murdered MILIIONS in the last century, and, by the numbers, communism murdered more, but "religion" as practiced by evil men are a close second in avoidable deaths.
2. Anonymous20/1/15
Who says that communism is not a religion? Except the communists, of course.
18. They were slaughtered by Muslims under the mandate of an Islamic Caliphate under Islamic Law.
The USSR also killed plenty of Communists and Nazi Germany killed its own as well.
What's your point?
19. Anonymous20/1/15
20. Anonymous20/1/15
We stood idly by while Rwanda became a killing ground. We'll do the same here because the Nigerians are black and mainly Christians.
Too bad, but it is mindful of FDR and the Jews, Gypsies, others.
We should be ashamed, and we're not.
21. Anonymous20/1/15
Hmmm...why do Democrats fail to act when genocide is occurring?
Islamic genocide now underway under Obama
Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia under Clinton
Cambodia under Carter
The Holocaust under FDR
22. There is a problem.
In the past, most wars were fought against a specific enemy.
Yes, the current Islamist iterations of Islam are Evil. Yes, it would be a blessing for them to be destroyed.
However, as we have already discovered with the Arabs called Palestinians who used to be called Jordanians or Egyptians or Syrians, that when they are destroyed and defeated and totally subjugated, another iteration - call it Hamas or Al Asqua or the PLO or the PA... It is born with hatred and death anew.
As we have discovered the same in Libya, after killed that evil dictator - new Islamist nutburgers have begun a whole new cycle of death.
Iraq - remove Saddam; get a corrupt Shia elected; get Islamic State of Terror.
Afghanistan - kill that one get this one.
Iran; Sudan; Algeria; Pakistan; the whole alphabet soup of Islamist murderers vying for power.... To Replace the previous Islamist murdering scum!
We kept on fighting proxy wars against "Communism" until the Soviet Union fell. Voila - the war against Communism ended. Communism ceased to be a threat.
In other words - we need to fight and eliminate the Source of the Islamist problem and that source is Saudi Arabia.
Change; Abrogate; Kill; or otherwise make the Wahhabist Saudi religion that has replaced normative Sunni Islam, null and void and the whole Islamist (Sunni) movement dies.
Cut off the head of the beast. It dies.
(Then we focus on the Shia death cult of Vilayat al Fiqh)
23. Anonymous20/1/15
Since 9/11/2001, muslims have murdered on average 80+ non-muslims per day, primarily for the crime of not being muslim. See here for more: http://www.thereligionofpeace.com
In December, they killed about 2,500 for the month. A 9/11 every month for what is now over 13 years. They're well over 250,000 and closing in on 500,000.
24. A simple man's side thought: All who so bitterly condemn the white men from having massacred more than other colored men tend to forget that the white men's inventions, medical and economic, have saved more lives of any color during the last 50 years than where ever murdered. Side thought two: The black Americans, so bitterly and so daily complaining to white America about the horror of slavery fail to buy a one way ticket and return to Africa, much preferring to live under the"racist" USA. Side thought nr.three: Hardly any of the leftwing accommodators of Islam in the west would take a one way ticket (see nr.2) to live under sharia law in one of the countries they so admire......
25. Anonymous21/1/15
Before this is over with, either they will kill a lot of us or we will kill a lot of them. We know what is coming if we don't act. I say we need to start now and not stop until the job is done.
26. Anonymous21/1/15
Evasion is the hallmark of our culture. I can think of 2 corny comedies that had vicious monster / aliens and the intellectual [scientist] who refused to see the threat, even while his own arms and head are being ripped from his body. I'm re-accessioning my opinion of them; they now seem prescient. djr
27. Anonymous22/1/15
Islam has committed holocaust after holocaust for centuries. Islam is a continual atrocity, crime, bloodbath caused by the conflicted, unstable, dissonant negative mental state created in the mind of its followers by its contradictory, irreconcilable ideology. Islam promotes hate, war, slavery, oppression, lust, lies, inhumanity and death.
Sibyl S.
28. Anonymous22/1/15
As pessimistic as I am about the future of Europe and the rise of Islam within it, Nigeria could not be played out on European soil. The fact is that the moment Islamists come at European society in any organised way - with a militia - it will be all over for them. In fact I would say that many civilian Europeans are counting on this to happen, because sadly this is the only thing which will force European governments to act to remove Islam.
As long as we have "lone wolf" attacks - even if they pick up in frequency from every fortnight to every day - the politicians and our media will make excuses about a "tiny minority". Once we are faced with an armed militia of 100s or even 1000s of Muslims attacking our towns that deceit will have to end.
Once we've dispensed with the Muslims, then hopefully we can move on to the traitorous politicians who allowed the situation to get this bad in the first place.
29. Yokel25/1/15
Several commenters have noted how little the Left has done to oppose these various massacres/genocides; these killings of Christians & Jews. Perhaps there is a reason for that. We know that Marx hated Christians & Jews with a vengeance, as exemplified by his "observation" that "Religion is the opium of the masses". The Left has always been a good breeding ground for anti-Semitism.
Could it be that the Muslims get a free pass on so many things because what they are doing is useful to the Left who are the current ruling elite? Indeed could the Muslims have been "invited" to the West for that specific purpose?
If true, that poses an awkward question. What happens when the Left thinks that the Muslims have done what was required of them, but the Muslims observe that they do not yet have their world-wide caliphate? Interesting scrap a-coming!
30. Muslims were indeed embraced by the left elite because of their useful destructiveness.
31. Anonymous28/1/15
The greatest joy in a Muslim's life is to die in the service of Allah. They WANT to die because their lives are one big mandatory suck fest; a suck fest by the way that they would kill you for suggesting they get out of. Thus, the only way to defeat Islam is to completely wipe it from the Earth. Turn all Mosques into pig farms and homosexual brothels. Burn the Koran, the Hadith(s), and every mention of More-Ham-Head (Pigs Be Upon Him) from the pages of history. This is not racist - as they are not a race, but a medieval conglomeration of dirt-worshiping savages that WILL NOT STOP until the world is Islamic, or all non muslims (Kafir) are dead. They are commanded by their pedophile prophet to LIE TO US about anything that will advance the Islamist agenda of worldwide enslavement. To you sexually repressed "Jihadhi Cool" pieces of crap: I've read your vile filth. I've combed through every inch of your so called "holy" books (knowing about abrogation and the fact that the Koran is not in chronological order helped) and found nothing but rape (tons of it including CHILD RAPE), incest, murder, mutilation, the very minute More-Ham-Head (Penis Be Upon Him) gained a little bit of political power. He was all Islam is Peace until he found enough dirt-worshiping cowards to join him in raping and pillaging.
Fuck Islam
Fuck Shari'ah Law
Fuck Jihad
Fuck Mohammed, y'all
32. Anonymous31/1/15
Anonymous posts this: "Side note/quick history lesson Muhammed never ordered an ethnic cleansing. In fact islam spread so quickly because it was so tolerant."
Correction - straight from the Qur'an chapter 9 verse 29:
“Those who do not convert to Islam or pay the Islamic tax (JIZYAH) will be killed.”
Jizyah is protection racket money. Conquered non-Muslims are allowed to purchase their lives, which are otherwise forfeit to their Muslim conquerors, with money.Jizya is simply extortion money. Its purpose has always been to provide non-Muslims with protection from Muslims: pay up, or else become one of us and convert to Islam, or else die. This is commanded in both the Qur'an and aHadith (sayings of Muhammad), the twin pillars of Islam.
Also, Muhammad DID order ethnic cleansing of Arabia, as narrated by 'Umar b. al-Khattib (Book 019, Number 4366:) the Messenger of Allah said: “I will expel the Jews and Christians from the Arabian Peninsula and will not leave any but Muslim.”
During the ten years before he died, Muhammad waged war on Arabia and ethnically cleased Yathrib [which he renamed Madinah - meaning "The Din (Law) of Ah"] of its entire Jewish population. He exiled some clans, and beheaded the males and enslaved the women and children of other clans. His earliest biographer, Ibn Ishaq, records that Muhammad personally beheaded between 600 and 900 men of the Jewish Qurayzah clan of Yathrib.
“The men of the Qurayzah were slain; the women were sold as captives of war (booty); their lands and properties were distributed or divided among the Muhajirs (Muhammad's followers)". [Yousuf Ali’s tafsir for Sura Ahzab].
In his campaign of eradicating all the Jewish tribes of Arabia, Muhammad and his marauders attacked the Jewish villages of Khyabar, Arabia in 628 BCE. This was a preemptive surprise attack, a Gazzowa (a sudden and unprovoked assault). After beheading the males over 12 years of age, he selected some of the Jewish women as his own personal sex slaves while distributing the remainder among his loyal cutthroat followers.
The Islamic Prophet on his death-bed, gave three orders one of them was to Expel the pagans from the Arabian Peninsula. (Bukhari Volume 4, Book 52, Number 288)
Further, Muhammad ordered genocide of all Jews:
Shalom, Yibel
33. http://reasonresponsibilityandchoice.blogspot.co.il/2008/12/anthem.html
An Anthem
Free People of the World, Unite!
Against Jihadi Genocide
Free Will and Candor will Prevail
Against the bloody Muslim Hell
We Choose the Freedom of the Thought
To Muslim Beast we Bow Not
Each individual is precious
Responsible he’s and courageous
Let the Thousand Flowers blossom
Fear Not the vile Colossus
We will smash it into dust
Overcome the Lies we must
Against the darkest of the Nights
We Choose our Might and we are Right
We’re Free as long We Do No Harm
We care and tend for our young
We stand Opposed to the Oppression
To weak and gentle our Protection
The wicked Lies reject we must
In God of Truth we put our Trust.
34. Anonymous26/4/15
Islamophobia is the immune system of Civilization.
35. Anonymous26/4/15
I understand Genghis had some remarkable success. Near total ...
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Is European Civil War Inevitable by 2025? - Part Two
Is European Civil War Inevitable By 2025? – Part Two
Islam expanded via the sword. Within decades of erupting out of the deserts of 7th Century Arabia it had conquered Palestine, Persia, Egypt, India, North Africa and Spain; it’s opponents paralysed in the face of fanatical violence. It was only in 732 that Charles Martel stopped this frenetic Islamic expansion at the battle of Tours, in France.
But now, in the 21st Century, Islam is back and wants what it has always wanted; a global caliphate. This time, unlike their previous attempts to overthrow the West militarily, they are already within Europe, well funded, radicalised, rapidly expanding, and as their numbers grow, so grows the violence they perpetrate, as we have seen all over Europe within the last few years.
And not only within Europe; Islam is engaged in religious conflict all around the world, from America, Nigeria, Somalia, Sudan, Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia, Kashmir, India, Russia, the Lebanon, Palestine, etc etc. Wherever Islam comes into contact with non-Islam there is conflict.
In each and every country, one glaring reality stands out. It is always Islam as the aggressor, even when they are in a minority of 5% such as Thailand, a country sliding inexorably toward civil war. Such is the prevalence of Islamic violence that Samuel Huntingdon, author of The Clash Of Civilisations coined the phrase “Islam’s bloody borders” the violence of which is represented by Gates Of Vienna’s animated Bloody Borders project which identifies Islamic terrorist activity since 9/11.
To this end there are now some 2,000 Mosques in Western Europe, many of them funded directly by Saudi Arabia to the tune of 90 billion dollars in which Imams - trained or imported from Saudi Arabia - preach extreme Wahhabism. They call for the overthrow of the West, and promote suicide bombing and martyrdom. Channel Four recently sent an undercover reporter into various Mosques in the UK, which exposed Imams in their call for Holy War against the West, which can be seen here on Youtube. CNN also ran an interview with Al-Muhajiroun’s Anjem Choudray, where he calls for Sharia law in Britain. He also prophesised that the Islamic flag will fly over 10 Downing Street.
The concept of Sharia law is not fully understood by the majority of Europeans. Under it they could be killed if they refused to convert to Islam or accept second-class status known as Dhimmitude. Homosexuals could similarly be killed, apostates killed, adulterous woman stoned to death, whilst limbs could be amputated for stealing. 40% of British Muslims wish this to be introduced.
What percentage of that 40% are young males? Muslim women have a great deal to be unhappy about under Sharia law, whilst older Muslims are far less radicalised than the young. It is quite possible therefore, that young males with a favourable view of Sharia constitute a higher figure than the 40% suggests.
So, Islam has a history of attempted Western conquest, and a present day policy of global domination, for which they are happy, in countries such as Sudan, to perpetrate genocide. In the West, their Jihadist rhetoric is accompanied by large-scale violence such as 9/11, the London tube bombings, the Madrid train bombings, and the lesser violence such as the murder of Theo Van Gogh, the indescribable torture and murder of Ilan Halami, the rape of European women as described by Fjordman, the civil unrest in France, where police claim they are in the midst of a civil war, and the death threats made against politicians who speak out against them, such as Gert Wilders.
After the London tube bombings, the government’s immediate response was to worry not about the English, but about the terrible oppression the perpetrators must have suffered from in order to commit such a crime. Much to our rulers dismay, the “fabulous four” were educated and middle class; their drive was Islam, not oppression. In British schools the Holocaust is no longer taught because it runs counter to the Holocaust denial beliefs of Muslims, whilst British historian David Irving was imprisoned for holding the same views as that of the Muslims. Our teaching unions are also of the opinion that the idea of teaching British values is racist, and the BBC is so viciously anti-Christian and pro-Islamic that there is simply not the space here to detail it, it requires an article on it’s own, and a lengthy article at that. (This is one of the more imponderable pathologies the BBC exhibits, considering the corporation has more than it’s fair share of homosexuals and feminists.)
There are many, many more examples of Islamic aggression and European appeasement, but the general thrust is one of overwhelming submission on our part. European politicians are clearly terrified of Islam. As well they might be. So, what can be done? Can Islam be contained, or is Europe drifting inexorably to all out civil war?
Essentially, there are five options. The first is that Islam integrates within Europe’s liberal democracies and we all live happily ever after. This scenario takes no account of the moral sewer that Liberal policies have turned Europe into; a Europe which Islam, quite understandably, views with revulsion. Nor does it take into account that Islam today is the same as Islam in the 7th century. Why should they reform now? Given the increasing radicalisation of Muslim youth and the disturbing numbers who agree with terrorist activity, this scenario is only possible within the mindset of deluded, ignorant liberals, whose naiveté is suicidal in the extreme. Option one can therefore be discounted.
The third option is that Europe wakes up to the danger it is in and expels all it’s Muslims. This is not going to happen; the European Union positively embraces Islam, as noted in Bat Ye’Or’s book Eurabia (thankfully abridged by Fjordman). Not only does the EU have no intention of such an action, they will not even stop further Islamic immigration. The 2.2 million predominately Muslim immigrants they wish to bring into Europe each and every year up to 2050 is a done deal as far as they are concerned.
Indeed, in an extract from this disturbing report published by the European Policy Centre, the EU seeks immigration not only for economic reasons but also for social reasons: “However, the arguments against immigration remain dominant in the political debates of many European countries, and must be taken seriously and challenged if immigration is to keep its place on the social and economic agenda.” Whilst this attitude prevails we can discount option three.
As options one, two, three and four can therefore be discounted; we are left only with option five, to fight. Whilst it is unfortunate that we should be confronted by an expanding, youthful culture with a set of beliefs they will die for, just at the time we are demographically declining, ageing, and apparently only believe in shopping, celebrity and alcohol, does not mean that we will not fight. We will simply have to. Not for domination, but for survival.
The history of man is essentially a history of warfare, where territory, tribe or religion drives the impetus for conquest. That our ruling liberal elites in the West today believe that history, current reality and the law of nature no longer apply to us, does not mean the end of warfare, rather, it simply makes it easier for those who wish to wage war against us. The idea that wars are a thing of the past is so fantastical that only liberals, who place fantasy over reality, could believe it.
Islamic terrorist activity is being constantly thwarted by European intelligence services, but over the next ten years some of these Jihadists will slip through the net and carry out their next atrocity. Although most Europeans are still in a deep liberal sleep regarding Islam, this will not last. By 2017 the tensions between Europeans and Islam will be nerve jangling and will be accompanied by ever-stricter government controls to keep societal order.
Somewhere between 2017 and 2030, during a period of heightened tension, Islamists in either France, Holland or Britain will blow up one church, train or plane too many, and we will retaliate. They will then retaliate, the police will be unable to cope, the army will be drafted in but will find themselves massively outnumbered and outflanked, civilians will be massacred and so a civil war will start.
When the violence starts for real, each and every person, be they moderate or extremist will be forced to take sides, and moderate Muslims will of course take the sides of the extremists. It will be a war entirely different to Europe’s previous wars, which were fought by standing armies along clearly delineated lines. Next time, it will initially be civilians, armed not with tanks and machine guns, but with knives, bombs and terror, who will fight it.
I say initially, because although the army will be of little use in the beginning, they will certainly be capable of forming an impregnable line, behind which the native Europeans, unused to knife fighting, will flee and re-group. And then, enter America, as always, Europe’s saviour. Whilst Europe’s navies blockade the ports, America will deliver weaponry to the Europeans against which Islam will have no response. Whilst they are being annihilated in response to the butchery they carried out in the early days of the war, Muslim countries such as Pakistan and Iran will threaten a nuclear response. If they do, they too will be annihilated.
Such is the future brought about by multiculteralist liberals. Not only will they be responsible for bloodshed unseen even in the last century, they will also be responsible for the extinction of Islam. In 1907 no one could see the coming carnage, whereas in 2007 all educated people with a knowledge of history can see the inevitable coming war. Quite how large it becomes is of course beyond any prediction, but rather than being merely a European war, it could well become a global nuclear war against Islam; and one they have no hope of winning.
Such a scenario is unimaginable to the vapid multiculteralist, but it is their actions, past and present, which will bring it about. One can hardly blame Islam for wishing to dominate the world, but one can certainly blame liberals for giving them the geographical means and ideological confidence whereby they feel that it is actually possible. Will they attempt it? On a small scale, with their ratio of 18:1 they are attempting it now. How do you think they will behave with a ratio of 5:1 let alone 2:1?
The liberal response to an article such as this is to make accusations of hysteria and paranoia. To those, I would say only one thing: Rather than leave sneering one line comments, write a 1,000 word article as to why the scenario outlined above is not inevitable, incorporating reality rather than ideology. I believe it is utterly inevitable, and a tragedy for the West, for Islam, for all of mankind. Please refute it. I really would like it not to be the case.
1. Your assumption that America will rescue Europe could well be negated by the growth of Muslims in the USA. Despite the 911 tragedy, Muslim numbers and influence in the US multiplies.
2. Unfortunately and take in consideration what's happening right now in Gaza city the future of Europe is really dark.
When they (the muslims)are a strong minority they cause problems and when they are the majority the others they can not live as citizens with fully rights...
My best regards,
Miazuria (Miguel Angelo Jardim)
4. Dear Sir / Madam
Thank you
Founding Paper.
UKNDA Chairmans Column
Home Page
5. Thanks for writing this.
6. I have a M. Winston Chang that pretend you took his work to write this article. Of course, I don't believe him. Just checking, he says that you took his work.
7. Tried to find anything written by a Winston Chang, but failed.
Perhaps he is as authentic as his name?
8. "Please refute it."
As you wish.
You, Paul Weston, claim five options:
1) integration
2) demographic takeover
3) expulsion
4) moderation
5) war
I would propose a sixth exists:
6) peaceful, voluntary conversion
Your entire thesis is based on the axiom that Islam is ideologically in the wrong. For this I accuse you yourself of agitating the very civil war you claim to predict. If civil war does occur, it will be because people like you caused it, not because it was inevitable.
Why do you not encourage Europe to at least consider with an open mind the possibility that the teachings of Islam could be good for Europe? Why do you not encourage your readers to learn about Islam from Muslims and then come to their own conclusions about it, instead of simply believing you? How well-acquainted are you yourself with Islam, and Muslims?
Yes, Islam is becoming more popular in Europe, but could this not be because its ideas are good? In Britain as well as across Europe, local converts to Islam are an increasing phenomenon. Have you spoken with these people in any depth and tried to understand the merits that they see in Islam? If so, why not mention these people and what they have to say about the value of Islam to Europe? Could they not be the first of many who would embrace Islam voluntarily if only people like yourself stopped spreading negativity about Islam that discourages more people from studying it without bias? You claim that Muslim women are especially unenthusiastic about their own religion, but how then do you explain that 4/5 of converts to Islam are female?
You speak of looming 'Sharia law' in Britain, yet Sharia law is not even mandated in Pakistan where the population is almost entirely Muslim! How can we take you seriously?
You speak of Europe 'submitting' to Islam, but why do you avoid the possibility that Europe may one day decide for itself that Islam is worth adopting?
I do not want war. I believe war occurs when people cling onto identities instead of evaluating ideas. You seek to push your readers into a position of: "I am European, THEREFORE I cannot be Muslim." This is the very kind of thinking that causes war. I think the best way to avoid war is if enough people see that Islam is not only not the enemy of Europe, but a spiritual force that could put Europe back on track.
9. I am assuming Anonymous is either a Muslim or a Muslim convert, I'm sorry, I meant of course "revert."
I don't beleieve I have ever stated that Islam is ideologically wrong, but it is certainly in the wrong place. Europe is not an islamic continent, and the reason it is not is because Islam failed to militarily dominate it on a number of occasions.
You don't believe in war, and have come up with a pretty spiffy way of avoiding it - voluntary conversion.
I am assuming you mean we should convert to Islam, rather than Islam adapting to the host culture.
In which case there is little point arguing with you. You want us to submit to Allah in order to avoid war, but to do it voluntarily.
Some might do that, the descendants of the warrior class will not.
Hence there will be war.
Whose side would you be on, in the hypothetical event?
What a curiously naive specimen you are. You state:
"I believe war occurs when people cling onto identities instead of evaluating ideas."
Really? Grown ups might consider war occurs when a foreign entity tries to invade you, as per history books.
I suppose there is little point responding to you, firstly because you are beyond reason, and secondly, because the sheer lunacy you come up with rather damns you in the eyes of the rationally and logically minded.
10. It's been six months since the last comment but I'm going to say my piece anyway.
Mr Weston, whether or not you have expressed the opinion of Islam's ideological rightness or wrongness, the fact remains that it is based on the barbarism of a 7th century tyrant and murderer.
His deeds include lying, cheating, torturing, raping and paedophilia. This is not heresay or bias -these are to be found described in the unholy trinity of the Koran, Hadiths and the Sunna.
A thought-system based on a character like Mohammed can only be perverse and destructive.
11. Mr Weston. You ask if I'm a Muslim or a convert? I'm actually a convert. It was the only way I was ever going to get my legover you see. I'm such an uninteresting social retard that it seemed an obvious choice to embrace Islam to find a female. You see in Islam its perfectly OK to force a women to do things she doesn't want to do - like have sex with a brainwashed, parasitical, useless slug like me. | http://paulweston101.blogspot.com/2007/04/is-european-civil-war-inevitable-by_12.html | isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2021-04
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The Text of Geert Wilders’ Speech
From the PVV website, here is the text of the speech given by Geert Wilders yesterday in Copenhagen (Note: I corrected a few typos in this version):
Ladies and gentlemen,
Thank you, Danish Free Press Society, again for inviting me to speak to you here in Copenhagen. It is good to be back in Denmark. Thank you, my friend, Lars Hedegaard.
And last but not least, I thank the Danish border police for having allowed me into the country.
Ladies and gentlemen, last week was a tremendous week. My party, the Dutch Freedom Party, came second in the Dutch elections for the European Parliament!
In many cities, including Rotterdam and The Hague, we even managed to become the largest party!
Meanwhile here in Denmark, the Danish People’s Party again performed very well, which is excellent news for Denmark. I congratulate Pia Kjærsgaard and Morten Messerschmidt on their party’s victory. Marvellous news!
There is more good news these days. In Europe the socialists — or social democrats, as they prefer to call themselves — lost nearly everywhere: in the Netherlands, in Belgium, in Germany, in Austria, in France, in Spain, in Italy and, perhaps best of all, in the United Kingdom. The greatest coward in Europe, the British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, suffered a tremendous blow at the hands of the British electorate. Serves him right!
I will not terribly miss Jacqui Smith, the British cabinet member that worked so hard to have me refused in the UK because of my film Fitna. It is rather ironic that her career-ending was somehow film-related, as it turned out the British taxpayer had to pay for the porn-movies her husband rented. At least, we cannot say she is a movie-hater as such. Just her taste is a little bit selective.
- - - - - - - - -
Why is it good news that the socialists lost by such a margin?
Let me answer this myself. It’s good news because socialists are the most inveterate cultural relativists in Europe. They regard the Islamic culture of backwardness and violence as equal to our Western culture of freedom, democracy and human rights. In fact, it is the socialists who are responsible for mass immigration, Islamization and general decay of our cities and societies. It are the socialists who are responsible for the fact that cities such as Rotterdam, Marseille and Malmö seem to be situated in Eurabia rather than in Europe. And they are even proud of it.
Our Western elite, whether it are politicians, journalists or judges, have lost their way completely. All sense of reality has vanished. All common sense has been thrown to the wind. They take all efforts to deny the things that take place in front of our eyes, and deny everything that is so obviously seen by everyone else.
They won’t stand firm on any issue. Their cultural relativism affects absolutely everything up to the point where they no longer see the difference between good and evil, or between nonsense and logical common sense. Everything is pushed into a grey area, a foggy marsh without beginning or end. The only moral standard they still seem to apply is the question whether or not it is approved by Muslims. Everything Muslims disapprove, they disapprove too.
And so, the voters have had enough. Because they of course realise that Europe is going in the wrong direction. They know that there are enormous problems with Islam in Europe. They are well aware of the identity of those who are taking them for a ride, namely, the Shariah socialists.
As for those present here today, I’m sure everyone knows how intractable the problems with Islam are in Europe, given that Muslims are over-represented in crime rate figures as well as in social benefit statistics. Of course, this is not to say that there aren’t many Muslims of good will who are decent, law-abiding citizens. But facts are facts.
According to the Dutch Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis, mass immigration has to date cost the Dutch taxpayer more than one hundred billion Euros. According to the Danish national bank, every Danish Muslim immigrant costs the Danish state more than 300,000 Euros. A Swedish economist has calculated that mass immigration costs the Swedish taxpayer twenty-seven billion dollars annually. In Norway a warning has been issued to the effect that the proceeds from North Sea oil will have to be spent entirely on mass immigration, while in France official figures have been published suggesting that mass immigration is reducing growth in the French economy by two-thirds. In other words, mass immigration, demographic developments and Islamization are certainly partly causes of Europe’s steadily increasing impoverishment and decay.
Ladies and gentlemen, you may know of the Danish psychologist Nicolai Sennels, who recently said that Muslim integration in the West is simply impossible. Now, that is not a novel idea. A certain Frenchman said pretty much the same thing in 1959. I quote, “Those who recommend integration must be considered pea-brained even if they are scholars and scientists. Just try mixing oil and vinegar. Then shake the bottle. After a moment the two substances will separate again. Do you really believe French society could absorb ten million Muslims, who would be twenty million tomorrow and forty million the day after? In fact, my own village would no longer be Colombey-les-deux-Églises but would rather come to be known as Colombey-les-deux-mosques.”
This quote, you guessed it, is from none other than the former French President Charles de Gaulle.
Now, I do not know whether Sennels and De Gaulle were right in their conclusion that Muslims are incapable of integrating into other cultures. I think in reality we do see Muslims on individual level assimilating into our societies. But what I do know is that very many Muslims do not want to integrate. Again, the facts don’t lie: four in ten British Muslim students want Sharia law to be implemented, while one-third of British Muslim students are in favour of a worldwide caliphate. Seven out of ten Spanish Muslims consider their self a Muslim first, instead of a Spanish citizen. One-third of French Muslims do not object to suicide attacks, half of Dutch Muslims admit to ‘understanding’ the 9/11 attacks. Seven out of ten youth prisoners here in Copenhagen are Muslim. In 2005, 82% of the crimes in Copenhagen were committed by immigrants, many of them Muslim. More than half of the Danish Muslims think that it should be forbidden to criticise Islam and two out of three Danish Muslims think that free speech should be curtailed.
Some time ago an interview was held in France with the French Muslim student Mohamed Sabaoui, who said the following, and I quote:
“Your laws do not coincide with the Koran, Muslims can only be ruled by Shariah law.
We will declare Roubaix an independent Muslim enclave and impose Shariah Law upon all its citizens.
We will be your Trojan Horse, we will rule, Allah akbar.”
End of quote.
Ladies and gentlemen, make no mistake: Islam has always attempted to conquer Europe. Spain fell in the 8th century, Constantinople fell in the 15th century, even Vienna and Poland were threatened, and now, in the 21st century, Islam is trying again. This time not with armies, but through the application of Al-Hijra, the Islamic doctrine of migration and demography.
Unfortunately, the Al-Hijra doctrine is very successful. For the first time in world history there are dozens of millions of Muslims living far outside the Dar al-Islam, the Islamic world. Al-Hijra may be the end of European civilization as we know it: The second Dutch city, Rotterdam, will have a non-Western majority within 3 years. Europe has now more than 50 million Muslims, it is expected that this will be doubled in just 20 years. By 2025, one third of all European children will be born to Muslim families.
Ladies and gentlemen, there is one Western country that has been forced to fight for its values since the very first day of its existence: Israel the canary in the coal mine. Let me say a few words about that wonderful country.
Like Bosnia, Kosovo, Nigeria, Sudan, the Caucasus, Kashmir, southern Thailand, western China and the south of the Philippines, Israel is situated exactly on the dividing line between Dar al-Islam, the Islamic world, and Dar al-Harb, the non-Islamic world. It is no coincidence that it is precisely this dividing line where blood is flowing. All those conflicts concern the Jihad, Jihad in the spirit of the barbarian Muhammad.
Islam forces Israel to fight. The so called ‘Middle East conflict’ is not at all a conflict about land. It is not about some inches of land in Gaza, Judea or Samaria. It is a conflict about ideologies, it is a battle between freedom and Islam, a battle between good and evil, to Islam the whole of Israel is occupied territory. To Islam Tel Aviv and Haifa are settlements too.
Israel is the only democracy in the entire Middle-East. Israel is an oasis of enlightment, whereas the rest of the Middle-East is covered by the black veil of the night. This is no coincidence, in 1939 Winston Churchill said about the Jews in what is now called Israel: “They have made the desert bloom”.
Ladies and gentlemen, I am very much in favour of a two-state solution. One Jewish state called Israel including Judea and Samaria and one Palestinian state called Jordan.
Ladies and gentlemen, wherever Islam and cultural relativism, advocated by Shariah-socialists, come together, freedom of expression is threatened. In Europe in particular, freedom of expression is at risk. As you may know, I am being prosecuted in the Netherlands for expressing my opinion, while being banned from the United Kingdom for the same reason. But, of course, this whole matter is not only about me. There is an ongoing Jihad against free speech in the whole of Europe. In Austria, for example, a lady politician was prosecuted for having spoken the truth about Muhammad. The truth, mind you! We have also had the Danish cartoon crisis; not to mention the threats and/or killing of people as Salman Rushdie, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Pim Fortuyn, Theo van Gogh, Oriana Fallaci and my brave friend Wafa Sultan. In the Netherlands a cartoonist was arrested by no fewer than ten policemen for having made some drawings! I could go on, but I won’t because it would make you sick.
Ladies and gentlemen, I strongly suggest that we should defend freedom of speech, with all our strength. Free speech is the most important of all our many civil rights. Free speech is the cornerstone of our modern free societies. Without free speech there is no democracy, no freedom. It is our obligation to defend free speech. It is our obligation to preserve the heritage of the British Magna Charta and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man. It is our obligation to defend the American Bill of Rights and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Human rights protect the freedom of individuals but they do not protect ideologies. I propose two things:
I propose a boycott of the UN Human Rights Council. Annually this Council adopts resolutions that attempt to kill free speech and the concept of human rights. Let there be no mistake about it, the UN Human Rights Council is a threat to free speech in the West.
I propose to repeal all hate speech laws in Europe. These laws enable radical Muslims to silence those critical of Islam. Free speech should be extended instead of restricted in Europe. We should consider laws comparable to the American First Amendment.
Unfortunately, however, if we really wish to combat the Islamization of Europe effectively, we will have to do more than guard or extend freedom of speech. In this regard it is my firm conviction that we will have to take the following measures:
First, we will have to end all forms of cultural relativism. For this purpose we will need an amendment to our constitutions stating that our European cultural foundation is Judeo-Christian and Humanistic in nature. To the cultural relativists, the Shariah-socialists, I would proudly say, “Our Western culture is superior to Islamic culture.” Or to quote Wafa Sultan when she compared the Western culture with Islam: “It’s not a clash of civilizations, it’s a clash between barbarity and reason”. I fully agree with her.
Second, we will have to stop mass immigration from Muslim countries and promote voluntary repatriation.
Third, we will have to expel criminal foreigners and, following denaturalisation, criminals with dual nationality. I have a clear message to all Muslims in our societies: if you subscribe to our laws, values and constitution you are very welcome to stay and we will even help you to assimilate. But if you cross the red line and commit crimes, start thinking and acting like jihad or sharia we will expel you the same out of our countries.
Fourth, we will have to close down all Islamic schools for they are fascist institutions, to prevent any further indoctrination of young children with an ideology of violence and hatred.
Fifth, we will have to close down all radical and forbid the construction of any new mosques, there is enough Islam in Europe. Besides that, as long as Christians in Turkey, Egypt, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan and Indonesia are treated in the scandalous ways they currently are, and as long as no permission is given for churches to be built or bibles to be sold in, for example, Saudi Arabia, there should be a mosque building-stop in the West.
Sixth, last but not least, we will have to get rid of all those cowardly so-called leaders. We enjoy the privilege of living in a democracy. Let’s use that privilege by replacing cowards with heroes. Let’s have fewer Chamberlains and more Churchills. Lets elect real leaders.
In short, ladies and gentlemen, my main message of today is that we have to start fighting back. No defence, but offence. We have to fight back and demonstrate that millions of people are sick and tired of it all and refuse to take any more. We must make it clear that millions of freedom-loving people are saying ‘enough is enough’.
Ladies and gentlemen, Europe is at the crossroads once again. We either choose the road to darkness or the road to freedom.
My generation never had to fight for this freedom, it was offered to us on a silver platter, by people who fought for it with their lives. My generation does not own this freedom, we are merely its custodians. We cannot strike a deal with Mullahs and imams. We cannot surrender and give up our liberties, we simply do not have the right to do so.
Ladies and gentlemen, we are in the winning mood! Cultural relativists and Shariah-socialists are losing, freedom loving people are winning. Things are changing for the better.
Ladies and gentlemen, and I leave you with this: We will never give in, we will never give up, we will never surrender, we have to win, and we will win!
Thank you very much.
Hat tip: erdebe.
El said...
good speech. on paper, wilders is pretty much perfect. no wonder they're scared of him. if only ukip in the uk could start talking about islam the way he does. i still don't understand their reluctance on the subject.
a question for dutch readers. does wilders really believe that he could stop muslim immigration, close muslim schools and deport muslim criminals (of whom there must already be many thousands, and would certainly be many more if he were to implement his program), without a general breakdown of civil order in urban areas of the netherlands? do you think he knows what's coming, but avoids, for obvious reasons, talking about it? or does he think there's still a way out without massive violence?
either way, i am indebted to him both for his courage and vision and his providing the clearest example to date of the type of thing i have predicted.
ɱØяñιηg$ʇðя ©™ said...
I agree to basically 99% of his speech who was excellent. I think he's a great rhetoric in general. I disagree about assimilation of muslims. I just want to get rid of them from our lands, all of them. I don't trust them, none of them. I'm sick of their taqyyia, kitman and hudnas. If they are so fond of their savage customs, there are plenty of other countries where they are free to practice it but not here. Not ever. I'm also glad to see that he is also worried about our common cultural and historical heritage, something I also has warned about in other posts. Make no mistake of it, once the muslims rise to power in our lands, these giants and especially their work, will be thouroughly banned and branded as haram for all citizens on the pain of death, the latter of which they will be more than happy to condemn us to. Not only will it be banned but as much of their works will also be destroyed. As much as they can get their hands on. I therefore suggest that all citizens already now saves copies of their work. The easiest to save is music and literature as it exists in forms of printed books and records. The pictorial art is harder to save as most of it are om museums. So I fear much of that will be lost in its original forms.
Fjordman said...
El Ingles: Yes, Wilders brings hope. I wish I had ten percent of his courage. But we need to be realistic, as you are in your essays, and understand that the crash is coming, one way or the other. It's too late to avoid now. We need to document what's going on, with special emphasis on how the authorities and the media consistently lie about everything related to immigration, both the scope and the consequences of it. We must document how we have been abused and lied to, demonstrate that we are being deliberately targeted for cultural and demographic destruction and that whatever steps we take to protect our interests are perfectly legitimate.
Many people from the so-called political Right have contributed significantly to these problems, but there is no doubt that Leftists have to take the majority of the blame for the mess we are now in. Let this be the one time that they are actually forced to take the consequences of their betrayal.
Anonymous said...
Well, im a dutch reader and hope so, but i dont think so.
I think he is somewhat inconsistent in his views and his ideas sometimes dont seem to be thought well through.
An example of the first is his view on immigration. The PVV election program says that PVV wants a 5 year ban on non-western (Turks and Moroccons) immigrants.
While in the danish interview and this speech he clearly speaks of muslims!
Now it might not seem like much, but banning non-westerners as a group is rathet ridiculous. Why ban Vietnameze, Chinese and so on. These are pretty succesfull immigrant groups.
But banning muslim immigration sounds spot on to me. They are causing most of the problems.
This example is no big deal but it shows he needs to keep his message consistent!
An example of not thinking things through is his proposal for expelling muslims immigrants who go criminal. Nothing wrong with the principle. But what do you do if the homecountry refuses to take them back? What to do with the kids and wife? What to do with immigrants with unknown or stripped nationality?
So, having said all that, i think he is basically just doing the right thing without any grand plan or claims he has all the answers, and damn the consequenties!
Anonymous said...
BTW i really loved:
and ofcourse
Anonymous said...
What I find interesting about this discussion is that American conservatives are quite willing to speak of the Muslim threat to Europe....but they say nothing about the many-times more massive Mexican settlement of, first, the American Southwest and, now, the rest of the United States.
Mexican are no more over-represented in the US crime statistics and welfare spending than Muslims are in Europe's.
Yet, our great American conservatives remain stone silent on this on-going invasion...on lands where Mexico was once actually sovreign: the future is Quebec-Canada at best, Kosovo-Serbia more likely.
And yet. Nothing.
Now why would that be? Why would someone loudly proclaim their position in a far-off fight that has nothing really to do with them personally while neglecting an actual issue on their own streets, schools and jails?
Watching Eagle said...
Jean Baptiste,
Hispanic immigration is (realitively) benign compared to Al-Hijra. You are right that it is causing some problems, though. We are IN HEAP BIG TROUBLE WITH BARACK OBAMA RIGHT NOW, AND CAN DO NOTHING (MILLITARILY) TO SAVE YOU Europeans ANYMORE from the 3rd. Jihad. Consider yourselves on your own now, for the first time in 50+ years. You Europeans (as a people) hated Bush. You have gotten what you wished for.
Watching Eagle said...
We must keep the goal in mind: To win an election is not to have solved the problem, it's only a start. The Left must be driven from power, and EVERY policy should be examined in the light of whether it helps or harms the long-term survival of our culture.
P.S. -- Jean Baptiste: Islamists were too afraid to be noticed in the U.S. before now -- our culture was strong-- with Barack Obama, that may be changing. THE 3RD JIHAD/AL-HIJRA IS OUR PROBLEM TOO NOW.
Cugel said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Cugel said...
Because Firx bites,I restrain my pessimism. Instead I watch, and I cherish hope while, under the Baron's benign sponsorship, forward-planning philosophers like Fjordman plot credible pathways.
thll said...
El... I'm surprised you're taken in by UKIP. They're surely nothing more than a safety valve?
Private Stock said...
Conservatives are far from silent about the Mexican immigrant invasion of the US. You simply don't hear it unless you search for it, thanks to our freedom-hating mainstream media.
Conservatives flooded Washington with letters, phone calls and emails protesting the illegal alien amnesty that our government tried to force upon us. Flooded to the extent that the politicians voted it down for fear of not being re-elected. The media hasn't taken it's nose out of Obama's ass long enough to report any facts.
Jedilson Bonfim said...
Now it might not seem like much, but banning non-westerners as a group is rathet ridiculous. Why ban the Vietnamese, the Chinese and so on. These are pretty succesfull immigrant groups.
To mention one such example that I've seen with my own eyes, even though San Francisco's Chinatown is really full of residents and business owners who can barely speak English, second-generation Chinese-Americans are overwhelmingly well-integrated and speak "Californian English" just as fast and clearly as any of the locals. Of course, they still keep a few of their forefathers' traditions, such as the celebrations of the Chinese New-Year (which is actually a big tourist attraction in SF), but that is nothing that poses a threat to Western values whatsoever.
Another such example of good integration of East Asians in the West, which I've seen with my own eyes, took place on one of my visits to Munich. On an unusually warm winter day in February 2008, my wife and I saw quite a lot of East-Asian couples, and couples made up of East-Asians and Germans, enjoying themselves with their children at the Englisch Garten, just like everyone else. And there weren't just a few such examples. They were truly all over the place. Though far from being a detailed study on the integration of East-Asians into German society, what met the eye that day was truly encouraging to see.
On the other hand, away from the Englisch Garten as the day approached dusk, we saw a few groups of young A-rabs sitting shoulder-to-shoulder (and even thigh-on-thigh, despite their supposed outspoken, but hypocritical homophobia) on isolated benches in the city, looking around with the angriest looks on their faces and growling in that gibberish-like language of Mahound.
And one wouldn't have to be too versed in mahoundian culture or Mein Qurampf, their little book of hate, to figure what they must have been talking about just by looking at the aggression, the hostility and the contemptuous looks in their eyes.
Observer said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
michelleroseville said...
The transcript is incomplete when Wilders talks about stopping Muslim immigration. It should read:
"Second, I believe, we have to stop the mass immigration from Muslim countries, no more immigrants from Muslim countries, not one, not one anymore". | http://gatesofvienna.blogspot.com/2009/06/text-of-geert-wilders-speech.html | isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2020-10
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} | 1,145 | MEMRI: Arab world self-criticism after Brussels
Arab press begins to self-reproach, following wave of articles blaming the West and Israel.
Hillel Fendel,
Brussels Airport
Brussels Airport
Following the Islamic jihadist terrorist attacks in Brussels last week that killed 35 and wounded over 300, the Arab press reacted with blame for the West and certain countries in the region for supporting terrorism.
A columnist for the Palestinian Authority (PA) daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, for instance, wrote recently that ISIS lacks the power and ability to carry out massive attacks like those in Paris and Brussels, and that they were actually orchestrated by Israel, using ISIS as a tool.
Now, however, MEMRI – the Middle East Media Research, based in Washington, D.C. – reports on several noteworthy and self-critical articles in the Arab media blaming Muslim and Arab culture for suicide bombers and horrific terror attacks.
MEMRI cites three articles.
** The first one is entitled, "We Have Failed Indeed," and is written by the editor of the London-based Saudi daily Al-Hayat. The article attacks the Arabs and Muslims for, in MEMRI's summation, "sowing destruction and fear in the very same European countries that had agreed to take them in after they had fled their failed countries.
"Are we simply part of this world, or are we perhaps an explosive charge implanted in [this world's] entrails?" asks the author. "Are we a normal neighborhood in the global village, or are we maybe a neighborhood of suicide bombers in [that village]? … Are we part of the world's present and future, or are we a dark tempest that seeks to send [the world] back to the caves that it abandoned when it chose the path of progress and human dignity?
** A second recent article is by Tareq Masarwa in the official Jordanian daily Al-Rai. Masarwa criticizes the way in which some Arabs attempt to justify terrorist attacks by claiming that European countries are racist and marginalize Muslims. "We hear these same excuses here. [But] why aren't there millions of terrorists in Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico, since they too are poor and grew up in the outskirts of big cities?! … Europe gives the immigrant the opportunity for a free education, and thousands of Jordanians have attended French and German universities for free... and had an easy time becoming citizens of those countries... It is shameful that we demand that the world treat us justly as we drive away our sons by killing them, imprisoning them, or failing to provide them with proper education, healthcare, and employment, and with a dignified life. The sight of people flocking to Europe's borders, including Syrians, Iraqis, Kurds, Afghans, and Iranians, is heartbreaking, especially when they are carrying their children or pushing them in front of them – but all we do is curse the Europeans as racists who hate Muslims and foreigners, and consider it our right to murder them in their airports, trains, and theaters…
** A third article cited by MEMRI appeared in the Bahraini daily Al-Ayyam, similarly blaming the Muslim world: "What are we doing here in our countries, or in Western countries in Europe and America, while these terrible blows of terrorism land on us and them, one after the other? ... In fact, we do not know how to act against these terrorists. Is it sufficient that after each of these terrorist actions, which take place in merciless rapid succession and are all perpetrated by young Muslims... that we say 'they aren't Muslims' and 'they do not represent true Islam' and are misguided apostates? And will the world be satisfied with [this]?
"Is it normal that while terrorism succeeds in recruiting hundreds and even thousands of Muslims, we are satisfied to persuade ourselves that their numbers 'are still negligible' compared to the global Muslim population? Must the number of terrorists swell to tens or hundreds of thousands before we realize … that this means that we must stop, convene, and give intellectuals the freedom to examine the reasons [for this] and the freedom to publish the results of their studies?...
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Iran cannot stand alone. There is only one enemy and it is Daesh.
Mourners chant slogans as they carry the body of Adel Termos, killed in a twin bombing attack, during his funeral in the village of Tallussa in the Nabatiyeh governorate on November 13, 2015 (AFP Photo/Mahmoud Zayyat)
Beirut (AFP) - Lebanon on Friday (click here) mourned 44 people killed in a Hezbollah bastion in south Beirut in a twin bombing claimed by the Islamic State group, the bloodiest such attack in years.
The Red Cross said at least 239 people were wounded, several in critical condition, in the blasts that hit a busy shopping street in Burj al-Barajneh, a neighbourhood where the Shiite Hezbollah movement allied to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is popular.
The attack harked back to a campaign against Hezbollah between 2013 and 2014, ostensibly in revenge for its military support of regime forces in neighbouring Syria's civil war.
But it was the largest attack ever claimed by IS in Lebanon, and among the deadliest bombings to hit the country since the end of its 1975-1990 civil war.
Hundreds of people attended funerals on Friday after hospitals started to hand over the bodies of victims to their families....
One victim, Adel Tarmous, was hailed as a hero in the newspapers for having prevented a bomber from entering a Shiite place of worship....
Exporting Terrorism from Syria. They aren't refugees or migrants. The attacks are for different reasons with the same result. France has freedom of speech and expression and received attacks for it's cartoons of Mohammad. Hezbollah was attacked because they are not Daesh sympathizers, they have loyalties to Assad.
So, while the result is the same in causing death, the motivations are different. It would not surprise me if Daesh is putting Texas in it's play book. Crackpot Cartoonists.
I don't think the attacks are as random as some may think. There is suppose to be a religious morality to inspire Islamists to act. France - cartoons, Lebanon - Shia and Assad. These Islamists don't view themselves as murderers. They see themselves as acting with their faith. There are motivations.
November 14, 2015
Eleni Chrepa
The Syrian passport (click here) found next to the body of one of the suicide bombers in Paris yesterday was registered on the Greek island of Leros, the Greek government said, suggesting that the holder came into Europe claiming to be a political refugee.
Don't be stupid about this stuff.
Prime Minister Cameron is correct. This is an ongoing problem. It is as much domestic now as in the Middle East.
Saudi Arabia uses a model to remove Islamists intent on violence to prison and reform before they act and kill innocent people. This mess is not new. It is millennium old. The countries in the Middle East, such as Saudi Arabia, knows how to maintain the peace in the homeland.
Is it good to have Russia at our side still yet again.
NATO needs to decide how best to end this war. The Islamists won't end it, they will proliferate it.
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, post war vermin.
The American people don't understand what happened in Paris.
This is the status quo for terrorism. This is literally gang warfare in the name of Allah. It never stops. When one is killed there are half a dozen others that will avenge the death. I am not joking. Islamic war is about retribution. Why are there always Islamists killing each other? There is no such thing as peace. Entering Iraq began a war without end.
NATO needs to decide how best to end the war that is now in it's second decade.
It is an absolute mistake to accept the idea this is "The New Normal." We have no new normal, that would mean The West will be at war inside it's own borders forever.
This has to end.
Europe never participated in the killing in Iraq. France is an easy target. France has violent Islamists within their borders. What happened in France was Daesh's proxy war with the USA.
These violent people are Islamists. They are not jihadists. Jihadists is not a name, it is a method of warfare. Jihad is the identity of an Islamist. Jihad carries out acts of war. Being a jihadist is like saying they are soldiers. Jihadists are ordered by holy men to act. The purpose of these attacks is best defined as Islamists. They have goals. An Islamist is a personal identity dedicated to bring about a different world including economic and political dialogues.
Jihadist = Soldier
Jihad is a form of warfare.
Suicide bomber is a form of warfare.
What good did the NSA do anyone? When government organizations exist for the purpose to exist, it does not solve problems, it causes problems. The mission of the NSA is absent. The people VESTED in the existence of the NSA will only add a faux sense of security. The Congress and the EU have to decide to close electronic communication at their borders or in the case of the EU at the borders of the organization.
The countries involved have to reclaim their sovereign right to protect the citizens. I don't know a country that does it better across the internet than Pakistan. | http://stopwarsaveearth.blogspot.com/2015_11_14_archive.html | robots: classic
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Charlie Dodo: A deal is struck in France...
Author's note: This is a satire. Sort of.
Don't you just hate it when people get killed? Murdered? Decapitated? Have their bodies blown up? Why would anybody in their right mind even consider killing another fellow human being? Have you yourself killed anybody lately? Not me. I've never killed nothing. Cockroaches, maybe -- back when I was living rough on the Lower East Side in 1965. But cockroaches don't count. Or do they? Can you get PTSD from killing bugs? Probably not.
Yet last week 12 people were shot dead in the streets of Paris by unknown gunmen dressed in black and carrying AK-47s -- and apparently even a rocket launcher. And yet nobody twigged to these odd Halloween costumes before it was too late? How did this happen? Apparently a deal had been struck.
But Pappy Bush said, "Let's go invade Kuwait and kill us some Iraqis." So he did. And then Baby Bush said, "I can do you one even better than that!" And he killed even more Iraqis -- and, being in a generous mood, threw in some dead Afghans, Palestinians and Persians as well.
Then Obama came along and started bragging, "I went to Harvard. I can top that!" And by God he did. Libya, Syria, Palestine (again) and Ukraine (technically not the Middle East but it did include slaughtering a whole bunch of people -- so that should count for something, right?)
And then apparently some Al Qaeda wannabes sent word to their handlers or whatever at the CIA, saying, "We've been your grunts since forever and, don't get us wrong, we really do appreciate all the training and weapons you've given us and the chance to behead women and children left and right. Don't get us wrong, Consigliere. We are not ungrateful. But could you kinda maybe send a bit of a tidbit or bone or reward our way too? We too want more of the action. War in the Middle East just isn't enough. We're bored of shelling Mosul and Damascus. Can we PLEEZE go shoot up Paris as well? Just a little bit? Please?"
Well, the CIA understood. Who can even think of resisting an all-expense-paid trip to Paris? Certainly not our homeys in ISIS. Paris being the City of Light and all that. "Sure, go on ahead with your bad selves," the ISIS handlers replied. And a deal was struck.
"What do you got in mind?" asked the handlers. "A little R&R on the Champs-Élysées?"
"Nah. We just want to shoot up Charlie Dodo. Those guys said really really obscene things about the Prophet. Not, of course, the same really really obscene things we say about the Prophet -- but definitely in the ballpark. Charlie Dodo has made a mockery of the Prophet. Not as much of a mockery as we have -- but a mockery just the same."
"Done!" cried the handlers -- and then the paperwork began. And why not? This could definitely be in War Street's best interests and get everyone in France hating Muslims (even more than they do already). Just look how well 9-11 turned out for Islamophobics! "Plus it's always fun to stage a false-flag operation -- and you know how we love to kill journalists." It's a twofer. This could work!
So their CIA handlers quickly dug up the requisite fake passports and the requisite phony ID cards to leave miraculously lying around at the scene And they even tried to get their new Qaeda-trash protégé thugs some free passes to Euro-Disney as well, but didn't quite have the clout to pull that one off. But the stage was set. Journalists and police and French citizens were gonna be slaughtered and the whole world was gonna be shocked and go around saying "I am Charlie". And it would be "Mission Accomplished" all over again, right? And, even more important, now France also has a carte blanche excuse to bomb Palestine or Russia or Vietnam or Walmart or whatever they please -- just like Baby Bush had his excuse to bomb Afghanistan.
But I still really hate it when people get killed.
PS: I wrote this because I'm really and totally dubious about what actually happened at Charlie Hebdo the other day.
I've been to Iraq, North Korea, Afghanistan, Syria, Iran, Africa, Palestine, Dallas, etc. and I've seen with my own eyes what is actually going on in these places. But then I go back home to the States and read the MSM newspapers and watch the TV news -- and it's a whole different world they are describing, one filled with fantasies, wistful thinking, propaganda and lies.
| http://jpstillwater.blogspot.com/2015/01/charlie-dodo-deal-is-struck-in-france.html | robots: classic
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} | 1,875 | The Zeitgeist Politics
Global Politics with a focus on The Middle East
Posts Tagged ‘Anwar al-Awlaki
Pakistan Army accused of extrajudicial killings in Swat. Again.
leave a comment »
The New York Times report:
The real question is over what fallout this will cause.
Written by alexlobov
October 1, 2010 at 5:37 pm
Just who, exactly, is a terrorist worthy of outrage over?
with 3 comments
Alleged members of the Hutaree militia from Michigan. Photos released by the US Marshals Service/AP
Complaining about the fact that terrorism perpetuated by white people isn’t considered terrorism is nothing new but always worth pursuing. This is not a straw man, this is a serious gaping hole in our society’s fabric of reason and consciousness. The fact that right wing crazies, teabaggers, birthers and the like go nuts over possible connections between falafel vendors and Hamas but fail to mention non-Muslim terrorists should not be surprising. They are, after all, crazies. They are not the voice of reason and while their mere existence and relative prominence in our society scares me, it is not as scary as the wanton lack of reason displayed not only by our own mainstream media but even alternative media that are more broad-based and even supposedly carry a liberal bias.
Exhibit A (February 2010):
Let’s see… flying a plane into a government building on a weekday morning because you’re angry at the government. Sounds like terrorism to me.
Exhibit B (March 2010):
Nine people federal prosecutors say belong to a “Christian warrior” militia were accused Monday of plotting to kill a Michigan law enforcement officer and then attack other police at the funeral.
The five-count indictment unsealed Monday charges that between August 2008 and the present, the defendants, acting as a Lenawee County, Michigan, militia group, conspired to use force to oppose the authority of the U.S. government. [CNN]
Let’s see… I wonder what would happen if a group of nine Muslims plotted to kill law enforcement officers?
Exhibit C (May 2010):
Let’s see… trying to bomb a place of worship. I wonder what would happen if the bomb was planted at a synagogue? The blame would be shifted onto ‘Muslim extremists’ in a heartbeat. But here… ‘no leads’.
Now compare these to the reactions to the ‘pantybomber’ and the foiled Times Square plot? I’m sure I didn’t see any of the above exhibits trend on Twitter like these two did and while I’m sure that an evacuation of Times Square is a major event and that the concept of a ‘panty bomber’ is possibly very amusing I don’t think these factors warrant the major scale shrug given to the above three exhibits. So how did the supposedly liberal interwebs do?
Florida mosque bombing = 211,000 results
Michigan militia = 221,000 results
Plane into IRS building = 986,000 results (hoorah)
as compared to:
Underwear bomb = 2,990,000 results
Times Square bomb = 13,000,000 results
OK, I don’t pretend to be some kind of SEO expert and I’m sure the above search terms or keywords or whatever aren’t precise and neither is my method but you’re getting my drift here, right? Why do we see constant articles written about Faisal Shahzad (9,650,000 results, incidentally) and related obscure facts, like that his handwriting “reveals hostility”, but nothing about the origins of the Michigan militia or the Texan IRS-bomber, Joe Stack?
All of this gives rise to the old paradox about the media: is it the chicken or the egg? Is the cause here a failing among the media to properly report on important events or is it the fault of the public for not being interested enough to demand such reporting, explaining the lack of supply? The Google and Twitter watch would suggest that the latter may well be the case. But then again, can the blame be shifted back to the media chicken for incubating, via years of selective reporting and broad-based orientalism, an egg that has hatched a desensitized and apathetic drone unquestioningly consuming panty-bomber lulz and Times Square oh noez?
How much do we really care about events that don’t fit our prejudiced race-based dichotomy, that white people are victims and Muslim people are terrorists? (Note: this is further complicated of course by white convert Muslim ‘terrorists’ like “Jihad Jack” and David Hicks treated like weird cross-cultural abominations that have given up “white person” status and are now the Other with added circus freak curiosity status).
I’m using the pronoun ‘we’ here because I believe I am equally guilty. Sure, I busted out this post and maybe a few tweets but I probably tweeted more about Faisal Shahzad too. I probably haven’t given this issue enough attention either. I mean the IRS bombing was in February and this post is coming out in May? I know many of my most respected Tweeple and fellow bloggers are equally guilty.
Note: I suspect that this is also the reason for the muted outrage over Barack Obama’s recent approval of the extrajudicial assassination of a US citizen who just happened to be… Muslim (Anwar al-Awlaki, 323,000 results). Would we be so quick to apply a prejudiced assumption that the person is probably a terrorist anyway, with or without trial, if the target was, say, a militantly aggressive white Christian member of an anti-Government tea party faction? I can only imagine the outrage. I can see what you’re thinking: “but, uh, I oppose that assassination!” Sure, but how much do we oppose it? If Obama plotted to assassinate a cheerleader from Ohio whilst on holiday in Amsterdam, I’m assuming y’all would blog about it a little more, eh?
Let’s face it, we’re no shrinking violets, we’re good at outrage, we love a spot of anger and a powerful target to rail against. Why then, is our outrage so selective and often so muted, particularly, when double standards are so undeniable? We need to take a good hard look at ourselves and our prejudices, and realise that, no matter how intellectually aware of it we are, orientalism pervades not only our key institutions and power structures but also the hope for the future – our own hearts. | https://zeitgeistpolitics.wordpress.com/tag/anwar-al-awlaki/ | robots: classic
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} | 1,290 | Glenn Greenwald full of beans on Boston
The American left's schizophrenic love-hate relationship with jihadism now manifests maddeningly regarding the Boston attacks—as exemplified in the cowardly commentaries of the grievous Glenn Greenwald. The last time we checked in on him, Glenn was condescending to the Malians that they have no right to any help from the outside world becuase it was Western intervention that got them into that mess in the first place by destabilizing Libya and setting off a domino effect. Of course, this actually means the Malians are more entitled to help in beating back the jihadists, but note the inherent double standard: the Libya intervention was bad because it unleashed jihadists, but when those jihadists seize northern Mali… it's not so bad. His screed objected to use of the inevitable "terrorist" label for the jihadist militias in Mali. What Greenwald didn't get is that by using the "terrorist" label, the media are actually giving these ultra-fundamentalist hoodlums a free rideAll the concern is for the purely hypothetical notion that Mali could be a staging ground for attacks on the West. The Malians getting stoned to death, or having their hands amputated, or the Fulani nomads who have been cleansed from their homeland? Who cares, except the guys on the West Africa desk at Amnesty International? Certainly not Glenn Greenwald—who now applies similar intellectual contortions to the case of the Boston bombings…
In his April 22 piece, "Why is Boston 'terrorism' but not Aurora, Sandy Hook, Tucson and Columbine?," Glen quibbles about whether the Boston attacks fit the legal definition of terrorism:
Oh bullshit, Greenwald. Islamophobia and propagandistic exploitation of the t-word are very real problems, but a progressive response is assuredly not mere denial. We ourselves pointed out that the 2010 attack on the Austin IRS building by some right-wing yahoo sparked no terrorism scare, and is hardly even remembered now. But that was terrorism. Legalistic hair-splitting aside, the Newtown massacre did not fit any sensible definition of "terrorism." And was there any equivocation about calling the Oklahoma City bombing terrorism? Or the Oslo attacks? A realistic single-standard approach to use of the word "terrorism" is what could really combat the exploitative use. But Greenwald is just further muddying the water.
The legal definition, which Ali Abunimah quotes in a piece Greenwald favorably links to, is of limited relevance to political discourse. (Greenwald also provides a BBC quote from Alan Dershowtiz, who similarly questioned whether the legal definition applies, in a case of very strange bedfellows indeed; Dersh has also weighed in for the Miranda rights of Dzhokar Tsarnaev.)
We ourselves also stated that it's probably a good thing that Dzhokar isn't being charged with terrorism, because this (illogically and unfortunately) implies al-Qaeda connections which may or may not be there. Greenwald won't even give Obama that much, excoriating him merely for using the word. (Neither Greenwald nor Abunimah point out the far more alarming abuse of the English language that Dzhokar has been charged with using a "weapon of mass destruction"—for bombs fashioned from pressure-cookers.) But there is a common-sense definition of terrorism established by usage before the atmosphere got so polluted: the use of terror as a political tool, typically by underground cells who attack without warning and target civilians. This counts even if you are a confused kid who got all riled up on al-Qaeda and Alex Jones videos on YouTube (as Tamerlan Tsarnaev seems to have been). It does not count if you merely want random revenge for perceived personal slights (like Adam Lanza, apparently), or if you are so desensitized that you think life is a shoot-'em-up movie (like James Holmes, apparently).
Greenwald argues that mere psychology may also explain the Boston attacks:
Dzhokar is certainly innocent until proven guilty, and if he and his brother were responsible for the attack you can bet "societal alienation" had a lot to do with it. But this precludes a political motive? An absurdity. Jihadists, neo-Nazis and other such totalitarians always play upon the "alienated"—certainly not the content! A bomb attack on a public gathering without any kind of political motive would almost certainly be completely unprecedented. And by invoking the deconextualized abstraction of "mental illness" (as if this has no social roots), Greenwald loans legitimacy to the chilling calls for an authoritarian therapeutic state that followed the Newtown massacre.
In addition to the al-Qaeda videos, it's also been established that the FBI had checked out the Tsarnaev brothers at the behest of Russian intelligence. Contrary to the cries on the right, the fact that the FBI took no pre-emptive action against them is a good thing—evidence that a few shreds of our democratic tradition yet persist. The FBI attention also may have had the paradoxical effect of radicalizing the brothers, a case of the state creating what it fears. But the notion of a purely apolitical attack seems vanishingly remote.
And what about Fallujah and "shock and awe"? It is a testament to just how toxic the atmosphere has become that if you say these were not "terrorism" it is almost immediately assumed that you are defending them. They are certainly superlative examples of state terror—but convention has established "terrorism" as an insurgent phenomenon. Denying this distinction just feeds the tendency to use the word as a mere propaganda weapon—as we've argued before.
But back to the love-hate relationship… The "left" in the US either glorifies or demonizes jihadism depending on the circumstance—exactly like US imperialism! We've pointed out how the jihadis that the idiot-left was avidly rooting for in Iraq were exactly the same ones they now demonize in Syria! One of Greenwald's few responses to the Syria crisis was a July 18 piece last year, "The Damascus suicide bombing," which he only used as another excuse to point out the Western media's double standard about the t-word:
[I]t's extremely doubtful that the term will be applied by Western media outlets to today's Damascus attack. The New York Times story uses the term only once, with scare quotes attributing it to the Assad regime: "SANA, the official news agency, described the assault as a 'suicide terrorist attack.'" The BBC did the same, referring to the anti-Assad forces as "rebels" and mentioning "terrorism" only when quoting the statements of the Assad government. It's actually inconceivable that any mainstream Western outlet or commentator will call this attack Terrorism.
Pretty hilarious. After calling out the Times for the use of "scare quotes" when terror strikes in Damascus, Greenwald does exactly that when terror strikes in Boston! E.g: "The same motive for anti-US 'terrorism' is cited over and over" and "Why is Boston 'terrorism' but not Aurora, Sandy Hook, Tucson and Columbine?" (Nor does Greenwald simply use quotes around the t-word by default; in the piece about Syria he actually rendered it not only without quotes, but with a dignified capital T!)
Glenn Greenwald is the mirror image of what he ostensibly opposes—another sophistic apologist for terror, just like the dominant propaganda system. Why don't his legions of fans get it? | https://countervortex.org/blog/glenn-greenwald-full-of-beans-on-boston/ | isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2020-34
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"Terrorists have beards in live in caves."
So says Dan Stone at Newsweek.
Comes down to ID. This guy was a regular guy-next-door Joe Schmo. Terrorists have beards in live in caves. He was also an American, so targeting the IRS seems more a political statement – albeit a crazy one – whereas Abdulmutallab was an attack on our freedom. Kind of the idea that an American can talk smack about America, but when it comes from someone foreign, we rally together. Or in the case of the Christmas bomber, vie for self-righteousness.
Yes, this is THAT Newsweek. Where, apparently, they're struggling to find reasons to call a guy who flew a plane into an IRS building anything but a terrorist. Why? Because he's white:
Kathy Jones, Managing Editor (Multimedia)
Here is my handy guide:
All foreign groups or foreign individuals bombing/shooting to protest American gov't: terrorists...
...Patrick Enright, Senior Articles Editor
Yeah, maybe the distinction depends too on whom you're attacking — if it's the people you think wronged you (like the IRS), you're a protester/separatist/etc., and if it's indiscriminate killing of clearly innocent people, you're a terrorist.
Jeneen Interlandi, Reporter
I agree with Kathy. Right or wrong, we definitely reserve the label 'terrorist' for foreign attackers. Even the anthrax guy (not that we ever found him) wasn't consistently referred to as terrorist.
Here is Michael Isikof, one of their chief correspondents:
Michael Isikoff ,Investigative Correspondent
ok, just to weigh in on this — I think some of the comments miss what I take to be the fundamental distinction. The underpants bomber, for all his ineptitude, was equipped and dispatched by a foreign enemy — Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula— whose ultimate leader (bin Laden) has declared war on the United States and who has demonstrated his willingness and intent to inflict mass casualties on our civilian population. That makes underpants man a terrorist and had he been captured overseas, would have made himan enemy combatant— and why the Obama administration dispatches the U.S. military and Predator drones to destroy the people who sent him here. Similarly, the Fort Hood shooter may have been a disturbed "lone wolf" but he was in ideological alignment and in communication with a member of the same foreign enemy.
That makes them both terrorists.
The Austin tax protestor, the anthrax scientist wacko, the Unabomber— all did heinous things that we can describe any way we want — certainly what they did were terrorist acts— but they all remain a very different kettle of fish, which is why Mr. underpants man gets more attention that Austin tax protestor flying plane into building.
It should be immediately obvious that this is all horseshit. (Sorry, no gentler word for it.) Domestic terrorists are so old as to be trite in any number of countries around the world, and especially in Europe, so there is no reason whatsoever to believe Isikoff's distinction is in any way accurate. (Isikoff goes on to do the "of course there can be domestic terrorists" line, but then qualifies his statements by talking about how this guy isn't "a bigger terrorist deal".
Let's be honest. That distinction has NOTHING to do with ideology, and it has NOTHING to do with foreign support. It's race. Pure and simple. If you're brown, you're a terrorist. If you're white, you can't be. And, of course, there is an ideological component. If conservatives hate something, and it's attacked, the attacker can't really be a terrorist. After all, conservatives are always right, and terrorists are always wrong, so they couldn't possibly agree! I mean, look at this:
Devin Gordon
I continue to be fascinated by the divergent reactions between Austin Wacko and Underpants Man, and I think it goes much deeper than the taxonomy of what is a "terrorist." (One simple reason: Tiger Woods didn't step on the Underpants saga the very next day. Sigh.)
Fundamentally, I'm with Dan: a Texan white guy named Joe Stack isn't as interesting / enraging / anxiety-inducing as a Nigerian Muslim named Abdulmutallab. I'm also with Eve: Stack's philosophy, unlike Abdulmutallab's, is pretty kosher with many — maybe even most — Americans. We're basically with him right up to the burn-down-your-house-and-fly-a-plane-into-a-building part of the story. Other than that part, right on, Joe Stack!
If they agree with you? You aren't a terrorist. If they don't? Terrorist.
I'm with Glenn. This says nothing good about Newsweek. Nothing good at all. That this is even up for debate is horrible; that people would make these sorts of statements even more so. Those that seriously argued in favor of this have discredited themselves as analysts and journalists; to the extent that a human being is an ethical being, they've discredited themselves as people.
Considering all the dehumanization going on here, that's somewhat appropriate, don't you think?
To be fair, not all did: Mark Hosenball was absolutely right in saying "I guess it's easier and more convenient — politically correct, even — to use that word to describe someone if they have a beard." I hope that he finds a better publication to work for.
But, well, here's Michael Hersh:
Michael Hirsh , Senior Editor, Washington Web Editor
Isikoff pretty much has it right. Al Qaeda and Islamist extremism co-opted the term "terrorist" after 9/11. No one had any problem calling Timothy McVeigh a domestic terrorist before 9/11.
And Stack is pretty isolated. There was the same fear after OK City. But it turns out there aren't as many copycat killings of this nature as there are, say, school shootings.
Apologies to Sam Jackson, but I DON'T REMEMBER AL QAEDA CO-OPTING A GOD-DAMNED THING. You did that, Hirsh. You did it then, and you're doing it now, and it's so much worse now because you clearly KNOW BETTER.
But here we are. With a pack of racist bastards unworthy of the label "sapiens".
No comments:
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Wednesday, October 25, 2006
The Best Way to Fight Terrorism Might be to Impeach Bush
Paul Weyrich has a piece at the Free Congress Foundation in which he basically admits that the polls are right -- a lot of Republicans are going to stay home on election day.
It's not especially insightful, but one paragraph did jump out at me:
Here are two matters for consideration. If Democrats win, the incoming Chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Representative John Conyers (D-MI), has said he wants to impeach both President George W. Bush and Vice President Richard B. Cheney. I have my differences with President Bush but do we really want our President dragged through an impeachment process in front of the world when we have a worldwide enemy, Islamofascists, whose devotion is to death? Will the impeachment of our President help us defeat this deadly enemy?
Um, yeah, it will.
You only have to accept the colossal incompetence of the current administration to come to that conclusion. Almost every decision this president makes spurs on terrorists. Think that allowing torture's making us any friends? How about blowing the living crap out of Iraq -- for pretty much no good reason? How about a bullying foreign policy -- does that win us any allies? It's hard to figure how having two completely insane executives is helpful in fighting terrorism.
Would Bush/Cheney be impeached? If there's any kind of investigation at all, it's hard to see how they wouldn't be. There's just too much in this White House that's obviously criminal. If lying us into a war isn't enough, there's corruption in the form of Jack Abramoff. If that's not enough, there's election fraud. Still not enough? Katrina. And don't forget the massive incompetence that led to 9/11. This administration's record is one of lies, fraud, and disaster. How could removing them not help us fight terrorism?
To fight terrorism, we need to address the root causes of terrorism. And one of those causes is that the US acts like a dick. Does anyone really believe that Bush or Cheney will decide to stop being jerks any time soon?
I've come up with a term to describe the Bush/Cheney brand of conservatism -- Hardass About Everything. I actually came up with that a few years ago to describe talk radio programmed robots on online forums. For them, there is no problem that can't be solved by being a bigger jerk than you are now. If Iraqis are unhappy that we're killing them, for example, the HAE solution is to kill more of them. Punishment solves every problem and the military is the only arm of government worth a damn.
Bush is often accused of being power mad. That's not actually true -- he just doesn't know any better. Bush and company just have about the worst case of HAE in american history. It's an extremely limiting mindset. Punishment is the only tool in their toolbox. That's why they came up with torture as an american policy -- they are unable to see any alternative. They fail to see that the way to end their 'war on terror' is to stop making terrorists. And the reason they fail to see this is because that would mean they'd have to stop being dicks. In the mind of an HAE sufferer, this is unacceptable.
So removing the president and vice president from office would help the war on terror immeasurably. Having a couple of inflexible jerks in office is helpful in what way? Why is it surprising to learn that being an ass earns you enemies? This became obvious last year, according to the State Dept.
Washington Post:
In what insane version of reality does increased terrorism constitute success in fighting terrorism? All the evidence shows that the Bush administration sucks at this stuff. How on Earth can you argue that removing people who are doing a lousy job wouldn't be helpful?
There may be good reasons why impeachment wouldn't be a good idea -- although, frankly, I can't think of one. But the argument that it would hurt the fight against terrorism isn't one of them.
Technorati tags: ; ; ; ; ; one of the best things we could do for the 'war on ' would be to impeach and
Anonymous said...
President Hastert?
Anonymous said...
Uh, in the scenario where Bush/Cheney get impeached, the Dems are in control so Hastert's not speaker any more.
Anonymous said...
This is a fantastic couple of paragraphs.
Thank you.
Nigel said...
Great post. Thanks for getting this out there. Found on reddit.
Dan said...
Such nonsense...
Anonymous said...
Anonymous said...
So stupid you are.
The US 'makes terrorists'?
Get a grip on reality. You think if Bush/Cheney go away that terrorism will magically stop?
Terrorists were around a long time before B/C, and will be around a long time after.
Root causes? Try militant Islam for starters.
Ian C. said...
Hi, People:
I'm an first generation immigrant in Canada. So, to be honest, I'm not really familiar with US's stuff.
But, I do know that, as a travaler/tourist, I've seen some very, very, very jerky US customs who either talk shit to threaten you, or treat you like an idiot in Kinergarden.
Appearantly, I'm not the only one; almost 90% of the local Canadians I've talked to all agree with my about the jerky, rude, and dis-respectful attitude of US Customs.
People got picked on and had unnecessary troubles while they pass the boarders, especially if they are middle east- oriented.
That's not very good for U.S.'s national image. Not even one bit.
Most of the time, when we talked about our trip to the U.S., we almost always agrees that the locals are fairly friendly, but the customs are always jerky, and they look down at us, because they know we don't want any troubles.
How should I put it... Yeah, your article about the Bush's office resonates greatly with our experience with the U.S. customs.
If this do keeps up, it's not hard to see that U.S. will be left with no allies, at least not with most of the Canadians.
For one more example, when in Europe, most Americans like to put Canadian flags on their back packs because they know they aren't always welcomed in foreign countries.
Why are those official americans so cocky and jerky? What good does it do to be rude and bulling people all the time?
Thanks for your time and patience
Sincerely, Ian C.
Anonymous said...
The biggest thing encouraging terrorism is people like you, who give them hope that our will to fight is being sapped.
You suggest that the US are being dicks. We're not the ones targeting civilians. We're not the ones who started this. By suggesting that we're the reason they hate us, you are defacto siding with them by buying into their justifications and propaganda.
Anonymous said...
And why is militant Islam attractive to people in muslim countries? Why are they gaining converts? Could it be that when we attack muslim countries, people there start to think that all that militant rhetoric about modern crusades is right?
Ian C. said...
To the person who's above me:
I don't agree with you.
The author's point is "The U.S. has got to stop bullying others first, or people who got pushed around by U.S. will start to resist in their own(extreme)ways".
Plus, did you know a lot of the "Terrorists" actually went to Universites in United States for education?
In a way, yes, U.S. does makes terrorists.
If you want people being nice to you, you gotta be nice to them first. If you bullying around people with forces, they'll come back and bullying you, too.
It's called Karma.
Plus, Not all the terrorists are Islamic. A lot of them are also Communists, Neo Nazis...etc.
You can't just said it's all Islamic's fault or they STARTED it simply because they are in the front page today. Also, if you ever study world history in high school, you'd know that Islamic people were being bullied/slaughtored by Jews, Christien, and other religions. In your theory, they are just "Fighting BACK to protect themselves".
Maybe you also didn't know that Bush's family were a very close family friend and heavy business partner with the Osama family. Or, perhaps you didn't know U.S. had surrported Sadam Husan with many high tech weapons' support back in the last century?
Or maybe you didn't know that U.S. soildars actually shot innocent civilians in execution-style at Iraq and other places?
This war... This war on Terror, is merely a political show that's pulled by the office in power.
The standards will change from time to time, today's friends will become tomorrow's enemies, so are the values that we hold so dear of.
If you search around the web, you'll find a lot of stories shared by ex-militaries and insiders.
The real question is: Are you willing to put down your difference and ACTUALLY LISTEN to what other people have to SAY?
Here's a link I found through that might give you some ideas.
"Mind Fuck"
For movie, try "Fahrenheit 9/11" by Michael Moore.
Even Video Games, I suggest you try the "Metal Gear Solid" Series, especially "Metal gear Solid 3: Subsistance".
Those medias should give you a basic idea about the thoughts of a veteran, the interesting facts behind the war that's called up by the Bush Administraion, and finally, some food for thoughts.
I've showed you different opinions, it's up to you to check them out or not.
But, please, at least try to think it through before you show your support to anyone.
Oh, I also hope you are not one of those arrogant people who supported trashing the CD's of "Dixie Chicks", who expressed their "FREEDOM OF SPEECH".
Sincerely, Ian C.
P.S. I'm just passing by here when I read news through
If you think I'm wrong in anyway, or if you want to dicuss with me about anything, welcome to send me an e-mail.
Have a nice day.
Ian C. said...
Sorry, my 2nd post are actually meant for:
Anonymous said...
So stupid you are.
The US 'makes terrorists'?
Root causes? Try militant Islam for starters.
Quote Line-----------
Ian C. said...
For the person who wrote the following:
Anonymous said...
Looks like we need to straight out something.
The definition of Terrorism is: People who resolve in violence in order to have their voice heard, right?
According to that definition: Osama Bin Laden is a Terrorist.
However, (I believe) Bush’s definition of Terrorism is: People who oppose the U.S., disregard the reason or methods.
Right now, the real Terrorist Osama, who were a Long term family friend and heavy business partner with the Bush family and had received various forms of military aids in last century, attacked U.S. and caused many suffering to U.S. people.
But, Bush’s administration office decided also head for “Possible” terrorists, such as Iraq.
From what I’ve seen in CNN so far, all I see is people (disregard of sides) got killed in Iraq.
Why are the military fighting in Iraq? Aren’t they going after Bin Ladin? Plus, now that U.S. has captured Sadam Husan, whom the U.S. supported to raise to power in the last century, and found out there’s NO MASS DESTRUCTION WEAPONS IN IRAQ, why are the U.S. Military still fighting in Iraq? What’s up with the stuff that INNOCENT CIVILIANS got EXECUTED by UNITED SOILDARS???
Now, surely you can’t blame people in Iraq for fighting back, can you? Just imagine if some maniac come over to your house, kill your families with excuses such as “it’s for the goods of the greater population/ I’m doing what’s God’s will” …etc. How are you going to react?
Saying it’s Bull Shit is a start, then maybe try to fight off the intruder even with your life, won’t you?
It’s nature for people try to survive and fight off intruders, especially when the intruders are unreasonable with excuses that justifies with their MASSACRE.
Not all Americans are arrogant, but, is it that HARD for the arrogant ones to try to walk in other people’s shoes for just once!?
Look at yourselves, 50 years ago, you treated Communist as your greatest enemy, now, they’ve become one of your best friend simply because their market allows you to earn BIG MONEY.
And U.S.’s dear friend, China was, and still is supporting North Korea. How’s that for a twisted plot?
In politic, there’s no Black and White… heck, there’s even no Grey… All there is… is profit, profit, and more profit.
Ian C.
ThaiTai said...
To understand where Bush is coming from, look into the history books to see what his grandfather and great-grandfather did. Prescott Bush, Dubbya's grandfather, was a director of Union Banking Corporation, a major financer of Hitler and the Nazi war machine. Working with father-in-law George Herbert Walker and E. Roland "Bunny" Harriman, they set up a bank and a shipping company to supply funding and arms to the Nazis. The UBC was siezed by the US on Oct 20, 1942. Too late. By then the Nazis were in power.
Others, like the Dulles brothers, one of whom later led the CIA, worked with these men to support the Nazis. Anyone who would like to read more should buy the book "George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography" published in 1992 by Webster Griffin Tarpley and Anton Chaitkin. It was reprinted in 2004 by
Do you honestly think the Dubbya has not been influenced by his forebears. When people compare him to the Nazis, they may not be aware of how close to the truth they really are. Look at everything he has done so far. He is re-creating a Nazi state, make no mistake about that. Only this time, it won't be the Jews going into the concentration camps. It could be YOU!
Anonymous said...
Impeach them now. All they do is ruin our reputation around the world.
The situation in Iraq is not going to get better any time soon and it's not our responsibility to police the world.
I've never hated a President before until now. I absolutely hate Bush. He's put us in major debt, destroyed our reputation, and killed thousands of American Soldiers, and he has no respect for the U.S. Constitution.
Please America. Vote Democrat and get the republicans OUT of office.
Anonymous said...
What complete nonsense. It's the complete opposite -- Bush is the first President to not be a pussy about terrorism. Being a dick is the only way to deal with terrorists, not being a dickless Democrat/liberal.
Anonymous said...
Neil Young just had a very Bush-bashing CD out. And one of the songs was "Let's Impeach the President". When he was asked how bad he wanted to impeach Bush, he said NOT AT ALL. He said the problem with impeaching him, is you get him replaced, and then the GOP gets to go to the next election with their heads high. No, he said, I want them having to face an election with W as President.
Betty said...
I like it Wiscoman, bring up some great points!
Anonymous said...
I love when liberals bring up Michael Moore - it just nullifies their arguments and makes them look like gullible children. And as long as we're referring each other to movies, please watch Fahrenhype 9/11 to see how easily Michael Moore twisted the facts to convince you sheep how angry you truly are at George Bush. If you get your facts from Moore and recommend others to watch his movies for unbiased truth, you're just too deluded to enter into this argument.
And did you really just compare a video game to the United States' foreign policy?
I'll apologize on behalf of our Customs workers for treating you rudely, but please understand that there are people out there that hijack planes and fly them into buildings. And if they tend to look more closely at people of Middle-Eastern origin it is just because in our experience (and Israel's, and the UK's, and Spain's, and Indonesia's, and India's, etc.) the people that desire to blow up planes, marketplaces, tourist spots, and trains are all young Islamic males. Yes, yes, we know - profiling is bad and you'll sic the ACLU on us, but when there's a pattern that's this clear-cut, we would be negligent to ignore it. Especially when lives are at stake.
On to militant Islam. After 9/11 happened, if we stood back and went about our business, do you really think the terrorism would have stopped? You defend terrorism by saying that it's simply a response to our actions. But there were countless acts of terrorism before we invaded Iraq. Let me name a few: the bombing of the USS Cole, bombing of embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the 1993 WTC bombing, and the Khobar Towers bombing. Yes, I know I'm missing quite a few more. The response was either to lob a couple of cruise missiles into a terrorist training camp or to not do anything. And tell me, if you're a terrorist group and you bomb a building and don't receive any resistance, what will deter you from doing it again? Especially if your religion tells you that if you kill non-Muslims you'll go to heaven and receive 72 virgins. Compare that to all other religions which preach that the path to heaven/salvation/enlightenment is through doing good deeds.
And if you think that religion plays no part in their hatred for us, why do all the names of their groups contain the words "martyrs", "holy", "islam", "Allah", and "jihad"? Furthermore, when they behead people, they consistently cry out "God is great!". We are "infidels" to them that stand in the way of their world domination. (Please note that as inflammatory and outrageous that last statement sounds, that is how Islamic theology is preached. It is a far more intolerant religion than you and I would like to believe. I won't provide links that will be construed as biased, so please do your own research on this topic.) Hell, they even fight amongst themselves over religion, Sunni vs. Shiite anybody?
By the way, the Crusades ended in the 13th century. Do you honestly think we're being attacked for actions that were taken (and stopped!) over 700 years ago?
And to the person who called George Bush a Nazi because his grandfather did business with them - you might as well call all Germans Nazis since their grandfathers either were Nazis or lived alongside them without intervening. And while you're at it, find all the descendants of slave-owners and accuse them of being slave-owners since they are present-day embodiments of their grandfathers. Oh, and by the way, look up "Godwin's Law". Don't worry, you're far from the first sheep to overuse that term.
Phwew. I'm sorry, I've run out of gas pointing out how ridiculous and flawed the various generic liberal arguments are. Let me give you time to respond, and I'll post again later.
Anonymous said...
look to the cause, not the root; one puppet is as good as another.. Lieberman as pres alarms me FAR more
Anonymous said...
It shouldn't be our responsibility to police the world. We should leave IRAQ now and let the Muslims kill each other.
Anonymous said...
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Thursday, January 20, 2022
The truth about terror and terra
By ROB KEZELIS If asked, an experienced world traveler will eagerly describe the most famous and beautiful tourist destinations. The ancient parts of Europe, the incredible ruins of Ur (Iraq), China, the walled cities of Bangkok, the ruins of the Maya and Aztec, just to name a few. At each site, what we really see are monuments to man’s inhumanity to man.
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The walled city of Vilnius, with its beautiful Ausros Vartai city gate, the moats and city walls surrounding the gorgeous city of Vienna, Strassburg, Budapest, The Great Wall, old Tibetan cities, castles and ancient walled cities near Bangkok, the original Edo of Japan, the walls protecting Aztec and Mayan ruins, moats around British and Scotish castles, – in fact, every single place where man has resided since historical times, you still see huge monuments to science, industry, and labor aimed solely at war and self-protection. War and terror – both have always been with us, regardless of how you define them.
That is precisely why the myths of 9/11 and the lies of the Bush administration are so deliberately misguiding and false.
Take any collection of historical tales (including the Christian instruction manual) and you find stories about roving gangs of thieves, of bandits, or highwaymen ready to pillage, rape and murder those they catch unprotected, and of course, of war. City-states were more often at war with one another than not. If water, food or money became scarce, or if some disease threatened one area, it was often easier and more profitable to attack someone else and take it from them, rather than to come up with a cure or a fix.
To put it simply, humanity’s history has always been filled with war and violence, of attacks and defense, of blood and taking. There is not one time in history when some armed conflict was not taking place. Not one. No wonder aliens find us captivating, but too dangerous to contact.
War and terror have always been part of humanity. those elements have shaped who and what we are today. There have been occasional, nay, RARE signs of civilization. Egypt ruled for thousands of years, until outside attacks and internal politics sapped its strength. Greece was famous for creating democracy, until it fell upon hard times. Roman roads were built for trade as much as for conquest. Once lands were taken over, their captives were incorporated into Roman society, with just laws and fair representation being the rule, not the exception. Even Western society has trifled with this “civilization†experiment. The League of Nations, the UN, and even NATO were efforts to stop war, to secure existing borders and to promote peace. And before this day, we used to think that America was different.
With this backdrop we have 9/11, the event that according to Bush, ‘changed everything’. Hardly, sir. To the contrary. It changed nothing. It only gave him cover to act.
A curious person should be struck by one glaring inconsistancy. The root cause of 9/11 has gone un-investigated. There has been no official research or investigation into what history, what events and what circumstances led us to such a painful and bloody event. Our MSM concentrates on missing blond bimbettes and the testamentary wills of dead silica-augmented playboy models. Even worse, President Bush stopped every effort to discuss or investigate the root causes. He even did his utmost to quash the 9/11 commission’s efforts into 9/11, as limited as they were. Bush and his cronies did everything possible to put legal, and possibly illegal roadblocks into the commission’s efforts.
Recently, we learned that Mr. Cheney led the effort to stymie an investigation by threatening Senator L. Graham and dropping all collaborative efforts and exchange of information with the senate committee. Given Cheney’s unbelievably seedy actions surrounding 9/11, the worst that we can imagine is probably inaccurate simply for not going far enough.
The truth is out there, and we can find it. In fact, all it takes is a little sitting back and thinking. The cause of 9/11 is not what Bush says. It is not some PR-framed pithy truism like, “They hate us for our freedoms.†That non-sensical statement collapses with the slightest rational analysis. In one sense, “They hate us for our freedoms†is actually brilliant – it is simple enough for your standard moronic Fox News watcher to grasp, it flows off the tongue easily, and it blunts any thinking person’s response, for the response is bound to be filled with facts, examples, proofs and logic – you know: All things that the Bush administration cannot stand.
Besides, Muslims do not hate us for our freedoms. To the contrary, US-based Muslims love America and its freedom of and from religion as much as any likker-drinkin, NASCAR lovin, redneck in Georgia or Alabama. They love the fact that they can worship as they choose, although some towns in Kansas, South Carolina, Texas and Miseri threaten to change that.
The problem is not our freedom or democracy. Rather, it revolves around the long-standing policies, the unstated, unpublicized and unfortunate policies regarding hegemony, oil and global power that are the problems. It is the unbridled greed of the military industrial complex that only thrives on disaster and war – and would pay dearly to keep was as the status quo. These policies have never been a topic in a national debate, mainly because the powers that try to run the US don’t want their goals to be trumpted in public. The Bush family, in particular, realize that the last thing they want to see is an honest national discussion about our foreign policies and actions.
That explains this latest gambit promoted heavily by Bush and Cheney. A surge, or in the infamous words of their brilliant spokesman, Condi Rice, the augmentation, is nothing more and nothing less than an attempt to maintain the status quo. How many times has the administration actually come out and “defined” victory or “explained” our goals in IraqNam? Bush often mentions a plan, but never has he stated what that plan is. He bandies about terms like democracy and the Iraqnam Constitution and millions of voters – but does he explain why we are there? Hardly.
Given humanity’s war-mongering history, it should surprise no one that the world is at war, not again, but rather, still. Instead of longbows, we have Apache choppers and air to ground missiles. Instead of links of iron turned into shirts, we have kevlar and armored humvees. Instead of moats and castle walls, we have intercontinental ballistic nuclear-tipped missiles and cruise missiles. Instead of the Maginot line, we have untested, unrpoven anti-missile systems in Alaska.
Our foreign policy is the problem. It is the cause of war, poverty, Walmart-based pseudo-slavery, and worse. It is no wonder that the world begins to hate us. What is incredible is that so many here remain in the dark about our real goals and actions – actions which have directly led to 9/11 and will lead to even worse problems in the future.
The realization that our policies are the root of war, and not a result of outside threats is a troubling concept. Most Americans have been brought up believing in apple pie, the American way, peace, a strong defense and in this post Viet Nam era, “Support the Troops”. Most Americans believe that we only strike out when attacked, that we only fight as the last resort, that we are the upholders of peace and democracy. It is a very hard lesson indeed to realize that our domestic propoganda has been false. It is painful to look at this administration and realize that we were lied into an invasion of a country that never attacked us, that posed no threat, and that in fact, that our CIA created and supported many times since the 1950s. We even profited from the Iraq-Iran war, we supplied Hussein with weapons, including the poison gasses he used with our tacit permission. And we gladly bought his oil.
We in America used to believe in our destiny, our past and our system of government and in justice. We believed that we were a force for good in the world. We believed that our leaders practiced what we preached. And until 5 years ago, a lot of the world believed that, too. Except, in the hidden recesses of the world, others saw first hand that our policies were not intended to create peace, but to create profit.
The blunt, unhappy truth: We invaded Iraq without any justification except global power and profit. In a historical context, we are the Huns, we are the ancient invaders of Egypt, we are the Nazis attacking France, we are the Napoleons and the Alexanders. We are the invaders and makers of war. And worse yet, when future historians look closely at these terrible times, they will conclude that it was our global policies that were the proximate cause of the 9/11 attacks, which in turn were used to justify our invasion of a country innocent of any connection with 9/11.
This invasion of IraqNam will go down in history as one of the worse mistakes ever made by the US. As a developing tragedy of regional, possibly global proportions, no good can come of it. The only ones who profit or gain from it are those who sell the arms, and sell the repairs of damage we cause, and those who feed and cloth our troops. The war-makers. The corporations owned, operated and controlled by Carlyle and others. Who in turn rely on Gearge HW Bush and his cronies.
As for the rest of us, the poor and unemployed continue to send their boys and girls to join the military, where they spill their blood, lose their legs, and destroy their brains. The middle class continues to get squeezed, and social benefits that aided all are being cut and eradicated. All of this to support this insane war. As a side benefit, the rest of the world now views George Bush as a larger threat to peace and prosperity than Osama Bin Ladin. Now, there is a mission accomplished.
Each day when our boys and girls put on their desert boots and personal armor, and become moving targets for Iraqis fighting other Iraqis, I can only hope that a few of them will realize that they are not fighting for democracy, but for GE, Boeing, Haliburton, Exxon and Carlyle. I can only hope that Walmart’s profits and General Dynamic’s weapons sales are far more important than the loss of a limb, one’s eyesight or one’s life. I can only hope that some day, America will hold an honest, informed discussion about what our government has been doing around the world without telling us.
But it is a faint hope indeed. It is time to stop this war. Now.
17 thoughts on “The truth about terror and terra”
1. It is because they like living and they know thier story wouldn’t get past the editors desk. If reporters write the truth, they are black balled or suicided or thier families are harmed. I think its pretty much the same with the congressmen and senators. If you buck the powers, you are done for
2. Pastor Agnostic – Thank you. I try daily to educate, warn others of what is/was REALLY happening. This is my path in this lifetime.
Ray,as usual, you know & speak TRUTH, thank you, too.
3. Another thing Phil. You talk about expansionism by the Islamic. Is it not obvious who the expansionists are in the Middle East? It is Israel who constantly encroaches and kills randomly. It is Israel who keeps egging on the US to attack Iran. It is Israel who illegally has nukes. It is AIPAC who rules congress. They are the expansionists.
4. By the way Phil. It was not those arabs that killed 3000 people. It was the executive branch, the pentagon, norad, and the Zionists. The sooner you realize that Osama did not plan and pull off that attack from his cave, the sooner you can help expose the real killers.
5. Those who somehow can suceed in bringing the truth about 911 to the masses will go down in history as the savior of america. If the american people could just see what actually took place and were informed of why, how, and who benefited, the powers that be would fall. That is the key that will change the course we are now doomed with. But as long as controlled media witholds truth and proper discussion about the false flag operation that gave the cabal the power to take control and to execute the crap that is termed war on terrorism. The mass are totally fooled into beleiving what they are told to be truth. These are the basic truths that need to be understood before any change will occur.
1. The neocons wrote the Plan for a New American Century, which clearly states that thier objective is military buildup, middle east aggression for resources and military bases. More control over personal freedoms.
2. They state that the american people will not accept these objectives or support them unless there was a shocking event, ” like a new pearl harbor”
3. Operation Northwoods was a false flag operation planned by the pentagon in the 60’s to start an invasion of Cuba by shooting down a US Plane and blaming Cubans. This document was signed by all but the top commander before it was put to rest. This document proves what our government is capable of doing
4. Since the false flag attack on the twin towers, we have invaded two countries illegally, murdered hundreds of thousands innocent people, destroyed infrastructure that will never be rebuilt, Shredded the constitution of the united states, commenced spying and wire tapping of american citizens, created homeland security which is just another SS Corps like Hitler had. Increased military spending to new highs that have bankrupt the nation. Wasted thousands of soldiers, poisoned thousands more. Earned the most hated nation on earth award. On and On.
But as long as Ruppert Murdoch and his cronies control the media, the truth will never be known if people keep watching TV and reading the major papers. They wrote the plan in 1997 and they created thier new pearl harbor event to shock americans into allowing thier own enslavement and ruin. That is the TRUTH of what is taking place and the bastards are winning, if any of you have’nt noticed. We are not leaving Iraq, we will attack Iran and Syria and the rest of Isreals nieghbors. The united states of America was highjacked on sept 11 2001. The only salvation is for the american people to extract thier heads from the sand and realize that this has been all by the design of the pnac group. You can form all the political action groups, elect all the god sent blow hards you want, but the cold hard facts are untill the mass mind controlled people see how they have been fleeced, not a goddam thing is going to change, NOTHING!
There is a conspiracy. It has been in our faces for six years. It can be drawn on paper for those who have trouble with comprehension. That conspiracy is about to end this nation, and probably will, because people in this country have become stupid, ignorant, and lazy. My Dad always said, Never believe what you hear and only beleive half of what you see. And never never trust a politician. America is about to roll over and sink. The treasury is beyond bankrupt according to the US Comptroller. Our leadership is a bunch of liars and fakers. Corporate greed dictates the futures of nations. There ain’t nothing that can change anything except knowledge of the plan and that our government is responsible for the carnage. Then maybe the masses will wake up and attempt to save something, otherwise its over.
6. 9/11 was not “blowback.” Journalists like to join in the debunking of the 9/11 truth movement, but they desperately avoid looking into the exercises (at least six held on that morning), insider trading, the money trail, the connections with drugs and oil, and the many, many parts of Bush’s story that just don’t make sense, starting with the timeline. Resolving these questions satisfactority inevitably requires that one point back at the US government itself. If journalists are really investigative truth-seekers, why do they studiously shy away from looking closely at these matters?
The “war on terror” is as phony as the “war on poverty” and “war on drugs.” The only thing we’ve gotten out of them are more terror, more poverty, and more drugs. Plus a lot of oppression and a huge prison population. Government policy creates poverty, for which the government announces a “war on poverty.” The CIA and elites run drugs for fun and profit, and the government announces a “war on drugs.” The elites who control the US stage “terror attacks” like 9/11 and then the government announces a “war on terror.” Am I the only one who sees a pattern here? Why don’t mainstream journalists write about this stuff?
7. Thank you Rob, it took me some time to finally read your commentary through to the end. My phone has not stopped ringing in the last couple of days and this morning, come hell or high water (yes it is raining in Arizona) I managed to take it all in.
I agree with Phil and we do need to discuss the whole picture of 9/11 and how we can change our ways to keep from seeing a repeat of this hatred for America.
In my research the terrorism against America started after WW2. It built up due to great win that America pulled off by having strong leadership and very strong military leaders. The fear of Communism did not play well with Americans and when Christianity tried to replace Communism as directed by our government, the real trouble started.
Hundreds of books have been written on why Islam began attacking America before 9/11 and yet no interest in D.C. was found that would open up the debate within or without our political groups. I wondered if the next step would be so humongous that it would indeed get our attention and then 9/11 appeared and the neoconservatives were all ready with their explanations.
The American people were treated like idiots with comments about how we are perceived in other countries. No mention was ever made that our armies were sitting on holy land after the first Iraqi war and we were asked to move them. We refused and all hell broke loose.
What stunned many of us was that Bush was prepared to bring up what we knew as “The Patriot’s Bill” which was a rewrite of Clinton’s Executive Order when they thought Americans would march on the White House during the Millennium. We had a lot of discussions on this terrible plan right here on CHB on Reader Rant. It was a plan to remove most American freedoms and keep them identified, and under the control of the federal government.
9/11 was a terrible shock to all of us but the quick reaction to it by the Bush Administration was too fast and too determined to remove our freedoms. It caused a lot of writers to stop what they were doing and take a closer look at the time line of 9/11.
Most of us older folks have been digusted with the government and how they refuse to discuss UFOs. They treat all of us like idiots unworthy of discussing the truth about UFOs, JFK’s death and now 9/ll.
We must not let the Federal government get away with treating any of us like dirt. We pay their salaries and they work for us. We need a total change of attitude when it comes to the Federal government getting away with torture, lies, murdering innocent people and pushing us away like drunken relatives.
If we do nothing else in 2008 we must demand that our questions be answered. I will not look at Islam as a killer religion until the heads of the Christian sects are also are identified as a long line of killers of innocent people. We must not continue to label each other and other nations in ways that we are also guilty as hell.
We cannot push ourselves into other nations until we establish our own morals. We need some open dialog with every candidate who will run in 2008 and we need a commitment from them that the secret party is over. America is either a free nation for everybody or it is not.
Thank you Rob for starting a much needed subject. We all have much to contribute and learn from each other.
Comments are closed.
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} | 3,049 | Congressman and Chairman of the House’s Homeland Security Committee: Terrorist Threat Worse Now than Before 9/11
Nice Job Creating More Terrorists, You Morons …
The Washington Times notes:
U.S. Rep. Peter T. King, New York Republican and Chairman of the House’s Homeland Security Committee, said Tuesday that al Qaeda is a greater threat now than it was before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
“That is the consensus of most intelligence experts,” he said on CNN’s “Starting Point.”
If King is right, then it shows that America’s anti-terrorism policies since 9/11 have been a dismal failure1.
D’oh! We’re Supporting Terrorists
Initially – in the name of fighting our enemies – the U.S. has directly been supporting Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups for the last decade. See thisthis, this, this and this.
If Al Qaeda is a greater threat now than before 9/11, maybe it’s because – oh, I don’t know – we’re supporting them?
Our Program of Torture Created Terrorists
In addition, torture creates new terrorists:
• General Petraeus said that torture hurts our national security
Our Wars In the Middle East Have Created More Terrorists
1 King is a blowhard who basically thinks that all Muslims are terrorists … and who supported the Irish Republican Army for decades.
• LootersParadise
Yes, torture fosters increased terrorism, but isn’t that intentional? If the torture regime’s goal is to engender fear of an external foe in order to justify the funneling of “defense” expenditures to cronies and unconstitutional constraints on civil liberties, then torture becomes an essential political tool. The pro-torture policies instituted under GWB were never about fighting terrorism, they were designed to create conditions friendly to extractive financial interests and repression of protests by the American populace.
• Rich H
Peter King is an idiot. He’s the human verison of the Color Coded Alert – with the same intent and meaning as used during the Bush administration. He’s a fool’s fool.
Some P.K. quotes, “WikiLeaks presents a clear and present danger to the national security of the United States.”
“If we have another 2,000 people killed, I want Nancy Pelosi and George Soros, John Conyers and Pat Leahy to go to the funeral and say, ‘Your son was vaporized because we didn’t want to dump some guy’s head under water for 30 seconds.'”
Which is it Peter, better or worse? Or does your view has something to do with the election?
• bcorno
I don’t know why they’re concerned. They weren’t concerned before 9/11.
• Blair T. Longley
Where does one bivouac when travelling through the infinite tunnel of deceits? The public politicians may well be “morons” since they are puppets. However, their puppet masters appear to me to be evil geniuses, that are accomplishing exactly what they intended.
Saying that the “war on terror” is a “failure” is similar to saying that the “war on drugs” is a “failure.” That is ONLY true IF one assumes that the public reasons given by the mainstream moron puppet politicians were actually the reasons for what was done. However, I tend to believe that what actually happens is what was actually intended by those who actually planned it.
I begin by observing that the events on 9/11/2001 must have been an inside job, since the collapse of the World Trade Center buildings is impossible to logically understand, except as the result of controlled demolitions. After that, it becomes publicly obvious who had the power to obstruct justice, and summarily destroy evidence, and make sure that no proper investigations were ever done into those mass murders. It is also publicly obvious who went along with selling the official story, while deliberately ignoring the manifest absurdities and contradictions present in that official story. My conclusion, on the basis of what I am able to learn, is that 9/11/2001 was a false flag attack, done by Zionists, to blame on Muslims. 9/11 was intended to become an excuse for more wars, and to prepare to impose martial law on Americans. The global ruling elites, who were the best at being dishonest, and backing that up with violence, are going for broke to consolidate their position through DELIBERATELY driving genocidal world war, and democidal martial law.
The reality is that the puppet masters, who control our political processes, because they already control our money supply, and the mass media, and so forth, are accomplishing exactly what they wanted to accomplish, by driving a vicious spiral of creating more terrorists, since those puppet masters were always the supreme terrorists themselves, who have set up the entire system whereby they benefit from doing that. They are quite willing and able to make more money from mass murders, since that is what they have been doing for quite a few thousand years already. The puppet masters, that control our mainstream moron politicians, and the brainwashed Zombie Sheeple that vote for those politicians, are achieving what those puppet masters intended to achieve. The worse it gets, the better they like it!
I have already abandoned all hope in this respect. I have no means to effectively resist the trillionaire mass murders that are controlling real world events. I already am 100% objectively depressed, and I already expect to become just another one of the many other people that they can kill with impunity. As long as the established systems can continue to fool enough of the people enough of the time, then nothing can be changed. I see no reasonable basis to expect anything else than the runaway triumph of huge lies, backed by lots of violence, automatically getting worse and worse, faster and faster.
IF one perceives that 9/11 was done to deliberately manufacture more terrorism, by blaming people who had nothing to do with that, and attacking them, then that must be seen as a great “success.” Of course, those who were manifestly incompetent get promoted, while those who are not get fired! The same thing applies to the drug wars, and all of the other historical methods whereby various systems of slavery were maintained by violence based on deceits. The puppet masters are using their mainstream moron politicians to make more terrorists, so that there will be good excuses to start world war, and impose martial law. I see no way to prevent that from happening, and I already expect to be destroyed by that, which I why I can publish something like this, because I already feel there is no reasonable hope, and I am already quite sure that the puppet masters, through their armed forces, are going to destroy me and everything I care about anyway, More truth makes no difference to established systems based on lies backed by violence, and so my writing this is too insignificant to matter.
Since the puppet masters, that control the politicians, are the supreme terrorists and torturers, who benefit from doing that, more and more, as much as they can, OF COURSE, that is what is actually happening, and that is not a “mistake,” but the manifestation of their deliberate, long-term, plans. My attempts to discuss and talk about that are practically pointless. If doing that could make any difference, then I too would become a target. However, the established systems are already so overwhelmingly dominant that they no longer care about being revealed. Instead, things which were always denied before might eventually be more openly admitted, because, after all, what can be done about it?
The established systems are the runaway triumph of fraud and robbery, maintaining ignorance and fear, which is mostly working out exactly as planned. The only paradoxical problem is the possible final failure from too much “success” at starting world war and imposing martial law going out of control. However, the people who were really behind driving those events are precisely those people who have been selected by the long history of the money/murder system to be able and willing to take those risks. The established systems do not care about evidence and logical arguments. They ONLY care about continuing to be able to back up their huge lies with more violence. We are driven into the cul de sac that nothing could stop them, except if somebody else was even better at being dishonest, and backing their dishonesty up with violence, BUT, then that would only make things be even worse! Therefore, I see nothing else that one can actually do but wait and watch as things get worse. No bla, bla, blah about truth and justice is going to matter, nor make any difference. Only more dishonesty and violence could make a real difference, BUT, the only real difference that could make would be to make things get even worse, faster.
LIKE I SAID, I AM ALREADY 100% OBJECTIVELY DEPRESSED BY THESE DISCOVERIES, AND THEREFORE, I CAN PUBLISH THIS BECAUSE I ALREADY FEEL THAT I HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE, SINCE WE HAVE ALREADY LOST. The real terrorists have won, by driving their demented spiral that creates more terrorists, so that there will be more wars, and more martial law, without any end in sight … There are no practical and realistic ways that I can perceive to prevent that.
• Rich H
“since those puppet masters were always the supreme terrorists themselves.”
Amen. I feel your despair. Somehow… I feel that if the government were to come for me I’d be able to present in a court of law how our government is nothing but a fraud and therefore has no legal right to sit in judgement of me.
But then I laugh to myself, having been to court before and seeing first hand how it works.
• Blair T. Longley
Yeah, a lot of people, who originally believed in “truth” or “justice” have attempted to go to through courts, only to discover that, yet again, the courts are ACTUALLY based on huge lies, backed by violence. After going through several Canadian court cases myself, over political issues, by a minor miracle winning one, while fighting the others to stalemates, I have too have first hand experience about that. I have finally changed my fundamental political philosophy to start with the concepts of SUBTRACTION, and then ROBBERY. I now regard “truth” and “justice” as practically meaningless transcendental poetry. There are ONLY different systems of organized lies, operating organized robbery! The PROBLEM is both the astronomical amplification of the size of those systems, and that they are now RUNAWAYS!
The social slavery system we are in has become a RUNAWAY FASCIST PLUTOCRACY JUGGERNAUT, which threatens to turn most of us into road kill. The theory of a democratic republic, or constitutional monarchy, etc., was that “We the People” would limit how bad the use of sovereign power became, and that the ability of the people to vote would be able to stop abuse of power. However, what has actually happened, bit by bit, is that the money system has become almost totally perverted, and then that enabled the perversion of everything else. Therefore, the powers of “We the People” ended up, more and more, being used AGAINST “the People.” The primary driver of that was the privatization of the money supply. The government gave away the power to make money out of nothing to private banks. The government legalized counterfeiting of the money supply by tiny elites, which elites then became runaway systems, that were able to buy up control over everything else, especially the mass media, and the political processes, by dominating the funding of politics. The real statistics are that more than 99% of the powers of “We the People” have ALREADY been privatized. Therefore, our “democracy” is a fake rubber stamp, and a cruel joke. The established systems only have to fool enough of the people, enough of the time, and they can easily do that. Therefore, we are endlessly tricked into a vicious spiral of more wars based on deceits, driving more debt slavery.
LIKE I SAID, THE PROBLEM IS THAT IS NOW A RUNAWAY SYSTEM OF DEBT INSANITY, BACKED BY WARS BASED ON LEVELS OF DECEIT THAT ARE ALSO INSANE! The real world has become controlled by a global electronic fiat money fraud, backed up by atomic bombs, which has all be amplified billions, the trillions, then quadrillions of times, to make the previous systems of lies, backed by violence, running frauds and robberies, become runaway psychotic insanities!!!
HOWEVER, there is nothing practical that can be done, given that those already established systems ALREADY control our money supply, and so, can ALREADY makes as much new money out of nothing as they want, and ALREADY own the mass media, and ALREADY totally dominate the funding of the political processes … so that the established systems are ALREADY RUNAWAYS!!!
Dishonest governments, corrupt courts, and ignorant citizens, are now locked into a vicious spiral, which is automatically getting worse, faster, every day … as the whole system heads towards final psychotic breakdowns due to the consequences of too much “success” at controlling civilization with huge lies. In that context, the lies about the “war on terror” are current ways that the pyramidion people are herding the rest of the people, to stampede off the cliff. The threat of too much “success” at doing that is real … BUT, I can not see any practical way to prevent the established systems from being able to continue to do that!
Therefore, like you said, Rich H., I have been there, and done that, regarding several attempting to take constitutional cases to court, especially about the laws that control the funding of politics in Canada, and everything I have experienced has forced me to face the facts ARE as I have outlined above: trillionaire mass murders are herding the Zombie Sheeple towards collective suicide, because of the runaway triumph of frauds being what actually is controlling civilization.
• Blair T. Longley
This expert seems to be speaking mostly truth:
Globalists Plan to Nuke America Revealed
• Manqueman
Gotta do a lot better than relying on Peter King. His record for veracity is just about completely negative. Disappointing post — disappointing because of reliance on an untrustworthy source. I expect far better. | http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2012/10/congressman-and-chairman-of-the-houses-homeland-security-committee-terrorist-threat-worse-now-than-before-911.html | robots: classic
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Post subject: Essential Maneuvers
PostPosted: Wed Dec 29, 2004 11:21 am
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Essential Maneuvers To Forestall Armageddon:The Next Steps
By,John Kaminski
Essential Maneuvers
To Forestall Armageddon
The Next Steps
By John Kaminski
Of course, far too few people comprehend the depth of the decay, the advanced state of the disease. When you willingly and happily participate in a program meant to deceive and destroy you, it is doubly difficult to first realize and second admit you've been had.
Then, when you finally do realize and admit your future has been rendered substantially dimmer by a small group of utterly conscienceless rich white men whose demented, inbred families have ruled the whole world from behind the scenes for probably five hundred years and maybe much longer, and you turn to the authorities you trust for protection from this suddenly discovered psychological tsunami, you learn another hard lesson. They are not on your side.
The real purpose of the police is not to protect the public, it is to protect the bankers and politicians who quite literally own the public, especially when that astonished and outraged populace realizes it has been betrayed, and attempts to turn on its keepers. The cops and the judges and the senators and the mayors will not be on your side, because they derive their authority as well as their affluence from the perverse plunderers who seek to wring every last penny from the hapless human herd they control and manipulate.
That is also the purpose of foreign wars, to keep the public distracted from noticing the crimes that are taking place right before their eyes while they enthusiastically cheer their so-called enlightened system and continue to boast they live in the best country in the world.
So, those who are paying at least nominal attention to the malfunctions of the world and the inconsistencies of all these facetious public explanations - that ever-so-small percentage of socially responsible humans - knows what the problems ARE. The question I keep getting - and the words on the lips of those aghast people who want to stop the mass murders and mass poisonings being inflicted in their names, is - what can we do?
Here's what?
* Capture control of the currency.
Without this step, freedom can never be real, because no truly humane system of governance can ever be implemented as long as the same greedy crooks retain control of the world's money. As long as ordinary people have no input into how that money is used, denominated, accumulated or distributed, the chances for peace in the world and happiness for its people are absolutely nil.
At present, more than 90 percent of the world's wealth, in a world of six billion people, is controlled by less than 10,000 individuals, mostly from two dozen families who can trace their bluebloody lineage back many hundreds of years. At the head of the line is the Rothschild family, which controls all the others. It has been estimated that the aggregate Rothschild wealth is at a minimum 5,000 times greater than the annual gross national product of the United States, although it's difficult to calculate, because the Rothschild octopus (and its loyal lieutenants of the Rockefeller family) literally own the U.S. money supply, the Federal Reserve, and all the major banks of the Western world.
Many communities around the country, such as Ithaca, N.Y., have already begun implementing their own alternative currency systems, but the vast majority of Americans are trapped in a financial system that will consume the assets of almost everyone should it ever collapse, or sag significantly, an event which many knowledgable observers think is imminent.
So when Bush the Younger drops a quick $78 billion on Iraq to be split up among his rich corporate friends, this is mere pocket change to the Rothschilds, about the size of a decent dinner tip relative to the immoral profit it will bring from the deaths of thousands of innocent victims.
The world's people - and most especially Americans - need to realize that to these people, you are nothing more than an expendable ant, to be crushed without thinking should you get in their way. With all of the inexplicably irresponsible spending done by the Bush administration, that day is rushing towards us headlong. Perhaps it's only weeks away.
And following this train of thought you begin to realize that it doesn't really matter how you cast your vote for president. And I'm not talking about vote fixing, or the computerized rigging of the elections. These combined examples of criminal fraud in Florida and Ohio are actually irrelevant distractions, because in an American presidential election, it doesn't matter who wins because the same people always stay in power. It has been that way throughout the 20th century, since the international bankers seized control of the American money supply in 1913.
Of course, merely contemplating the capture of the world's money supply means considering the complete disintegration of the world's financial networks, which are inextricably intertwined with the cancerous Rothschild octopus, and rescuing control of the currency from these criminals would result in the instant collapse of almost every government on Earth.
Who would accomplish such a fantastic feat? Who would control the new system? Would the world revert into piratical barbarism? Probably. But that's what we have now, only with a smile for the cameras, which are owned by the pirates in control.
This process, should it make any headway, would take a century or more, and be accomplished gradually, as states around the world recalibrate their objectives from pure profit to sensible self-sufficiency and actualized independence.
Of course, with heartless predators like the United States manipulating all these little countries into bankruptcy at every opportunity, there would be difficult times. But they would not be as difficult as the situation now, where the New York and London banks immorally reap the lion's share of profits for the labor of most of the people on the planet.
The tradeoff has always been security or liberty. Ben Franklin still has the last word on this: "Those who give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." Sooner or later, we all have to bite the bullet and decide that we don't want to be slaves to the Rothschilds and Rockefellers, or it's curtains for freedom.
Which leads us to the second essential step toward promoting real freedom in the world ...
* Identify the real power structure.
Some silly Americans thought they actually had a choice during the 2004 elections. Right, ace, with two guys from the same college fraternity as the choices. Which makes all this handwrung consternation about Ohio recounts as useless as the peace demos prior to America's invasion of Iraq.
Bulletin to all Americans (and whomever else may care to listen): we are well past the point where influencing public opinion is going to stop the people in control of practically the whole world from doing exactly what they want to do.
The main difference between the Vietnam-era protests and what happened in the late winter of 2003 was that the entire media spectrum in the United States had been locked down by the corporations, which was not the case in the 1960s. The anti-Vietnam protests succeeded in bringing the war back home because it got on TV. That is definitely not happening today.
Most Americans don't know that U.S. troops had orders to kill everyone in Fallujah, whether old and infirmed or young and harmless, or that we essentially destroyed the whole city (and for no particular reason).
Even though a lot of Americans are becoming suspicious that everytime Rumsfeld's boys need a justification for some new atrocity, they just trot out a new Osama bin Laden video, whose on-cue performances have helped many people reach the horrifying realization that the U.S. war on terror was created in Washington, and bin Laden, who was once known as Tim Osman, is definitely on the U.S. payroll.
But then, identifying who the real players are has always been difficult in media-drugged, flag-waving America, which is thumping the world to death with its unopened Bibles.
If you think George Bush or Dick Cheney is running the show, then you are woefully undereducated - which is the mental status of most people in America.
Notable midwife to tyranny Henry Kissinger is the chief lieutenant of David Rockefeller, who is the American commisar of the Rothschild empire, which runs just about everything. There are no real enemies, only those created by the powers that be to create the chaotic conditions to both cull the population and profit from the sales of weapons to both sides. It has been that way throughout the 20th century, and doubtless long before.
Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany were funded by Jewish bankers in America and England. The Bush family was one of the primary benefactors of these maneuvers. They are trusted stooges of the big money players - Queens Elizabeth and Juliana and Sofia - and the banking giants of both Wall and Fleet streets. John Kerry's Jewish father was a CIA agent and he married a Forbes girl (the Forbes family, with Jewish ties, being one of the richest criminal American families of the 19th century, profiting from both slavery and drug sales to China).
Maybe, if you have the time, and any interest in your own freedom, you should to a little reading.
So you begin to see, when people ask me, "What can I do?" to oppose or combat this insanity that has wrapped itself around America's spinal cord like some demonic Stargate Goa-uld, it's difficult to toss back quick answers. Certainly supporting Dennis Kucinich didn't get us very far, did it?
We didn't get into this mess overnight, and it won't end for a long time, if ever. In the meantime, because of the lack of attention and cultivation of naivete and gullibility over time, we are deep into a tyrannical scenario where we do not have control over our own lives and have placed people in charge of our welfare who mean to kill off many millions of us, simply to make their own situation more comfortable.
This assessment can no longer be in doubt.
So what can we do?
How about you tell me?
Tell me true, noble citizen. What ARE you going to do when they come for you?
When the judges pronounce you a terrorist for participating in a peace demonstration and revoke your citizenship, what will you do? If you're a good boy, they may put you on probation for life and let you work in a McDonald's, or maybe Wal-Mart.
When the police decide to search your house because you contributed to a Muslim charity, and you decide to pull out your contraband AK-47 that you bought in a gun show in Texas, are you going to duke it out with them? Like Bill Cooper? Hell, they'll just fentanyl the whole neighborhood. What will your thought be with that last choking breath of yours? That you live in the best country in the world?
What will you do if they put you in a camp where nobody comes out? Petition your Congressperson? My Congressperson is Katherine Harris, as perfidious a felon as exists in any penal system. Don't count on me taking this route.
So what that you know you can't get an iota of truth from your TV or your local newspaper. So what that you know the vote was shamelessly stolen in Ohio, guaranteeing the ratcheting up of endless war. So what that you know we are being poisoned by chemtrails, insufficiently tested pharmaceuticals, and radioactivity spawned by America's own devil weapons.
The question on the table is ... what will you do when they come for you?
For me there is only one logical answer.
Shut down the government NOW, before we no longer have a chance to do it all.
But it won't happen. I received an e-mail from my friend Blaga in Bulgaria today, mired in her New World Order imposed poverty (she calls it USraeli occupation) and pining for happier days under predictable and relatively benevolent (in her estimation) Communist leadership.
She included snips of Milton Mayer's famous anti-Nazi polemic, "They Thought They Were Free." Yes, Mayer was a Jew, but I'm thinking he had no inkling of the Nazi-like menace Jewish Israel and the Zionist U.S. would become today. At least, you can't hear it in his prosaic lament, chillingly appropriate for the situation in America today.
"And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self deception has grown too heavy .... The world you live in - your nation, your people - is not the world you were in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring .... But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves .... Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.
"Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven't done (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we do nothing). You remember those early meetings of your department in the university when, if one had stood, others would have stood, perhaps, but no one stood. A small matter, a matter of hiring this man or that, and you hired this one rather than that. You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair.
"What then? You must then shoot yourself. A few did. Or "adjust" your principles. Many tried, and some, I suppose, succeeded; not I, however. Or learn to live the rest of your life with your shame. This last is the nearest there is, under the circumstances, to heroism: shame. I said nothing. I thought of nothing to say.
And so away went your freedom ....
.... and one gray day, your life ....
John Kaminski is a writer who lives on the Gulf Coast of Florida. His frequent Internet essays have been collected into two anthologies, the latest of which is titled "The Perfect Enemy." He also wrote "The Day America Died: Why You Shouldn't Believe the Official Story of What Happened on September 11, 2001," a 48-page booklet aimed at those who cling to the belief that what the U.S. government said about that tragic day was the truth. For more information go to
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Blue Moon by Trent © 2007 | http://tvnewslies.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=305&p=934 | robots: classic
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} | 15,578 | Saturday, April 17, 2010
The Gauntlet We Face
The American Action Report began as a blog with a single purpose: to drive the rats out of Congress. Once I began tugging at that thread, I found, as the ancients discovered, that “…all things work together….”
If we succeed in driving the rats from Congress, we mustn't assume that their successors will not also be rats, or will become rats through exposure to Congress. As many people already know, the system itself is a rotten barrel that spoils the apples. How do we gain by making room in Congress for other rats?
I'm reminded of the writer who said, “Nobody ever reads what I write. I continue to write because I want to know what I think.” The more I wrote and discovered my thoughts, the more I realized that a whole-systems approach was needed. I also discovered that I make a poor newsman and probably a worse rabble rouser because I think too much and too deeply, and I have too many ideas.
No, with my nimble fingers tickling the keyboard, the American Action Report is more appropriate as a political guidebook and reference book. If it ever becomes an honest-to-goodness book, made with real paper formed from trees that have been assassinated expressly for the purpose of giving people something to hold as they read, perhaps the name should be changed.
Perhaps then it should be titled The John Book of American Politics. In book form, each article would be about two pages long. That length is perfectly suited for bathroom reading. One can learn more about attending to his constitutional responsibilities as he attends to his constitutional. Already, I'm convinced that neoconservatives (previously known as Trotskyites) and other authoritarian types have found that reading these articles has helped to relieve their symptoms of irregularity.
As for solutions to our political woes, I'm not a bit optimistic. I've never believed in optimism. Optimism is the madness of maintaining that everything will turn out well simply because we want them to turn out well.
No, I'm a possibility thinker. There's a difference.
There are far more ways that things can go wrong than right. For that reason, I believe that things naturally go wrong; and they seldom go right except by planning and effort. If we sincerely want to “take our country back,” we'd better have a plan as to what we're going to do with it; and we'd better be willing to accept that responsibility. If we don't, we'll lose it again. Worse still, for each demon we drive out of Congress, seven more will take his place, and the situation will be worse than before. The rotten barrel must be cleaned before they can spoil the fresh apples we put in it as replacements for the incumbents. This calls for fortitude.
I've also observed that there's very little that anyone can do about anything. Opportunities to affect things for good are few and fleeting. Here's the good news: The difference between a person (or group) that is effective and one that isn't is the alertness to recognize those opportunities as they arise (or anticipate them before they arise) and make the most of them before they can get away. This calls for prudence and vigilance.
The members of Congress will never be better than the American people. If we want the blessings of peace with other nations, we must learn to be at peace with one another. We can't always understand each other. We can't always like each other. We can and should always care for one another's well-being even when we don't understand one another.
If we want the blessings of prosperity, we need to respect one another's property and hold government leaders to the same standards.
If we value the right to life, we must respect the lives of others.
If we want the blessings of liberty, we must respect the rights of others and demand the same of government. That includes the recognition that people in far-off lands, who are no threat to their neighbors, have a right to be left alone.
If we want a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, then We the People must become more closely involved in it.
Sending an honest person to Congress, we send him out as a sheep among wolves. If ethical behavior were always simple, there would be no decisions to make. Many corporations have divisions devoted especially to guiding their employees in doing the right thing. We the People have offered no such guidance for our Congressmen.
A careful study of the major acts of legislative embezzlement and shredding of the Constitution over the past ten years will reveal systemic failures that the voting public have failed to address. The demonically evil people guiding various embezzlement bills and human rights violations (the USA PATRIOT Act, the bailouts, and the “healthcare” scam, to give a few examples) through Congress followed certain patterns. They systemically cut congressmen off from their sources of guidance, lied incessantly, offered them a choice between two appalling evils, and pushed them in the direction of the decision the government gangsters wanted them to make.
Many of them, having already signed away their souls, eagerly embraced these atrocities against their constituents. Others went along with the evils because We the People were not there to offer them the guidance they needed. When our congressmen are faced with choices between two evils, We the People can't always expect them to have the wisdom to find a third way. We the People must take that responsibility.
The damage is done. We must clean up the mess we helped to make, bring about a rebirth of freedom, and take steps to keep from making a mess of things in the future.
Congressmen who failed us must be replaced for the same reasons that a sick patient sometimes must be removed from the source of his ailment. If they're returned to Congress two years after being removed, they’re likely to return as better representatives. Congressmen who are willfully corrupt must be removed for the same reasons one might remove an alcoholic from his job as a bartender or a pedophile from his job at a day care center. Scoundrels such as they should be cast into outer darkness and never returned to any position of public responsibility. In all probability, criminal investigations of dozens of congressmen should be carried out.
Sweeping the rats out of Congress, then, is not a cure-all. It won't be enough to drive the money changers from the temple. A clean-up from top to bottom and from inside out is needed. Much of that clean-up must take place within the lives of each voter. Figuratively speaking, our bones have been broken partly because We the People have repeatedly gone astray. If a proper cleansing takes place and the right spirit is renewed in us, then the bones that have been broken may rejoice.
I pray that the American Action Report—admittedly, one of many blogs written by many bloggers—will, in its small way, serve as a reference and guidebook toward that end.
Pray for wisdom in the 2010 congressional elections.
Click here: Light a Candle Endeavor
Monday, April 12, 2010
How Washington Really Works: Part 1
(This is the first of a five-part series.)
We hear a great deal these days about “taking America back.” This popular slogan begs a few questions.
The first question is, “Take it back from whom?” Any attempt to answer that question tends to invite accusations of envy, populism, or a belief in conspiracies. While any or all of these accusations may be accurate, they tend to close off discussion rather than answer questions. Please pardon my caution, then, in writing part 1 of this series.
To understand what we must do to take America back, it’s helpful to understand who has America now, and how we lost it in the first place. In this article, I’m not going to present anything new to you. In this part of the five-part series, step by step, I’m going to tell you things that you already know or believe or suspect; but I’m going to put them together in a way that may surprise you.
If you’ve ever taken the initiative of contacting your congressman or anyone else in government, then you, like millions of others, have tried to influence the workings of government. You’re a special interest group, even if you’re a group of one.
Let’s limit this discussion to legislation and regulatory activity. There are basically three reasons people ask something of government:
1. To benefit themselves and, they believe, other people, whether we’re talking about a family, an industry, another interest, or the nation as a whole,
2. To benefit only themselves, though not at the expense of anyone else, and,
3. To benefit only themselves at the expense of other people.
As a general rule, people who combine into groups are more successful at influencing the functions of government than those who act alone. Groups of groups, such as political parties and those with compatible interests (such as environmental issues or religious issues) tend to be even more successful. Political parties in the U.S. usually claim to be ideologically driven, but, in fact, they’re just “holding companies” for diverse special interests.
Obviously, some groups are more successful than others at gaining influence in government policy. Some have gained actual power in certain areas of government policy.
At what point, then, does an interest group gain so much political power that it undermines the American ideals of democracy and freedom? Look at the list of three items again. Most people would agree that #3 should be the exception rather than the rule, and that the burden of achieving #3 should be negligible to the American people as a whole.
Groups that use their power to gain things for themselves at the expense of everyone else rarely, if ever, admit to selfish ends.
Our nation’s Founding Fathers gave us a system of government with checks and balances among three branches of government: legislative, executive, and judicial. They never envisioned the fourth branch of government we have today: regulatory agencies that are accountable to no one. These regulatory agencies write their own “laws,” enforce them, and judge the people who run afoul of them.
In Federalist paper #48, James Madison, acclaimed as the “Father of the Constitution,” wrote, “The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny." Regulatory agencies claim all three powers.
If regulatory agencies use a degree of power that “may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny,” who controls the regulatory agencies? How are they appointed, and why? In the next four parts to this series, I’ll use a combination of research tools called network analysis and issue sets analysis to show you who wields power in Washington, how they wield it, and what they gain from it. This will necessarily involve who holds the “power of the purse, as well as other forms of power brokerage. Some of the most influential power brokers can be found in the most unexpected places.
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Pray for Wisdom in the 2010 congressional elections.
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How Washington Really Works, Part 2
In my previous message, I promised to give you some details on how things really work in Washington. The illustration you see above is just the beginning. Three more are yet to come, and even that is the tip of the iceberg--or rather, the first whiff of the sewer.
You may have noticed that there's no place for the taxpaying voters in the illustration. That's because the taxpaying voters are not in Washington. Most don't contact their congressmen at all. This doesn't mean that your opinions don't mean anything to him. Election Day means a great deal to him. It's just that--well, maybe you've heard the old song, "When I'm not near the girl I love, I love the girl I'm near." The illustration you see here reflects whom our congressmen are near.
Our nation's Founding Fathers designed a system of checks and balances among three branches of government: legislative, judicial, and executive. They never authorized the erection of a fourth branch of government: the regulatory agencies.
Instead of taking the time and trouble of writing and passing laws that are clearly understood, Congress passes laws that can best be described as Chinese fire drills or soup sandwiches. If a congressional committee were in charge of creating new animals, they would create something like the platypus. Then the executive branch has to do its job of enforcing flexible and sometimes vaguely worded or contradictory laws.
The executive branch doesn’t want to create reasonable laws either; and, besides, that’s not their job. They kick the can down the street by creating what they call regulatory agencies. Basically, the job of regulatory agencies is to transform Chinese fire drills into Chinese puzzles. On any given day, they create puzzles that the inventor of Rubric’s cube would envy.
Though these puzzles hamstring and often destroy small- and medium-sized businesses, the CEO’s of giant corporations love them. They can afford to hire people to work out these puzzles. Besides, their people create those puzzles in the first place.
Here’s how it works:
Congress appoints the regulators from the business community; that almost always means the giant corporations. The top regulators are changed from one presidential administration to another, so where do they work when they leave government “service”? They go where they’re most qualified to work: a company in the industry that they’ve been regulating. How’s that for a sweetheart deal?
It gets worse. If you see a congressman’s name on a bill, it doesn’t mean that the congressman wrote it. It means only that he introduced it. It may have been written by an official for a regulated business, by members of a regulatory agency, or both. There’s nothing wrong with that practice, because those people have more expertise in that area than the average congressman does.
It does, however, create a potential conflict of interest. Imagine yourself accepting campaign contributions from someone who has handed you a bill to introduce—a bill that, for all you know, may benefit that person at the expense of everyone else. It’s a potentially corrupting system, and it behooves the congressman to study it more carefully and seek other expertise.
Congress is advised by experts who work only for the Congress, but where do they get them? Usually, the same places they get the regulators.
You can see how the system can be used to benefit the few at the expense of the many. In tomorrow’s blog, I’ll describe an iron triangle of potential conflicts of interest among congressmen, news reporters, and corporate CEO’s.
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How Washington Really Works: Part 3
In part 2, I described the iron triangle among Congress, the regulatory agencies, and the businesses being regulated. In part 3, you see another iron triangle: the one among Congress, the news media, and the big banks and corporations. As you saw in part 2, we're talking about a mutual back-scratching society.
Money has been described as “the mother's milk of politics.” Big banks such as Citibank and Goldman Sachs have a ton of it. So do giant corporations such as Monsanto and Baxter International. According to federal law, banks and corporations are forbidden to directly contribute to political campaigns. CEO's, however, are allowed to set up political action groups (PAC's) and shake down their employees for contributions.
Nobody really believes that these political contributions aren't tied to the kind of service they expect to get from congressmen. If you've ever contributed to a political campaign, you probably did so because you expected certain behavior from the candidate. In your case and mine, there wouldn't be any quid pro quo (That's Latin for, “You scratch my back, and I'll scratch yours.") After all, most candidates have no reason to remember our measly little contributions. On the other hand, candidates can't help but remember receiving thousands of dollars from one CEO. Do I hear a back being scratched?
Congressmen also are in need of publicity. As long as the name is spelled correctly, any publicity is good publicity. That's because voters tend to remember names better than news. The information media, which is charitably called the news media, is a rich source of free publicity.
What can congressmen give the—er—news media in return? They can give them status, credibility, and (for what it may be worth) news. You've heard the adage, “Names make the news.” People in government have the names that count the most. Me? I'm nobody. Putting my name in their rag wouldn't give them any status or credibility at all.
Here's an example: During the Jimmy Carter administration, White House muck-a-muck Hamilton Jordan peeked down the bodice of an Egyptian ambassador's bodice and said, “I've always wanted to see the pyramids.” It got more space in the Washington Post than a presidential address Carter gave at the time.
If some unknown person did something like that to a vegetable seller, who'd know about it?
Then there's the sweetheart arrangement between the “news” media and the big banks and corporations. Of course, the giant banks and corporation CEO's want favorable publicity; but, more significantly, they want unfavorable publicity to be as muted as possible. If you get all your news from the big six communications companies that dominate the flow of news, you probably didn't hear that Baxter shipped “vaccines” containing live (A) H1N1 flu virus to 18 countries. When the “vaccine” was tried on ferrets, every one of them died.
What do the banksters and corporate parasites have to offer the—um—“news” media? One thing they have is effective control. Most votes are won or lost within a range of 3%; a switch of 1.5% is usually enough to change the outcome of the vote. For that reason, 5% ownership of a company is considered “controlling interest.” Giant banks and corporations are heavily invested in the big six communications companies, and they enjoy the advantage of interlocking directorates. That is, they have people sitting on each others' boards of directors.
Big banks and corporations also heavily advertise in the big six communications companies. You may have heard that the “news” media compete with one another for news. Actually, the news is incidental to a news outlet's profitability. The main pursuit of a news outlet is advertising, not news.
People who buy newspapers and news magazines buy it for the news, but the piddling amount they pay for them is nothing compared to advertising profits. The price of a newspaper is just earnest money to make sure that somebody's actually reading that rag. The broadcast media doesn’t charge the viewer anything, and they make higher profits than the oil companies.
If you're paying less than a dollar for a newspaper, and somebody else regularly places $2,000 advertisements in that same paper, who's going to have more influence on the news and editorial content of the paper? Especially if the advertiser has a henchman on the paper’s board of directors?
In the next article, I'll share with you how an iron triangle among the Congress, the banking cartel, and the military-industrial complex makes war more likely, even when it's against America's national interest.
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How Washington Really Works, Part 4
Of three iron triangles of power I describe in this five-part series, this one is the most complicated. That's because not one person in a thousand knows how the Federal Reserve System (Fed) works. For that reason, this installment is mainly about the Federal Reserve System.
Each of the twelve branches of the Fed is called a Federal Reserve Bank. That’s a misnomer, because the Fed is not federal in the sense of being part of the federal government; it has no reserves, and the Fed isn't really a bank. The U.S. Constitution grants Congress the power to “coin money,” but, in 1913, Congress presumed to pass that legal power to a banking cartel and called it the Federal Reserve System.
The Fed has the power to create paper currency out of thin air (not backed by anything of value) and lend it to the U.S. Treasury. This paper currency is, in fact, certificates of debt (promissory notes), with the promise that the American taxpayer will repay the debt.
If paper currency is not backed by anything of value, from where does it get its value? It gets it from the value of paper currency already in circulation. Let's say you have $100 in your wallet out of, say, $10 trillion in circulation; and the Fed prints another $10 trillion and puts it into circulation. Because there is twice as much paper currency to pay for the same amount of goods and services, the $100 in your wallet is now worth only half what it was worth before.
You lose money twice: once when Congress borrows the money for you to repay; and a second time, when the value of the currency in your wallet drops. It's as though a thief has taken $50 out of your wallet and left you with an IOU stating that you—not the thief—will have to “repay” the debt “owed” to the thief. (Think about that the next time you think about the $multi-trillion bailouts.)
Look at the left side of the triangle above. The taxpayer pays interest for borrowing something that had no value at the time the Fed loaned it to the U.S. government.
During the War Between the States, Abraham Lincoln refused to finance the war on borrowed money. There was no Fed at the time, of course, but Lincoln recognized that fractional lending and the use of promissory notes as “paper money” amounted to the kind of double taxation I've just described.
Instead, the federal government rather than the bankers issued its own paper currency. This inflation of the currency was a form of invisible tax, in that it raised money by reducing the value of currency already in circulation. Nonetheless, there was no debt for the taxpayers to repay. Here's how Lincoln described his policy:
- Abraham Lincoln
The following are from two other Lincoln quotes: "I have two great enemies, the southern army in front of me and the financial institutions, in the rear. Of the two, the one in the rear is the greatest enemy..... I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands, and the Republic is destroyed. I feel at this moment more anxiety for the safety of my country than ever before, even in the midst of war.” Abraham Lincoln- In a letter written to William Elkin
As strange as it seems, the Federal Reserve has never been audited in its entire 97-year history. Establishment shills have consistently beaten back attempts to make the Fed accountable to the American people, but this may soon change. On a bi-partisan 43-26 vote, the House Finance Committee approved HR1207—a bill to audit the Fed. The House passed HR1207 (known as S604 in the Senate) by an overwhelming margin.
Did your congressman vote to make the Fed accountable to the American people? Or is he beholden to powerful special interests? Click here and find out.
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How Washington Really Works: Part 5
(This is the last of a five-part series)
The diagram you see above is just a sketch of how power and influence are exchanged in Washington. The exchanges are explained in parts 2-4 in this series, in which iron triangles of power are illustrated. This diagram shows only bilateral relationships that indirectly add up to a power establishment.
The diagram doesn’t show interlocking directorates among businesses and banks or the blurring of distinctions between commercial banks and investment banks. It doesn’t show the investments that individual congressmen or individuals elsewhere on the diagram have in others in the diagram.
As a precaution against tendencies toward monopoly, federal law prohibits banks in the same city from having interlocking directorates. That law was passed in the days of green eye shades and paper ledgers. In the age of Internet and Excel, all banks are virtually in the same city.
In 1933, Congress wisely passed the Glass-Seagall Act, separating commercial banks, investment banks, and insurance companies. For the next 66 years, the Glass-Seagall Act served as a deterrent to some of the worst abuses that had led to the Great Depression. Insurance company representatives could proudly claim that no insurance company in American history ever went bankrupt.
Then, on November 12, 1999, the curtain rang down on sanity and then came Act Two. The ironically titled Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999, also known as the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (or more formally, (Pub.L. 106-102, 113 Stat. 1338) was passed. Phil Gramm now holds the dubious distinction of being the Father of the Current Financial Crisis.
None of these three perps are still at the scene of the crime. Leach and Bliley dropped out of sight, and Phil Gramm became a lobbyist for malefactors of great wealth. Astonishingly, Gramm was 2008 presidential candidate John McCain’s chief economics adviser. McCain admitted that he didn’t know much about economics, but that was ridiculous. It’s like admitting that you don’t know much about surgery and asking Jack the Ripper to perform an operation on you.
Phil Gramm also holds the dubious distinction of ending insurance company bragging rights about never having experienced bankruptcy. Courtesy of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, American International Group (AIG) became heavily involved in credit default swaps and collateralized debt obligations. (Don’t feel embarrassed for not understanding those terms. Fed Chairman Allan Greenspan admitted that he didn’t understand them either but that they must be good for the economy. In 2008, Greenspan was the one who ended up feeling stupid. When McCain picked Gramm to advise him, McCain really was stupid.) Courtesy of Phil Gramm and his unindicted co-conspirators, AIG became the first insurance company in American history to be nationalized to save it from going bankrupt.
You may be wondering if the wheeler dealers in Washington are at least as sophisticated as the average teenage Facebook user. That is, do they, like their pimpled counterparts in cyberspace, do networking or participate in meet-up groups? Well, yes, they have several of them. That’s another phenomenon that the diagrams in this series don’t show; and that will be the subject of a future article.
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How Congressmen Stack the Deck against Voters
Most American voters have a low opinion of Congress but feel that their own congressman deserves to be re-elected. There's an obvious disconnect here. Why? I think that it's mainly because, in each election, most voters let their congressmen control the election debate and the flow of communication.
By way of analogy, suppose you were a teacher, and you had 345 students—that's the number of congressmen there are in the U.S. House of Representatives. Think of elections as mid-term or final exams. As their teacher, how would you react if your students told you that there should be 345 separate sets of questions on the exam; and that each student would decide what questions he should be required to answer? Then how would you react if they suggested that each student should be allowed to grade his own paper?
Now you have a picture of how it is that almost all congressional incumbents are re-elected to a congress that most voters think is rotten. Most voters let the incumbents tell them which issues and which votes are relevant to the voters’ decisions as to whether he should be re-elected. Don't expect that the incumbent's opponent will do the job for you. Opponents also have their agenda. Who's making sure that your agenda is properly addressed in the election? If you aren't, nobody is.
In case you think this is an exaggeration, let me tell you about two incidents I experienced. During one election on which I'd help manage, I asked an experienced operative, “What are the issues in this campaign?”
She replied, “The issues are whatever you say they are.” Did you get that? In most cases, the voters don't decide what the issues are; the candidate and his campaign team decide.
On another occasion, I observed that taking a stand on a controversial issue loses a candidate support from those who disagree, but it doesn't gain support from those who agree with the candidate’s position. I asked, “How do you deal with a controversial issue?”
The answer was, “If anyone asks you, give your answer in a truthful but matter-of-fact manner. If you don't treat it as an important issue, neither will most voters.” Did you get that? In most cases, the voters don't decide how important an issue is; the candidates do.
When individual voters or groups try to make an issue of some of their congressmen’s votes in Congress, congressmen usually protest, “Those votes weren't representative of how I usually vote in Congress. You should look at all of my voting record.” He knows, of course, that nobody will do that because nobody has that much time on his hands. On the other hand, when the congressman tells you what he has been doing in Congress, he makes no attempt to tell you about all of his voting record—just the votes that will make him look good. Did you get that? He's saying that you, the voter, have no right to choose which votes to consider in judging his performance; only he has the right to do that.
Since you're reading this article, I must assume that you want to “take America back,” to use the popular catchphrase. Before we can do that, we have to take the responsibility of taking our elections back. For a change, each voter must put himself in the driver's seat.
You decide which issues are important to you, and you be the judge of your congressman’s performance. How does your congressman stack up? Here and here are web sites that may help you to decide:
There are many other resources on the Internet. I'll try to find a few more non-partisan, really useful sites for you between now and the November elections. As the saying goes, “A new broom sweeps clean.” This November, let's sweep the moneychangers from the temple.
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How News Reporting Really Works: Part 1
(This is the first of a four-part series)
I recently had an email discussion, concerning American society and politics, with a Taiwanese student. His perceptions of American politics weren’t exactly wrong, so to speak; but they were wildly exaggerated. Because I used to be a journalist, and I had taken journalism courses, I think I know the cause of his misperceptions. I believe the problem is systemic—that the problem caused by the way news is gathered and reported.
Let’s take a case in point.
According to a recent CNN survey, 56% of the American people see the federal government as an immediate threat to their liberties. That’s large enough a percentage to call it a mainstream view. Now take a look at this video news clip, and remember that this clip and the survey I just mentioned were generated by the same source: CNN. In this video clip, a CNN reporter characterizes the people who hold those concerns as being far outside of the mainstream.
What accounts for that disconnect between CNN’s polls and CNN’s reporting? One cause is that news reporting has become a form of entertainment; and, like other forms of entertainment, broadcast news programs compete for advertising dollars. Another is that, as a general rule, news reporters aren’t hired because they understand the issues; they’re hired because they can write well or can present themselves well on camera. Another is, although the camera doesn’t lie, the camera does exaggerate. Yet another cause is that there’s more news to report than means to report it; thus, the individual viewpoints of editors, reporters, and even headline writers tend to filter and slant the news. Advertisers also play a role in how news is reported. Finally, newspaper readers and television viewers—that means you and I—also play a role in slanting the news.
Today, let’s take a look at one of those causes: that the camera exaggerates.
Suppose you were shown two photographs of audiences attending speeches. In one, three fourths of the seats are empty, a few of the members of the audience are slumping in their seats, and one or two are yawning. In the other, audience members are closely packed, all the seats are filled, and everyone is leaning forward, obviously interested in what the speaker is saying.
You could be excused for believing that the second speech was more interesting and better attended than the first. Forgive me, but I tricked you. Both photos were taken at the same speech. The photos depict different parts of the audience at different times during the speech. A snapshot of how a small part of the audience looked over a period of 1/16 of a second or less gave you the impression of how all of the audience members reacted during the whole speech.
Now think about the Tea Party loudmouth you saw in the video clip. In the minds of those unfamiliar with the issues involved, one babbling loudmouth was representative of the entire crowd of perhaps 100,000 people.
Of course, the reporter in the clip showed herself willfully misinformed, but I’ll address the cause of reporter self deception in another article in this series. (I call this problem the Malie Bruton effect, after the reporter who spent two hours interviewing a folk religion scholar and, in her newspaper article, presented him as a practicing witch.)
So, why did the reporter head for someone who seemed pretty low on the food chain instead of someone more coherent? Part of the answer has to do with the nature of brief news reports. It takes longer to give an intelligent, well-thought-out answer than it does to rant and babble incoherently. When you have only seven minutes to make a news report, you pass by the rational-looking ones and head for the kooks. If you see someone whose knuckles drag the ground, you’ve hit pay dirt. Besides, let’s face it: Intelligent people aren’t interesting enough to drive up ratings and draw in advertising dollars.
Something like that also happens with interviews in which interviewees reasonably state their case. Many years ago, Martin Luther King was interviewed concerning his hopes for the future. By most accounts, he was pretty reasonable to all sides. When the interview was mentioned on the nightly news, however, his reference to “black power,” in a clip lasting only a few seconds, was the only thing that made the news. News reporting of that sort was credited with creating the black power movement.
That was the only part of the speech reported because that was the only part of the speech that made a good sound bite. People who get all or most of the news from the broadcast media are given sound bites in place of rational discourse. That’s only one of the ways that news reporting distorts the news.
We can find the solution within ourselves. Contrary to what the movies suggest, investigative journalism is rare. We have to be our own investigative journalists. The Truth is out there, but so are misinformation and disinformation. We have to be discriminating in selecting our sources.
How News Reporting Really Works: Part 2
(This is the second of a four-part series.)
From time to time, we hear that the news media is “biased.” What does that mean, and is it true?
Let’s look at the first question first. Depending on your area of study, a bias may also be called a conceptual framework (academic literature), an attitude (or value)(psychology), or a frame of reference (social science). In all of these areas, some frame of reference is needed as a yardstick for measuring (or a dowsing rod for finding) the truth.
Let’s say you were upset because someone stole your candy and wouldn’t give it back. In any discussion of what to do about it, you would assume that everyone within earshot held the attitude that property can be owned. No one would even consider discussing the issue unless one of your listeners came from a culture in which people had never heard of private property.
In a moment, I’ll give you a link to a video showing a real-life impasse between two people who had different frames of reference on a controversial political issue. First, though, let’s take a look at what psychologists call Rokeach’s Onion.
Each of us has countless opinions. When asked to back up our opinions, we often give facts, but the facts always come with certain beliefs on which our opinions are based. If, for example, you asked a constitutionalist why he calls a certain government action an “intrusion,” he’ll give you facts, but he’ll also cite a well-known theory (such as Social Contract Theory) or law (such as the Tenth Amendment). He may not know what the theory is called, but he understands the basic idea of it.
When asked to defend his belief in Social Contract Theory or the Tenth Amendment, though, he’s usually stumped. He has never thought to defend it, and he has never thought it needed defense. Until you brought it up, he may never have realized that it, in some way, applied to the belief he’s asked to defend. This is called an attitude. Three examples of attitudes are the right to own property (or lack of that right), that all men are created equal (or not), and, for that matter, that there is such a thing as a right.
To Thomas Jefferson, an attitude was something that is regarded as a “self-evident truth.” It’s taken on faith and can neither be proven nor disproven. Of course, if a person has a “bad attitude,” his attitude only seems like a self-evident truth.
Now take a look at this video clip of a CNN reporter and a Tea Party protestor “talking past” each other. In the reporter’s frame of reference, government is the source of our rights; in the protestor’s frame of reference, God (or Nature) is the source of our rights. Obviously, neither had given the idea much thought, but they’re acting on those attitudes just the same.
Because of the reporter’s frame of reference, she presented the “stimulus package” as a gift from specific government leaders, as if it had come from their pockets. The protestor, in his babbling way, showed that he realized that the money was borrowed from the people and that it amounted to “double taxation.” That is, the taxpayer must repay the debt, even after losing some of the value of his money to the inflation of the currency. He also seemed to know that the government can’t give more than it takes; the reporter clearly did not recognize that fact.
The CNN reporter also subscribed to the Leviathan theory of government. She suggested that the people we elect to make our laws are free to pass any law they wish. The protestor clearly subscribed to the republican view that we elect leaders to represent us and that we’re not electing them to do as they wish.
The babbling protestor’s biggest mistake was his attempt to frame his views in lofty quotes. He probably would have done a better job of presenting his views if he had used the same words he uses when he talks with his friends and acquaintances.
The CNN reporter’s biggest mistake was that she made no attempt to understand the man’s frame of reference. (That’s mainly what people mean when they accuse reporters of bias.) Instead, she berated the man for being ungrateful for what she saw as the generosity of government leaders. She further suggested that the protests amount to fringe elements claiming that they shouldn’t be required to pay their fair share (whatever that means) in taxes.
We should remind CNN that 56% of the American people—that’s around 170 million people—can not honestly be called fringe something-or-other. You can’t find that many “right wingers” in America.
Over a hundred million liberals, conservatives, libertarians, Southern agrarians, and non-aligned Americans are uniting to take our country back from the banksters, war profiteers, and other perps in the Wall Street/Washington crime syndicate. As Benjamin Franklin said, “We must all hang together or, assuredly, we shall all hang separately.” This November we can, and must, sweep the rats out of Congress, topple the Axis of Evil, and reclaim our country.
How News Reporting Really Works, Part 3
Hanlon's Razor runs something like, “Never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by stupidity.” Someone has added, “But don't rule out malice.” Parts 3 and 4 of this series of articles will cover each in its turn. In this article, we're looking at stupidity as an explanation for how the news media get their stories wrong.
In saying that reporters are often stupid, I don't mean that they lack intelligence, or that they have a monopoly on stupidity. As Forrest Gump pointed out,“Stupid is as stupid does.” (And whom did Tom Hanks support in the last election?) It's worth reading Jim Longworth's commentary in which he gives five defining characteristics of stupidity and claims that America is suffering from an epidemic of stupidity.
For starters, reporters don't get their jobs because they understand the things they report. They get their jobs because they can write well enough to be understood and because they're willing to accept the low pay that most reporters receive.
Don't expect reporters to dig for the "real" news in their stories. Investigative reporting is rare and takes more time than most editors allow. The reporter doesn't have time to get the truth; he has only enough time to get a story. He quickly writes it and files it. The next day, it's another story and another deadline.
When a news reporter arrives on the scene, he finds many more facts than he can possibly cover in a story, so he decides on the spot which facts are important enough to report and which aren't. He writes in a style known as inverted pyramid style. In the first paragraph he places what he thinks is the most important information (though it may not be) which must include who, what, when, and where. The "why" and“how" is left to his discretion.
If he fails to understand the frame of reference for the people on whom he's reporting, he's likely to get the "why” and "how" completely wrong. If he does that, he risks getting the story wrong.
Here's an example:
In 1986, Dr. Lee Yuan-tseh received the Nobel Prize for chemistry. The news media acted as if Taiwan's educational system had received the prize. After all, Dr. Lee was, as the story spinners wrote, a product of Taiwan’s educational system. To this day, the media frequently give Taiwan's educational system credit for Dr. Lee's accomplishments. The truth is Dr. Lee, in his view, had to fight Taiwan's educational system every step of the way. Here are his comments.
Reporters write to please their editors, and editors edit to please media owners and advertisers. I'll discuss those guys in the next article.
There are many more stories out there than there are reporters to cover them or newspaper space to print them. How are some stories selected for reporting and all others are ignored?
The editor decides which reporter to send to cover which story. It's more a business decision than a matter of journalistic responsibility.
When Elvis Presley supposedly died, news anchor Dan Rather saw it as less important than some economic news of the day. On that occasion at least, he was choosing journalistic responsibility over ratings. If a news program gets the lead story “wrong,” he has lost his viewers for the rest of the program, and his advertisers won't like that. CBS lost viewers that day. (Please be patient; I'll discuss ulterior motives for editors in the next article in this series.)
The last person to touch a newspaper story is the headline writer. Years ago, I saw a newspaper article reporting the death of a man who had been a leader in the French Underground during World War II. The headline read, “Ex-Nazi Leader Dies.”
I recently heard the following joke about how news stories are written:
An Iranian was visiting Paris when he saw a vicious dog attacking a little girl. At the risk of his own life, he fought the dog to the death. A newspaper reporter praised his heroism and said, “I can see the headlines now: ‘Brave Parisian saves little girl from vicious dog.’”
The Iranian explained that he wasn’t from Paris. “Brave Frenchman, then?” No, he wasn't French. “How about, ‘Brave European'?” No, he wasn't European. He was a Muslim from Iran.
The next day's newspaper headline read, “Islamic terrorist kills little girl's dog.”
How News Reporting Really Works: Part 4
(This is the final article in a four-part series.) In part three of this series, I mentioned Hanlon's Razor, which runs something like, “Never ascribe to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.” In this article, I’ll address the problems that can't be adequately explained by stupidity. I'll confine myself to stating the facts and avoid any discussion of Conspiracy Theory.
Around 1980, about 50 corporations dominated the world's information media. Today, most of the world's information apart from the Internet is dominated by only six media giants. They are as follows, with the names of their CEO’s placed in parentheses: Time Warner (Jeffrey L. Bewkes ), Disney (Bob Iger ), Bertelsmann AG (Hartmut Ostrowski ), Viacom (Sumner Redstone ), News Corporation (Rupert Murdoch ), and NBC Universal (Jeff Zucker ).
There you have them: the Gang of Six. Apart from the Internet, they control around 90% of the world’s flow of information.
In a previous article, I used a triangular illustration to show the interlocking of Congress, the information media, and corporate owners and advertisers. Several decades ago, MAD magazine alluded to a similar phenomenon at the level of local newspapers. In journalism class in college, I was taught that newspapers and other news media are more answerable to their advertisers than to their subscribers. Reading “How Washington Really Works, Part 3," you can see how.
The State newspaper in Columbia, South Carolina, is a practical example of this phenomenon. For most of the 43 years I lived in South Carolina (1949-1992), I was a reader of the State newspaper. After the erstwhile media giant Knight-Ridder bought the State in 1986, the change in editorial slant was so sudden and stark that it no longer seemed like a South Carolina newspaper. Since then, Knight-Ridder has been swallowed by the McClatchy Company, which also has Internet holdings.
To see how the Gang of Six wields power over which news is reported, what slant is used, and which news gets spiked, let’s take a brief look at how the Gang of Six treats the most important news event since the assassination of President Kennedy.
World history over the past nine years has been shaped by the destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. That event was more pivotal than the assassination of President Kennedy was for the period from 1963 until 1973, and it rivals the significance of America’s entry into World War I in 1917. The official story of 911 has been the rationale for almost every major governmental policy change in America since 2001.
It's vital, then, for us to understand what happened on that day. That would necessarily involve asking questions. We know from experience, though, that the Gang of Six hasn’t taken the initiative to do so. It’s as if the official government story is the final word. (By contrast, the official cover-up of the Watergate burglary was investigated and reported almost daily for more than two years.)
I promised not to get into Conspiracy Theory, and I'm keeping my promise. I'm sticking to the facts. Here's an important fact: At least a half dozen members of the Congressional Committee into 911, as well as their senior counsel, told the news media that the truth was being covered up. Wouldn’t that be big news? Why haven't you heard it?
This explosive news and other news concerning 911 either haven’t been reported, or they were under reported. As an example of under reporting important news concerning 911, the following quote appeared in a CNN report: “"We were extremely frustrated with the false statements we were getting [from the Pentagon]," [Commission member and Congressman Tim] Roemer told CNN. "We were not sure of the intent, whether it was to deceive the commission or merely part of the fumbling bureaucracy." Unlike the Washington Post covering a burglary, CNN didn't spend two years telling us about it, and the story was quickly forgotten.
What else is the Gang of Six not telling us?
Sometimes They Lie
After I had written a series of articles called “How News Reporting Really Works.” I’m a systems thinker. The idea of the series was to explain, systemically, how news reporters often get their stories and even their facts wrong. As a result, I was accused of giving the news media too much credit for honesty.
Actually, I wasn’t. I’m quite aware that some reporters deliberately slant the news to make lies look like facts and make speculation look like news. At the time, I had two reasons for not mentioning it: 1.) You already knew it, and 2.) It doesn’t take an entire article to say, “Sometimes they lie.”
A couple of days ago, I electronically copied the top half dozen web sites regarding, “Tea Party Movement.” For reasons of my own, I wanted to compare key words. Two of the top half dozen sites were Manhattan-based mainstream media (MSM) slanted against the Tea Partiers.
The one for Forbes magazine featured the porcine face and equally porcine opinions of Bruce Bartlett, and it was called The Misinformed Tea Party Movement.” The kicker read, “For an antitax (sic) group, they don’t know much about taxes.” (For a journalist, he doesn’t know much about spelling or getting his facts straight.) Like King George III, Porcus Ignorantiam (We’ll call him PI for short) failed to realize that the Tea Parties are more about representation than about taxes.
PI based his conclusion on a survey he pulled on 57 of the several hundred people attending a Tea Party rally. Click here to see his survey questions. (If you’re an English grammar or composition teacher and have a weak heart, I caution you not to see how he phrased the questions. Likewise, if you’ve ever had experience conducting surveys, please consider the state of your health before clicking the link.)
Not even one of the survey questions is a reliable means of measuring people’s understanding of the issues of concern to them. Some of the questions are open to broad interpretation; thus, they’re open to widely disparate conclusions even by experts.
How’s this for a survey idea: Get 57 shameless propagandists who have been cloistered in the offices of magazines far from mainstream America. Place each one’s feet into a tub of wet cement until the cement hardens. Drop them into the ocean with a pen and pad for writing underwater. Then start asking them questions about their situation.
The questions may include the following: How much longer can a person hold his breath on land than he can in 100 feet of water? By percentage, what’s the carbon dioxide level in your brain? When sea salt comes into contact with the carbolic acid in your stomach, are the chances of your vomiting more, less, or about the same? How many swollen or ruptured capillaries are in your eyeballs at this moment?
If they’re not able to answer those questions, shall we conclude that they’re ignorant of their situation? May we thus conclude that they’re not really drowning?
Surely, Bruce Bartlett deserves the Ananias Award for Dishonest Reporting. (Oink! Oink!)
One of the sites (no longer in the top six, so I can’t locate it) said that the Tea Partiers are not populists. His creative line of reasoning read like a Monty Python script: Most populists identify themselves as mainstream conservatives (whatever that means). The article’s writer identifies Tea Partiers as to the right of (whatever that means) mainstream conservatives. Since they’re to the right of mainstream conservatives, they’re not populists.
Excuse me, but didn’t he say that most populists identify themselves as mainstream conservatives? Doesn’t that mean that some populists are not mainstream conservatives? Even if we excuse the writer’s ignorance of political theory and history, and even if we excuse his careless labeling, his entire argument hinged on a single point that he managed to get wrong.
Newsweek magazine went so far as to condemn Tea Partiers for their populism. Isn’t it amazing how MSM, with all their informational resources, can’t get their stories straight yet accuse millions of average Americans of being ignorant?
You may remember the CNN reporter who recently badgered Tea Party demonstrators in Chicago. She suggested that residents of Illinois shouldn’t complain about the so-called “Stimulus Package,” since a lot of the money went to Illinois. Check out the You Tube clip here.
Here’s a little experiment you may like to try—on second thought, you’d better not. Steal her purse, hop a flight to her home state, and max out all her credit cards. Then ask her how wonderful she feels about the money being spent in her home state. She deserves the Cujo Award for Most Obnoxious Bitch.
Many years ago, as I walked along an abandoned causeway in Sparrow Swamp, I suddenly found myself surrounded by hundreds of rattlesnakes. I had to calmly and carefully make my way about 100 yards along the causeway until I reached safer ground. I had to remind myself that they were probably more afraid of me than I was of them.
Tea Partiers, you have my sympathy. When you find yourself besieged by MSM reporters, stay calm and be careful. They’re probably more scared of you than you are of them. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be making those strange noises at you. You’re not doing what you’re doing to convince MSM; you’re doing it for the people reading their rags and watching MSM’s antics on television. You're doing it for all of us.
Guest Commentary: The Eloquent Pogo
(Today, veteran radio personality John Wrisley is taking up his walking stick and giving it a curmudgeonly shake in the direction of voters who seem unclear on the concept of why we have representative government. I shall resume my crusty commentaries tomorrow.)
The Eloquent Pogo
written by John Wrisley (used by permission)
Pogo's general philosophy suited me fine, and I miss him. Every Christmas I lift an eggnog in his honor and sing, "Deck us all in Boston, Charlie! Walla Walla, Wash, and Alley-garoo." Sometimes I'm tempted to hop a bus for Waycross, Georgia and hunt for him. I'd borrow or rent a bateau and paddle around in the Okefenokee Swamp hollering, "Pogo-o-o-o! Where ARE you? We n-e-e-e-ed you!!"
You'd think we grown-ups could get along quite nicely without the advice and wise-cracks of an opossum from South Georgia, but as history is made right before my eye-bones I'm convinced we're making a grand mess of a formerly proud nation and may never straighten things up without someone of Pogo's statesman-like wisdom telling us what we're doing wrong.
One of the most important phrases of the 20th century was uttered by Pogo in 1970. "We have met the enemy, and he is US!" We have since forgiven the little critter for stealing the line from U.S. Navy Commodore Oliver H. Perry who, in 1813, sent a message to an army general declaring, "We have met the enemy, and they are ours." Besides, Pogo's renowned version more accurately describes the present state of political affairs in the USofA.
Republicans would not admit to being their own enemy, nor would Democrats look in mirrors for people to blame. The poor continue to blame the filthy rich for their plight, and the bewildered middle class sees the purchasing power of the once mighty U.S. dollar evaporating in their pockets, but they have no idea whom to blame. They don't even save any of it any more. What's the point? The interest it yields doesn't keep up with inflation, so they just borrow whatever they need to keep up with their wants. "Spending money they don't have for things they don't need," one wag remarked.
Were Pogo on the scene you can bet he'd have some sharp quips about our behavior. He'd wonder why consumers and government bureaucrats are frantically digging themselves into a debt hole they can't crawl out of. "What must these idiots be thinking?" he'd remark. "They could duct tape together all the extension ladders at Lowe's and never get out of that pit."
Pogo would also be amazed that we stand still to let a full blown WAR be paid for on the credit card. Up until foolish politicians invented the "guns and butter principle" citizens of a nation that wanted to go to war had to sacrifice a big chunk of their living standard to pay for it. It was unthinkable to prosecute a war any other way. Today the political weaklings who run the country would dare not call upon citizens to pay the bills of military adventure. It's easier to borrow a couple of billion dollars a day from foreigners. Citizens aren't even asked to buy War Bonds any more!
The denizens of the Okefenokee Swamp may be peeking at us from amidst the Spanish moss and remarking about our foolish conduct. Simple J. Malarkey might mutter something about debtors becoming slaves of creditors, but wouldn't push the point. He would observe almost at once that we like being slaves, as long as our masters keep the the cable services priced within our means and brewers keep the prices low on beer.
Before he turns, sadly, to vanish into the swamp Pogo might quote his friend Walt Kelly who wrote; "There is no need to sally forth, for it remains true that those things which make us human are, curiously enough, always close at hand. Resolve then, that on this very ground, with small flags waving and tinny blasts on tiny trumpets, we shall meet the enemy, and not only may he be ours, he may be us!"
Is there an echo in the swamp?
March 20, 2006
(To read more of John Wrisley's wise and witty remarks, visit him at his website at
How We Created the Mess in Washington, Part 1
(This is the first of a three-part series.)
Most discussions of cleaning up the mess in Washington begin and end with a single fallacy: the belief that, if we elect the right people to the right offices, everything will be all right. I used to believe that.
When I was a young man working my way toward a baccalaureate in political science, I tried to convince others to vote for so-and-so because he would improve things. An old man said to me something like, “Even if you elected Billy Graham to Congress, he’d soon be corrupt.” I didn’t want to believe it.
In part, you and I have caused the problem of corruption in Washington. We wanted to take the easy way by finding great men who would absolve us of the responsibility of managing our own government. Now we’re faced with the task of taking our country back.
While great men often make a difference in the course of history, a greater difference is made by millions of people toiling in obscurity—or failing to toil when they should. Voters tend to elect people who are primarily actors and salesmen and expect them to be magicians and political think tanks. Part of the problem is not that voters expect too much of their congressmen but that they expect too little of themselves.
When Jimmy Carter was running for President in 1976, he promised a “government as good as” the American people. Actually, the promise wasn’t necessary because, whomever we elected, we’d get a government as good as we were. H. L. Mencken put it another way: “Democracy is based on the belief that the people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.”
If that sounds harsh, think of how we decide which “great man” is to become our Wizard of Oz in Washington. I’ve already pointed out the error of electing actors and salesmen to do the job of problem solvers and opportunity creators.
How else are our “public servants” chosen?
For one, it helps if a candidate has a full head of hair that’s well-coiffed. After the age of 25, the chances of a man experiencing substantial hair loss is around 25%.. From that point on, his age closely matches the chances of him having substantial hair loss. Since the average male U. S. senator is 66 years old, 66% of the 83 males in the Senate (or 54 senators) should be showing substantial hair loss. Remember, though, that they were first elected to the Senate when they had more hair.
Take a look at their pictures and dates of birth at the Wikipedia page. Just for fun, find the senators who are your age or older and compare your hair to theirs. What’s Chris Dodd doing with a full head of hair at the age of 65? What’s Robert Byrd doing with that much hair at the age of 93? And get a load of John Kerry, at the age of 66! Did he mug a high school student and take his hair?
I don’t have enough hair even for a hair transplant, unless I had it transplanted from a bird dog. I’m afraid that, if I did, I’d fall into the habit of pointing at everything.
Height is another factor in how we elect our officials and make other choices. Several different surveys have shown that height is a significant factor in hiring salesmen, selecting corporate CEO’s, and electing modern Presidents.
And when was the last time America elected a fat President? I believe the last one was William Howard Taft way back in 1908. Judging from the Wikipedia photos, several U.S. senators are overweight, but still more slender on the average than most people their age.
It also helps if the candidate has a face made for television and a voice made for radio.
I’m not appealing to anyone’s sense of envy. All those qualities really shouldn’t disqualify a candidate from consideration. Columbia, South Carolina, radio personality and narrator John Wrisley (in his eighties!) has all of those qualities, and I’d vote for him in a heartbeat. I’d vote for him because I know him, his abilities, and his views. No, he’s not running for political office and probably never has. It’s a shame.
What I’m saying is, we shouldn’t disqualify a candidate simply because he has a head like a billiard ball or a body like Bilbo Baggins or a face and voice like Gollum. Nor should we vote for a candidate because he’s an excellent actor or salesman. (John Wrisley has also been an actor.) Congressional candidates are running for a position in which they’ll be expected to find or make solutions and opportunities for their constituents. As voters, our criteria for hiring should fit the position.
How We Created the Mess in Washington, Part 2
Suppose we could somehow always know who the best person to represent us in Washington is. Suppose we were always right. We’re still left with the old man’s opinion, “Even if you elected Billy Graham to Congress, he’d become corrupt.” Actually, he was right.
It goes back to the Rotten Barrel Theory. It’s not that a few rotten apples spoil the whole barrel; it’s just that a rotten barrel spoils the apples. We’re partly responsible for the rottenness of that barrel.
We vote for the ones we think are the best people for the job; then we leave them to fend for themselves. Our congressmen need supervision. Strange as it seems, some of them need their constituents to hold their feet to the fire.
I mean it. I have heard some congressmen say privately that they know what they should be doing, but they’re under considerable pressure to do the wrong things. People with oceans of money threaten them with defeat in the next election if they don’t cave in. Those same congressmen have said that they’d like to be able to say that their constituents are angry and would ensure their defeat if they do the wrong thing. In short, they'd like as much pressure coming from us on certain issues as they're getting from greedy big shots.
Of course, I’m talking about the Congressmen who’ve not become corrupt--the ones who are not beholden to the banksters, Big Pharma, and the military-industrial complex. In the 1930’s movie Dracula, Renfeld wasn’t as subservient to the Prince of Darkness as many of our congressmen are. Likewise, I don’t see any hope for Nancy Pelosi seeing the light, either. (Like Lucy Westenra, also in the movie Dracula, Nancy Pelosi seems quite averse to the light of day.) She also seems perfectly content in her role as the Tammy Faye Bakker of Congress.
When I came to the realization that our congressmen need to hear from us, their constituents, I came to another realization: We need to educate ourselves. That was about the time I heard the remark, “Congressmen are like cockroaches. You shouldn’t be as concerned about what they’ll steal and carry off as what they’ll fall into and mess up.”
In those days, congressmen were content to steal only what they could carry off, which usually amounted to millions of dollars. Now they’re stealing trillions by borrowing it in our name for us to repay, and flooding the economy with fiat dollars that reduce the purchasing power of the dollars we already have. Incredibly, they’re using the rationale that they’re enriching us by further impoverishing us.
It took me almost ten years to realize that we needed to do more than just elect “the right person to the right office.” Afterwards, I devised a formula for what else we, as voters, should be doing.
We should inform ourselves on the issues of concern to us. We should inform other citizens. We should inform our elected officials and keep them under close supervision. (See my earlier article, “How to Contact Your Congressman.”) It was at that point that I became less focused on elections and more focused on political education.
(Speaking of educating yourself, I’d be remiss if I didn’t provide a helpful link so that you can see how your Senator or congressman voted on issues of concern to you. What those issues are, and how you feel about them is your decision. I won’t decide for you. Go to Open Congress.)
For about five years or so, I thought that my formula for cleaner politics should be enough. It wasn’t. As I went deeper into causes and solutions, I found the root of the problem—and, with it, a hint of a solution. At least one of the people on my mailing list knows exactly what the most important thing we can do to ensure more responsive—and responsible—representation is. I’ll discuss it in the next article.
How We Created the Mess in Washington, Part 3
(This is the third of a three-part series.)
In the second part of this series, I pointed out the importance of creating voter understanding, electing the right people to public office, and keeping in touch with them. I also said that this wasn’t enough. What’s lacking?
If we want a government “as good as the American people,” it’s important to examine just how good we really are. One of the reasons we’ve gotten the government we have is, we haven’t been as good as we thought we were.
Before some of you piously nod your head in agreement, let me remind you that Jesus was crucified by government officials to satisfy the demands of religious people.
Someone once said, “You can’t cheat an honest man.” I’ve heard of many examples of supposedly honest men and women who were cheated by con artists. They were considered honest because they weren’t consciously trying to cheat someone. They were, in fact, dishonest either because they were expecting something they shouldn’t have or they were expecting more than they were paying for.
To give an example, one woman paid $200 to have her driveway paved and was cheated in the process. The concrete alone would have cost much more than $200, but her greed blinded her to that reality. She was being dishonest, even if it were not called that.
I’m often reminded of a line from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Even after the wizard was revealed to be a fraud, Dorothy and her friends expected him to deliver on his promises to them. He then conned the odd threesome into thinking he had given them a heart, a brain, and courage; but he told Dorothy to come back the next day for her trip back to Kansas. After they had left the room, the wizard said to himself, “How can I help being a humbug when people expect me to do things that everyone knows can’t be done?”
People who had been adults during the Great Depression have told me how they survived. In effect, they said that families that had only enough food for two days would share what they had with families who had nothing to eat. On other days, the latter families would return the kindness. Now, that’s generosity!
Nowadays people want to feel as though they’re generous without giving of their own resources. When asked to donate to the needy, people have told me, “I don’t have to donate to the needy. That’s why I pay my taxes.” Using government to take someone else’s property just so that we can feel generous isn’t generosity—it’s theft!
Before anyone starts accusing me of being a hard-hearted conservative, get your facts straight. I stopped being a conservative a long time ago. I consider myself a Southern agrarian. (By the way, you can be an agrarian in the midst of a large city.) If you want to read an agrarian manifesto, turn to the fifth chapter of Matthew; it’s called the Sermon on the Mount. Due to the impact of Madison Avenue advertising, too many people see the Sermon on the Mount as a feel-good speech with little practical value. On the contrary, it’s a powerful antidote to a lot of today’s problems.
One of those problems is materialism. The Sermon on the Mount stresses the virtue of simplicity. I confess that I never saw that in the Sermon until I read it in a book about Buddhism. When I did, I thought, “Doesn’t the Bible say something like that?” Then I thought, “Why haven’t I ever heard it from the pulpit?” I’ll tell you why: Because it’s not profitable. We’re supposed to believe that fulfillment is found on E-Bay or on a store shelf or in a bottle with a child-proof cap.
If we loved our neighbors as ourselves, if we sought first the rule of the Supreme Being in our lives, we’d be satisfied to ask less of government. We wouldn’t have 800-plus military bases in almost every country in the world to force them to buy our products or sell us theirs. We wouldn’t elect congressmen who promise us things we shouldn’t have, only to end up taking all we have—which is what con men always do to suckers.
For many centuries, agrarianism was the only competitor to monarchism. Even today, liberalism, conservatism, and libertarian all contain traces of it. That’s one reason I say that liberals, conservatives, and libertarians can learn a great deal from each other. Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Taoists, and others have much to learn from each other.
I don’t advocate a new political party or a new religion. We have all the parties and religions we need. What we don’t have enough of is righteousness according to our faiths and cooperation as good neighbors.
It may not be true that, as the saying goes, “It takes all kinds to make a world,” but the fact remains—like it or not—we’ve got all kinds. Let’s make the most of it.
The True Story of Civilization, Part 1
(Or "How Civilization Really Works")
Since you’re reading this, it’s a safe bet that you’ve heard of Social Contract Theory. I hope you like fairy tales.
Once upon a time, people decided that they wanted a government. How this full-blown concept of government entered their heads, and why, remains a mystery. As it happened, in a wondrous land nearby, there lived a government in need of people. When the government and the people discovered one another, they joyously made an agreement. The people and the government set the conditions by which the government would rule by serving, and the people would serve by ruling. The powers of government would be strictly defined and leave the people otherwise free to pursue their favorite—well—pursuits.
That’s the essence of the Social Contract Theory of government. It’s a sweet little story; but, alas (Alas is Early Elizabethan for, “Oh, hell!), it’s just a fairy tale. It never happened that way. Even the Social Contract theorists will tell you that it never happened that way. Social Contract Theory is just a justification for government, dreamed up thousands of years after the first governments were formed.
Really, now, can you imagine cave men talking as philosophically as all that? Here’s something closer to what really happened:
Through skill and a little luck, a cave man (whom we’ll call Larry) killed a wild animal and carried it home. As his wife Linda was preparing it for supper, along comes Bob and demands half of it. Larry says, “Give me one good reason.”
Bob replies, “I got two good reasons, and each one of them has five knuckles. I’m the meanest, ugliest, and most selfish person that ever gave you nightmares; and, now that you got me upset, I’ll take all of it.” With that, he takes a rock and smashes Larry’s foot.
That’s how government got started. In fact, that’s how civilization as we know it got started.
The strongest and most violent people forced their will on those not as strong or as willing to use force. You’ve often heard that the history of the struggle for freedom is a history of the struggle against tyranny. Tyranny is a political word. Put in psychological terms, this history has been a struggle between mentally healthy people and psychopaths.
Even psychopaths have to sleep sometime. Thus they needed bullies to help them rob and kill, keep them safe from normal people, and share the spoils. That was the first government.
You’ve heard of the Magna Carta. It’s considered a giant leap forward for freedom. Actually, it did nothing for anyone other than the few dozen men who forced King John to sign it. They still went about bullying their serfs. They still went about asserting their supposed “right” to have sex with the bride of a serf on her wedding night. They still went about asserting that raping a virgin guaranteed them victory in battle. (Of course, all that sounds like more after-the-fact justifications for psychopathic behavior.)
I know that sounds a mite prickly, but think. Let’s suppose you lived in a hidden valley or on an uncharted island, and no one there had ever heard of government. How would you propose the idea to them? How would it sound to them? Wouldn’t they think that you’re a con man or a psychopath or both?
Why should they want to give you part of what they’d earned? Why should they go off and kill someone just because you said that you wanted more land or more power to tell someone else what to do and have them do it? Why should you accept paper in exchange for things of value, knowing that each slip of paper you accept will take value away from what you already have?
In Gulliver’s Travels, Lemuel Gulliver found such a place as this, and he offered to reveal to them the secret of making gunpowder. He said that, with gunpowder, they could overpower their enemies by killing vast numbers of them. They thought that he was a psychopath, and they hoped that others in his homeland were not like him.
Like many of you, Gulliver was so accustomed to the supposed prerogatives of government that, to him, those perogatives seemed perfectly normal to him. During the late nineteenth century, a man told an American named Hiram Maxim that Maxim could get rich if he invented a more efficient way for Europeans to kill each other. The result was the Maxim gun, which was the most efficient killing machine of its day.
Here’s another "why" for you: Assuming that you managed to convince these hypothetical people to sign a social contract with you and form a government, how long a period should the contract cover? Just because several living people made the agreement, why must their great grandchildren be bound by it?
This article is not an argument against the existence of government. It’s an effort to get people to think about the limits of authority. Remember the Nuremberg defense: The Holocaust was considered legal under the system of government that existed in Germany at the time of the Holocaust.
The Nuremberg trials established that, even with the backing of government, individuals are responsible for their behavior. Murder is murder, even when ordered by government. Terrorism is terrorism, even when ordered by government. Other violations of human rights are human rights violations, even when ordered by government.
Everywhere in the world, the struggle for human liberty and human rights has always been a struggle between mentally healthy people and psychopaths. In ancient times, King Herod (who was king when Jesus was born), King Arthur, and other kings ordered mass murders of infants in order to secure their thrones.
During the Medieval Era, a third of all popes and European kings were murderers.
Machiavelli described many things people did to gain and hold power. One usurper had his henchman murder everyone even suspected of opposing him. Once his power was secure and he was thoroughly hated, the usurper placed all the blame on the henchman, had him cut in half; and the two halves of his body were placed on either side of the city gate so that people entering or leaving the city would walk between the two halves. Thus the usurper secured the loyalty of the people.
I give this example because politicians have used various forms of this tactic all over the world throughout history. During the Three Kingdoms Period in China a thousand years earlier, Emperor Tsao Tsao’s supply officer reported that half the grain had been spoiled by rats and that there wouldn’t be enough to feed the army. Tsao Tsao ordered him to put the army on half rations. When the supply officer protested that the army would mutiny if he did that, Tsao Tsao told him he would manage it himself. After the supply officer put the army on half rations, the emperor had him beheaded and put his head on display with a sign accusing him of stealing the grain and selling it. This placated the army and the mutiny ended before it could begin.
Do you see the pattern? It’s easier for most people to believe that an underling is guilty of evil than it is to believe that their leader would do evil.
Now let us turn to the Early Modern Era. In 1509, Henry VIII became king of England. The guy had two his wives executed because they didn’t give birth to male children on the first try. Grab your barf bag and take a look here. He had two marriages annulled for the same reason. Does that sound normal to you?
It doesn’t stop there. Over a two hundred year period, every British monarch murdered a family member to gain, hold, or perpetuate personal power.
What about the wars for which Europe is famous? From one end of Europe to another, every monarch was related to every other monarch. They were so inbred that hemophilia, a hereditary disease, was present in most of the royal houses of Europe. The wars of Europe were family squabbles, but the so-called nobles rarely died in those wars. No, the victims were the peasants who’d rather have been left alone. Does that sound as if normal people were running things?
Okay, that was then, and now is now, right? Wrong. Psychopaths are still running things. You’ve heard of Hitler, right? He was a psychopath, right? Okay, we’re on the same page. How does an underemployed paper hanger get the money to run for Germany’s highest office and win? No, he didn’t get it from German blue-collar workers who were so impoverished by inflation that they often couldn’t afford to buy bread. And think about this one: During the closing months of World War II, Germany was thoroughly blockaded, both economically and strategically. How did German manufacturers obtain the materials to construct gas chambers and make enough gas to kill nine million people?
The answer to both questions is that Hitler had outside help, and those people couldn’t have been normal either. I’m sure you’ll require proof for that one. In the conclusion of “The True Story of Civilization,” we’ll take a journey into the heart of darkness, from the rise of Hitler to the present day.
The True Story of Civilization, Part 2
(Or “How Civilization Really Works”)
In part one of this article, I described the beginnings of government thousands of years ago. I also described how the age-old struggle for liberty has been a struggle between mentally healthy people and the psychopaths who run things. The question arose, “Do psychopaths control governments even in contemporary times? I pointed to Hitler as an object lesson.
There seems to be an immutable law of the Internet that, if an Internet argument runs long enough, someone will mention Hitler. I believe there are two reasons for this—one unreasonable, one reasonable.
The name Hitler has become a trigger word. Knowing that the name has the power to get people excited, excitable people often bring up the name when they run out of facts or reasonable arguments to bolster their cases. In short, it’s a cheap shot intended to circumvent the logical process.
The other reason is that the lessons of Nazi Germany are well known, well explored, and—to use a popular metaphor for such lessons of history—written in large, easy-to-read, easy-to-understand letters. To introduce a metaphor of my own, the history of Nazi Germany is like a For Dummies book on political science.
Hitler’s motives were clear: He was criminally insane and hated anyone whom he thought didn’t measure up to his ideas of lives worth living. He hated Gypsies, Slavs, labor unionists, communists, homosexuals, handicapped people, and many others, but most of all Jews. Just to make sure that he got his point across, he wrote a popularly selling book called Mein Kampf (My Struggle) in which he said that, if he gained control of Germany, he’d kill all of them. Almost everyone agrees—and I assume so do you—that Hitler was a sick puppy.
If it were just Hitler, I seriously doubt that he could have killed more than thirty people before he was caught and put away. If you’ve read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, or some other book that details the history of Nazi Germany, I’m sure I don’t have to convince you that Hitler managed to attract hundreds if not thousands of criminal psychopaths to form a government.
That much shouldn’t be surprising. Like attract likes; and, as the economists like to say, people respond to incentives. In the Third Reich, psychopathic behavior was rewarded. The Nuremberg trials established that very many of the perps willingly committed these acts and were even proud of them.
Now we’re no longer talking about just one madman. We’re talking about thousands of them running one of the most advanced countries in the world.
Where did an underemployed paper hanger get the money to run for the nation’s highest office and win? No, he didn’t get it from angry people who were impoverished by rampant inflation. What about the Holocaust itself? In the closing months of the war, Germany was economically and strategically blockaded. How did Hitler get the materials necessary to manufacturer gas chambers, gas ovens, and Zyklon B gas? With fuel famously in short supply, where did he get the means to operate the gas ovens?
For the answers to all those questions, we have to look beyond Germany.
The Zyklon B gas was manufactured by I G Farben, the world’s largest chemical manufacturer, with branches in Germany and the United States. (The U. S. branch was a wholly owned subsidiary of the German company.) I G Farben was established with help from J. P. Morgan’s New York City Bank (the precursor of today’s Citibank). None other than James Paul Warburg sat on the U.S. board of directors. Warburg was a banker, an adviser to Franklin Roosevelt, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a founder of the Institute for Policy Studies. He was famous for saying to Congress in 1950, “We shall have world government, whether or not we like it. The question is only whether world government will be achieved by consent or by conquest."
In Germany, his brother Max Warburg sat on the board of directors.
Notwithstanding Hitler’s insane hatred of Jews, I G Farben donated RM400,000 to Hitler’s 1933 campaign for chancellor of Germany. Throughout the Holocaust, as six million Jews and three million others were rounded up and killed in Hitler’s death camps, I G Farben manufactured the gas that killed them. Throughout the Holocaust, Max Warburg, safely in the United States, remained on I G Farben’s board of directors.
Without the help of I G Farben and Wall Street, Hitler could not have gone to war. To see just how much I G Farben contributed to the German war machine, click here. Not one person in Germany or the U.S. resigned from I G Farben’s board of directors—not while their products were killing Americans, nor when the Holocaust they were supplying was in full swing. Do they sound normal?
After the Nuremberg trials were over, a second round of Nuremberg trials began. All but one the top officials of the German branch of I G Farben were tried for war crimes and most were found guilty. The only member who was not brought to trial was Max Warburg.
What about Wall Street and the American branch of I G Farben? Their participation in the Holocaust was conveniently dropped down a memory hole.
I mention I G Farben as only one example of collusion between Wall Street and Hitler. In point of fact, dozens of top Wall Street banks and other businesses were indispensable to the rise of Hitler and to the Holocaust. (Click here.) One of the co-conspirators was Prescott Bush, the grandfather of George W. Bush.
In her book The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein uses the term disaster capitalism in connection with government policies that cause disasters which, in turn, bring huge profits to disaster-related corporations and to government officials with investments in those corporations. The term shock doctrine refers to the principle that only a major shock can cause people to accept radical changes in their lives such as preemptive war on a nation that’s no threat to us, a surveillance society, or a host of other radical changes wrought by the Bush-Obama administrations. She points out how Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and others in the Bush administration multiplied their wealth as a result of investments in the War in Iraq, in domestic surveillance, flu scares (Rumsfeld’s investments in Tamiflu increased eightfold in value while he was in government “service,”) and other profitable disasters.
She also demonstrated how government service has become, in her words, a reconnaissance mission to become familiar enough with the workings of a government agency to leave government “service” and start a consulting business built around gaining contracts from that agency.
Before Bush unilaterally ordered the invasion of Iraq, his own chief arms inspector told him that Saddam Hussein no longer had any weapons of mass destruction. The invasion of Iraq was ordered after Saddam Hussein had indicated that he was going to make an oil export agreement with Russia, effectively cutting off American oil companies. Naomi Klein indicated that that was the real reason for the invasion that has killed more than a million Iraqi civilians and made millions of others homeless. Don’t forget that Bush and Obama have also caused the deaths of thousands of Americans in Iraq.
Contrary to what we’ve heard from Bush, and now Obama, people in Iraq don’t hate us for so flimsy a reason as “our freedoms” (which we have less of now than before 9/11.) They hate us because the U.S. government started a war with them when they were no threat to us, because our military hit mainly civilian targets with 30,000 bombs and 20,000 precision-guided cruise missiles in just five weeks; because over a million Iraqi civilians (out of a population of 25 million) have been killed and several million others have been made homeless. They hate us because, every day, they see foreigners who have become wealthy or wealthier by looting the Iraqi economy. They hate us because the war on them has raised their unemployment rate to 67%. While 17 Iraqi cement plants and countless workers lie idle, cement and workers are being imported at ten times the expense it would take to do the jobs locally. There’s no incentive to keep costs down because it’s all either looted from the U.S. taxpayers or looted from the Iraqi economy.
Does all this sound like the sort of things mentally healthy people would do?
From reading the newspapers over the past few months, we read how Goldman Sachs, a heavy contributor to the 2008 Obama campaign, was rewarded for betting on disasters. Even as they were advising people to make risky housing loans, they created a financial instrument for betting that the housing market would fail. Only one day before the British Petroleum blowout in the Gulf of Mexico, Goldman Sachs “bet short” on BP stocks.
We also learned that Halliburton (of Dick Cheney infamy) had the contract for BP’s blowout valves, and they had installed them only a few days before both of them blew out. More recently, newspapers reported that Halliburton had heavily invested in oil spill cleanup equipment. It’s worth asking how much of a profit they’re making from the oil spill.
Whether you call it disaster capitalism or, as Congressman Michele Bachmann calls it, “gangster government,” the history of Wall Street at least as early as 1910 has been a history of Wall Street insiders capitalizing on disasters. In some cases, such as the sinking of the Lusitania, leading to America’s involvement in World War I, or the looting of Iraq, or the collapse of the housing market, insiders caused the disasters and then profited from them. In others, such as the “Gulf of Tonkin Incident,” which was used as a pretext for ratcheting up the War in Vietnam, and the flu “pandemic” scares, the disasters or threats never existed; but the American people were told that they had.
On spurious grounds, we went to war with Afghanistan and Iraq, we’re now engaged in a secret war to destabilize Pakistan, and the disaster capitalists are trying to push us into a war with Iran over their non-existent nuclear weapons program. Does that sound like the policies of mentally healthy people?
The psychopaths who now run the U.S. government have at least one Achilles heel: amoral congressmen, whom the psychopaths have bought with campaign contributions. The overwhelming majority of our congressmen and senators have voted to loot the U.S. Treasury and borrow trillions of dollars against our future after accepting massive campaign contributions from such gangsters as the health insurance racket, Big Pharma, the military industrial complex, and Wall Street banksters.
[Note: For more information on political ponerology (the study of psychopathy as a source of political evil) click here.]
To see whether your congressman represents you or the gangsters, click here and go to one of the sites listed. They include, which tells you where your congressman gets his campaign contributions and other income; Project Vote Smart, which tells you how various interest organizations rate your congressman, and other information you’ll need to sweep the rats out of Congress this November 2. | http://americanactionreport.blogspot.ca/2010_04_01_archive.html | robots: classic
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I thought the Obama Administration was making domesting oil drilling impossible
Oil well drilling activity continued to increase in the fourth quarter of 2011, according to API's 2011 Quarterly Well Completion Report: Fourth Quarter. The report estimates that 6,149 oil wells were completed in fourth quarter 2011, a 10 percent increase from year-ago levels.
"There's good news that domestic drilling continued to increase into the fourth quarter of 2011," said Hazem Arafa, director of API's statistics department. "And with policies that allow greater access to the vast energy resources right here at home, we can provide even more of the energy our country needs while hiring more American workers and generating more revenue for our government."
Thursday, January 26, 2012
Is America's economy fair?
That's the question in this week's Scripps Howard column, following up on yesterday's Gallup poll and President Obama's State of the Union comment that "We can restore an economy where everyone gets a fair shot, everyone does their fair share and everyone plays by the same set of rules." My take:
"Fairness" can be a slippery concept, so let's use Obama's formulation as our guide. In the American economy, does everybody get a fair shot? Does everyone do a fair share? Does everyone play by the same set of rules? No. Yes. No.
No, not everybody gets a fair shot. Sixty-five percent of American men born poor stay poor, according to research from the Pew Charitable Trusts. Sixty-two percent of those born rich stay rich. Other studies show that it's much easier to rise from humble circumstances if you're a native of Canada, Norway, Finland or Denmark than in the United States. The poor often lack the education and resources to advance in today's high-tech economy.
No, not everyone plays by the same set of rules. Banks get bailed out by taxpayers and their executives still collect bonuses in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, but homeowners stuck with bad mortgages are sneered at as "losers" by television pundits. If you're rich, it's tough to stop being rich, no matter how badly you screw up.
If you're less well off, one mistake can doom your whole life.
It didn't used to be this way in America. There were once opportunities to rise from humble circumstances. That's not really the case anymore. Horatio Alger may have become famous writing rags-to-riches tales about opportunity in America. But Horatio Alger is dead and mostly forgotten. And it's not fair.
I guess I could've applied the test posed by John Rawls and asked if this economic system would've been agreed to by most Americans if they were blind to whether they'd be advantaged or disadvantaged by it. My guess: No. But I don't think the tweaks would actually be all that massive under such a scenario.
Ben thinks the economy is unfair ... to free enterprise. Bwahahahaha!
Wednesday, January 25, 2012
Gingrich would bomb Cuba, is awesomer and less Communist than Reagan
Adam Serwer:
You know, I've wondered the same thing about Ronald Reagan. He too bombed Libya and didn't bomb Cuba! I blame Saul Alinsky and Kenyan anti-colonialism for Reagan's weakness.
More seriously: We don't expend much in the way of resources in toppling Castro because Castro represents no security threat at all the the United States. None. Zero. Zilch. He doesn't like us, and we don't like him, but the Communist regime there isn't going to do anything to us. We might see offing the regime as democracy promotion, but the rest of the world would see it (not without cause) as imperialist meddling. Gingrich should maybe shut up.
A very interesting poll on the fairness of our economic system.
Via Gallup, we learn that Americans are roughly divided on whether the country's economic system is fair—but that 62 percent believe that the system is fair to them personally.
Here's where it gets interesting. Fifty-six percent of Democrats believe the system is unfair. Fifty percent of independents believe the same. Only 42 percent of Republicans think the system is unfair.
Weirdly, though, more Democrats than Republicans believe they've profited from that system:
The columns, from left, are "fair," "unfair," and "no opinion."
There's a rough correlation between whether Republicans believe the economic system is fair and whether they believe the system is fair to them. That correlation pretty much disappears for independents and Democrats. Why is that?
The Philadelphia School District can't actually go out of business, can it?
Sounds preposterous, but via The Notebook, here's the City Controller formally and publicly telling the district that "we have identified various conditions and events that, when considered in the aggregate, indicate there may be substantial doubt about the School District's ability to continue as a going concern."
Man. I don't wanna move to the suburbs.
Who misses the 1950s now?
For most of my life, the 1960s have loomed large in the political life of the country. If you loved the 1960s, you were probably a liberal who loved the Civil Rights movement, feminism, Medicare—all the things that made the era perhaps the last great moments of center-left ascendancy in the United States. And if you hated the 1960s, you probably missed the simpler times of the 1950s, when "Ozzie and Harriet" and Ward Cleaver ruled the airwaves, and life was orderly and a little more moral.
Somewhere in the last few years, though, the script has flipped. Liberals have come to embrace the relative economic egalitarianism of America in the 1950s—blacks and women notably excepted—while conservative Republicans seem to view Dwight Eisenhower as an accomodationist who too easily surrendered to the welfare state designs of his Democratic predecessors.
I'm not sure where all this started to change. Paul Krugman's "The Conscience of a Liberal" certainly celebrated the 1950s to a degree I hadn't often seen in liberal writings before. And Max Boot comes along today to offer the conservative critique:
From our standpoint today, there are some good aspects of the 1950s–the hard work, the sense of common purpose–but also much that we would reject, especially the pervasive racism, anti-Semitism, sexism, homophobia, and other social attitudes–not to mention the pervasive drinking, smoking, and other bad habits. America today is far more individualistic and far more meritocratic with far less tolerance for rank prejudice and far less willingness to blindly follow the orders of rigid bureaucracies.
On the whole this is a positive development–it is what has made possible the dynamism of an information age economy symbolized by Apple’s staggering earnings. We would all be poorer–literally–if we went back to more of a top-down command economy, which is what Obama seems to be pining for. Indeed per capita income in 1950 was $1,500 (which, adjusted for inflation, works out to around $10,000 today) compared with almost $40,000 today.
I think the "per capita" statistic is slightly misleading: The distribution of income is much more unequal today than it was in 1950—the critique that liberals have been making—so the "average" per capita American isn't necessary a typical American. The median household income in the United States—half of all households made more, half made less—was $3,319 in 1950, or about $31,000 in today's dollars. The median household income in 2010 was $49,445. Taking these statistics and the ones Boot cites, America is roughly four times richer today than it was in 1950—but the middle American household isn't even twice as rich, in real dollar terms. (UPDATE: And that doesn't really address the fact that the middle American household probably has two incomes these days, whereas the 1950 household probably had one earner.) You may not see that as an actual problem (richer is still richer!) but it lies at the heart of the critique that liberals make of post-1980 politics and income inequality.
In any case, Boot says, "the 'Mad Men' world is not one most of us would like to live in today. It was, after all, a world where big institutions–whether big government, big media, big business or big unions–had far more power than they do today." Maybe I misunderstand, but it seems that conservatism once defended the role of big institutions in society as helping bring order and cohesiveness to the national community. What's changed (in part) since the 1950s, it seems, is that conservatism has taken a libertarian turn that rejects and attacks all of Boot's "bigs," with the seeming exception of big business.
Anyway, it's an interesting transition. The Weekly Standard likes to (frequently) depict liberals as cartoonish, aging hippies on its cover, but maybe it would be more accurate these days to stick a pipe in Ward Cleaver's mouth and a union card in his front pocket.
'Send me': These are the SOTU policies Obama won't actually pursue
One of my criticisms of President Obama has been his seeming willingness to sit back and let Congress take the lead on certain issues, refusing to wade into certain lawmaking issues that might force him to get his hands dirty. One reason the Affordable Care Act debate lingered for a year was that the president left most of the dickering to Congress.*
So the way I figure it, when Obama gives a State of the Union address and recommends policies, but casts himself in the passive role in getting those policies passed, you can be sure the president won't actually be pushing for those policies.
My rule of thumb for determining what those policies are? When the president asks Congress to "send me" a bill—instead of suggesting he'll send Congress a bill to get passed. The passive "send me" happened four times in the State of the Union:
• He won't push to take tax breaks from companies shipping jobs overseas and give them to companies building their businesses here: "So my message is simple. It is time to stop rewarding businesses that ship jobs overseas, and start rewarding companies that create jobs right here in America. Send me these tax reforms, and I will sign them right away. "
• He won't push for the DREAM Act—which provides a path to citizenship for the children of illegal immigrants. Heck, he didn't even call it by name. "Let’s at least agree to stop expelling responsible young people who want to staff our labs, start new businesses, defend this country. Send me a law that gives them the chance to earn their citizenship. I will sign it right away."
• He won't actually push to promote jobs and energy efficiency in one fell swoop: "Of course, the easiest way to save money is to waste less energy. So here’s a proposal: Help manufacturers eliminate energy waste in their factories and give businesses incentives to upgrade their buildings. Their energy bills will be $100 billion lower over the next decade, and America will have less pollution, more manufacturing, more jobs for construction workers who need them. Send me a bill that creates these jobs."
• He won't push Congress to stop using its position to enrich its members: "So together, let’s take some steps to fix that. Send me a bill that bans insider trading by members of Congress; I will sign it tomorrow."
Congress has its role, and the president can't necessarily bend the branch to his will. But I think that the president hasn't always applied the leverage that he has. When the president asks Congress to take the lead, it seems likely he's washing his hands of his own good ideas.
Maybe President Obama isn't so bad on signing statements
The Congressional Research Service offers an overview:
I still believe that if you're going to use a signing statement to challenge a law, you might as well go ahead and veto the law. And certainly, conservatives have delighted in chiding President Obama for using the statements at all. (Their objections were mostly muted during the Bush presidency.) But if Obama is wrong to use signing statements in this fashion, it's apparently the case that he's only 1 percent as wrong as his predecessor was. Obama: The lesser evil!
Sunday, January 22, 2012
Why learn history when you can just make it up?
A reader of the Scripps Howard column sent a lengthy reply--too lengthy for me to care to excerpt in its entirety--cataloging a list of destructive policies imposed on the country by Democrats. Some of it is hilariously off-base. For instance, did you know that Democrats created...
Slavery. This practice was originated by the Democrats in the middle 1800's so that farmers in the deep South could pick their crops with cheap labor. Democrats are quick to counter that these were different times and so was the party. But a look at the economic facts behind the practice of slavery shows that it was based on the same theme they are pushing today. Democrats advocated slavery as the only way the South could compete with the wealthy railroad tycoons like the Rockefellers in the North. This tired Socialist Doctrine mimics the Democrats campaign cry today that it's the "rich" who are responsible for all our problems. Slavery also was the beginning of the Democrats phylosophy of keeping their party in power by making the poor reliant on their policies. By convincing the public that someone else was responsible for their failure the Democrats both made the poor dependant on their services and guaranteed a loyal following. It is ironic that this model is followed by every Socialist dictator in the world.
1964 Civil Rights Law. Vowing that injustices such as slavery would never happen again the Senate set out to pass legislation that would cement this into law. The Civil Rights Law enjoyed unanimous support by the Republicans when sent to the Congress but hit a blockade put up by the Democrats. As previously mentioned the Southern Democrats were reluctant to drop their hatred of black citizens and in fact many were still members of the Ku Klux Klan (including Senator Robert Byrd). In the end this ground breaking civil rights legislation passed only because nearly every Republican Congressman voted in favor. That's two to zip when it comes to which party has proved its support for minorities!
That, of course, isn't true at all. In fact, most of the "facts" recounted, both above and in the letter, are ... absolutely false. (If you don't know why or how, crack open a book. Or Wikipedia.) But they help my reader weave a narrative of Republican heroism and Democratic perfidy, and I suspect that's all that really matters.
What's interesting to me is that this guy is apparently a newspaper reader--he caught the column in the Long Beach Press-Telegram--and reasonably literate. But the history he recounts sounds like a mishmash of half-remembered facts recounted at a retired guy's coffee klatsch, with no care given to ascertaining the truth. He thinks he knows the truth already.
Mama reads to boy
Friday, January 20, 2012
The Philadelphia School District's deficit could lead to the decline of Center City
Over the last year, there's been a lot of celebration in the local media about how college-educated parents are staying Philadelphia and raising their kids here—and even sending them to the better of the city's public schools. While Philadelphia has a lot of problems, the revitalization of Center City has generally been judged to be a good thing.
I suspect that progress is very much threatened:
In plainer, starker terms than it had ever used before, the School Reform Commission laid out the district's financial woes to the public in a dramatic meeting Thursday night.
Commissioner Feather Houstoun, who chairs the SRC's finance committee, said the situation was much worse than people realized.
And with 51/2 months before the end of the school year and little left to cut, the only options left on the table are bad ones - possibilities include cutting all spring sports, all instrumental music, all gifted programs, half the district's psychologists.
Oh, and all of school police officers, too—that in a year in which school safety has been highlighted as one of the district's biggest challenges.
I'm not sure what percentage of Center City kids go to public schools; obviously there's a relatively high proportion that end up in private schools. But I also know that we've stayed in our Fitler Square neighborhood apartment, in part, because we're in proximity to one of the city's most-praised elementary schools. We can't afford to send our son to private school in 2013, so we thought we could have our urban cake and eat it too by planting our flag right here.
But if schools are being stripped for parts because the administration couldn't see this financial disaster coming, I'm not sure what choices we'll have. We love living in the city. But we're not precious about it: I'm not willing to sacrifice my son's education and well-being just because I like being in walking distance of Rittenhouse Square.
And I'm willing to bet there are plenty of parents like me. Mayor Nutter really should be on alert: The crisis in the school district threatens the revitalization of Center City. What's bad for the schools could end up being awful for the entire town.
Christine Flowers distorts the record in Illinois
I actually agree with Daily News columnist Christine Flowers that churches, synagogues, mosques, etc., should have the right to choose their own ministers without government interference. But I think she distorts the facts of one case she references:
Things do get murky when money is involved. As Catholic Charities of Illinois found out, the state can put you out of the adoption business if it thinks that you're discriminating with public funds.
Just to be absolutely accurate: The state didn't put Catholic Charities out of the adoption business. Catholic Charities put itself out of the adoption business in Illinois rather than comply with state rules and help gay couples adopt kids. Flowers' description is legally defensible, I suppose—she is a lawyer, after all—but her characterization really misses the point of what happened.
End this war, already (A continuing series)
The continuing casualties from a decade of war
David Leonhardt's must-read column about your tax bill
What is clear, though, is that a large majority of American households — about two out of three — pays less than 15 percent of income to the federal government, through either income taxes or payroll taxes.
This disconnect between what we pay and what we think we pay is nothing less than one of the country’s biggest economic problems.
Many Americans see themselves as struggling under the weight of a heavy tax burden (partly for the understandable reason that wage growth has been so weak). Yet taxes in the United States are quite low today, compared with past years or those in other countries. Most important, American taxes are not sufficient to pay for the programs that many people want, like Medicare, Social Security, road construction and education subsidies.
What does this combination create? An enormous long-term budget deficit.
Read the whole thing.
Thursday, January 19, 2012
Newt's race-hustling campaign
Ben and I talk about Newt Gingrich's food stamp comments in this week's Scripps Howard column. Is he running a racist campaign? My take:
Here's a little rule of thumb: If a politician offends someone but doesn't immediately "clarify" his remarks after the backlash, he meant to give offense. The fact that Gingrich doubled down on his remarks with smirking, sneering, patronizing comments to Fox News' Juan Williams -- an African-American journalist -- leaves little doubt: He is counting on the racism of South Carolina's Republican voters to keep him alive in the GOP nominating contest.
There's a long, storied and relatively recent history of racist appeals to the South Carolina electorate. In 2000, John McCain appeared to be a threat to George W. Bush's march to the GOP nomination -- until someone circulated fliers accusing McCain of fathering a black daughter. McCain lost South Carolina, and with it his chance to be president.
So Gingrich's recent comments are par for the course. What's particularly frustrating about them is how wrong-headed they are. It's true that the number of food-stamp recipients has grown under President Barack Obama. But that growth started under Bush -- fueled both by the recession and Bush's changes to food stamp eligibility.
The truth is this: Whites, not blacks, are the leading recipients of food stamps. A fifth of food-stamp recipients are employed, but not making enough money to stay out of the program. And the use of the food stamp program has most notably grown -- in recent years -- in white, middle-class suburbs.
If Gingrich really wanted to deliver a stern message in favor of work and shunning food stamps, he wouldn't go to the NAACP. He'd drive down to the nearest Ikea.
The problem isn't food stamps or race, however. It's that Americans lack sufficient opportunity to get paid work that keeps them out of the safety net. Gingrich should focus on that; instead he's choosing to be a race hustler.
Ben says only liberals can hear racist "dog whistles."
Overcoming privilege and wealth somewhat similar to overcoming racism
Yes, I think that's the case that Seth Mandel is making today. Because Romney is really wealthy, he's a minority that will have trouble overcoming the prejudices of a majority of Americans who are unlike him:
If Romney is the Republican nominee there is no chance Obama would refrain from the class warfare rhetoric he has already outlined. But the ironic thing about this line of attack is that it must insinuate, because to say it plainly–that Romney is unlike most voters–would outrage many Americans. Obviously Romney’s election would not carry nearly the same cultural significance as Obama’s, but Romney would nonetheless face a challenge somewhat similar to the difficulty Obama had in explaining himself to voters.
If Romney is elected president, it won’t be quite so dramatic, to say the least. But it will mean he had overcome a parallel challenge: his story, that of an honest, hardworking family man who built a life for himself and his loved ones through effort, education, skill, and yet more effort, is also a classic American story.
Well, sure. Mitt Romney's story goes to show that you can start out as the humble son of an American car company president-turned Michigan governor-turned cabinet member and rise to really make something of yourself despite the dearth of opportunity! Brings a tear to my eye.
In fairness, Mandel suggests that Americans aren't really buying the idea that we're a classless society anymore, and that pretending we are might have electoral consequences. But I think he reaches too far with this comparison.
Americans Anti-Big Business, Big Gov't
Monday, January 16, 2012
People, not profits: A response
A letter-writer responds to the Scripps Howard column on Mitt Romney and Bain Capital:
History shows that the "People not profits" slogan does "bear up under examination" contrary to Joel Mathis' assertion that it just "sounds cool". For example, KB Toys, an American company founded in 1922, employed manufacturing line workers, designers, engineers, and a host of supply chain jobs for thousands of workers. With health care and profit sharing for employees, KB was clearly a company that understood that when you consider people, profits come as a by-product. KB Toys wasn't in deep trouble, but the boom in electronic toys prompted KB to seek out Bain Capital for an infusion of money to bring the company in line with manufacturing more high-tech toys. Bain soon seized control of the company, off shored jobs, raided the company's pension fund, and eventually turned it into what is now Toys R' Us where you'd be hard pressed to find toys made in America or workers that are paid much more than minimum wage or have a benefit or profit sharing package. Ben Boychuk lauds Romney and Bain Capital for jobs created at Staples and Sports Authority as "how a dynamic economy works and grows". Both companies also pay workers minimum wage, offer no benefits, and sell goods manufactured mostly offshore. This is the free market capitalism Romney, conservatives, and the GOP envision for America.
David P. Lewis
Long Beach
Ben points out the KB deal was done after Romney left Bain.
Saturday, January 14, 2012
Bill Kristol doesn't understand how to fight the war he loves so much
Bill Kristol is good at finding new ways to be contemptible. It's bad that Marines in Afghanistan urinated on dead Taliban, he says, but you know what really makes him mad? The Obama Administration apologizing for it.
So perhaps, as Rep. Allen West, once a battalion commander in Iraq, put it last week, all the sanctimonious Obama administration bigwigs “need to chill.” Did Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta really need to speak up at all? Couldn’t comment have been left to some junior public affairs officer at Camp Lejeune? And once he decided to weigh in, did Panetta need to condemn the Marines’ action as not just deplorable but “utterly deplorable”? Perhaps he felt a need to match Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who expressed not just dismay but “total dismay.”
Maybe, our current civilian leaders should spend a little less time posturing and a little more time supporting the troops who’ve been sent abroad to fight at the direction of their administration.
Kristol is congenitally unable to praise Democrats, and the overall piece veers dangerously close to being an apologia for corpse desecration. (Patton pissed in the Rhine, after all!) But what he seems not to understand is that the Obama Administration very vocally deplored the urination video because it's otherwise it's a huge victory for the Taliban.
Even Kristol's fellow warmonger Max Boot understands this:
The Marines are fighting not a total war but a counterinsurgency in which their goal is not only to militarily defeat the enemy but to win over the population. This could potentially make that job harder.
The Marines often speak of the “strategic corporal”–the notion being that decisions made even by a lowly corporal can have high-level repercussions. This is a perfect example; indeed, one of the urinating Marines was a corporal.
The reason top-level administration figures weighed in was because the acts of a few stupid Marines was potentially devastating to the war's strategic aims, one of which is winning over the population. (Afghan President Hamid Karzai is also pretty good at loudly condemning U.S. errors in order to shore up his own position.) Contrition from senior, recognizable figures was required to minimize the damage.
Kristol, though, turns this incident into one of Obama not loving the troops enough. "He and his administration have a responsibility to err on the side of supporting our troops, rather than competing to chastise them sanctimoniously," Kristol writes. But if those troops commit an act that actively aids the enemy, what the hell else is there to do? Bill Kristol wants his war in Afghanistan. But maybe he just mostly wants to use it as a cudgel against Democrats. Because this column makes clear that he has no clue about—and maybe less interest in—achieving victory.
Gary Schmitt, the forever war, and the First Amendment
Let's gut the First Amendment forever! That's not precisely what Gary Schmitt says today in The Weekly Standard, but that about covers the gist of it:
Schmitt says such a statute could be "narrowly drawn" so that we don't go back to the bad old days of seditious libel. Maybe. But we still don't know which circumstances would cause the United States Congress to end the "war" authorizations spelled out in the AUMF and various other laws. Given the way our leaders have interpreted that so far, it might be a crime to praise the Muslim Uighurs who have rebelled against the Chinese government, or the Chechnyan Muslims who have revolted against rule from Moscow. More likely it might be used to prosecute Americans who praise Hamas. And that's where we start to get into plausibly scary territory.
Generally speaking: We don't know that the "war" will ever end. Which means a statute that sunsets when the war does is basically a statute on the books forever. Wanna draw First Amendment considerations a little more narrowly? You may well have the power to do so. Just don't pretend it's a temporary state of affairs.
Friday, January 13, 2012
Those dead Iranian scientists
I've been struggling with what to think—and how to express my thoughts—about the wave of assassinations directed at Iranian nuclear scientists. I think that war is bad and killing is bad, but I'm not the complete pacifist I was in my Mennonite days—back, that is, when I thought God would make everything OK in the end, making it easier to accept certain evils and injustices on Earth. Perhaps it's the Mennonite poking through, but the assassinations strike me as ... unsavory. Yet, unlike Glenn Greenwald, I'm not prepared to quite condemn it either. This troubles me. I like my moral conundrums easily resolved.
I suspect we could live with a nuclear-armed Iranian state. I don't think the mullahs are suicidal. I think they—like the U.S. and the old Soviet Union—would use the threat of nuclear arms use to throw their weight around the region and the world. But: The more nuclear weapons there are in the world, the more countries that get their hands on them, the more opportunities there are for something to go disastrously, genocidally wrong.
So what's the death of a few scientists compared to an averted genocide?
Yet, something doesn't feel quite right about that to me either. I found myself rubbed wrong by Jonathan Tobin's praise of the assassinations yesterday. He wrote: "Anyone who believes Iran should be allowed to proceed toward the building of a nuclear bomb has either lost their moral compass or is so steeped in the belief that American and Israeli interests are inherently unjustified they have reversed the moral equation in this case. Rather than the alleged U.S. and Israeli covert operators being called terrorists, it is the Iranian scientists who are the criminals. They must be stopped before they kill."
Wait. The scientists are criminals? That doesn't strike me quite right, either. It's entirely possible they're patriots, with all the good and bad that implies. (And I've heard a few experts suggest that the end of theocracy in Iran wouldn't necessarily mean the end of the pursuit of nuclear weapons; it's kind of rational for a country to want to have the ultimate weapon to use in its defense.) Or it's entirely possible, authoritarianism being what it is, that the assassinated scientists simply didn't have much choice about their participation: Show a talent for math or physics, and voila! You're working on a planet-killer. Do we have evidence that these scientists are, well, mad scientists, bent on the world's destruction? I'm not sure we do. Ascribing criminality to those individuals—instead of the regime they serve—seems a way of making us feel better about the awful thing that has happened.
But as awful as that hypothetical genocide?
I don't have a good answer to this. There's the certainty of the awfulness now, weighed against the (again) hypothetical danger avoided. It's a guessing game, but one in which a few lives or many might be sacrificed.
Rod Dreher gets at it better than I can here:
To be sure, I’m against war with Iran, and the main reason I would never vote for Santorum is that he relishes the thought of war with Iran. However, I am by no means certain that it was wrong for the Israelis to have killed this scientist, given that they are in a state of de facto war with Iran, and that the Iranian leadership has publicly and repeatedly vowed to exterminate the Israelis. My point here is that even if the killing of the Iranian scientist is justified as self-defense, it is nothing to be called “wonderful.” A grim, tragic necessity? Perhaps. But “wonderful”? We must not allow ourselves to bless these things, much less glory in them, as Santorum has done.
That sounds close to right to me. One reason I'm pretty sure I'll never become a certain variety of conservative is because I have enough Mennonite left in me to disdain glorying in such things. But I've also got enough distance from that faith to suspect that sometimes bad things must be done. I feel remorse about the death of the scientists. And I hope that their deaths served the (apparent) intended purpose. I suspect they'll just be another trigger in an endless cycle of recrimination that might one day end up immersing us in the awful violence we seek to avoid. I'm not sure we'll ever know the right answer.
Mom? Dad? MOM!?!?!?
In fact, people over 60 are now the fastest-growing group contracting sexually transmitted diseases, according to government agency figures. Since 2002, syphilis has tripled in the over-65s in the UK, and HIV is up by 60%.
Thursday, January 12, 2012
It really is getting worse
After adjusting for inflation, the typical male college graduate earned about 12 percent less in 2009 than his counterpart did in 1969. Sounds pretty bad, right?
The numbers are even worse for men without a bachelor’s:
Inflation-Adjusted Change in Median Earnings for American Men, 1969-2009
Weekly Earnings, Full-time, Full-year Male WorkersAnnual Earnings of All Male WorkersAnnual Earnings of Male Population
Ages 25-64-1%-14%-28%
Ages 30-50-5-16-27
Less than High School-38-47-66
High School-26-34-47
Some College-17-24-33
College Degree-2-7-12
Not Married-2-14-32
Source: Adam Looney and Michael Greenstone, Hamilton Project
As you can see from the last column in this table, the median man whose highest educational attainment was a high school diploma had his earnings fall by 47 percent in the last four decades.
Romney's problem: Profits over people
Ben and I discuss Mitt Romney's venture capitalist past in our Scripps Howard column this week. My take:
And Mitt Romney helped lead the way.
Ben's take: "Venture capitalism creates, sometimes through destruction. Crony capitalism merely stagnates."
Conor Friedersdorf on liberals and civil liberties
End this war, already
Yeah, maybe it's time to simplify the tax code
War crimes in Afghanistan?
I blame Newt Gingrich's attacks on Bain Capital
Conflict between rich and poor now eclipses racial strain and friction between immigrants and the native-born as the greatest source of tension in American society, according to a survey released Wednesday.
Republican constituency includes people who dislike Republican ideology
A Pew Research Center survey identified financially-squeezed “disaffected” voters as a Republican-leaning constituency; just 21 percent of them agreed that “most corporations make a fair and reasonable profit.”
In the UK, the 1 percent looks out for the poor
Tuesday, January 10, 2012
There aren't enough jobs for all the job seekers
EPI points out that the ratio means that cutting unemployment benefits remains a bad idea. It probably also means that Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett's move to restrict food stamps will also have pernicious effects.
Pennsylvania goes after food stamp millionaires
I've been noting all fall and winter the growing Republican rhetoric against millionaires receiving food stamps. Now that rhetoric is translating into action in Pennsylvania:
Pennsylvania plans to make the amount of food stamps that people receive contingent on the assets they possess - an unexpected move that bucks national trends and places the commonwealth among a minority of states.
Well, that's one sure way to make sure that millionaires don't get food stamps—make sure the thousandaires can't, either!
Conservatives, I know, want to ensure that people who use the safety net actually need the safety net. And hell, I don't want the well-to-do to abuse the system, either. There's not much evidence of abuse, though, which makes Pennsylvania's move appear to be more anti-poor than anti-abuse. I don't mind having an asset line to determine eligibility—but the line set by the state doesn't even pay two months' rent in parts of Philadelphia. In essence, the state now requires you to fall all the way through the safety net—to destitution—before being saved. Republicans are pretty good at demanding people lift themselves up by their bootstraps; it would help if they let food stamp recipients keep their boots.
Looks like American elections will stay American
Today, the U.S. Supreme Court summarily affirmed a ruling by a three-judge district court in Bluman v. Federal Election Commission which had upheld the federal ban on campaign contributions and independent expenditures by foreign nationals temporarily residing in the United States.
“We are pleased by the decision from the Supreme Court to affirm the lower court ruling and its recognition that certain restrictions on even independent expenditures are constitutional in federal and state elections,” Tara Malloy, Legal Center Associate Counsel, stated.
Looks like American elections will stay American
Can Philly's police police themselves?
True story: I got of the Broad Street line in South Philadelphia a few years ago with a group of four or five cops right behind me. As I walked down to the Italian Market, I listened to their conversation behind me.
It was gossip, but interesting gossip. Apparently a young new police officer had been assigned to one of the cushiest precincts in the city. Why? His dad was an Internal Affairs officer, and he had marched his son before the precinct's higher-ups and told them, essentially, "You take my boy or I will start vigorously investigating every complaint against officers in this district."
I don't know if the story is true--I didn't think the police officers telling me the story would appreciate it if I revealed myself to be a journalist, listening in to their public conversation, so I didn't get in any follow-up questions--but the officers telling it sure seemed to think it was true.
So it's good that a few Internal Affairs heads are rolling for failure to investigate the case of guns that went missing from the department. But I can't help but wonder if the systemic rot in the part of the Police Department designed to hold officers accountable for their conduct is much more widespread than the scandal shows. And I wonder if Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey knows that--or if he's just taking care of the one problem that made the papers. Either way, I don't have a lot of faith in the ability of the police department to police itself.
Thursday, January 5, 2012
Speaking of indefinite detention and civil liberties...
Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, today introduced the Due Process Guarantee Act of 2011, legislation that states American citizens apprehended inside the United States cannot be indefinitely detained by the military.
The Feinstein bill also codifies a “clear-statement rule” that requires Congress to expressly authorize detention authority when it comes to U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents. The protections for citizens and lawful permanent residents is limited to those “apprehended in the United States” and excludes citizens who take up arms against the United States on a foreign battlefield, such as Afghanistan.
Feinstein said: “The argument is not whether citizens such as Yaser Esam Hamdi and Jose Padilla—or others who would do us harm—should be captured, interrogated, incarcerated and severely punished. They should be.
Let's see where this goes.
Obama, civil liberties, and security
Over at No Left Turns, Bill Voegeli offers a thoughtful response to my Philly Post piece decrying President Obama's signing of the NDAA. I suggested Obama had betrayed the cause of civil liberties; Voegeli sees it a bit differently. If I'm reading it correctly, his argument is two-fold:
The now-bipartisan embrace of once-unthinkable security measures represents a considered response to the terror threat that the United States faces. "National security is a hard, grave business. Candidates who spoke as glibly as bloggers and editorialists about respecting boundaries regardless of the consequences become far less categorical when they're in important positions of national power and must confront just how horrific those consequences might be."
Secondly, that we're at war, and sometimes during war the Constitution is set aside in order to save it. "Drawing the lines and rightly understanding the nation's exigencies is not merely a post-9/11 problem. The most famous example is Abraham Lincoln suspending the writ of habeus corpus - first by executive order, later according to congressional enactment - as secession and civil war consumed the nation in 1861. He defended his actions in a message to Congress: 'The whole of the laws which were required to be faithfully executed, were being resisted, and failing of execution, in nearly one-third of the States. Must they be allowed to finally fail of execution, even had it been perfectly clear, that by the use of the means necessary to their execution, some single law, made in such extreme tenderness of the citizen's liberty, that practically, it relieves more of the guilty, than of the innocent, should, to a very limited extent, be violated? To state the question more directly, are all the laws, but one, to go unexecuted, and the government itself go to pieces, lest that one be violated? Even in such a case, would not the [president's] official oath [of office] be broken, if the government should be overthrown, when it was believed that disregarding the single law, would tend to preserve it?'"
Let's take the second point first. More than a decade after 9/11, it seems apparent to me that a "war" framework for dealing with terrorism badly serves the United States and its citizens. War, after all, is an emergency: Lincoln had a sense that the emergency would end when he set aside habeas corpus; FDR had the same sense when he gave Nazi saboteurs a kangaroo trial during 1942 and confined Japanese-Americans to prison camps. Sooner or later, the war would be over—and eventually the excesses undertaken in the national defense would recede into a half-embarrassing history generally understood to be at odds with the longer, stronger narrative of American liberty. It's a pattern that's repeated itself over and over again throughout the country's history.
America has spent more days at war with Al Qaeda than we did enmeshed in the Civil War and World War II combined. There is no end in sight. I have no reason to believe that the "emergency" represented by the War on Terror will end in my lifetime. So the "temporary" excesses—the setting aside of certain Constitutional safeguards—doesn't appear to be temporary at all. It's the new normal, one that is a clear departure from 200 years of an American journey toward greater-liberty.
What's remarkable about the NDAA and its expanded detention powers for government is that it comes at a time when Al Qaeda has essentially been defeated. To use Voegeli's Civil War reference, it's as though General Robert E. Lee had surrendered at Appamattox—and then the federal government decided it was really, really time to get serious about cracking down on insurgents. And it's a further indication that the war will go on forever, even when the men and group that initiated have vanished from both the earth and operational effectiveness.
But there are, clearly, still bad men out there who will try to do bad things to America. Given the current dynamics of American politics and law, as long as there is even one non-state terrorist attempting to harm the United States, we remain at war. Our laws and policies—our Constitution—can be held hostage by a few people with bad intent. That's where we're at. Whatever the deficiencies of the "crime" approach to terrorism, it at least didn't trap us in an unending emergency. To use an old trope: "Tell me how this ends." If you can, I might be more sympathetic to the excesses, knowing eventually they'll end. But nobody really can, and I'm not.
Which leads us to the behavior of the political establishment.
One might see the bipartisan consensus for the NDAA as proof of its wisdom. But one might also take a look at how political incentives have developed since 9/11, where even unsuccessful attack attempts have been used as proof of a president's supposed weakness. The president and Congress have decided they have more to lose, politically, by not being "tough" than they do by being steadfast about America's history of civil liberties. That, of course, means they've judged the American public is more interested in safety than civil liberties.
At some point, I guess, I have to accept that. My viewpoint on these matters probably isn't the majority viewpoint.
But I remain irritated, to say the least, that there are many people in American politics who see creeping tyranny in EPA regulations but are happy to support indefinite detention. Kim Jong-Il, after all, isn't reviled because he made North Koreans fill out paperwork on toxic chemical spills.
And given the eternal nature of the War on Terror, we shouldn't fool ourselves that we're on the same path of liberty that Americans have imperfectly been trodding for a couple of centuries. We're choosing a slightly different path, in the name of security. Most of us might not even notice the difference in our daily lives—we probably won't see the differences except in occasional Pulitzer-winning newspaper stories about how "other" people have been made to suffer—but it will be different all the same. We're not setting aside the Constitution and law in order to save them; we're simply setting them aside.
Maybe we'll be safer. We'll certainly be less free. When the next attack succeeds—somewhere, eventually, it will—the laws will be tightened even further. And so on and so forth, with cries of "freedom" escaping our lips the whole time, even as we forget what we once thought that word meant.
Updated: I misspelled Voegeli's name in the first edition of this post. My apologies.
Upside to austerity?
There may be some overlap between "projecting power" and "maintaining defense." But they aren't necessarily the same thing. Maybe there's an upside to austerity.
Today in inequality reading: Horatio Algier moved to Denmark
Tuesday, January 3, 2012
Ta-Nehisi Coates: Ron Paul is the new Louis Farrakhan
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Friday, January 28, 2011
ICE: "Sham" University, Cover For Illegals
By Claudia Cowan - FoxNews
Officials with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) say every year, they bust hundreds of schools that served as fronts for illegal immigration operations, leaving thousands of foreign nationals who've paid tuition in exchange for a student visa in the lurch, while the head of the "school" often winds up forfeiting property, or, behind bars.
The latest example appears to come from the San Francisco Bay Area: Tri-Valley University based in Pleasanton. Federal prosecutors say it wasn't a school at all- rather an elaborate scheme to defraud the government, and perhaps the biggest scam of its kind.
Open since 2008, TVU's website touts on-line classes in engineering, medicine, and law, and a faculty list of more than 50 highly educated professionals. But those we contacted said they'd never seen the school, or taught a class. Many had no idea their names were on the site, which is peppered with numerous spelling and grammatical mistakes ("Now you graduate, we would like to hear from you, about life and how the study at TVU and the degree do to your career, not just your million dollar donation!").
ICE officials noticed enrollment nearly tripled in a matter of months to over 1,500 students- almost all from the same region of India, and each paying $5,400 per semester to the schools founder, Susan Su.
Court documents say "since its inception, Tri-Valley University has been a "sham" university which Su, and others, have used to facilitate foreign nationals in illegally acquiring student immigration status that authorizes them to remain in the United States."
In a raid last week, ICE agents seized computers and other evidence from four properties allegedly bought with millions in tuition money, including the school's main office building, a converted condo, and a luxury home owned by Su.
She says the school is for real, and denies any wrongdoing. "Make millions dollars-- that is true," she says in her broken English. "You talk about our income, but we do not do cheating, we suppose to be right. This is the standard we charge, with so many students, we never forced anybody to sign up with us."
But in a government sting operation, Su was caught giving F-1 student visas to undercover agents posing as foreign nationals, who told her they wanted to come to the U.S, but had no intention of attending classes.
According to the court filings, the university listed the same address - a single apartment in the Silicon Valley city of Sunnyvale - for nearly all the students. The fact that none were actually living there was a clear attempt, officials say, to conceal the fact that few, if any TVU students lived in California at all. It's believed most were working in other states, and are now scrambling to either transfer to another school, or get a valid visa to stay here. It's likely that many-possibly up to a thousand- Indian nationals will be deported.
As for Susan Su, the government just wants to seize her property for now. But criminal charges, including immigration fraud and money laundering, could be next.
A couple of tunes from Jon Butcher this evening...
Some Random Hotness this evening...
Revolution is in the air but US sticks to same old script
This is a scorching criticism of obama and his administration. I only hope the author of this article understands that the majority of the American people are even more sick of the weakness this administration displays than the rest of the world. The United States should always maintain a position of strength and support for our allies, which is impossible while bowing to every tyrant and dictator on the planet.
In the past, before obama, our Country has always been supportive of those fighting for their freedom. The administration may be a bunch of wimps, but the Citizens of the United States aren't...
The Sydney Morning Herald
Washington appears addicted to propping up tyrants, writes Paul McGeough.
Events in the Middle East are moving too fast for the Obama administration to think it can get away with Plan A and Plan B reaction strategies according to the regimes or leaders it wants to keep in and out of power.
Consider the response of the US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, to Hezbollah tightening its grip on power in Lebanon this week - Washington might have to pull its funding worth hundreds of millions for Lebanon, her office warned.
Advertisement: Story continues below But as democracy demonstrators were confronted by thousands of baton-wielding policemen in the streets in Cairo, there was no mention of pulling the $US2 billion-plus cheque that Washington writes for the octogenarian President, Hosni Mubarak, each year.
Instead, a rhetorical nugget that Mubarak's mouthpieces would use in their defence - ''our assessment is that the Egyptian government is stable'' and then some namby-pamby words about how Mubarak was ''looking for ways to respond to the legitimate needs and interests of the Egyptian people''.
That response came on Wednesday - more thugs in and out of uniform in the streets, more tear-gas and 860 more young Egyptians banged up in prison because, Oliver-like, they had the audacity to stand in the streets and to ask for more. Such is stability.
Undaunted, Clinton tried again on Wednesday, when she called on the Egyptian authorities to cease blocking the communications on which the demonstrators relied. But on Thursday the Twitter and Facebook websites were inaccessible and mobile-phone users in Cairo said that it was difficult or impossible to sent text messages.
And, even as the focus sharpened, the administration refused to tell the truth about the despot upon whom Washington relies - ''Egypt is a strong ally,'' the White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs, replied when asked if the administration still supported Mubarak.
And, in a week in which the Middle East's historic self-started wave of democracy protests came to a head, Barack Obama might have used his State of the Union address to cheer along all the protesters; and perhaps to warn all the leaders, country by country, of the fate that awaits them.
Instead he confined his specific remarks to Tunisia, saying: ''The United States of America stands with the people of Tunisia and supports the democratic aspirations of all people.'' So, in a region of 333 million people, where to varying degrees a good 325 million are under the heel of unelected leaders, the US President addressed only little Tunisia.
The lame excuse offered to reporters was that Cairo erupted late in the drafting process of the speech but that last ''aspirations of all people'' phrase was a recognition that ''what happens in Tunisia resonates around the world''.
But lost in the lunge to protect US strategic and commercial interests by propping up the region's dictator class is any realisation that that support is what leaves the youth of the region under-educated and under-employed and, thereby, ripe for the picking by Islamist and other underground movements.
In Tunisia the revolutionaries are still searching for a leader who can articulate their demands. And this week a leader flew in to Cairo - searching for a revolution. That was the former International Atomic Energy Agency chief Mohamed ElBaradei, whose return to Egypt underscores a challenge brought on across the region as much by the local community as the international community - the grooming of those who might form a half-decent opposition.
Tracing an arc through Obama's approach to the Middle East, the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies professor Fouad Ajami described the President's foreign policy pragmatism as ''a break of faith with democracy''.
Alluding to the suppression of demonstrations in Tehran after the contested 2009 presidential election, he wrote in Lebanon's Daily Star: ''American diplomacy was not likely to alter the raw balance of power between the regime and its democratic oppositionists. But the timidity of American power and the refusal of the Obama administration to embrace the cause of the opposition must be reckoned one of American foreign policy's great moral embarrassments.''
The Mubarak machine's contempt for popular aspirations and whatever the US might think of them was on full display yesterday when Safwat el-Sherif, the head of the ruling National Democratic Party, feigned obliviousness to the reality of political power in Egypt as he lectured the protesters - ''democracy has its rules and process - the minority does not force its will on the majority''.
Abdel Moneim Said, a stooge government-appointed publisher, echoed Hillary Clinton's midweek ''stability'' comment when he told reporters: ''I can't think of anybody that I know that has any concern about the stability of the regime.''
Finding the right policy mix to influence events without being accused of interfering is a fine balance that some observers have concluded eludes the Obama administration.
''It's about identifying the US too closely with these changes and thereby undermining them; and not finding ways to nurture them enough,'' Aaron David Miller, of the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars, told The New York Times.
Meanwhile, observers on the ground in the region shake their heads. ''People want moral support,'' said Shadi Hamid, of the Brookings Doha Centre. ''They want to hear words of encouragement - right now they don't have that. They feel the world doesn't care and is working against them.''
His point seems to be this: it is time Washington thought in terms of investing in people in the region, not in dictators.
Vigilant Defense
Read this, it's good stuff. T.L. Davis makes some very good points, as usual. We have the right to disagree with our government. We have a right to protest.
Our Founding Fathers risked everything to free us from our oppressors. In the eyes of their government, they were criminals. But they saw the promise that this Country offered. They fought, against all odds, to attain that promise. They laid out a roadmap for this Country. Somewhere along that map we veered from the true path. We were led astray by our own inattention. We have allowed our Country to be steered by fringe groups that have their own interests at heart, and care nothing for the good of our Nation.
It is past time for us to use our rights to protest, to take a stand, to take our Country back from the thieves. If we wait much longer, we won't have a Country to take back...
By T.L. Davis - Guardians of Liberty
There is one irrefutable fact: I was born in America and I was born with rights given to me by God and recognized by the Constitution of the United States of America. There is no question as to the veracity of that statement, but to atheists they might consider that their rights come from nature. Each is free to believe what they will as long as they recognize that rights are not privileges, conditional luxuries or rewards for good behavior. Also, however, rights are not self-enforcing; they are the product of vigilant defense.
What does that mean? It means that every time they pass a restricting gun law or speech law and you do nothing about it, you verify the legitimacy of it. We see in Tunisia and Egypt the result of injustice, but not here in America. I know, you are but one person against a whole government, what can you do? If there were a protest, you would join. If there were a riot, you would engage. Hmmmm.
Here is the doctrine of 1x1x1. You are an individual, you are 1. You can do 1 act as a means of rebellion against that law. You can produce 1 outcome from your act.
This is minor. This is the start. This is the very least you could do. It is anonymous, perhaps even spontaneous, but better if well planned for effect. Look around your AO, what is vulnerable, what is a message that can be sent as protest? If you demand to act as an individual, then for God's sake, act! Here is your chance, embrace the doctrine of 1x1x1.
There are those of us who are willing to stick our necks out, to break laws if necessary, it is an American tradition. Sitting at the "white" counter was breaking the municipal codes, it was breaking the law. Any law, in contravention of the Constitution, is no law and since the government will not enforce the Constitution, it is itself illegal. There is not one representative, or senator alive who has sworn to uphold the Constitution who is not right now in violation of the law. To obey a law handed down by an illegal government to restrict the liberties issued by God is no sin and it is not illegal. But, even if it were, you have that right as an American as a form of protest. Throwing tea into Boston Harbor was an illegal act committed by criminals against a legal authority, yet it inspired those jealous of their rights to act. Today, that act is revered for its inspiration to form a new government, one that now has forgotten the lessons of those times.
What is the price of our inaction? $14 trillion of debt and counting. The futures of our children. Lost liberty (a value incalculable through the avenue of price). The violations of our sovereignty, our borders, our security and our rights. That ain't much, why all those things are trivial to the comfort of yourself as a "law-abiding" citizen. The trains were full of "law-abiding" citizens and the streets ran with the blood of the righteous. What else would an illegal government bent on the subjugation of its people do?
Rep. Moran: Dems Lost Because Many 'Don't Want to Be Governed by an African-American'
I belong to no group, I am my own man. I don't care if the president is black (or half black), white, brown, yellow or even purple. What I do care about is his ability to do the job, the job as it is described in the Constitution of the United States of America.
I am more qualified to be president than obama. I have run a business, met a payroll, hired and fired. I have worked hard all my life to care for the ones I love. No one has ever given me anything. Everything I have I earned. I care more about this Nation and the ideal of this Nation than life itself. Yet, I would never presume to be presidential.
The reasons I rail against obama and his corrupt administration have NOTHING to do with the color of his skin. He is not only unqualified, his beliefs do not mesh with those that the Founding Fathers of this great Country risked everything for. obama believes that we should all be cared for by the government wether we want it or not. A cradle to grave entitlement society kills the American spirit. Taking from those who have worked hard all their lives to care for people to lazy to care for themselves goes against everything most people in this Country stand for.
obama wishes us to become another third world nation. A few wealthy people at the top, millions and millions of poor people at the bottom, and nothing in the middle. And all those millions depending on the government for their every need.
jim moran is attempting to stir up a controversy. He has nothing to base this claim on, he has no evidence to back it up. If he truly wants to view racism, he needs to look no farther than obama and eric holder. The two of them have succeeded in setting race relations back 30 years. There are probably those who have seen the racism exhibited by holder and obama and are angered by it, but I would guess many of them don't vote.
The election in November was a direct reflection of the policies obama has forced on us in the two years he has been in office. No matter how loud we spoke, he and nancy pelosi and harry reid refused to hear us. They pursued their radical agenda to their own peril. We spoke in a different way in November, we voted out many of the people who betrayed our trust. In 2012 we will vote out more of them. We will keep voting them out until those we elect hear what we are saying.
We don't want to be a socialist nation. We don't want to have the government intrude into every part of our lives. We want to go to work, enjoy our families, live our lives and be free...
From FoxNews
Virginia Democratic Rep. Jim Moran is blaming his party's losses last November in large part on voters who "don't want to be governed by an African-American."
The comments were made following President Obama's State of the Union speech Tuesday during an interview with Arab network Alhurra. Asked about the results of the midterm elections, the Virginia congressman compared the political environment to that which preceded the Civil War and suggested race was a determining factor.
"It happened ... for the same reason the Civil War happened in the United States," Moran said. "Southern states, particularly the slaveholding states, didn't want to see a president who was opposed to slavery.
"In this case a lot of people in this country, it's my belief, don't want to be governed by an African-American, particularly one who is inclusive, who is liberal, who wants to spend money on everyone and who wants to reach out to include everyone in our society. And that's a basic philosophical clash," Moran said.
Moran attributed his party's opposition to an "uneasiness" with President Obama, saying the criticism comes from a "selfish and close-minded perspective."
Reached for comment, Moran's office stood by the remarks.
"With nearly 1,000 identified hate groups in the U.S. and recent studies showing a majority of Americans believe racism is still widespread against African-Americans, it is no secret that our country has and continues to struggle with racial equality," spokeswoman Anne Hughes said in an e-mail. "The congressman was expressing his frustration with this problem and the role it played in the last election. Rather than ignore this issue or pretend it isn't there, the congressman believes we are better off discussing it in order to overcome it."
Thursday, January 27, 2011
A couple of Rush tunes this evening...
10 states now developing eligibility-proof demands
Uh oh, this could get ugly. Maybe it's a waste of time for obama to begin campaigning and raising money. But then, maybe he has people figuring a way around this obstacle too. He seems to have a knack for disregarding the rules and getting away with it. I have a feeling though, that one day soon, his world will come crashing down around him. He will be caught in the web of lies he has woven with no escape...
By Bob Unruh - WorldNetDaily
More of the Smoking HOT Goddess Carmen Electra!
Supreme Court: Emanuel on Chicago mayor ballot
What did I tell you? On Monday I told you that emanuel would wind up on the ballot. It's absolutley amazing that every single government institution in chicago is corrupt. Even the supreme court of the state can be bought and sold.
Rules don't apply in a place like chicago. At least not to the rich and powerful. There are still plenty of rules for the average citizen though, like being denied the right to protect themselves...
By Liam Ford and Jeff Coen - Chicago Tribune
You can read the opinion by clicking here.
A cheer went up at Emanuel's headquarters when the news came out. The candidate was preparing to leave for tonight's debate with the three other leading contenders. But first he stopped at the Clark and Lake "el" stop to greet voters.
He shook hands with a large smile on his face, slapping the backs of commuters and posing for photographs. Some slapped his back in return.
Opponent Gery Chico issued a statement saying "Game on."
CBO Director: Trillion-Dollar Deficits Risk 'Fiscal Crisis' in U.S.
It's been a story a day lately about these bean counters condemning obama's debt. Why do I doubt that it will make any difference. Up to this point, no one has been able to tell obama anything. He refuses to see the truth. He only sees what he wants to see and that doesn't include heis destruction of our Country...
From FoxNews
The top numbers cruncher for Congress warned Thursday that the federal government increasingly risks sending the country into a "fiscal crisis," projecting that unless cuts are made, within a decade the national debt could reach nearly 100 percent of all annual economic activity.
That's like having $50,000 in debt on a $50,000-a-year salary.
Invoking recent economic crises in countries like Ireland and Greece, Elmendorf said waiting too long to curb spending and reduce the debt can have a host of consequences which all add up -- investors get nervous that the government can't finance its debt; the government loses the ability to respond to emergencies while interest rates eat up more and more of the budget pie; and taxes rise.
As is customary in congressional hearings about the nation's fiscal problems, Elmendorf rattled off a string of staggering numbers in his forecast of future budget shortfalls. He said that if nothing changes in the law, the federal deficit will add up to $7 trillion over the next decade, pushing the debt up to 77 percent of GDP. But he suggested that estimate "understates" the problem, given that lawmakers frequently extend policies, like tax cuts and higher Medicare payments to doctors, that would help balance the budget if they were allowed to expire.
If such short-term policies are extended, Elmendorf said, the deficit would reach nearly $12 trillion over the decade, pushing the debt to almost 100 percent of GDP.
The hearing comes after the Congressional Budget Office released a report that shows the nation's red ink running even deeper than previously thought.
"Spending as a share of our national income is at the highest level in 60 years. Revenue as a share of our national income is at its lowest level in 60 years. No wonder that we are headed for the largest deficit ever," said committee chairman Kent Conrad, D-N.D.
The analysis showed the deficit hitting a record $1.5 trillion this year, charting a rise due in part to a lagging economic recovery coupled with the recently passed tax cut package.
The study also showed Social Security in a deficit this year. The entitlement program ran at a deficit in 2010 but had been expected to run in the black for a few more years before reverting back and permanently paying out more than it takes in. The latest estimate now shows Social Security consistently operating at a deficit through about 2037, when its reserves are expected to run out entirely.
President Obama touched on the need for deficit reduction in his State of the Union speech Tuesday. He called for a five-year freeze on non-mandatory domestic spending, a proposal he estimated would save $400 billion over the next decade. He called for action on reforming entitlements like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, without offering specifics.
But the $400 billion in proposed savings adds up to less than one-third of this year's projected deficit, and Republican congressional leaders roundly called on the administration to do more to address the nation's debt and deficit.
At the Budget Committee hearing, there was a bipartisan call for Congress to develop a spending-cut plan this year.
"We can't continue to put this off. We need to reach an agreement this year," Chairman Kent Conrad, D-N.D., said.
"The time for debate is over, and we must take action," said Sen. Mike Crapo, R-Idaho.
Iranian Book Celebrating Suicide Bombers Found in Arizona Desert
This is just a guess, but I think if our border was secure we wouldn't be finding these items down there. Of course, janet napolitano and her gang don't have any evidence of terrorist cells operating along the Southern Border, but who says the radical thugs stayed in Arizona? They could be anywhere, planning, waiting.
Illegal aliens from mexico draining our welfare system, over crowding our school system and committing crimes against American citizens aren't the only reason we have to fear an unsecure border. Every year, thousands of thugs and criminals pour across our Southern Border from iraq, iran, yemen, pakistan and a host of other countries that consider us an enemy.
What is it going to take for our elected leaders to do the right thing and protect our Country from this scourge. Are we going to have to suffer another massive attack by these radical islamic thugs? Are the imagined votes these politicians covet more important than the lives of American Citizens?
By William La Jeunesse - FoxNews
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
Cheeky? Kucinich Sues for 'Oral Injuries' From Errant Olive Pit
dennis kucinich is an asshole. The judge that tries this case should put kucinich in jail for filing a frivolous lawsuit and wasting the court's time.
Do you really think that food service providers on capitol hill would wilfully put olive pits in the food? I'm thinking it was an honest mistake and not an intentional act of sabotage.
kucinich is provided with the best dental care in the world by who? Us, that's who. He doesn't pay a dime for that coverage.
dennis kucinich is an asshole...
From FoxNews
An initial scheduling conference is set for April. The four respondents named in the case are all food service providers for Capitol Hill. The offending sandwich was purchased at the Longworth House Office Building.
According to the lawsuit, a copy of which was obtained by, Kucinich is filing civil charges on two counts of negligence and two counts of breach of implied warranty.
Asked about the suit, which cost $120 to file in the D.C. Superior Court, Kucinich attorney Andrew Young told Fox News, "This is a private matter that needs to be tried in the courts and not in the public media."
More of the Stunning Monica Leigh!
$1.5 TRILLION DOLLARS! obama's lame plan for freezing spending for five years isn't even a good idea. Do you know why? Because freezing spending at the current level is unsustainable, the current level of spending is what got us in this mess in the first place.
Let me put this in terms that even a dumbass like me can understand. Let's say I want to buy a new $1,000 rifle every month in 2012. I can't afford it, so I charge in on my credit card. At the end of the year I have accumulated debt of $12,000 dollars. So my Bride kicks me in the nuts and tells me we can't afford to do that again. According to obama, I can tell her, "ok, I'm going to freeze spending at the 2012 level." and I buy another twelve $1,000 rifles in 2013, winding up with $24,000 in debt plus the interest on the original $12,000. It's pretty stupid isn't it.
Spending has to be CUT not frozen. There is no way to balance a budget and stop a deficit when you spend more money than you take in. That's like high school math, maybe even junior high. It doesn't really take a fucking rocket surgeon to figure that out. Yet some of the highest paid money guys in the english speaking world will argue about it. Holy shit, it just boggles the mind.
At some point, some one in washington is going to have to grow a set of balls and make some tough decisions about our economy and the way we spend money. You can bet your ass that person won't be a democrat...
Associated Press
The deficit is on track to beat the record of $1.4 trillion set in 2009. That figure reflected huge outlays from the Wall Street bailout. The nonpartisan budget agency predicts the deficit will drop to $1.1 trillion next year.
"I find the president moving in the same directions as (the deficit commission), certainly the same goals," said Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., who served on the panel and voted for its controversial findings. "Stay tuned."
But under its rules, the CBO assumes that recently extended cuts in taxes on income, investment and people inheriting large estates will expire in two years. If those tax cuts, and numerous others, are extended, the deficit for that year would be almost three times as large.
Separately, almost a dozen Republican senators endorsed a proposal by Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, to amend the Constitution to require a balanced budget. The version is stricter than a bipartisan balanced budget amendment that fell one vote short in the Senate in 1997. It requires a two-thirds vote in Congress to raise taxes, among other provisions backed by tea party activists. No Democrats have signed on to the measure.
Medicare Actuary Doubts Health Care Law Will Hold Down Costs
Every thing we were told about obamacare is a lie. It wasn't miscalculation or error, it was a lie.
obamacare isn't going to provide us with higher quality health care. Just the opposite, it is forcing good doctors to leave their practices and causing would be new doctors to choose another line of work.
obamacare isn't going to lower the cost of health care. Again, just the opposite, as the government reduces medicare payments, hospitals and doctors will be forced to charge paying customers more money to cover the losses of treating medicare patients, if they even treat them at all. Doctors refusing to treat medicare patients because they are getting screwed by the government will lead to rationing of services.
This is all a plan. It is designed to funnel us all onto a big government welfare health care plan. The single payer system was shot down in the original obamacare debate, so like everything else with this gang of thugs, they will backdoor it in, and all of us will take it in the backdoor. It is a powerplay.
It's not going to work. It hasn't been effective anywhere it has been tried. The same government that wants to control our health care is the same group that currently controls medicare, medicade and the post office. I don't think they have any idea what they are doing with those three, so I damn sure don't trust them with the health of my children.
I fear for the elderly of our Country. They deserve better than this...
Associated Press
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
Game-changer! Arizona to pass 2012 eligibility law
Oh damn! This could mess up somebody's plans to further drive our Country into socialism...
By Bob Unruh - WorldNetDaily
Obama will have to produce birth certificate to run again
It could be a game-changer.
It needs only 16 votes in the Senate to pass.
Got this in an email from my buddy BigMullet...
The Afghan Quarterback
Then he threw another at a passing car going 90 mph.
"I don't want to talk to you," the old Muslim woman says. "You are not my son!"
rahm emanuel back on the ballot...
Remember yesterday I told you that emanuel would wind up back on the ballot? Even though he is, by rule, ineligible to participate in the chicago mayoral election, the Illinois supreme court decided to let his name still be printed on the ballots.
They haven't decided yet to allow him to actually run for the office. I read different opinions today. Some said the court will act quickly and allow him to run, others said there was no way the court could act that fast. I tend to think he will be allowed to run. obama has probably already been on the phone with each member of the court and convinced them to allow emanuel to break the rules and enter the race.
It truly is who you know...
Excerpts from Chairman Paul Ryan’s Republican Address to the Nation
Every bit of this is good stuff. This is exactly what the Republicans and the Tea Party should agree on and accomplish. The push for everything on this list should begin tomorrow morning...
From John Boehner's Website
Washington (Jan 25) Tonight, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) will deliver the Republican address following the President’s State of the Union message from the House Budget Committee hearing room, where the Democrats’ spending spree will end and the Republicans’ push for a fiscally responsible budget that cuts spending will begin. Following are excerpts from Chairman Ryan’s address:
A couple of .38 Special tunes this evening...
Mina Morgan is a Smoking HOT Texas Goddess!
Obama "Invests" America Into Oblivion
I'm sorry, but if anyone is fooled by obama's fake to the center, you are an idiot. This guy is a politician, a true politician. He will do or say ANYTHING to try to get re-elected, even acting like he something that he is not. He is not a centrist, he never will be, he is a hard core liberal. He want to redistribute our money, not his money though, just ours. He is going to bury his theft of tax dollars in all kinds of pretty words, but at the end of the day, he wants to spend more money, money that we don't have. More than likely, any money that he does want to spend will be funneled to his friends and supporters, just liek large portions of the stimulus money. Don't be fooled...
by Jason Mattera- Human Events
If BHO had the slightest bit of integrity, his State of the Union address tonight would be no longer than 30 seconds, and it would go something like this:
“My fellow Americans, my presidency has sucked. Big time. My stint as your leader has been worse than the Matrix Revolution, and you know how awful that Keanu Reeves movie was. To the American public, I’m sorry. The job of being President has been above my experience. I had no idea what I was supposed to be doing, and I still don’t. I’ve screwed over so many generations of Americans with the debt I’ve been racking up. So for the good of the country and because I’m tired of Michelle forcing me to eat organic arugula from the White House garden, tonight I am resigning. Take care America, and please don’t ever say that Jimmy Carter was a better President than I was, because that would really sting.”
I know – there’s a better chance that Keith Olbermann guest hosts the “The O’Reilly Factor” than there is of BHO’s resigning. But we can dream, can’t we?
In reality, Obama will take the opportunity of his second State of the Union to do what he’s really good at: Propose even more spending. And he’s going to do this under the rubric of “investments.”
How do I know this? His advisors have been “leaking” the themes of this evening’s speech, which the New York Times describes as a “call for ‘investments’ of tax dollars in specific areas like education, infrastructure and technology” as a way to boost economic growth.
But don’t be fooled. These aren’t investments. These are confiscations of private-sector capital that Obama has neither earned nor knows how to earn, for that matter.
The left uses the word “investment” each time they’re after your wallet. In fact, Obama sold the failed “stimulus” plan as a package of… investments!
Before he signed the inaptly named “The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act,” Obama called it “an investment that will create jobs building 21st-Century classrooms and libraries and labs for millions of children across America.”
He also dubbed the spending measure as “an investment that takes the important first step towards a national transmission superhighway,” while also claiming that “nearly 400,000 men and women will go to work rebuilding our crumbling roads and bridges” via the stimulus’s “investment.”
In total, Obama blurted out the word “investment” 20 times at the signing of the stimulus.
And now he wants more.
While Obama is attempting to use “the language of the center-right” to come across as pro-business, from what we’ll hear tonight, it’s clear that he is still committed to the shopworn idea of government spending creating wealth.
It doesn’t and never has. Societies prosper through free-markets and limited government.
Look, if government spending were a magic bullet, the Soviet Union would have been an economic juggernaut rather than a basket case where millions of people were ensnarled in unspeakable destitution. Heck, Cuba, Venezuela, and every other socialist tyranny around the world would be economic nirvanas today.
Even the Europeans are saying that federal spending inhibits economic growth. Dan Mitchell of the Cato Institute highlights a recent study from the European Central Bank which concludes that “expenditure-based fiscal consolidation” appears to “foster growth,” especially “in times of severe fiscal imbalances.”
In other words, “reducing spending promotes faster economic growth” and is the track Obama should’ve taken to lift our sagging economy.
The truth is, we can’t handle any more of Obama’s “investments.” This guy is spending the country into oblivion.
If the spending doesn’t stop now when we’re running deficits of 1.3 trillion and owe $14 trillion in debt, when will it?
As economist Kevin Hassett rightly observes, “A welfare state that can’t shrink in a recession will possibly never shrink, which means that today’s high taxes provide an ominous foreshadow of even higher rates to come.” | http://exibicionismo.blogspot.com/2011/01/ | robots: classic
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TARTA wants money - still
Sadly, he's probably right.
Thursday, July 29, 2010
Government's dietary guidelines vs. science
I came across this summary of several articles on the Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) dietary guidelines and wanted to share it, as it calls into question the one-size-fits-all recommendations as well as political issues versus actual health issues.
It's from the National Center for Policy Analysis:
It seems that the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which revise dietary guidelines for Americans every five years, are even more reluctant to admit to a mistake than your average guy. Indeed, there's increasing scientific evidence that past and current federal dietary recommendations are often wrong, says Steven Malanga, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and senior editor of "City Journal."
For instance:
* In the March issue of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, researchers analyzed the daily food intake of 350,000 people and found no link between the amount of saturated fat ingested and the risk of heart disease, even though Americans have been told since 1980 to supplant saturated fats with carbohydrates.
* The diet-to-heart connection just isn't holding up; by recommending an increase in carbohydrates over fat, the government has actually contributed to the obesity epidemic, points out the American Council on Science and Health's (ACSH) Dr. Elizabeth Whelan.
In its new recommendations, the FDA advises Americans to reduce daily sodium intake to a maximum of 1,500 milligrams. "This guideline is not consistent with good health for the majority of Americans, not to mention impossible to comply with, and is likely to do more harm than good," says ACSH's Dr. Gilbert Ross.
"In the 1970s, the dogma was not to eat more than one visible egg per day, but now we know eggs are very nutritious and one of the least dangerous foods one can eat. The FDA is just wrong, and their recommendations reflect popular wisdom more than science," says Dr. Whelan. "They're just not willing to make modifications even when science shows the truth."
Source: "Inaccurate Dietary Guidelines," American Council on Science and Health, July 20, 2010; and Steven Malanga, "U.S. dietary guidelines hard to swallow," Los Angeles Times, July 18, 2010.
For text:
For Los Angeles Times text:,0,2205200.story
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
Cato: Abolish state income tax
read more....
Quotes of the Day
A decision every person must make:
"How bad do things have to get before you do something? Do they have to take away all your property? Do they have to license every activity that you want to engage in? Do they have to start throwing you on cattle cars before you say “now wait a minute, I don’t think this is a good idea.” How long is it going to be before you finally resist and say “No, I will not comply. Period!” Ask yourself now because sooner or later you are going to come to that line, and when they cross it, you’re going to say well now cross this line; ok now cross that line; ok now cross this line. Pretty soon you’re in a corner. Sooner or later you’ve got to stand your ground whether anybody else does or not. That is what liberty is all about." ~ Michael Badnarik
Important points to remember about what our founders intended in terms of the separation of power and checks and balances:
And in light of the expiration of the Bush tax cuts in January, when EVERY income tax bracket will see an increase in the amount of money they are forced to pay to the federal government:
Saturday, July 24, 2010
AFP Right On Line #7
Continuing speakers from the general session:
Sharon Angle, Candidate for U.S. Senate in Nevada (running against Harry Reid):
* I'm running for the people's seat from Nevada in the Senate. I was told the fate of the nation rests on me - but it really rests on you.
* We have a calling - a purpose: to pass on the American dream to our children and our grandchildren - not deficits and debt.
* Harry Reid says he needs $25 million - I say I need 1 million people with $25 each...
* We need a one nation under God - not one nation under government.
* We can do better and our country deserves 'better.' Reid says he is 'doing more.' We have 14.2% unemployment, the highest home foreclosure rate in the nation, the highest bankruptcy rate in Nevada. We need Harry Reid to stop 'doing more.'
* If we want more tax revenue, reduce the tax rates, so I signed the pledge to permanently repeal the death tax.
* "We the people' are the solution. We know what it takes to put the country back on the right path.
* Pay Back on the deficits and debt, and the Social Security fund.
* Cut Back on spending: the federal government has only enumerated powers and everything else is for the states, so we can cut departments and agencies that would be best at the state level - like the dept. of education that forces down one-size-fits-all policies that fail; shrink the size of the federal government.
* Every state needs at least one sheriff like Joe Arpaio (Maricopa County)
* Take Back our economy and our lives from the government. Talk about what real restructuring looks like: audit the fed, liquidate Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac (phony mae and fraudy mack).
* We have the right contract with America: our Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
* We have the right 'Angle' to defeat Harry Reid.
November is Coming ad with photos of Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama to the tune of the theme from Jaws...
AFP Right On Line #6
Continuing with general session speakers...
Phil Kerpen, AFP Vice President Policy:
* Van Jones is speaking across the way - after being fired, he was embraced by the left...he is teaching a course at Princeton, got an award from the NAACP.
* If this man says 'green jobs' will destroy the capitalist system and he's so embraced by the Democrats, should we think the Democrats want to destroy our capitalist economy?
* Does anyone believe Harry Reid when he says 'cap and tax' is out of the energy bill? We don't either.
* Lame-duck threat is bigger than just the energy bill, a value added tax, other tax increase, a 'labor reform bill' with card check, an immigration bill with amnesty...everything with their extreme left-wing agenda that they cannot get passed now will be on the list after November.
* No Republican Senator should vote for any policy change in a lame-duck session. Do not help the Democrats in a lame-duck session.
* They should not help disregard the wishes of the people.
* We need to get every member of the House to commit now to not making policy changes in any lame-duck session.
* Have more bad news: Obama administration is using executive power in ways it's never been used before and avoiding Congress to advance his leftist ideas.
* The EPA wants to apply the Clean Air Act to regulating everything - they have 18,000 pages of ways they think they can regulate global warming under the guise of 'clean air.'
* All Republicans but only six Democrats voted to restrict the EPA's power, needed 51 votes, in June.
* Heard last night how the FCC wants to regulate the Internet - Congress must step in and prevent them from doing this. A bureaucracy should not get away with these things.
* Even the National Labor Relations Board is in the mix. Craig Becker's nomination to the NLRB was rejected, bi-partisan vote, but he was appointed in a recess by Obama and now he is promoting card check as a regulation rather than as a vote by Congress.
* We finally repealed the moratorium on off-shore drilling in 2008...and now Obama has a new moratorium on the only place we had left to drill.
* We need Congress to stand up for itself and stop the Executive Branch from imposing laws that they cannot get through our elected representatives.
Kirby Wilbur, radio host:
* Tail winds of freedom are reaching the left coast.
* We are at a crossroads in American history and we will decide on November 2 which way to go.
* If we do not win in November, the left and the Obama Administration will feel vindicated by our failure and will move us any further the wrong way.
* Unlike the left, I believe American is an exceptional country - there is no where else to go where we can be free.
* No other country was founded on such ideals...and they are at stake on November 2nd.
* It is our responsibility to ensure the fires of freedom still burn.
* We've defeated the enemies of freedom in the past and we can do so again if we rise up and meet our responsibilities.
* We have lives and we want to be left alone. The left wants to run our lives for us. We must not just try, we must do, as Churchill said. And we must do on November 2nd.
* The rest of the world has somewhere to run to for freedom...we don't.
* On November 3rd, we're going to wake up and hear either we won or Obama won. Please consider what earlier generations have done for us and what we must do today, so that when you wake up on November 3rd, you hear the 'right' thing.
* Guarantee America for your children.
Herman Cain, radio show host and Fox News contributor:
* Intro had a tape of saying "We made our money the old fashioned way. We worked for it."
* Intro also gave his history as owner of Godfather's Pizza and other entrepreneurial efforts.
* It was Dr. Mayes (sp?) who was president of Morehouse College who said the tragedy of life is not in failing to reach your goals, but of failing to have goals...calamity not to have dreams.
* I have a dream... that in November of 2010, we're going to change the House of Politicians back to the House of Representatives the way it's supposed to be.
* I have a dream... that when the spending revolt is over, spending will never be the same again in DC.
* I have a dream that we are going to return to those principles that our founders envisioned for the greatest nation the world has ever seen.
* Those principles created the greatest country in the world and some of us want to keep it that way.
* Three challenges ...
* One, we must stay united in our goal of freedom and prosperity. The people in DC don't have a clue and that's a good thing.
* Liberals are so desperate because the fact is that the stimulus bill isn't working so they keep changing the subject so people don't know what's going on.
* They are desperate to keep a grip around the neck to keep they've resorted to name calling - saying we're racists (Cain is a black man). The good news is that it is backfiring.
* Two, we must stay informed ... because stupid people are ruining this country.
* When 50% of the people can be persuaded by a slick speech or ad, we must have the knowledge... the numbers are on our side, but we must get our fellow conservatives off the couch because November is coming.
* Three, stay inspired. They want us to believe we cannot do this...that we must 'save' our image.
* In 1996, I was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer. I was told about a 30% chance of being alive five years from now, so I asked, what do I have to do to solve this problem? Three weeks ago I go my latest results and CAT scan and after four years I have been totally cancer free.
* I tell you this because that was God telling me, "not yet because I've got something for you do." I've got to help take back our country and our government in 2010.
* Another story that inspires me is that I've often been put in positions where people tell me it can't be done. I learned in college that the bumble bee is not supposed to be able to fly, based upon aerodynamics. But we know it can be done because we see it. But mathematicians try to prove it, so they run tests, etc... and the computer tells them 'the sucker can't fly.' So they do more testing and put the results in a bigger, faster computer and the bigger, faster computer comes back and says, 'the sucker still can't fly.'
* The only reason the bumble bee flies is because it didn't get the memo telling him he can't. He believes he can and he does.
* I have a dream that we can take our country back, we must take our country back and we will do this.
* While do I believe we can make this happen? Because we've got bumble bee power.
* I have a dream for 2010 and I BELIEVE we are going to take back our government. (standing ovation)
AFP Right On Line #5
Continuing with the general session speakers:
Guy Benson, Political Editor for
* My first trip to Las Vegas, home state of Harry Reid, who is so popular that his own son, running for governor, is omitting his last name.
* We want to re-focus the public's attention on the health care bill. We've isolated eight of the central promises made when promoting the bill: not a tax, will reduce spending, you can keep your plan, etc... And we demonstrate that each and every one is either a ludicrous promise or an outright lie.
* We have a law that the public does not want, will not do what defenders said it would and will bankrupt the country.
* It is built on lies and needs to be repealed.
* Essential step is to make the change at the ballot box and then hold Republicans responsible to their re-discovery of the limited government principles they are supposed to support.
* There are a couple of Republicans in Congress who could use some friendly adult supervision - and our task is to provide that to them after the coming Republican 'revolution' in the fall.
Roger Hedgecock, grassroots leader and radio host:
* Reporter asked me why we don't have Netroots speakers here and send our speakers there? No one wants to listen to their 'talk show hosts' anyway.
* I'm through talking and ready to act. I'm taking my talk show host to Arizona to stand up for Arizona. (lots of applause)
* I asked the host hotel is they were ready. They said yes.
* Last week the President, in filings in the case, said the federal government has the right to not enforce certain immigration laws. Thought that was part of the oath to uphold the law??? Time to stand up - we are all Arizonans.
* As Americans, we could not have a service greater to our country than defeating Harry Reid in November.
* When President went to Missouri to campaign, I responded by having Roy Blunt on my show and did something I've never done before: I asked people that if they liked what they heard to donate, go work in Missouri for the candidate, get involved.
* We have to do this in every district and every Senate seat.
* We're going on the road...because we're going to defeat the Obama machine in Illinois, send Russ Feingold back to the private sector, elect Rubio in Florida.
* We don't just reject them telling us that they know better how to spend our money than we do, we reject that they know better how to spend money not yet earned by our children better than our children do.
* We have to retire them one by one.
* We are the ones to do it. Today we're going to put Harry Reid's voting record on every door in Henderson, NV. We're going to tell them truth - and it will set us all free.
Dr. Joe Heck, candidate for Congress (NV-3) - his race was moved from toss-up to leans Republican:
* For the first time, we run the risk of leaving to our children a nation that is not better than what we have.
* I refuse to jeopardize our children's future with run-away spending.
* Patriots across America are afraid of what the future holds, they worry about the agenda coming from this government that forces government control of and intrusion into our lives.
* We need leaders who know what it means to sign the front of the check - not just the back of a check.
* We also need more elected leaders who have worn the uniform of our country.
* We need leaders who know that the people's interest needs to be represented - not the interest of groups like unions, environmentalists or trial lawyers.
* These liberal interests and policies are unacceptable and must be stopped.
* My opponent followed like a lemming the failing policies of Nancy Pelosi and is motivating her liberal liars in the race. She is Pelosi's puppet and if we are going to retire Nancy Pelosi, we need to retire her.
* It is races like mine that will help take back our country.
* This year, more than ever, you must understand the weight of your words and your ability to control the on-line debate and ensure that the conservative message survives the onslaught of liberal spending.
Erick Erickson,
* We're coming and we're going to take over and we're going to recover our nation.
* When we 'set the clock back,' we're going back before George W. Bush, too. We need to stop looking at the letter behind someone's name. We have to hold our side accountable, too.
* Brooms - sweep them out of office.
* Churchill quote: if you will not fight when you can win, you will have to fight when the odds may be against you for if you do not fight, you will be slaves (paraphrased).
* Some of us are going to get ahead, some of aren't, but government should not hold us back just because others cannot. Politicians want to punish those who get ahead, but we cannot let that happen.
* These issues are not 'tea party' issues, they are American issues. Put down the protest signs and pick up the campaign signs. It's time to hit the doors, get out the vote. It's time to beat the Democrats. It's time to beat the Republicans.
* In DC, there are two parties: Democrats and Democrat-lite.
* I want more people on the 'right' but all the talking heads in DC want to talk about is 'finding common ground.' I don't want to stand next to them, I want to beat them.
* There is no common ground: they want to destroy us, we want to build up the country.
* Writing a book and one chapter is about Pres. Obama's fight with everything except the enemy.
* I love this country and if we want to preserve our freedoms, we have to win and they have to fail. Rush is right: America wins when Democrats lose.
* told story ... In 1862, we were the envy of the world - in America, unlike anywhere else in the world, every man can make himself. But not for long, and this is a reality we must face.
* Discern who the real friends and enemies are, but in all cases, stand on the side of freedom and fight like hell in November.
Curtis Sliwa, radio host:
* I may not please people with what I say, but I'm not a politician.
* I'm not loyal to a party or a religion, but I am loyal to my country and will support my country because I don't need the government to take care of me because I can so myself.
* We need to support our 'real' community organizers so Republicans and Democrats have an ex-lax attack when they see thousands outside their offices.
* When government interferes, we, the taxpayers, suffer.
(I cannot type as fast as Sliwa talks with his rhetoric and alliteration...)
* We need to treat all crime the same - if you commit the crime, you do the time. Do not protect them and take their campaign contributions - banks 'too big to fail' or financial institutions you've bailed out.
* We want government out of lives, we have huge debt, but I'm a free agent and I must get out and do the things that we've previously turned over to government.
* Government tells us we cannot survive without them - we must prove them wrong.
* New York City went to federal government and asked the president to bail them out and the president said, 'drop dead.'
* I'm a New Yorker and we wanted to bailed out by the taxpayers in Nebraska and Iowa??? But we were told no and we had to get our house in order. We had to adopt fiscal restraint.
* The result was lawlessness and I organized young men and women and formed the Guardian Angels. We haven't taken one dime or penny of taxpayer dollars!
* The politicians in DC have been on the ropes before - don't let them off the ropes this time around.
* If we are to rein in government, we must step forward and volunteer. We can make a difference - we can change the world and change the future of America. Our land needs fighters who are not quitters. The principles must perservere and if we are to win, we must take back the work we have outsourced to government.
* I want my country back - I'm going to take it back.
AFP Right On Line #4
Tim Phillips, President of AFP:
Ed Morrissey,
John Fund, Wall Street Journal:
AFP Right On Line #3
Today is the general session for RightOnLine so I'll have a series of blog posts on the various speakers. Again, these are my rough notes taken during their speeches and is not verbatim. As my fellow bloggers here say, thank goodness I can type fast.
VP of the parent company of the Venetian Hotel and Resort, where we are staying (I did not get his name):
* Venetian is the largest building in the world. He says that after Pres. Obama made his negative comments about Las Vegas, they had over 26,000 room cancellations resulting in millions of lost revenue from both the rooms and food & beverage sales.
Judge Andrew Napolitano:
* Starts with several humorous stories from his time on the bench
* Talking about Thomas Moore in his trial, who was beheaded for refusing to admit the king is the head of the church on earth. He argued for a natural law and the fundamental belief that we are free individuals.
* This led to the statement that 'all men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator,' not their government.
* He had a debate with a person the other day who said that these statements were just Jefferson's 'musings.'
* When the government fails to protect human freedom it is the duty of the people to alter or abolish it.
* These are not Jefferson's musings, these are written by the natural law in every person's heart.
* British soldiers used to be able to write their own search warrants to look for the king's 'stamps' on all your private papers...this was actually rescinded prior to our Revolution but it was too late and we won the Revolution and wrote the Constitution to ensure we'd never again be subject to the tyranny we'd just rejected.
* Our freedom comes from our humanity - it is as natural to use as our physical bodies are. Our tendency to be free are hard-wired into us by our Creator.
* This is the natural law argument that won the argument during the writing of our Constitution.
* The Bill of Rights - our right to defend those freedoms, even from the government when it is taken over by tyrants, even the right to be left alone are guaranteed to us in this document.
* Everyone knows 'Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech' so how is it that shortly thereafter we had a law making it a crime to criticize the government (alien & sedition act)? Then one congressman referred to Pres. Adams as 'his rotundancy' and was then convicted and sent to prison under the act. But he ran for re-election from prison and won.
* So how could the same people who wrote the Constitution with the free speech provision then violate it so? The 'lust to dominate' - the urge people in government have to tell others how to live their lives.
* If a candidate or elected official wants to tell you how to live your life, VOTE THEM OUT OF OFFICE.
* Lincoln locked up publishers from the North during the civil war - they were locked up in a military prison but the Supreme Court set them free.
* Espionage Act makes it a crime to talk someone out of being drafted, work in a munitions, etc. These other bad acts have expired, but this one is still in effect.
* Tells story of a man who was tried and convicted under this act, but the problem was that his written urgings were in Yiddish. He died in prison.
* The other thing to remember is that the states created the federal government and not the other way away. I would have added also: and the power the states gave to the federal government, they can take back from the federal government (much applause)
* If someone came to your door with a gun and said, "give me your money so I can give it away to others in your name.' So you call the police only to find he is the police, a federal officer. Taxation is theft.
* Taxation assumes that the government has a higher right to your money than you do. The Constitution ensures that what you earn, work for, etc... is yours - not the government's.
* Congressman Clyburn - I asked him where in the Constitution is the authorization for Health Care? He said most of what we do here is not authorized in the Constitution. "Where is the prohibition for health care?" This is a problem with the thinking because the federal government is granted only limited duties with all others reserved to the states or to the people.
* Government took over the Mustang Ranch and couldn't provide hookers and booze to truckers and they want to provide health care????
* Today we gather to celebrate our freedoms. Five years from now, will there be anything left to celebrate? Only a few generations have been given the honorable role of defending freedom - this is your role today.
Friday, July 23, 2010
AFP Right On Line #2
RightOnLine's Opening Session rough notes.
Ann McElhinney, Director of the movie "Not Evil Just Wrong."
* went across to Netroots Nation to hear Van Jones so we wouldn't have to. Room was only about half full.
* According to what she heard, Van Jones believes that George Bush orchestrated the 9-11 attack on our nation.
* He said that most of the problems faced by the Progressive Movement and Barack Obama is because we banished those who would filter the news. He also said there are people engineering viruses to infect progressives. I say, 'Hello lovely, lovely viruses.'
* He said we don't need to worry about the debt because there is plenty of money out there - ask Haliburton. I say, they have no issue with the wealth of George Soros or Ophra Winfrey. They don't have an issue wealth, only with certain people who have it.
* He said something I've been saying: the way a culture evolves is by stories. I say, all over Hollywood, they're telling anti-development, anti-American, anti-capitalist stories to every house, every school child, every American. Where are the oil men telling the story of the people they employ and the comforts they make possible because of the product they produce? We don't need moratoriums, we need more energy - of all kinds.
* So I'm going to tell a story. When we came to America, we were told conservatives were obsessed with sex - that they were too interested in what you do in your bedroom. But we haven't found that to be the case. What we have found is that progressives might not be in your bedroom, but they're in every other room in your house, from your refrigerator to your bathroom, down to actually being inside your light bulb!
* People need to hear the tremendous success story of American capitalism. It has given us the best of everything and most people don't realize that the many benefits and luxuries they enjoy are the result of that capitalism.
* While progressives are telling us we should all drive electric cars, they're protesting coal mining. Where do they think the electricity they need actually comes from?
* You must watch the movie Avatar. It has the most unbelievable and most hypocritical message ever.
And then she ran out of time....
Emery McClendon - blogger and Tea Party Organizer:
* Yes, I am a tea party organizer. I am a tea party speaker. I am a true red, white and blue American.
* I was told I couldn't do a tea party because the tea party is racist.
* I told people on election night that they had the right time, but the wrong black man.
(McClendon is a black man.)
* Founding fathers built this nation on limited government and capitalism.
* If you're not angry about what's going on, get angry. If you're already angry, stay angry.
* We can restore America: Hear us Congress. Hear us Harry Reid. Hear us Nancy Pelosi. You will hear us in November.
* People want to diminish American but we will not let that happen.
* We are going to rise up and take our nation back.
(He gave an extremely energetic and powerful speech!)
AFP Right On Line #1
These are my rough notes from the opening session of RightOnLine in Las Vegas:
Erik Telford from AFP:
* Third annual event with over 1,000 registered participants
* The on-line activism is not dominated by the 'left' - there are plenty of conservative activists promoting conservative philosophies.
Congressman Mike Pence (R-IN):
* Welcomes us to Las Vegas where we will win back the west.
* Rented an old movie - called 'When Harry Met Sharon" ... don't want to ruin the movie, the Harry lost. (Harry Reid vs. Sharon Angle for Senate in Nevada)
* What happens in Vegas must not stay in Vegas - what you hear and learn here, you need to take to your homes.
* I'm a conservative, but I'm not in a bad move about it. I'm optimistic about the future and the conservative movement.
* We have a challenge - Pres. Barack Obama had a 120% approval rating, according to MSNBC. He also had a 65% approval in all 57 states.
* Freedom-loving Americans are on the march to win back the nation with their conservative ideals. Even Republicans in Congress have returned to the fight for fiscal discipline and limited government.
* Three years ago, Republicans in Congress didn't just lose their majority, they lost their way.
* Our party lost our principles, but we've found our way. Republicans are standing strong with unanimous opposition to big government and less freedoms.
* Despite conservative gains, we are facing challenges, we've lost respect in the world, we're going broke...
* We need to return our national government to the common sense and common values of everyday Americans.
* Americans are out of work and Democrats are out of ideas. They said we needed to borrow billions to keep unemployment below 8% and now it's at 10%.
* V. Pres. Joe Biden touts jobs 'created or saved,' but according to Bureau of Labor Statistics, that's not accurate.
* American families don't want to rely on government's jobless benefits, they want jobs with benefits...and Democrats are offering only more borrowing, more spending and more deficits.
* $26 Billion is projected debt in 2026 (?)
* Spent $1.6 trillion in the first 8 months of the Obama presidency, according to their own numbers.
* It is morally wrong to take the incomes of future Americans to pay for the problems of today.
* We're looking into the doe-eyed faces of our children and grandchildren and saying 'give us your credit card.'
* Americans are saying enough is enough. We must make the hard choices today to deal with the problems of today.
* Democrats have increased taxes by $670 billion. Their answer to problems is to raise taxes - and are talking about embracing the largest tax increase in American history: every income tax bracket in the country will increase as of January 1 if the Bush tax cuts expire.
* Washington DC doesn't tax too little, it spends too much!
* Only in DC would you find people who believe that increasing taxes in this economy will create jobs.
* House Republicans will oppose the tax increase on every American with everything they've got.
* Getting the economy moving again requires government to get out of control and out of the way and American will come roaring back.
* Need to restore fiscal discipline by ending the era of takeovers and bailouts once and for all.
* Americans deserve health reform that lowers their costs without growing the size of government.
* Democrats may have had their say on the first Sunday in March, but Americans will have their say on the first Tuesday in November.
* Republicans will not rest until we repeal this lock, stock and barrel.
* If you want to repeal ObamaCare, you start by 'repealing' Nancy Pelosi in November.
* And no more bailouts for insurance companies, banks, auto companies or socialist foreign nations.
* The freedom to succeed must include the freedom to fail.
* We must get spending under control in Washington DC. We've tried everything with both parties in control...
* We must limit federal spending to no more than 20% of the nation's economy in the Constitution of the USA.
* If God can get by with 10%, Uncle Sam ought to be able to get by on 20%.
* Our present crisis if not just economic and political, it is moral in nature. People in positions of authority have walked away from the principle of an honest day's work for an honest day's pay, and honesty in dealings with others - the golden rule.
* This starts in our families, our churches and our communities.
* What is at stake, what this is really all about. The day after the Wall Street bailouts, he was in his home state and many people thanked me for my vote against the bailouts. One man who'd just lost his job came out to thank him for his vote against the bailout. He said, 'I can get another job, but I cannot get another country.'
* We know what is at stake: the right to live and work in freedom.
* This election is not about who will be in control in the House and Senate, but about who is in control of our nation. Now is the time for all of us to do what we can to promote the principles that make this nation great.
* You will not fight alone. quote: Proclaim Liberty throughout all the land and unto all the inhabitants thereof.
* The time has come to take our stand - the time for action is at hand. We must not be afraid but fight for the source of America's greatness: our faith in God and our freedom.
* We will take the Congress back in 2010 and take the nation back in 2012, so help us God.
Right On Line 2010
I'm at RightOnLine, sponsored by Americans For Prosperity, in Las Vegas, Nevada.
This event is primarily a training session for conservative activists and it's held in the same city and the same time as the liberal event, Netroots Nation.
New for 2010, they've broken out the training sessions into four tracks:
* Online Activism 101, which is geared toward individuals who are just starting their online activism;
* Advanced Online Activism, for more experienced new media people focusing on being more strategic and effective in their efforts;
* Citizen Journalism, or the investigative reporting track;
* Public Policy, providing details and thorough information on AFP's policy priorities including killing the death tax, the takeover of the Internet, global warming/energy policy and state fiscal crisis;
* Grassroots Activism, showing activists how to get involved beyond the new media tools.
The agenda certainly provides something for everyone.
In addition to the training sessions, the following people are scheduled to speak:
* Congressman Mike Pence (R-IN)
* Ann McElhinney, director for the movie "Not Evil Just Wrong" (which was previewed by The Children of Liberty in Maumee last year)
* Herman Cain, who is also doing a live radio show from RightOnLine this afternoon
* Congresswoman Michele Bachmann (R-MN)
* FCC Commissioner Roberty McDowell
I listed the key note speakers in yesterday's post.
I will be joining my friends EM Zanotti and Chris Faulkner in today's last Online Activism 101 track, Getting Started: Where to go from here? Then tonight, we'll enjoy the comedy of Evan Sayet (Right to Laugh) and Steven Kruiser, a conservative comedian and Fox News Contributor.
For those of you who read my posts through my Facebook stream, I'll be blogging more than usual today and tomorrow, so I hope you won't mind the additional posts. During the general sessions and key note speakers, I'll be blogging their comments in bullet form so you can participate on line.
Hope you enjoy!
Thursday, July 22, 2010
Quotes of the Day
I'm heading out to Las Vegas today for Americans for Prosperity's annual RightOnLine Conference. I'll be blogging about the break-out sessions and will cover all the speakers, including:
* Judge Andrew Napolitano
* Herman Cain, Radio Host and Fox News Contributor
* John Fund, The Wall Street Journal
* Erick Erickson,
* Ed Morrissey,
* Jim Pinkerton, Fox News Contributor
* Representative Sharron Angle, Candidate for U.S. Senate (NV)
I'm also looking forward to catching up with Samsphere and other blogging friends:
* Warner Todd Huston, Publius Forum
* John McJunkin, fellow radio guy, morning show producer/sidekick at Newstalk 550 KFYI
* Skip Murphy, GraniteGrok
* Fred Dooley, Real Debate Wisconsin
* Steve Eggleston, No Runny Eggs
* Emily Zanotti, American Princess
* Trent Seibert, Texas Watchdog
* Stephen Kruiser
* Eric Ericksen, RedState
* Bob Weeks, Voice for Liberty in Wichita
and a host of others.
So as I prepare for a 4-1/2 hour flight, here are a few quotes to start your day:
"Were we directed from Washington when to sow, and when to reap, we should soon want bread." ~ Thomas Jefferson
From Richard Armey, The Freedom Revolution:
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
A tribute to Chet Zarko
Several years ago, I participated in a gathering of bloggers from across the nation at the Sam Adams Alliance in Chicago. Our gathering, Samsphere as it was called, gave me an opportunity to get to know some really terrific individuals - including Chet Zarko from Michigan.
Sadly, we learned yesterday that Chet had passed away at the age of 39.
Chet was a tireless supporter of transparency in government and was a well-deserved thorn in the side of elected officials who opposed his public records and Freedom of Information Act requests. His latest work, which he believed would set a precedent, was a case before the Michigan Supreme Court against the Michigan Education Association over whether or not e-mails sent by union bosses from school computers discussing union business were "personal communications" and thus exempt from disclosure.
Everyone's money was on Chet.
While fellow bloggers in Ohio will contact me about Ohio public records law, I always turned to Chet when it came to certain strategies or federal FOIA issues. And he was always quick to respond with good advice that proved right every time.
One of the things I enjoyed most about him was his quick wit. He was not only knowledgeable, but fun - combining intelligence and humor in his discussions and comments.
He fought for freedom and individual liberty wherever it was opposed. Michigan - and all of us - are better off because of his work and his efforts on behalf of those principles.
His life was short, but impressive, and full of good deeds. We will miss him very much.
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
Quotes of the Day
For those who believe the federal government should 'do something' every time an issue arises:
For Toledo City Council members who don't want voters to have a say on whether or not the city should 'pick up' the employee portion of their mandated pension payments:
Sunday, July 18, 2010
Quotes of the Day
"A free society can exist only when public spirit is balanced by an equal inclination of men to mind their own business." ~ Edward A. Shils
"Had the states been despoiled of their sovereignty by the generality of the preamble, and had the Federal Government been endowed with whatever they should judge to be instrumental towards the union, justice, tranquility, common defence, general welfare, and the preservation of liberty, nothing could have been more frivolous than an enumeration of powers." ~ Virginia’s General Assembly
"The only vice that can not be forgiven is hypocrisy." ~ William Hazlitt
Saturday, July 17, 2010
Things I don't want to think about on a summer Saturday
My postings have been a bit light lately, due to a number of things. I have work (yes, that thing that earns me money to help pay the bills) - and that's a good thing.
But I also have disgust at what I see going on in the political realm - and that's a bad thing.
I know exactly how so many people feel when they see what counts for 'action' by our governments at all levels and it is eerily reminiscent of the feelings I felt while in office .... that efforts are for naught.
Don't get me wrong - I'm very encouraged by a lot of things: good candidates with firm philosophies and not various 'positions' on issues; a growing awareness of the impact political decisions being made have on individual freedom; the enthusiastic embrace of limited government/low spending approaches by many individuals regardless of political party, etc...
But sometimes, the idiocy or 'stuck on stupid' things just really get to me.
We've seen Toledo City Council and the Lucas County Commissioners spending time on non-binding 'statements' opposing a state for a law greatly supported not only by their own residents but by a majority of Americans as well.
Considering all the polls on the issue, I can't help but think these elected officials are violating the wishes of their own constituents, but that's nothing new. They were catering to a specific small-but-vocal group of interests that they believe they need to placate.
We've seen the news that Ohio is facing huge budget deficits for the next year and that our governor is again hoping one-time money from the feds (actually from all of us) will get him by. State Auditor Mary Taylor warned everyone in the last budget go-round that relying upon one-time 'stimulus' funds was a recipe for bigger problems in the future - and she was absolutely right. Why the idiots in Columbus cannot see that, I don't know.
And then I heard on the news yesterday that Gov. Strickland has asked his departments and agencies to let him know the negative impacts a 10% budget cut would have. That's the most WRONG question to ask! You ask them how they can cut their budget, not how bad things could be if they are forced to do so.
I don't know why it is that politicians never want to ask the questions that will actually give them the answers they need. They always ask 'what don't you want cut,' knowing full well that every little group that benefits from the spending will show up to say 'don't cut my program.' We see that in Toledo and Lucas County, too.
Instead, they should be asking 'what can you live without'? With that type of question, you'll at least get a listing of programs, projects, etc...that people can do without as opposed to the ones they don't want to give up, regardless of priority.
So what will Strickland get as a response to his request? He'll get a bunch of doom-and-gloom scenarios as bureaucrats list the most dire consequences of a cut in funds. He'll then end up in a no-win situation if he and the state legislature make the cuts that we all know need to be made.
We've seen President Barack Obama give 'stimulus' funds to a foreign company that is setting up shop in Michigan. Where is the outrage from all the 'buy America' people?
I despise the idea of any 'stimulus' coming from the government in terms of handouts to companies while that same government simultaneously increases taxes and regulatory compliances. Talk about contradictory! We're supposed to be ever so grateful for the meager government largess while ignoring that they're making us less profitable by requirements/fees/rules/taxes/etc... that add much, much more to the cost of doing business. That's not the way to 'stimulate' the economy.
And while that is a huge thing, it's nowhere near the double standard so evident in the action. If providing subsidies to foreign companies is a bad thing, then it's a bad thing even when Democrats or Pres. Obama do it. If groups are pushing a 'buy American' approach, they need to be vocal when American tax dollars are going to a foreign company in Michigan. And if they're not going to object to this particular expenditure, they cannot object to others.
Most people can live with either position - or at least agree to disagree. But when the criteria for comments or outrage is not the principle, but whichever political party is engaged in the act, the American people see it for what it is and reject the hypocrisy. (I hope.)
We've also seen the slippery slope in full effect. Many people have rightly complained that when government pays for things, it insists upon making decisions relating to those monies. We see it with the states: impose certain laws or forgo the money we're planning to give you.
As the federal government moved into the realm of health care, they made promises about us still being in control, but many of us knew it was only a matter of time. If government is paying for your medical care, it won't be long until they're dictating your eating and exercise habits under the guise of 'containing costs' for your care.
The White House chef is now a 'senior policy advisor' to the White House so he can advise us on an 'epidemic' of obesity. I always thought an epidemic was some sort of infectious disease that spreads among the populace. Who knew that your own actions (or lack thereof) could qualify?!? So now obesity is a matter of 'national security' and legislatures are trying to figure out how to control things you eat like salt and trans-fats and junk food.
Oh - let me clarify. They're not yet trying to make YOU stop eating things that are bad for you (though they are requiring a reporting of your Body Mass Index to them by 2014). They realize that if they tell you that you can no longer eat too much salt (even though 'too much' is a large range that varies from person to person), you'll rebel. So they're telling food manufacturers that THEY can't include salt in their products - and they're doing so through force of law.
It is a slippery slope and we are gliding down it at a very fast pace, approaching an even steeper incline.
So with all these things going on it's easy to just bury oneself in work, family and things like mowing the lawn. But, as Wendell Phillips once said:
Thursday, July 15, 2010
Challenges for the new TPS superintendent
According to today's paper, Jerome Pecko, the new superintendent of Toledo Public Schools, will have an "unorthodox employment contract."
Apparently, it's 'unorthodox' because it includes performance goals. But I think many people will say 'it's about time!'
One of the 'goals' is to get the voters to approve a 7.8 mill levy in November.
I'm going to go out on a limb and make a prediction about the strategy for this levy. I believe they'll try to convince us that the new superintendent 'deserves' the funds to make the changes he believes are necessary and that we need to pass this levy so he has the funds to do the job we just hired him to do.
This is one of the few arguments for increasing our taxes that might actually resonate with some voters. We certainly don't want to put our new superintendent into a no-win situation now, do we???
Of course, the fact that he's expected to accept the job offer and actually sign his employment contract KNOWING that the district faces a $44 million deficit for the upcoming school year probably won't even be mentioned, much less considered.
As an aside, I'm not sure I believe the job of the superintendent is to 'pass levies.' It seems to me that task should fall solely on the elected Board of Education and that the role of the superintendent would be to administer the school system, producing educated graduates with the funds allotted to him...but what do I know?
So we'll await the signed employment contract and see if it contains the levy provision - and then we'll wait for the advertising campaign to see if I'm right.
Wednesday, July 14, 2010
Thurber's fleeting thoughts on a sunny morning
* Lucas County Commissioners have tabled the plan put forward by Pete Gerken to change Lucas County's form of government to a charter council. Under his proposal, we would have voted in November for members of a committee to study and then present a county charter. Gerken explained that there wasn't enough interest among the citizens to run for the 15 positions, reflecting the general lack of interest fellow commissioner Ben Konop found for his proposal to adopt Cuyahoga's charter language.
So while the Democrats have abandoned their support for The Blade's latest fad, Republican Party Chairman Jon Stainbrook is still 'on the streets' trying to gather the signatures Konop couldn't in order to move the agenda of The Blade forward.
Now, I could go so many places with this:
- Did Gerken present a competing idea specifically to derail Konop's? Did he privately discourage people from expressing an interest in his 'committee plan' in order to demonstrate a complete lack of interest from the community? Knowing Pete, that is very likely.
- Why is the Republican Party pushing so hard to carry out the wishes of the local paper and its publisher? We all know it's because of the close, personal relationship Stainbrook has with John Robinson Block. But are Republicans as interested in the idea as his supporters are? And have his supporters who are going door-to-door actually evaluated the plan or looked at the pros and cons? Or did they just 'believe' what Stainbrook was telling them?
- Is this 'three strikes and you're out' for The Blade? They failed to garner support for their push to keep the old United Way Building. They failed to garner support for their push to prevent the YMCA from selling/closing the South Toledo Y. Now they have failed to garner support for their county charter form of government. And they just raised the price of their daily paper to $1.00. What's next?
- Stainbrook's petitions are due tomorrow and he needs over 14,000 valid signatures. If he doesn't get them, will his self-promoted 'reputation' for being able to put 'boots on the ground' be diminished? I mean, in other people's minds - not his own....
* Toledo Public Schools has a new superintendent, Jerome Pecko, and I wish him all the luck in the world. I want to have a good public school system in Toledo - I just disagree with the methods our current board is employing to achieve that goal. But I believe he may have gotten off on the wrong foot. TPS is facing a huge deficit and will be putting a 7.8 mill levy on the ballot for November, after a stinging defeat of their income tax plan in May.
Pecko also said something a bit disturbing (clip being played on WSPD). He said that if students are leaving TPS because they're afraid of a diverse student population, then their parents are doing them a disservice. Now, he didn't say that was happening, but 'if.' However, 'if' that is what he thinks the problem is, he is going to work to address an issue that isn't the cause of students leaving the schools. And 'if' he is merely reflecting the impressions or thoughts of the TPS board, then it's no wonder the school system has such a terrible reputation for actual performance.
Sunday, July 11, 2010
BEST Act: Bill for Enforcing Societal Training Act
My friend - and fellow blogger - Warner Todd Huston has penned a column, with a twist, that may reflect what so many are feeling today when it comes to government mandates, regulations and intrusion into our private lives.
In it, he applies the 'logic' relating to the exercise of a citizen's Second Amendment rights to other enumerated items in the Bill of Rights. I highly recommend you read the entire article. I hope you'll also reflect on the implications of 'regulating' one right and how that could easily apply to regulating others. As WTH (as he signs his emails) writes: " It’s what’s BEST for us all, ya know?"
"Democrats might be right. It’s obvious that Americans have become a stupid people. Our schools have disgorged students who have fallen to the bottom of the barrel in literacy, math and science scores, late-night comedians have no lack for citizens on the street that have no cue about law or history, and as voters…. well, as voters we’ve been stupid enough to elect people like James Traficant, John Edwards, Robert “KKK” Byrd, “Benedict” Arlen Specter, Pete Stark, or for that matter Jimmy Carter and Barack Hussein Obama. We need help and what better entity than government to rescue us? So, we need some new rules so that Americans can be better controlled."
Read more....
Wednesday, July 07, 2010
Guest hosting on WSPD
You may have heard that WSPD morning show host Fred Lefebvre's brother passed away. As a result, Brian Wilson will filling in for him from 6-9 a.m. and I'll be filling in for Brian from 3-6 p.m. Thursday and Friday (July 8-9).
I guess it's a good thing that my work schedule prevented me from doing much posting this week...I've got a lot of good stuff ready to go!
Monday, July 05, 2010
Quotes of the Day
More on Liberty from our Founding Fathers, thanks to Liberty Tree:
And from Rev. Samuel Francis Smith (1808-1895), Baptist minister, journalist and author, the four stanzas to My Country 'Tis of Thee:
1. My country,' tis of thee,
sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing;
land where my fathers died,
land of the pilgrims' pride,
from every mountainside let freedom ring!
2. My native country, thee,
land of the noble free, thy name I love;
I love thy rocks and rills,
thy woods and templed hills;
my heart with rapture thrills, like that above.
3. Let music swell the breeze,
and ring from all the trees sweet freedom's song;
let mortal tongues awake;
let all that breathe partake;
let rocks their silence break, the sound prolong.
4. Our fathers' God, to thee,
author of liberty, to thee we sing;
long may our land be bright
with freedom's holy light;
protect us by thy might, great God, our King.
Sunday, July 04, 2010
The Declaration of Independence
as it is too familiar to what we experience today.
The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America
For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:
For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:
For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:
For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:
— John Hancock
New Hampshire:
Josiah Bartlett, William Whipple, Matthew Thornton
Rhode Island:
Stephen Hopkins, William Ellery
Roger Sherman, Samuel Huntington, William Williams, Oliver Wolcott
New York:
William Floyd, Philip Livingston, Francis Lewis, Lewis Morris
New Jersey:
Caesar Rodney, George Read, Thomas McKean
North Carolina:
William Hooper, Joseph Hewes, John Penn
South Carolina:
Button Gwinnett, Lyman Hall, George Walton
Saturday, July 03, 2010
Quotes for the Fourth of July Holiday
"Liberty is not a cruise ship full of pampered passengers. Liberty is a man-of-war, and we are all crew." ~ Kenneth W. Royce
"Better to dwell in freedom's hall,
With a cold damp floor and mouldering wall,
Than bow the head and bend the knee
In the proudest palace of slaverie
~ Thomas Moore
Thursday, July 01, 2010
Quotes of the Day
On liberty:
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} | 5,008 | Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Suzanna Gratia Hupp explains meaning of 2nd Amendment!
For Borat Obama and Attorney General Holder.
Luzerne County Corruption Yuhas, Payne, and Martinelli Style
I wrote about twister and Bobby getting health insurance courtesy of the county for nigh on four years. It was reported in the local papers today that none other than AJ "I Need AA" Martinelli signed off on it for them.
I can't even keep track any more of all the elected dems and appointed dems that have been or are about to be indicted in Luzerne County. Lord knows one would be too many but we seem to have a slew of them. For the record, Martinelli was appointed by Pennsylvania's Gov. Fast Eddy Rendell D-ouche. That's right folks, another coup for the democrats. It seems those pesky lefties just have a lock on the corruption around here.
Keep voting them in, it makes writing this so much easier!!!!!!!!!!
Monday, March 30, 2009
The Tax Increase on Tobacco
Our glorious Chairman, Obama, has raised the tax on tobacco. While this soft tax hike will only affect about one in five adult Americans, care to guess who will be most affected by it? Yep, the poor and middle class. I can actually hear your thoughts as I sit and type this. Screw them, they shouldn't be smoking anyway. It's bad for people!!! The sanctimonious non-smokers should be careful what they wish for. Just because smoking isn't your particular vice, don't be so sure that your vice won't be taxed next.
I think it is a very safe bet that alcohol will be the next vice to have a significant tax increase. You know what will happen then? The non-smokers and the tea drinkers will say "Good, they shouldn't be drinking anyway".
So I am going to jump on the Obamination Taxation band wagon. As I am not obese and rarely eat fast food, I want them to put a 100% tax on fast food, junk food, and candy. Lord knows being over weight is just as much a health risk as any other vice. Picture it, Big Macs 4 bucks a pop. KFC family meal for four, fifty bucks!! Snickers bar, two fifty. Large bag of potato chips six fifty. etc, etc, etc. The government might raise enough to pay for some of Obama's record setting deficits.
Why is Obama raising all these soft taxes? To fund his programs of course. He told us all that he was only going to raise taxes on the "rich". Well guess who's taxes he is raising? yep, all of ours.
Don't worry if you don't fall into any of the above categories, you're still going to get an anal probing when the chosen one's 100% tax increase on utilities passes. If you haven't seen the full page ads in every major paper in the country, that is exactly what Zero has planned. For those that voted for him, I hope he is living up to what you wanted.
Thursday, March 26, 2009
More Luzerne County Corruption
Two more very connected and powerful Democrats get caught with their hands in the cookie jar.
The Times leader reported today that two former members of the prison board, Wister Yuhas and Robert Payne, have been getting health insurance paid for by the county for close to 4 years and they had absolutely no right to get that coverage. These two Super Dems were appointed by the infamous Conahan and Ciavarella so it really shouldn't come as a surprise.
They are quoted as saying they thought they were supposed to get the coverage. I just want to ask a few questions;
1. To Twister and Bobby, do you know of many part time jobs that you only work 3 or 4 hours per month that have that kind of benefit? Do you realize just how fooking stupid you sound by claiming that you thought it came with the job? Do you really think the taxpayers believe you?
2. To all the big shot democrats at the courthouse, do you really think that by saying you didn't know, it happened before I was on the job, I had no knowledge of that, etc, etc, that you are hiding your complicity?
3. Will the democrat controlled county government demand restitution from them?
Kudos to Steve Urban for catching this. The troubling thing is just how many more at corruption central are getting thousands of dollars per year worth of benefits that they have no right to?
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
Obama's Prime Time News Conference
The wizard of uhhs was in fine form last night. Thank god I wasn't playing the drinking game where you have to take a swig every time Barry says Uhh, Err, or Hmm. Just think if that was coupled with having to take a swig every time he said that he inherited all the problems facing our country!! Anybody playing would've been loaded inside of twenty minutes!!! He should have let TOTUS handle the questions, at least then he wouldn't have sounded like such an idiot. I thought Bush was a terrible public speaker but Obama has easily taken his title away from him.
Even though I wasn't playing, I am having a hard time recalling if he answered a single question directly or at all. The change he promised on the campaign trail doesn't resemble the changes he is making in our country. His administration is wiping their ass with our constitution and preparing to flush it down the toilet. The new power he wants his administration to have is frightening at the very least. Can you imagine if any other president said that he wants the power to seize businesses??? If you hated the Patriot Act, how do you feel about this?
Bush, who in fact was a RINO, spent our tax dollars like a drunken sailor. Chairman Zero is spending it like a crack whore that won the lottery. Worse still, he is proud of it. I ask you, what is the logical conclusion of the rampant growth of our government and national debt?
Friday, March 20, 2009
Which President Cut Taxes The Most For Wealthy Americans
A little test for the weekend.
Which Pres. cut taxes the most for the wealthiest Americans?
A. Ronald Reagan
B.William Clinton
C. George W. Bush
If you get this wrong, please refrain from voting for the rest of your life.
Thursday, March 19, 2009
AIG Bonuses
We need to remember that this is a very complicated issue and should extend some leeway to the Obama administration. I mean really, can you imagine trying to sort out that contract when you're trying to read it through 632,000 distractions? It has to be the most difficult job in the world.
While it is absolutely no surprise that they are using tax dollars to pay bonuses, it is inconceivable that we are even remotely shocked by this. This pattern of behavior is long established by none other than our own government. That's right, our congress and presidents for more years than I care to think about, have consistently rewarded themselves regardless of how poorly they perform in their job. Yet those same jerkoffs are now scraping the sand from their collective vaginas over these bonuses and who knew what and when. You want to know who knew what and when? They all knew and they have known about the bonuses for quite some time. What they aren't telling us is that just about every entity that is getting bailout money is going to use some of it to pay bonuses. That is a fact.
Will our outrage lose some steam as more and more of these bailout queens do the exact same thing as AIG? I think so. After all, it's hard to stay upset about what has become the "norm".
In case you're wondering what the 632,000 distractions are, that is the amount donated to the Obama campaign by AIG and its executives. What I really want someone to offer me is that same deal. I give you $632,000 and you hand me back $170,000,000. Any takers?
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
Happy St. Patrick's Day
An Irish man went to confession in St. Patrick's Catholic Church. 'Father', he confessed, 'it has been one month since my last confession. I had sex with Nookie Green twice last month.' The priest told the sinner, 'You are forgiven. Go out and say three Hail Mary's.'
Soon thereafter, another Irish man entered the confessional. 'Father, it has been two months since my last confession. I've had sex with Nookie Green twice a week for the past two months.' This time, the priest questioned, 'Who is this Nookie Green?' 'A new woman in the neighborhood ,' the sinner replied. 'Very well,' sighed the priest. Go and say ten Hail Mary's .
At mass the next morning, as the priest prepared to deliver the sermon, a tall, voluptuous, drop -dead gorgeous redheaded woman entered the sanctuary. The eyes of every man in the church fell upon her as she slowly sashayed up the aisle and sat down right in front of the priest. Her dress was green and very short, and she wore matching, shiny emerald-green shoes. The priest and the altar boy gasped as the woman in the green dress and matching green shoes sat with her legs spread slightly apart, but enough.
The bug-eyed altar boy couldn't believe his ears but managed to calmly reply, 'No Father, I think it's just a reflection from her shoes'
The Economic Stimulus Payment
Q. What is an Economic Stimulus Payment?
Q. Where will the government get this money?
A. From taxpayers.
A. Only a smidgen.
Q. What is the purpose of this payment?
Q. But isn't that stimulating the economy of China ?
A. Shut up.
If you spend it on gasoline it will go to the Arab countries.
If you purchase a computer it will go to India.
If you purchase fruit and vegetables it will go to Mexico, Honduras, Chile and Guatemala (unless you buy organic).
If you buy a car it will go to Japan.
If you purchase useless junk it will go to Taiwan.
If you pay your credit cards off, it will go to bank management bonuses and they will hide if offshore. Same with stock investment.
Instead, you can keep the money in America by spending it at yard sales, going to a baseball game, or spending it on beer and wine (domestic ONLY) or tattoos, since those are the only American businesses still operating in the US.
Monday, March 16, 2009
Americans With No Abilities Act
Washington, DC - (Dateline February 26, 2009)
In a Capitol Hill press conference, House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi – Democrat, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid – Democrat - pointed to the success of the U..S. Postal Service, which has a long-standing policy of providing opportunity without regard to performance. Approximately 74 percent of postal employees lack any job skills, making this agency the single largest U.S. employer of Persons of Inability.
Special thanks to Kar for sending this to me.
Friday, March 13, 2009
Ted Kennedy's Memoirs
In honor of the distinguished Senator's memoirs being published, I humbly submit this for the book jacket.
Thursday, March 12, 2009
Breaking News on the Luzerne County Judicial Corruption Case
Judge Toole is next in line to take a very hard fall from grace. He has hired an attorney to represent him and charges are said to come out any day. The amount of kickback dough is said to be far less than what Ciavarella and Conahan got but apparently it's enough.
Stay tuned.
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
1. It is registered.
2. You are fingerprinted.
3. You supply a current Driver's License.
4. You supply your Social Security #.
A Great Letter to the President of GM
First, here is Troy Clarke's letter:
Troy Clarke
President General Motors North America
Response from:Gregory Knox, Pres.Knox Machinery Company Franklin , Ohio
Gentlemen:In response to your request to contact legislators and ask for a bailout for the Big Three automakers please consider the following, and please pass my thoughts on to Troy Clark, President of General Motors North America.Politicians and Management of the Big 3 are both infected with the same entitlement mentality that has spread like cancerous germs in UAW halls for the last countless decades, and whose plague is now sweeping this nation, awaiting our new "messiah", Pres -elect Obama, to wave his magic wand and make all our problems go away, while at the same time allowing our once great nation to keep "living the dream"... Believe me folks, The dream is over!
This dream where we can ignore the consumer for years while management myopically focuses on its personal rewards packages at the same time that our factories have been filled with the world's most overpaid, arrogant, ignorant and laziest entitlement minded "laborers" without paying the price for these atrocities...this dream where you still think the masses will line up to buy our products forever and ever. Don't even think about telling me I'm wrong. Don't accuse me of not knowing of what I speak. I have called on Ford, GM, Chrysler, TRW, Delphi, Kelsey Hayes, American Axle and countless other automotive OEM's t hroughout the Midwest during the past 30 years and what I've seen over those years in these union shops can only be described as disgusting.
Troy Clarke, President of General Motors North America, states: "There is widespread sentiment throughout this country, and our government, and especially via the news media, that the current crisis is completely the result of bad management which it certainly is not."You're right Mr. Clarke, it's not JUST management....how about the electricians who walk around the plants like lords in feudal times, making people wait on them for countless hours while they drag ass...so they can come in on the weekend and make double and triple time...for a job they easily could have done within their normal 40 hour work week. How about the line workers who threaten newbies with all kinds of scare tactics...for putting out too many parts on a shift...and for being too productive. (We certainly must not expose those lazy bums who have been getting overpaid for decades for their horrific underproduction, must we?)
We are living through the inevitable outcome of the actions of the United States auto industry for decades. It's time to pay for your sins, Detroit .I attended an economic summit last week where brilliant economist, Alan Beaulieu, from the Institute of Trend Research , surprised the crowd when he said he would not have given the banks a penny of "bailout money". "Yes, he said, this would cause short term problems," but despite what people like politicians and corporate magnates would have us believe, the sun would in fact rise the next day... and the following very important thing would happen...where there had been greedy and sloppy banks, new efficient ones would pop up...that is how a free market system works...it does work....if we would only let it work...
"But for some nondescript reason we are now deciding that the rest of the world is right and that capitalism doesn't work - that we need the government to step in and "save us"...Save us my ass, Hell - we're nationalizing...and unfortunately too many of our once fine nation's citizens don't even have a clue that this is what is really happening...But, they sure can tell you the stats on their favorite sports teams...yeah - THAT'S really important, isn't it...
Does it ever occur to ANYONE that the "competition" has been producing vehicles, EXTREMELY PROFITABLY, for decades in this country?... How can that be? Let's see... Fuel efficient... Listening to customers... Investing in the proper tooling and automation for the long haul... Not being too complacent or arrogant to listen to Dr. W. Edwards Deming four decades ago when he taught that by adopting appropriate principles of management, organizations could increase quality and simultaneously reduce costs. Ever increased productivity through quality and intelligent planning... Treating vendors like strategic partners, rather than like "the enemy"... Efficient front and back offices... Non union environment...Again, I could go on and on, but I really wouldn't be telling anyone anything they really don't already know down deep in their hearts.
I don't want to oversimplify a complex situation, but there certainly are unmistakable parallels here between the proper role of parenting and government. Detroit and the United States need to pay for their sins. Bad news people - it's coming whether we like it or not. The newly elected Messiah really doesn't have a magic wand big enough to "make it all go away." I laughed as I heard Obama "reeling it back in" almost immediately after the final vote count was tallied..."we really might not do it in a year...or in four..." Where the Hell was that kind of talk when he was RUNNING for office.
Stop trying to put off the inevitable folks ... That house in Florida really isn't worth $750,000... People who jump across a border really don't deserve free health care benefits... That job driving that forklift for the Big 3 really isn't worth $85,000 a year... We really shouldn't allow Wal-Mart to stock their shelves with products acquired from a country that unfairly manipulates their currency and has the most atrocious human rights infractions on the face of the globe...That couple whose combined income is less than $50,000 really shouldn't be living in that $485,000 home... Let the market correct itself folks - it will. Yes it will be painful, but it's gonna' be painful either way, and the bright side of my proposal is that on the other side of it all, is a nation that appreciates what it has...and doesn't live beyond its means...and gets back to basics...and redevelops the patriotic work ethic that made it the greatest nation in the history of the world...and probably turns back to God.
Gregory J. Knox, PresidentKnox Machinery, Inc.
Franklin , Ohio 45005
By the way, in order to check out the website and validity of the letter and this guy and his company…
Here’s the link for the company:
Thursday, March 5, 2009
Luzerne County Meet the Candidates
Is tonight at the Republican Party HQ on the square in Wilkes-Barre at 7:00. I think most of the people running for office in the county will be there.
Hope to see you there!!!!!!
Tuesday, March 3, 2009
Why Obama's Economic Stimulous Will Not Work
Our economy is a house of cards and the tornado is here.
Never mind that the notion of fixing an economic problem brought on by bad debt by piling more debt on top is retarded at best. Never mind that Obama's (not Bush's, he isn't pres. any more) first budget deficit is stated as being 1.75 trillion dollars but that figure relies on a grossly unrealistic rate of growth of 3.2% in the economy making it more likely to be around 3 trillion dollars.
The real problems have yet to become fully evident.
Over 3 trillion dollars of real wealth has evaporated since Obama was elected. That money that has disappeared into the ether could've and would've provided jobs, investment, security, etc. That is now lost. The eat the rich crowd may be crowing now but I think when they realise just how dramatically that will change their own lives they will be singing a different tune. New businesses opening? Nope. Businesses that may have been able to weather this crisis? Nope. Companies keeping their employees on? Nope. That all is just as lost as all that wealth. Sorry to tell the class warfare crowd but poor people do not provide jobs.
Look at college savings accounts. People that thought they had funded their children's educations are literally weeping when they look at those account statements. While I realise that money is part of the 3 trillion in lost wealth I have mentioned, you must also realise that if they want to send their kids to college, that money has to be made up. This means that disposable income will drop dramatically. Less disposable income = less spending,less spending means that this crisis will spiral downward even faster. Whether you like it or not, our economy is fueled by people spending money not the government throwing it out the window. What do you think this will cost?
Look at the pension funds that are backed by our government. Typically, a pension fund will sell bonds and pay interest to those that buy the bonds. The problem here is the rate of return on the money they took in from selling the bonds is now but a fraction of what they are obligated to pay in interest. This digging massive holes in every pension fund out there and the cost of bailing them out is about, eyp you guessed it, a trillion dollars. Not to worry though, these are government backed so Obama will just print more money to cover it right???
To read an in depth article on this click this link;
Do you still think pork laden spending is going to fix this crisis??????
Let me put something in perspective for you; A million seconds is just over 11 days. A trillion seconds is about 32,000 years. Keep that in mind as you listen to our illustrious leader and his minions as they bandy about spending trillions of dollars.
Funny Obama Bumper Sticker
But sad at the same time!
Monday, March 2, 2009
The Luzerne County Republican Party
As a life long Republican, I have to tell you that I am very excited about the direction the County Party is moving in. There is excitement and purpose that have been lacking for decades. The sheer numbers of people showing up for candidate announcements alone is exciting.
We all know that in the past, the county party lacked leadership and wasn't exactly open to new faces (Ha!! that puts it mildly). With Terry Casey at the helm and Renita Fennick directing, the change is obvious. People from all walks of life are coming out to events and frankly, that is a good thing. I have read at some other local blogs that it is just the same as it was in times past. That couldn't be farther from the truth!!
I encourage all to come to this Thursday's Lincoln day to meet the candidates. Some of the local boys have been writing that only registered Republican candidates can address the audience. While that is true, I would bet that every single person running for judge will be there and I think everybody should come out to meet them and get a sense of who you will be voting for. More importantly, I'd like you to come out and talk to the people in attendance. You will see that it is not the "Old Rich Man's Club" that you have been led to believe. The people that will be there will be your neighbors, co-workers, and gasp, maybe even your friends.
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No Debate - More Madness
How is it that this petty dictator, this tyrant, is RAMMING this shit through WITHOUT any procedure, WITHOUT any debate, WITHOUT meaningful opposition...yet the left is stomping and screaming about the mean tone of conservative talk show hosts (while using and employing more hate-filled words and rhetoric than any talk show host ever could) and stomping and screaming about "obstructionists" who can't possibly mount a meaningful opposition even if they wanted to? What kind of la-la land are those people living in? Look, I remember Reagan being accused of bankrupting future generations as well (by people who conveniently ignored the fact that he had a completely democrat congress and senate who demanded shit spending) and of course Bush was accused of the same thing (while Clinton was lauded for a false snapshot "surplus" that was never used to pay down any actual debt) so I'm not necessarily going to complain that we can't pay for it. Which we can't. Of course calling tax cuts an "expense" is a false complaint in the first place, and measures that ACTUALLY stimulate and grow the economy (unlike runaway spending on make-work projects and earmarks and caps collapses the economy) are at least helpful in many ways. But try explaining economics to a leftist. Heh. This runaway spending is a sure recipe for quick disaster - Obama actually knows this, it seems, which is why he keeps warning us that it's going to get a lot worse. This is nothing but a reformatting of our entire personal liberties and system of self-governance and it's just being railroaded through before anyone can blink. It's tyranny, it's despotism, it's riddled with outright lies, and there is no comparison here between anything a conservative president or legislature has done in the last 30 years or even 50. Bankrupt the people, break their backs quickly and surely, like a cat with a tasty mouse, destroy property rights and personal liberties, and you're left with nothing but a petty tyrant and dictator. I don't know which of his cronies are going to be thrown to the wolves - Pelosi? Reid? But Obi-wan is angling for absolute rule here, and it's coming. Quickly. Actually it's here; we just haven't felt the pain yet. I see the curtains being drawn very quickly on this experiment that has held up pretty well for 200 years, this experiment in self-governance and curbing voracious government. It's a dark and bloody vision, but if you can't see it, I have to think you're blind. We didn't know for sure he would do all this, but we know now. And some of you have the gall, the balls, to complain that we wanted it to fail. If you didn't, you're a fool.
Do not forget to go to Copious Dissent so that our friend in the video gets credit for his courage.
February 25, 2009
Idiots to the Left and the Right
Ok, seriously, that camera guy's clueless questions - hey, where's everybody going? It's too hilarious. But I don't think they mock this stuff on the Daily Show or whatever the hell leftwing political comedies there are on television.
Many of the other NYU students who watched the revolt fizzle said they still don't know what the rebels wanted.
"They're requesting so many different things," said Ryan Jacobson, a 19-year-old freshman. "None of it actually seems doable."
Senior NYU Vice President Lynne Brown said that whatever it was, the protesters didn't get it.
NYU did not "bend" to student demands, and the malcontents were banned from all NYU buildings until their expulsion hearings, Brown said.
When they took over the cafeteria, the students' stated cause was a demand for greater transparency in the NYU budget.
Bwahaha! THIS is what you send kids to college for. This is why US students literally get dumber for every year they spend in public de-edukation. This is why we elected a communist barrel of monkeys into full charge of the country. This is why people cheer at empty slogans and get tingles up their legs when a black man says "Stimulus." Good lord, what a world.
And from the other corner we get this madness, which is made funny by the guy, well, making fun of it. But isn't it sad that he had 8 full YEARS of such unhinged lunacy to mock on from the left and didn't take the chance to do so? What a hugely wasted comedic potential that is.
February 24, 2009
The Solution to the Mortgage/Housing Crisis
Hey, it's better than a tent city. A car city! A STINGER car city. With flashlight.
Palestinians celebrating Obama's victory - oops, I mean celebrating 9/11. Did you know that Obama's sending Gaza 900 million dollars to reward their lobbing rockets into Israel for years and countless suicide bombings and doing nothing with the land except build a terrorist base? Why doesn't Israel tell us to go to hell already?
And, come to find out Henrietta Hughes, whom Womanist Musings calls "courageous" and "the foundation of the US", and claims that questioning her only proves the GOP has no heart at all, actually is a lying cheat. She signed a quit-claim deed on the home she owned jointly (actually she owned THREE lots) with her son so that her free gub'mint money wouldn't get messed up. Foundation of the US huh? Well, I guess that's true in a way. A horrible way. Sweetness and Light has all the poop; with a big Hat Tip to Moonbattery. Now I'm left to wonder, where DID that 124 grand come from, and was she hand-picked by the Obi-wan Barrel o'M**k*ys to put on that show, or did she think it up on her own? I recall reading a little something about how one gets into one of those things, and it's mighty suspicious, but then she's a phony, too, so who knows? We'll likely find out at some point, though the very act of finding out is called cruel, heartless mockery.
Hey, at least no heavy campaign contributors are illegally using government databases to search out her fraud like they did with Joe the Plumber - no one's gonna be indicted for proving what a phony this "courageous" "foundation of the US" is.
February 23, 2009
These? The faces of the "ailing economy"?
A school bus driver with two kids who was so dumb she thought she could walk into an 800 THOUSAND dollar house? Who would think that? What made her think she could ever afford such a thing? We bought our house (in great need of repair I might add) for under a hundred grand, under 1000 square feet, one ancient bathroom and one gutted addition - and when we had to take out some equity to get essential repairs, it became necessary for me to take on full time work in order that we would have enough to pay for this MODEST house. If I'd been so stupid as to try for an 800 thousand dollar house, I'd be blaming no one but myself for a foreclosure. Instead she tells "Obama! Stop the foreclosures!" Are you KIDDING me?
And another subset of the people suffering under this heinous depression we're supposed to be in - the upper-middle-class, unemployed and loving it! Excuse me while I break out the world's tiniest violin for these people. Now which is it, because I could have sworn we were supposed to be talking about people who are forced to live in roach-infested hellholes in overcrowded cities, breathing smog and getting sick while all the doctors refuse to treat them, and instead I'm treated to morons in McMansions they (and I) could never afford, and rich people who have it a hell of a lot better than I ever have living it up on unemployment (they USED to make you look for a job while you collected; but I guess not anymore!)
The one story is supposed to, I suppose, garner sympathy but engenders more of a feeling of "You IDIOT" while the second could never have taken place under George Bush, because anything "bad" that happened under him, like someone losing their jobs, could never be reported as a positive. I also take it that the mom in that relationship, who *willingly* gave up her job, isn't going to go back to work and let dad stay home, eh? I mean, considering she's a lawyer and could probably go back to work anytime, but he keeps saying how he's going to have to, going to have to go back! Nice.
Or maybe we're supposed to be thinking of these folks, an entire family where all the siblings, spouses, parents, - every adult there is - just doesn't work, and are having a hard time making the car payments on welfare. Without that car, how is one of them (the only one even looking for work among those who never have) supposed to "keep" a job. She had "several" last year - which is always a good sign of someone who shows up on time and works hard at their job. Apparently they can't even buy as many groceries anymore on the stingy payments they get from Uncle Sam, courtesy of assholes like me who keep killing myself to work and pay my goddamn taxes so I can maintain a standard of living below what these people have. (Car payments? I've never been able to buy a car that was new enough to have payments - how did she get a loan anyway? I always had to save up a grand or so and buy a junker, then hope to hell it could be made to pass inspection. And with only liability insurance - apparently when you have car payments you have to buy full insurance. Cry me a RIVER. Maybe it's time for me to give this "system-sucking" thing a try - everyone I know who's ever done it lives better than I do, and they don't have to kill themselves.) By the way, in reference to groceries and the fact that they're fat, I don't want to hear it. Fat is not the issue here; lazy and an insistence on being worthless probably is.
February 22, 2009
Condi freaking Rice. A woman of TRUE class and eternal good taste. She never had to raise her voice (as Coulter does) but Joy Behar sat there like a stunned mule on tranqs, her jaw unhinged, unable to say a WORD. I like that. "You don't CALL him George." Classic!!!
One of those times when the collective IQ on the stage rocketed into the triple digits.
By Any Means Necessary
This is unbelievable. No comment required here.
February 21, 2009
The Magical Cloak - Part 2!
So my daughter took a brief hike over to the Quick Chek on the corner last weekend, and it were COLD. So she wore her warm, cozy, luscious cloak. (Now this is her story and I'm going to let her add to it; but since she's going too slow for my tastes I'm starting it. Neiner neiner.) It was about 2:30 AM on a Saturday night.
Suddenly a squad car pulls up and accosts her. A SQUAD CAR? Ok...there IS a curfew in this town; if you're under 18 you're not allowed out after 11PM. Never mind whether that's right or not. She does have a baby face, and looks about 12, depending. So they sometimes stop and check her ID to be sure she's not a kid, then apologize and leave. Not so this time.
THIS time they took her ID and started running her name, asking if she had any outstanding warrants. She said, "Uh, no, I DON'T have any warrants, what's the trouble?" Meantime, police car after police car began pulling up - they do that in these podunk fucking NJ towns - one guy gets a live call and suddenly they ALL show up to see the fun - and she stood there having a cigarette and laughing. Because it was already really dumb.
They told her - and I'm serious - that they received a call in to the station that someone was outside dressed as a SUPERHERO.. A what? Not a Druid? And, pardon me, but when you get insane calls like that, shouldn't it go more like,
"There's a person outside dressed as a WHAT?"
"A...(whispering) superhero."
"Well he's OUT THERE. Dressed as a...(whispering) superhero."
"What's he doing, ma'am?"
"He's...(whispering) WALKING."
"Walking? Is he doing anything else?"
"(low voice) No."
"Yeah, ok, we'll be sure to check THAT out." Click.
Or perhaps, "Ma'am, put down the vodka bottle and go to bed now."
Instead they send the entire fucking police force to check it out? Are you kidding me?
So while they're RUNNING HER NAME, she asks, "Um, so is there something illegal about wearing a CLOAK?"
Actual answer, "Well, well, no...but we just want to know why you're wearing it." WHAT?
Possible answers:
It is the will of Landrew.
You speak in strange whispers my friend...but you better hurry, it is the red hour.
No more blah blah blah!
Actual answer: "Because it's COLD out here!"
As the other police cars showed up, the accosting officer yelled over to each one in turn, "It's ok! She was just wearing it because she was cold!" and they went off on their merry way.
What in FUCK can be going on here? How in the HELL do police answer such a ridiculous call, and harass an innocent citizen who's walking down the fucking street? She asked them what IF she had been wearing a superhero costume, or a fucking TUTU for that matter...no answer. When they determined she had no warrants, they left her alone. Jesus. She wasn't even carrying a sword. She should try that next time.
February 20, 2009
Say What?
Ted "The Swimmer" Kennedy and his dog, SPLASH.
Wait, what? His fucking dog is named SPLASH? Am I the only one that got the piss-shivers reading that? It's worse than naming the damn dog Mary-Jo, FFS.
Also, the video below is HILARIOUS.
February 19, 2009
Best 911 Fail Ever
And yes, he said "drag." LOL
In The Know: Should The Government Stop Dumping Money Into A Giant Hole?
Guess The Onion gets it right sometimes, eh? Nice satire (or is it parody?) Whatever, it's funny.
February 18, 2009
Of Cabbages and Chimps
So there's a story that's apparently been big news (see, I told you I don't watch/read that shit; which is why I don't know this stupid story - and I'll tell you why it's stupid in a minute) about a pet chimp who went bad (possibly rabid?) and attacked its owner's friend. Eventually the animal had to be shot by policemen because it was violent. Now the reason it's stupid is because chimps are NOT gentle creatures nor suitable pets for human beings. More on this later. So I guess a cartoonist from the same newspaper that's been making a big deal out of the monkey story starts thinking about how the "stimulus" is so stupid, it could have been written by an infinite number of monkeys sitting at an infinite number of typewriters, because frankly, no matter how long that goes on, they're NOT going to turn out a copy of Hamlet. Just...no. It's gibberish, and it's BAD, and a monkey may as well have banged it out randomly on a typewriter.
He puts these two things together and makes a not-very-funny but not entirely unfunny cartoon; because the image of chimps sitting at typewriters has always been funny, and really, them turning out this massive turd of a bill is appropriate.
Raaaaaaaaaaaacist! Because everyone knows that monkey = black people. And because Obama WROTE the bill...except he didn't. Daschle, Pelosi, and for all we fucking know, a roomfull of actual chimps wrote the damn thing. Had the cartoonist said they'd need someone else to SIGN the next bill, then it would have been about Obama. He didn't; he said WRITE the next bill. Jugears is no author - he didn't sit there writing this thing LOL. Jeesh. Now Al Sharpton, he does strike me as something like a gibbon, the way he jumps around and screams and acts the fool. Oh yeah, he's doing it now. You paid any of that settlement to Pagones yet, you filthy life-ruining LYING turd, Sharpton? No? Then STFU you filthy disgrace of a "man".
While I'm at it, apparently this was ok because I didn't hear anyone screaming about it.
And dozens of collages. Actually, just google Bush Chimp, hit images and see what you get.
Last time - The cartoon refers to the **author**, not the signer, of the bill, and Obama ain't it. And after 8 years of the self-same people who are bitching now making the pictures I just posted above? You can all go to hell with that complaint; even if it WERE accurate, which it isn't. I intend to call him any number of things and liken him to many animals - some of which may be monkeys, depending on his behavior, and I really don't give a damn what anyone thinks of that.
To tell you the truth, my grandfather looked EXACTLY like a chimp, and 90 times out of a hundred when I see any kind of ape I am immediately nostalgic for him. Even his hands were like theirs. Well, his fingers and nails. His expressions. George Burns did too, when he got older. Some people do look like monkeys - Obama doesn't really (except the cartoon Curious George). Maybe when he gets older he'll get that monkey look too. Meh, whatever.
I'll be interested to see the shitstorm that develops around this. The bullshitstorm, that is.
Wait, What? Chimps AREN'T good pets? Hell no.
Read the article (hilarious!) but in the meantime here's a sample:
It's sort of like a fraternity initiation, only they don't give a shit if you survive. For instance, look how the adorable monkey treats his "friend" the zoologist, who's been coming to his island and feeding him bananas for years.
If that clip reminds you less of Ross's adorable pet monkey on Friends and more of Stephen Seagal "taking out the trash," that's because you watched it. Now imagine what that monkey would do to your goofy, non-banana bringing ass if you tried to make him wear a funny hat and a necktie.
Oh, here's something to make that mental image even worse: On four recorded occasions in the last 50 years, chimpanzees have abducted, killed and eaten human babies. That's human with an H, as in Homo Sapiens, as in a human baby getting wrenched out of its mother's arms, dragged off into the forest and devoured by a chimp. We are not making this up.
Oh the Times, How They Change!
I saw a new ADORABLE collection of letters from little children to the Obamessiah, and decided to compare it to those cute little human interest stories they publish of that sort during the last administration. Quite the difference!!! Let's compare, shall we? Also - it's kinda creepy as hell, because one list reads just like an indictment while the other reads like a PRAYER TO GOD. See if you can tell which!
Letters to President Bush by THE Chillllllldreeen!
Dear President Bush,
We’re almost out of ivory toothpicks and we need a new hedge maze (the old one is too easy). Please give Daddy another tax cut. Pleeeaaassseee? If you do, I’ll get Yolanda to bake you some cookies. She’s from Mexico but don’t tell anyone ‘cuz it’s a big secret.
Chip, age 7
Awww! Isn't that CUTE? See, Bush is bad because people employ illegal immigrants at slave wages and keep it a big secret because they're imperialist assholes. Of course, the left wants illegal immigrants to have full amnesty, so I'm not sure what the hell else they're supposed to do, but hey! Logic need not apply!
Dear President Bush,
Can you really turn back time? Mommy’s life partner says you want to go back to a time when radio was popular and people wore hats and there were tigers everywhere. Just be careful that you don’t accidentally kill your own grandmother or grandfather, because then you wouldn’t exist. It’s a paradox.
Ashley, age 8
Get it? I...think I do. It means Bush is a bigot against lesbians. Or something.
Dear President Bush,
I’m hungry. Mommy lost her second job at Target and now we can’t afford relish or anything. Please put food on my family! Anything you can spare would be great. God bless!
Conny, age 7
See, Bush is starving the chiiiildreeen! And they actually write to the president to tell him they're HUNGRY. Because they wouldn't ask for food at school or anything, they are so hungry that only the president can feed them! Then they say "God Bless" because Bush is a Christofascist Godbag who imposes religion on everyone.
Dear President Bush,
I used to want to be a politician like you, but not anymore. Aunt Lucy says politicians eat pies stuffed with baby birds. I tried to bake a pie like that, and now I’m not allowed in the park anymore, not even just to use the swings. It’s not fair!
Teddy, age 9
Bush was so evil he caused little children to commit violent crimes against animals. Because he hates animals too!
Now let's see what Obi-wan Jugears gets in the way of prayers - er, letters - from children.
I would appreciate it if you would try to make this a greener planet and try to bring home the troops and end the war. I am very luckey because I am not part of a military family, but it saddens me to hear about all the people who die in Iraque and know that somewhere In the world people are greiving over a lost family member.
Oh...I guess that's a little hat tip to how heinous the last administration was, so it's really a letter about teh evil Bush. Which isn't really a CHANGE.
Another child drew Obama as the "new sunrise of America." One made Earth and labeled it "Obamaland," and still another created the president's face as half dark and half light skin tones with the words: "United We Are One."
A sunrise! That's beautiful. And the whole earth Obamaland? Well...I dunno, you might wanna check with Ahmedinejad and Castro and Chavez first...that might be considered a little presumptuous! Though I hear Venezuela just elected its president FOR LIFE! Maybe Obama could do that! Be sure to put up Che posters, too!
"Make fires and earthquakes not exist. Make no tornadoes or any of those things that break things."
Oh, no need to worry - Bush and his evil hurricane-creating-machine have been banished right along with Sauron! I'm pretty sure he ran out of power after using it to create Katrina and drown a city.
An 11-year-old boy from Ohio drew himself in tears at the side of a relative. His dream, he wrote, is that a "cure for cancer will be found" with Obama in the White House, "Because it took my aunt to a better place on father's day."
I'm sure that with healthcare rationing that he just signed into law, which will bring the experimental and exploratory pharmaceutical and medical research to a halt, that THAT dream will come TWUE! Nah, just kidding; she'd be euthanized instead; but probably not on father's day.
Sasha's drawing is an all-green globe. Her enthusiasm for Obama and his ability to get the job done speaks volumes: "I just think he's really, really awesome."
Oh he is, Sasha, he is.
Dear Mr. Obama. Please Make it rain candy! (Or Chocolate Rain?)
Oh, he will, Aaron, he will. Just ask Henrietta and Julio. Some people say the stories of them getting into those meetings and being so perfectly timed were a little fishy, but I'm sure they're just big ol' meanies who hate Santa and eat baby kittens for breakfast. If he'd rain some candy down on Hamas, maybe they'd stop killing off furry children's show hosts and bombing Israel too. Though being a martyr IS a huge draw.
Kiddie shows! Maybe you'll stop blaming Bush and blame the dirty jews if you're carefully taught.
February 16, 2009
Pretty Cool
Why doesn't stuff like that happen here?
February 15, 2009
Professional Dirt-Diggers in White House?
I'm feeling nostalgic - we haven't had professional partisan dirt-diggers in the White House since Hillary served with Bill!
For My Rottweiler Friends
I know it was all very funny (and hey, I was more than half lit, totally being silly about it) mocking Yngwie Malmsteen, but before calling him a freak again, give this one a shot, eh?
"Crappy Nappy"
Phoenix is now the kidnapping capitol of the US, and almost of the world (right behind Mexico city.) Illegals from drug cartels have been crossing into Phoenix unchecked and wreaking plenty of havoc, all right. Under Jean Napolitano's watch.
Well thank God she's out of there now, and maybe with a responsible governor they can do something about the problem.
Uh-oh. I just remembered something. She's now in charge of Homeland Security. Well, at least she promised us we won't have to worry about all those dangerous Canadians sneaking in - that's the border she intends to defend. I guess defending the other one would be too hard. Maybe we can surpass Mexico as the kidnapping capitol of the world in the next couple years! H/T to Moonbattery.
Dissing the Brits
I'm dumbfounded. Via Newsbusters:
{snip}Again... wasn't Obama the one that was going to make every ally ecstatically happy?
Actually, I think that was "make every ENEMY ecstatically happy."
But Obi-wan isn't fit to polish Churchill's shoes, at any rate. Maybe having the bust there shamed him - it ought to have. Let's see why:
"I will not pretend that if I had to choose between communism and Nazism I would choose communism."
There is no such thing as a good tax.
Some see private enterprise as a predatory target to be shot, others as a cow to be milked, but few are those who see it as a sturdy horse pulling the wagon.
An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile—hoping it will eat him last.
The problems of victory are more agreeable than the problems of defeat, but they are no less difficult.
Bessie Braddock: “Sir, you are drunk.”
Churchill: “Madam, you are ugly. In the morning, I shall be sober.”
Nancy Astor: “Sir, if you were my husband, I would give you poison.”
Churchill: “If I were your husband I would take it.”
By the way, Lady Astor sure got her licks in on Churchill, too; see here. These two were great at verbal sparring and comebacks!
If you are going to go through hell, keep going.
Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement; then it becomes a mistress, and then it becomes a master, and then a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster, and fling him out to the public.
A sheep in sheep’s clothing. (On Clement Atlee) (or, you know, Obama)
A modest man, who has much to be modest about. (On Clement Atlee) (or, you know, Obama)
I am ready to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the ordeal of meeting me is another matter.
Solitary trees, if they grow at all, grow strong.
Everyone has his day and some days last longer than others.
The whole history of the world is summed up in the fact that, when nations are strong, they are not always just, and when they wish to be just, they are no longer strong.
From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. -“The Sinews of Peace” speech, Westminster College, Fulton, Missouri, March 5, 1945
Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth lasts for a thousand years, men will still say, “This was their finest hour!”
Actually, it's no wonder jugears didn't want to be reminded of this great statesman, is it? It's shameful that a man who stands against everything Churchill stood for should occupy our white house. Boehner on the House Floor:
I'm with Emperor Misha on this one - fuck him, too. They knew Obama lied about letting the people SEE this stuff before it was passed, and react to it, they KNEW it was the most enormous turd EVER to come out of Washington, and all they could do was "not vote for it"? Why didn't they fight it to the fucking mat? Screw 'em.
And get this - this bill that was so urgent, so desperately needed to pass NOW - will not be signed by the President until Tuesday, because he had a 3-day weekend vacation coming. 3 days that the bill COULD have been read by congress and discussed, as well as been put up on the website for the public to read and give feedback. But it had to pass NOW or NEVER. Republicans are "obstructionists" for not wanting to pass something they hadn't read and didn't have time to read. Up is down, slavery is freedom, ignorance is strength. Unreal.
February 13, 2009
"Good Faith"?
Baby 'Liss.
McEwan today,
Now is the time for the overtures to end. The GOP has been given more than enough chance to prove they're operating in good faith. They are not.
Extraordinary. Or maybe they're, you know, acting in good faith with THEIR CONSTITUENTS and not your Messiah; especially considering support for this bill is plumetting like a lead zeppelin. But I can think of a few reasons, dear young crybaby, why the House Republicans won't vote for it. (And by the way, if everyone's acting in "good faith" wouldn't a few Dims have voted AGAINST it? Did that happen?)
They know what devastation this bill will wreak and they don't want any of the blame.
They genuinely think the bill is wrong.
Their base hates them because they're mostly RINOs and liberals, and especially after the McLame debacle they have to operate conservatively - the conservative base has made it clear that this "reaching across the aisle" just so Dims can break your fucking arm is not to be tolerated any longer. They have much more to fear now than broken arms from Dims - they face the spectre of non-re-election. They have to actually be conservatives and stand up against Dim/Socialist unconstitutional bullshit.
They don't have to vote for a bad bill just because it makes them look gracious.
They're raaaaaacist space aliens who feast on newborn kittens and spread albino brain chiggers to the public just to watch them suffer.
Now I'm not sure, but it could be a combination of those things. But they're probably really racist space aliens.
Lefties, on the other hand, are never happy even when they get their way. They just keep wailing.
Red or Blue?
I love the Alice In Wonderland/Looking Glass imagery throughout the original Matrix. The other two movies suck wind, IMHO, but that one was pretty damn good.
Anyway, it is with a slightly surreal feeling that I quote one Lew Rockwell here, considering that, as I've stated many times before, he and I parted company more than 7 years ago. If the world were NOTHING but an economy I would have to agree with him; but he seems to forget the existence of insane people bent on destruction, and the need for defense. He even took up an ill-advised jaunt with the Huffington Post. But I really don't want to put a slew of disclaimers around everything I quote from the man (what am I, some PC slave?) because frankly, when it comes to economics there isn't much to argue here. And thus I present some indisputable info from that very source which ought to make its way to the ears of all possible hearers.
Obama's Wealth Destruction
President Obama is under the impression that history owes him $1 trillion right now to spend on whatever he wants. His language is strident and full of irritation that anyone would question his right to live out his personal dream of being Franklin Roosevelt to George Bush's Hoover. This, he says, is what the election was all about.
It just goes to show you that the presidency is something like a drug. It makes people lose all connection to reality. Part of the reality that Obama needs to recognize is that the New Deal was a calamity far worse than the initial market downturn that began it. He needs to stop basing his policies on dumbed-down civics texts versions of events and consider the economic logic.
I believe I just gave a brief rundown of that in my previous post, did I not? The initial downturn is NOT what causes a depression or a prolonged recession. Reagan proved that with that colossal market crash in '87. Oh, the newspapers were trying to scare the SHIT out of us! You know what happened? If you wanted to work, there were MORE jobs available pretty much the next freaking day. You had MORE choice, MORE power as an employee - you could make MORE money and CONTINUE your upward mobility more than ever before. Bad debts were gone; the immense destructive power, the shock and awe of the market only serves the market; and not in the "long run", either. Billions of individuals making billions of individual decisions converging into one ultimate force - the price - these are wondrous, constructive things.
With his rhetoric and policies, he has decided to demonize private enterprise, just as FDR did, as a way to present government as the great savior. Now, think about this. If there is a way out of the recession, it will have to be provided by private enterprise. It will come by new businesses, business expansions, entrepreneurship, new technology, and this will be the source of lasting jobs and prosperity.
Meh, don't blame him; he's echoing (just as Rush Limbaugh doesn't lead but merely echo the sentiment of millions of "Dittoheads") the sentiments of countless lackeys who think just. like. he. does. They've been trained to. The socialists have been in control of the publik de-edukation system and the colleges for a long time, sir. He's doing what we as a people (under the tyranny of the overpopulated, urbanite, latte-sipping city-dwellers have been demanding and demanding for a long time.
You cannot make a country rich by looting taxpayers and paying people to pound nails into siding at public schools! These activities amount to capital consumption. They are not sources of investment. You can say that they are stupid tasks or wonderful tasks, but it is not a matter of ideology as to whether such public projects will make us all wealthier. They will not. They drain the sources of wealth from society. They represent a cost, not a blessing.
I know that, and you know that, and frankly a good many of THEM know that...ask your pal Katie Couric what she thinks as she giggles with Pelosi over raping our civil rights with Porkulus Maximus and how hot Obi-wan is. They DON'T CARE. Those of us who CARE about that have been trying to ram a clue into the GOP while you've been screaming about the war and buddying up with leftists, for whom it will never, ever be enough.
I'm not so cynical about human affairs that I believe that errors must be endlessly repeated. Obama can put a stop to his madness. He needs to know — someone must tell him frankly and openly — that his current path is going to lead not to recovery, but to an extension of suffering, and untold amounts of it.
Well then maybe you're not cynical enough. Maybe you don't KNOW much about Saul Alinski and his disciples (such as Hillary, Wright, Ayers, Obama, et. al.) See, they know it and they WANT it. It gives them massive amounts of power, and THEY aren't the ones suffering under it, are they? Or maybe you haven't read Ayn Rand's discussion of slaves and masters. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice is speaking of slavery, and HE intends to be the master. If he's the master, where's the harm? See, I'm cynical enough to believe that Obama doesn't WANT the country to flourish and prosper but rather to be piddling slaves begging scraps off his and the government's table. We know this from the Soviet Union. THIS is why sometimes WAR is necessary, Mr. Rockwell, even though it is an economic loss. Because there ARE evil people in the world who would make you a slave even if it hurts them in the short or long term.
Go and read the rest of it, if you feel like putting up with the (some of it deserved) Bush-bashing. Say what you want about Bush, he didn't seek to crush the US under his boot and make it his servant.
Economically, he's pretty much spot on. Tragically so.
Take a fucking pill Neo. Which one will it be? If I had the power to erase my own memory and eat a fake steak that tasted good, I just might take the pill that let me do that and remain in ignorance. Unfortunately madness is not a voluntary option. The only really voluntary option in such a case is suicide (not an option for me) and possibly booze (I can do that one, within reason.)
Poor market - making its adjustments. It doesn't know what's about to hit it. Good times WERE just around the corner (not the doom and gloom Obi-wan keeps promising - but hell, even he knows what he's bringing on us.)
February 12, 2009
Oh, Ezra - Echoing New Talking Points/Memes
From Ezra Klein, The Columbia Dispatch, and most leftist blogs who just parrot their talking points: "U.S. Rep. Steve Austria said he supports a scaled-down federal economic-stimulus proposal, but the Beavercreek Republican told The Dispatch editorial board that the huge influx of money into the economy could have a negative effect.
"When (President Franklin) Roosevelt did this, he put our country into a Great Depression," Austria said. "He tried to borrow and spend, he tried to use the Keynesian approach, and our country ended up in a Great Depression. That's just history."
Most historians date the beginning of the Great Depression at or shortly after the stock-market crash of 1929; Roosevelt took office in 1933.
Followed by whatever snark or silliness the blogger in question wants to add. First of all, Steve Austria doesn't know what he's talking about. This is not a huge influx of money INTO the economy - this is taking money out of your purse and putting it into your pocket. Or more accurately, a behemoth taking money out of everyone's pockets at the point of a sword and putting it willy-nilly wherever they see fit according to Porkulus. This is not an "influx" of money, this hasn't been created or produced - it's stolen, it's fiat money.
In the American context of the Great Depression, one book captures the whole onset and response. It is Murray Rothbard's America's Great Depression. He shows that it wasn't the 1929 crash that was the problem; it was the response to the crash that created the Depression. Bailouts. Price controls. Wage controls. Government programs. Trade restrictions. Crackdowns on the capital markets. And who did all this? It originated not with FDR but with Herbert Hoover — clear echoes of today. There is no understanding the present crisis without this book.
There was a massive crash (equal to or greater than 1929) that occurred during the massive Reagan boom. The response? Nothing. The press squawked for a day or two that we were going to sink into a massive depression, but there was nary a blip. Bad companies folded and new ones sprang up immediately; bad debt disappeared and good investors filled the gaps. No one got bailed out, and the market adjusted pretty much overnight. Had they been distorting the market consistently as in recent years with interventions by government, trying to stave off possible recession (which is just the name of the period when the market adjusts from distortions, on its own), there might have been some temporary ill effects, as postponing the inevitable makes the eventual reality worse each time. But society was quite upwardly mobile at the time, and no such thing happened.
This time, we are going the Hoover/Roosevelt route. First bailouts, then caps, controls, and finally, the monster with a trillion heads - Porkulus Maximus. The same Keynesian route Roosevelt took that deepened and prolonged the Great Depression into permanent proper noun status. We can eventually recover, but only with an eventual return to a free market, a period of adjustment (which will NOW, due to massive intervention and distortion, be longer and more painful than it need have been) and a reversal of these absolutely destructive and unconstitutional plans. I'll include a layman's explanation below, but buy the book so you can get a handle on the reality here and not just buy into these ludicrous talking points that really, make no economic sense.
February 11, 2009
Me and Julio Down By The Schoolyard UPDATE
Raaaaaaaaaacist! (Figured I'd beat 'em to it.)
Obama Claus has come to town! Free houses and broadcasting jobs for McDonald's workers and all comers! Just don't call yourself a plumber. Some people think the Hughes story is a bit fishy, kind of like the timing of the sudden crash, when 500 billion dollars was yanked in a period of a few hours.
It couldn't be that some things are...orchestrated? Like those fortuitous rocks Billy-boy found on the beach at Normandy so that he could arrange them tearfully into the shape of a cross for the cameras? Or that laughter at his friend's funeral that turned to sudden tears? Nah; things like that don't happen in the second, Most Ethical Administration EVAH! Poor Henrietta, though - wait 'til she gets sick and the new health Czar tells her it's not cost-effective to prolong her life - now give back that house, eh? The Messiah has need of it.
Oh and get this: Republican senators have vowed to filibuster the Fairness Doctrine, which is enjoying a lot of renewed support (and demand) by Dim congressleeches. So let me get this straight, you assholes have just passed a bill that brings the federal government down to rule over EVERY ASPECT Of our personal lives - down to the MOST personal decisions and events - and have instituted an entirely totalitarian society that we are now going to have to pay for out of OUR pockets for countless generations...and we're supposed to be glad that at least we get to listen to the apocalypse on the fucking radio? Are you SERIOUS?
Where were you when we needed you, asstards? Where were you to stop the rape and abortion of our civil rights, privacy, autonomy and Constitution? Screw the fairness doctrine - frankly if I'm going to starve to death under a communist dictatorship, I'd rather NOT hear about it every day. Just give me some bread and a fucking circus to watch while my children go out and dig my grave for me, eh? This senate needs to be executed.
UPDATE on the Henrietta and Julio stories - looks like a lot was fishy about these stories, just like all the money being pulled out precipitating the crash. And that woman didn't really swim the Atlantic either. Harumph. Seems like the wool's being pulled over the sheeple's eyes a LOT lately.
The Magical Cloak
I wish these pictures did it justice. I bought the pattern for that Kinsale Cloak from Folkwear about 17 years ago, hoping to learn how to sew and eventually make it for my daughter. Well things being as they were, that never happened, but she never stopped wanting it. Kinsale cloaks have been worn in Ireland for hundreds of years, and I suppose they're popular at renaissance fairs now :)
Then I met Limor and not only is she cool as hell, she sews. So we contrived to give my daughter a huge Christmas surprise - I found some luscious black velvet and some beautiful deep jewel-toned teal satin for the lining, shipped it and the pattern out to Limor, and she worked her magic! We had it in time for Christmas, and my daughter couldn't have been more thrilled or surprised by it. Sometimes she just lays it over herself in her bed, and other times she wears it to walk down the street. She likes to be different and has never concerned herself with fashion trends; just likes what she likes. Also, she doesn't mind showing her face online, unlike me ;) So there she is - I wish the pictures could do this beautiful creation justice, but you're going to have to trust me - this thing is absolutely luscious and absolutely beautiful. For a beautiful girl.
Thanks Limor!!
February 10, 2009
Comic Relief
It's funny 'cause it's true!
Excuse Me? I Was Told There Would Be Obstructionists?
So where the hell were they on this one? Why didn't somebody block this fucking thing? They've hidden all this shit in there that is drastically unconstitutional and shreds our individual liberty, autonomy, and privacy to pulp. Instead of, as would be customary for something that has NOTHING to do with economic stimulus, having, say, a proposal, a bill, a DISCUSSION and then a VOTE - they just snuck this abortion into a bill where it doesn't belong, and torched our autonomy in the process.
That's better. Because the reality now is that there is NO opting out of this, and doctors who fail to report your EVERY visit, EVERY prescription, EVERY concern, test, or issue, EVERY cold, EVERY wart, EVERY Xanax TO THE FEDS - yes, TO THE FEDS to keep in a database - will be PENALIZED at the sole discretion of the HHS Czar. The National Coordinator of Health Information Technology, will **monitor treatments to make sure your doctor is doing what the federal government deems appropriate and cost effective**. If you're costing them too much, they are going to tell you to fuck off - EVEN IF IT'S UNDER YOUR OWN INSURANCE, EVEN IF YOU ARE PAYING FOR IT YOURSELF OUT OF POCKET. There is no "opt-out" in this Trojan Horse. But before the euthanasia starts, the elderly are going to be hit. Hard. The author of this Obamination has stated that old people are going to have to start just dealing with the diseases and problems that come with old age instead of treating them, and we're going to have to stop demanding so much from health care.
The children will be hit, and those who are most in need of health care are going to get creamed, and the fat people are going to be obliterated, and smokers will probably just explode.
Now we can ALL die of poor health care - you remember how we told you that SOCIALISM isn't a rising tide that lifts all boats, but rather SINKS them to the lowest common denominator? We will all now be equal partners in misery and ill health - now whether you can afford it or not, you can not get adequate health care. Instead of figuring out a way to help people who are down on their luck get treated more easily, you've just condemned us ALL to the shitheap.
Thanks a lot, socialist fucktards. Did you really think you weren't going to see armed revolution in your lifetime if you managed to FORCE all the rest of us to live by your evil socialist plans? Forget it. You all bought this one, and it's NOT going to be pretty. I'm willing to die for my liberty - are you willing to die to take it from me?
February 9, 2009
Discredited Malthusian Bullshit Again
I long for the day when this meme would ever, ever end, but since the Marquis de Sade, through the discredited Malthus, through Z(ero)P(opulation)G(rowth), the VHEMT, and wackos like this one (Warning: contains radical feminism and mind-cracking stupidity), it seems we're never going to escape this hysterical overpopulation hoax. Even in our fiction we get it - the original Star Trek once showed an earth that was so full of people they dind't have room to turn around or move about (which really makes no sense when you think about it even for a minute.) Arthur C. Clarke wrote a series of very good short stories in the decade of the 50s, "The Wind From the Sun" and one of the stories was about having discovered the secret for a life prolonged to at least 200 healthy years - the low gravity of the moon. When the excited young scientist wants to tell the world, his mentor points down at the earth from their moon base, and delivers a scathing indictment about the people so crowded down there that they are spilling over the shores into the oceans, clambering for a few free feet of space in which to exist...that if life were to be prolonged, what the hell would happen then?
Well, it's certainly not just fiction to the hysterical ZPGers and thier ilk - not by a longshot. This is one of the latest in a general leftist trend to ban children, and damn rights or choice or anything of the kind.
A bestselling author has called octuplets-mother Nadya Sulamen a 'murderer' and warns of overpopulation saying, "we need to lose 4.4 billion people."
An odd juxtaposition. She is a murderer for giving *birth* to several children, while he claims we need to "lose" 4.4 billion people - who sounds like the murderer to you? Hmm?
“STOP HAVING CHILDREN.” Steven Kotler has declared that responsible adults should stop having children in order to save the planet. Those who are having kids, are being selfish and stealing from the future, the rest of humanity, and “every living thing on the earth,” he wrote. Have too many kids and you should go to jail.
Wow, JAIL? Is that right, jail?? 'Cause I could swear that lefty after lefty has screamed blue murder that the conservatives want to enact "enforced birth" and turn the world into the dystopian vision of "The Handmaid's Tale." That we must, in fact, ensure that women have ABSOLUTE AND FULL CONTROL over their own bodies and their reproduction, period, full stop. The same people claiming women must control their bodies are the ones proposing laws such as these, banning people from having children. The proposals run the gamut; it's horrifying and appalling all the various proposals they manage to come up with; but the end result is the same - in the name of saving the planet and in order to take the act of procreation OUT of private hands and put it into government hands, we will enact draconian laws and usurp bodily sovereignty of every individual in some fashion to bring about what we BELIEVE will help the environment though we have no just rationalization to believe this.
This isn’t a joke. Kotler writes a blog called “The Playing Field” on the Psychology Today Web site. He is a best selling author and an advocate of controlling population growth. His latest solution: a five-year moratorium on having kids.
Huh. It's one of the less draconian proposals I've read. But every time a deSade or a Malthus or an Ehrlich or a ZPG or any organization/crackpot you can name has made these predictions, they have proven spectacularly, stunningly, utterly WRONG. One of the major flaws in their reasoning is the false belief that people are "consumers" when in fact they are "producers." As problems arise, human ingenuity contrives to solve them, and as population has grown we have been able to greatly increase per capita food production, make food and water supplies safer than ever, and conquer disease and unnecessary death more than ever before. I realize people like that aren't HAPPY unless they're predicting the end of the world (and it's all our fault!) but if we dug humanity's grave every time one of these geniuses predicted we had about 5 years left before we all died, we'd be eating Chop Suey in fucking China by now. They're wrong. They've always been wrong. They get wronger as time goes by. Some places are suffering for their fall in birth rates, such as China and their inhuman childbearing policy, and Korea who has experienced a drastic decrease as well. Other places are beginning to feel the pinch, and as the aging of our time age without enough young people to bear their burdens, we really don't know what we're going to see. There is no indication that a massive death toll wiping out more than half of humanity is going to improve any conditions for anyone or anything, anywhere, in any way. It would, in fact, be an unqualified disaster of epic proportions.
I also would love to know exactly how they propose to ever POSSIBLY enforce something like that - in anything beyond an absolutely Hitlerian society, that is. And how will that enforcement be undertaken throughout the rest of the world, in 3rd world hellholes, too? Geniuses, I tell you.
February 8, 2009
Dreams of BillBama
History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce, then as Journalist Dream Books about Democrat Presidents.
Sometimes a President Is Just a President
The other night I dreamt of Barack Obama. He was taking a shower right when I needed to get into the bathroom to shave my legs, and then he was being yelled at by my husband, Max, for smoking in the house. It was not clear whether Max was feeling protective of the president’s health or jealous because of the cigarette.
As we all know, in journalism, two anecdotes are just one short of a national trend. I figured that my friend and I couldn’t possibly be the only ones dreaming, brooding or otherwise obsessing about the Obamas. Were other people, I wondered, being possessed by our new first family?
I launched an e-mail inquiry. And learned that they were. Often, in strikingly similar ways.
Many women — not too surprisingly — were dreaming about sex with the president. In these dreams, the women replaced Michelle with greater or lesser guilt or, in the case of a 62-year-old woman in North Florida, whose dream was reported to me by her daughter, found a fully above-board solution: “Michelle had divorced Barack because he had become ‘too much of a star.’ He then married my mother, who was oh so proud to be the first lady,” the daughter wrote me.
I've read this story before. In 1992 a journalist wrote the exact same article about Bill Clinton and launched the same inquiry. People from all over the country sent her their stories, and by 1994 she had published the collection into a book. You can buy it here, at Amazon. If you like that sort of thing. And Oh, it's high-larious times now that we can read of journalists jizzing in their pants over Barack Obama - I mean, Chris Matthews and his leg tingle are nothing compared to this, right?
The first time I dream of Barack Obama because of this, I'm going to be very pissed off.
Hat tip to Annie's Inferno for bringing my attention to this story! (Deja-VOUS!) It's in the New York Slimes of course.
February 7, 2009
Obama, speaking to about 200 House Democrats at their annual retreat at the Kingsmill Resort and Spa, dismissed Republican attacks against the massive spending in the stimulus.
"What do you think a stimulus is?" Obama asked incredulously. "It's spending — that's the whole point! Seriously."
Ok, so is the guy just STUPID or is he evil? I really can't tell yet. Spending is stimulus LMAO
February 6, 2009
Save the Country!!!
Pandagon has us pinned!
Limbaugh has given the marching orders: Obama Must Fail. Realistically, that means the Republicans feel that it’s their partisan duty to ruin this country with the hopes that ill-informed swing voters will vote for them in desperation next two election. Not just ruin Obama or the Democrats, but ruin the country. That unemployment rate needs to keep going up, according to Limbaugh’s orders, so they can blame Democrats and get elected, even if it’s actually their own fault.
Wow, I didn't know it was that bad. Limbaugh declared that Obama "must fail"? Holy mackerel! And that means, practically, that they are dedicated to ruining, not just elections, but the COUNTRY? Holy crap! We're in trouble! Limbaugh even ORDERED the unemployment rate to keep going up - omg! (That way he can falsely blame Dims.) I had no idea the plot went this deep.
Limbaugh has the power to shape reality! Let's hear the staunch warning from our friends at IMAO:
Limbaugh said he hopes Barack Obama will fail, so the Democrats have made a petition against Rush. See, they suspect Obama probably will fail, and then if that happens people will be like, “This is exactly what Rush hoped would happen! He has the power to shape reality!” And then the Democrats will be like, “What if the next thing he hopes is for man-sized badgers to bite our heads off?” But then they’ll hear a loud scratching at the door and cries of, “Kree! Kree!” (which is the sound I imagine man-sized badgers would make). Then the door will come crashing down and the Democrats will be like, “Aieeeee!”
So that’s why they have an online petition.
Limbaugh will destroy the country with his words! KREE!!! KREE!!!!! The man-sized badgers are here to eat us all! And to usurp elections according to the will of Rush. Holy crap, we're in trouble! AIIIEEEEEE!!!!!
Milton Friedman PWNS Phil Donahue
1979. Donahue does his thing. While he is not as funny as Phil Hartman impersonating him, he's still kinda funny. In a "laughing at you" kind of way. But Milton shreds him pretty handily. Enjoy.
February 5, 2009
Fucking Genius
This guy is hilarious, and holy shit - lay it on the LINE why don't you? LMAO
Under the Tyranny of Cities
Both movies deal with the depravity of suburbia
one reason that Frank handicaps his and April’s attempts to get out of the stifling suburban life
They spoke to me both because I was white and suburban and because I wanted the fuck out of that world.
"Flyover" country
Feminists. Urban (sneer.) Suburban (sneer.) How sick can someone get of THAT? I've been sick of it all my life. Even at the height of my leftism it didn't occur to me that living in a filthy, dangerous city would be good. While I didn't relish the thought of the inconveniences of really urban life (at the same time admiring those who engage in agriculture and brave those inconveniences to provide the ACTUAL necessities of life), there is happily a middle ground here in the United States and other affluent, free-market cultures. We have the option to take in a Broadway play and be home in bed by one AM. But it goes beyond that. How very far we've come that the scales have actually tipped - and in the WRONG direction from what our founding fathers intended for our liberties and our prosperity and happiness. Harken to Thomas Jefferson for a moment, a little sanity injected into the sneering hatred of the urbanites for those of us who choose a better life (with zomg a backyard and a patch of - gasp! - GRASS!)
To James Madison Paris, Dec. 20, 1787
DEAR SIR, -- My last to you was of Oct. 8 by the Count de Moustier. Yours of July 18. Sep. 6. & Oct. 24. have been successively received, yesterday, the day before & three or four days before that....
.... I think our governments will remain virtuous for many centuries; as long as they are chiefly agricultural; and this will be as long as there shall be vacant lands in any part of America. When they get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, they will become corrupt as in Europe. Above all things I hope the education of the common people will be attended to; convinced that on their good sense we may rely with the most security for the preservation of a due degree of liberty.
Jefferson was a prophet as well as a statesman.
The map makes it abundantly clear that we ARE under the tyranny of the population of overcrowded **cities** and have become, possibly irretrievably, corrupt.
A Trillion and a Modest Proposal
A Trillion Stars.
There's a talking point right now about how a trillion dollars in federal spending (falsely named "stimulus") could not even be matched if you were to spend a million dollars per day for two thousand years. They specifically mention "since Jesus' birth" to give it a reference point. There are charts and graphical representations attempting to give an inkling what a trillion is, but it's a number only astronomers really understand (and I'm not sure they do either.)
The left is annoyed at this attempt to explain the astronomical number to people so that they can comprehend it, but they're just being stubborn. They know that if it is a trillion in deficit by Republicans they get more than ornery about it too, and will use any analogy to explain it to people and piss them off about the number.
Obama already addressed the atrocity of a trillion dollars, though, and the answer is quite simple. He claimed that if we were only to return to the "obesity" rates of 1980, we'd save Medicare a trillion dollars. The answer is thus quite simple. If the government wants to spend a trillion dollars, they have to find some cheap way of eliminating all us fat people. Death camps are too expensive - maybe we can get hold of some cheap cyanide, have them all line up to voluntarily take it, spend a few million on new jobs digging mass graves, and instruct them all to jump in neatly after consuming the poison. Just a modest proposal. I'm sure others can expound on ways of doing this cheaply and neatly. Then we'll have our trillion dollars to spend on health care! But who's gonna need it once all those icky fat people are dead?
February 4, 2009
A Novel Idea
Ok, so it's not new at all. It's just sound economics.
Massive spending of nonexistent money to *improve* the economy ought to, on its very surface, sound like madness. Unfortunately, some people think it is the meaning of "stimulus."
If my mortgage is late, and my car needs major repairs, and my phone, power and gas are on the verge of shutoff, and my taxes come due (because I must be punished for being one of those "rich" working class people who actually earns my daily bread), would it sound like a good idea to take out a home equity line of credit and spend it painting my walls and putting in new floors? Would that "stimulate" our household economy? Or would we be the biggest fools in the world?
So what makes you think that would work for an entire country, exactly?
The ONLY proven means of causing an economy to rebound is to get the hell out of the way, STOP the government intervening and spending what it doesn't earn or have, and let the market adjust. A free market is a self-adjusting system. Granted, you might have to go get a J-O-B if you find yourself in trouble, but there are worse fates in life, honest.
In fact, when people tell agitators who are out pounding the pavement demanding a bigger piece of my hard-earned money to pay for their health care and housing and food to "Get a Life" that is generally what they mean. They don't mean stop caring - they mean start caring about the right things. They mean that most of us don't have the luxury of spending all our waking hours whining on blogs or making petitions for socialized health care and demanding a piece of the pie that OTHER people are working hard to bake - we have jobs to do in order to make sure that our own needs are met and hopefully something left over for our children and even our friends who are in worse shape. If more people would spend their time in productive pursuits and realized that government is actually an impediment to things working properly and helping the most people in the greatest fashion, would in fact, get out and start making their own pies, a lot less senseless political squabbling would take place, and the economy would improve, as it is wont to do when left alone to the people that make it work. The working people ARE the activists - as in, they are active AND productive. It was action by THOSE people (not by activists demanding that *government* act FOR them) that put a man on the moon, manifested the Westward expansion, and won the World Wars.
I realize this crazy idea of a self-adjusting free market sounds crazy, but it works - really it does! There are plenty of economists who understand this, not that they are often featured on the Obamedia, but they're right. It's time to get out of fairyland, it's time to stop trying to cut open the goose that laid the golden egg (so you end up with a handful of guts and no gold) and time to get back to common sense free market principles that work. Yes we can!
February 3, 2009
The Source of AGW FOUND!
It's Tom Daschle's fault!
Tsk tsk tsk. Not only does he blow smoke up our asses, he blew a ton of smoke into the atmosphere. HE KILLED THE POLAR BEARS!
Journalism? SICK!
Curiouser and curiouser. And, ew! Go to Detroit Free Press (one of those objective, unbiased, journalistic type newspaper thingies) and you too can have your face merged with Barack Obama's face. Tell them "what part of Obama is in you" and they'll include a caption.
It's journalism, I swear? Journaljism. Creepy as hell.
February 2, 2009
A Must Read
A study in contrasts told in cigarettes.
Are you getting the feeling that Obama, contrary to the hope hype, is a very grim, depressed man? Since the precise moment of his inauguration, his every pronouncement has been redolent of hopelessness and anger...
In other words, everything that we see in that picture of Obama and his cigarette, we see in his speeches, predictions, threats and apologies. He’s got all of Roosevelt’s vices (economic insanity) and none of his virtues (good cheer and optimism). Americans like optimism, because they are essentially an optimistic people. It is our national nature, and I do wonder how long it will be before they turn against this man, just as they turned against Carter, the last president to try to drag the American people into his own personal depression.
February 1, 2009
Let 'Em Heat Cake - Sacrifice and Slavery
No end in sight in Kentucky.
You see, the reason the president --- and others -- were jacketless was simple: "Mr. Obama, who hates the cold, had cranked up the thermostat."
After all, it's freezing cold out there, and as White House senior advisor David Axelrod reminded us, "He's from Hawaii, O.K," adding that "He likes it warm. You could grow orchids in there."
Could this be the same Barack Obama who said last May that:
"We can't drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times... and then just expect that other countries are going to say 'OK.' ... That's not leadership. That's not going to happen."
And could this be the same Barack Obama who is looking to sign a stimulus bill that would spend billions of dollars installing millions "smart meters" that would enable your power company to prevent you from being as comfortable as he is on hot and cold days?
While President Bambi is warm-and-toasty in the Oval Office, is he considering the plight of Michigan's Marvin Schur, a 93-year World War II veteran, who was recently found frozen to death courtesy of a malfunctioning electricity "limiter" device installed by his power company?
He also seems to think it's pretty funny the way some people react like pussies about a little ice - they should all be tough Chicagoans like him.
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I Shrink to Forget
stilton’s place, stilton, political, humor, conservative, cartoons, jokes, hope n’ change, trump, hillary, buttigieg, easter worshippers, isis, terror, sanders, boston marathon, madness, stilton's palsy
We won't lie to you: today's cartoon and commentary aren't really clever insights and perspectives, but rather a laundry list (and a highly shortened one, at that) of the stuff that is driving us out of our ever-loving minds today.
And there's a wee bit of personal experience woven into this. For several months, we've been seeing a psychotherapist to help us develop better coping skills to reduce the levels of stress which may (or may not) be causing "Stilton's Palsy," our self-named affliction that interrupts both sleeping and waking life with occasional involuntary modern dance routines, complete with "spaz hands."
We're glad to say we've been making nice progress, doing our meditation exercises, breathing deeply, and picturing ourselves in the safe interior of a magic subterranean cave which has soft shafts of sunlight and a glowing pool of gently lapping water. And, importantly, our peaceful place has no freaking sources of news whatsoever. But eventually we have to return to reality, where we're again assaulted by political and media lunacy - causing a tsunami of stress hormones to pressure-wash the insides of our rapidly-aging veins.
What's most frustrating is that we're not nuts - there really is stark raving, mouth-breathing, utter insanity loose in the world and it's only spreading and growing in popularity.
Seriously, if Democrats would just look at all these crazy news stories, it might suddenly dawn on them why so many sane people have chosen to support a President who is at least a bit less nuts than anyone in the Democrat party.
We'd say more, but the session time is up.
Unknown said...
And in New Zealand they have bestowed human status on a tree. This crazy stuff is international. It has to be God's hand besotting the minds of leftist loo loos.
Pat Cummings said...
Albert told us: “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results." Well, expecting the liberal left to wake up to their insanity is not far behind that in dementia...
Jim Irre said...
Ban skyscrapers? Did he really say that? I think we'll get a better gauge of what Americans believe in the next election.
Fish Out of Water said...
Obamacare? Despite all the ranting and raving, it's still around and probably will remain so.
The only federal agency/program I can think of that went away was Prohibition..
james daily said...
Today's cartoons are, unfortunately, spot on. What the dems are accomplishing in destroying this country must be stopped and stopped soon. You would think it would be impossible for anyone to be as stupid as their mores. Why they are doing this is a question that needs to be addressed and not just given lip service. If the only solution to this growing cancer is a great belch from Yellowstone, so be it. To me, that is preferable to the alternative, not for me but my children and grandchildren and generations yet to come. We have always been able to recover from natural disasters but we cannot recover from man made disasters that include the confiscation of the means to correct errors.
M. Mitchell Marmel said...
It seems appropos that iTunes came up with this little ditty as I was reading this:
Fruitcakes in the kitchen
Fruitcakes on the street
Struttin' naked through the cross walk
In the middle of the week
Half baked cookies in the oven
Half baked people on the bus
There's a little bit of fruitcake left in everyone of us
-The well known philosopher James William Buffett
Fish Out of Water said...
Speaking of half baked....
NaCly Dog said...
Good morning!
Let's smile and be happy and strike fear in the hearts of killjoy leftists everywhere.
That's my therapy.
Emmentaler Limburger said...
I have said for years that modern liberals all suffer from the same mental illness. And the term "progressive"? It certainly applies, as evidenced with the boldness with which they display their collective insanity every day. With each day they become progressively worse.
The advanced modern liberal seems to suffer from the same mental state that drives people to take their own lives; however, with the political class, they are channeling this self-hatred against the entirety of the human race rather than solely upon themselves.
Fish Out of Water said...
From another blog. No plug intended, but be sure not to be drinking anything while you read this.
Anonymous said...
@New Zealand Trees (and a River and a National Part) - watch for the media's mistakes in equating Legal Person by implying Personhood (aka a Natural Person). New Zealand basically incorporated these places or object, the same process of creating a fictitious "person" that gives us town charters, legal corporations or enables the representatives of our local food cooperative to enter into a purchase contract as the coop, rather than as an individual. Juridical personhood is nuanced and the media makes an effort to create outrage from fairly mundane matters. Click bait really.
@The Leftist's Insanities - Seldom, excepting large scale administration of hallucinogens to crowds - have large group insanity resulted in the serial insane playing one-up-manship challenging Alice in Wonderland on every front. Usually when there is a loud crazy event it is a distraction meant to focus out attention away from something really mischievous. Just like how a pickpockt uses a decoy who may bump us, or in you're on Bourbon Street in New Orleans flashes her breasts. Every wonder how many pockets are picked at the very moment the mammalian protuberances are given the moment of public display? When all the leftists go publicly insane at the same moment, largely with campaign thwarting unpalatable stances, we have to wonder what sort of Kabuki Theatre we're in? And we better watch each other's six as there is a threat we're being distracted from.
@The Real Cause - is this gyrations of a surveillance state, a shadow form of power that had usurped our constitutional powers not to mention rights, thrashing about to protect itself first, and its members from the consequences of breaking the constitution every which way, and basically giving every one of us the shaft?
What to do about all this is a challenging question, as while we can defend our wallet against a pickpocket, we can't defend it against the state, nor can we effectively do much more than protest when our rights are subverted. Our long standing ideals that by voting the bastards out we could effect change has been taken away by the clumsy vote manipulations of the left and they attacks on the norms of who can vote and how it is counted. Our votes have been neutralized bit by bit.
My challenge response is centered around doing the best I can under the circumstances, being truthful and loyal to faith, family and country, all while trusting my example my encourage others. Just because the left wants drama, I don't need to take up a script for their insane playacting.
Whether I'm just another player in the "dance band on the Titanic" doomed to go down regardless because the scale of the catastrophic events, so be it. I will at least go out playing "my tune" rather than theirs.
jpb252 said...
Am surprised that you left out the Flyers taking down Kate Smith's statue because a virtually unknown song she recorded 80 years ago used a word, "darkie," that is no longer acceptable in today's culture. What's scary and unsettling is that compliance seems to becoming the standard response to these leftist attacks on symbols of American culture and patriotism.
Rod said...
How about some crazy-sane: Trump should hire Comey to explain to the nation that whatever he (Trump) has supposedly done that's an impeachable offense does not in-fact rise to the level any reasonable prosecutor would pursue as a case.
Also have him compare all that to what Comey told the nation Hillary had done, but which was not sufficient for charges. If it's all about intent, it's clear Trump INTENDS to MAGA. It's also clear the progressives, leftists, socialists do not.
Comey is just a politics-whore; and he could probably use the work.
Geoff King said...
Meanwhile, scientists at Yale have managed to reanimate portions of dead pig's brains.
First zombie pigs, then a whole new group of democrat voters can be expected.
Stilton Jarlsberg said...
@Unknown- I'd missed the story about the tree, and it's probably just as well. Though admittedly there are some trees that I like better than a lot of people.
@Pat Cummings- I don't expect change from the Left, I just hope for it. Which is, again, insanity.
@Jim Irre- Yep, de Blasio really said that steel and glass "skyscrapers have no place on our Earth." It will be interesting to see how New York fares in the future with buildings of sun-dried mud bricks and thatched roofs.
@Fish Out of Water- Obamacare is absolutely still here, still making healthcare unaffordable for many, and still driving medical professionals into retirement or finding new jobs. All of which was baked into Obamacare by design.
@james daily- I agree with you completely. This is a bad and dangerous road we're on.
@M. Mitchell Marmel- Are we still allowed to call them "fruitcakes," or is that triggering?
@Fish Out of Water- Make it stop. Please, make it stop! For that matter, there's an article floating around that libraries are racist and emblematic of white culture, and therefore need to be closed down.
@NaCly Dog- I like your proactive attitude! And I agree that we should all do our best, in whatever small ways, to enrage and befuddle those on the left.
@Emmentaler Limburger- Great analysis! I can see why you charge $200 for a session.
@Fish Out of Water- AOC is indeed the poster girl for the current wave of madness.
@Anonymous- Great comments! Thanks for explaining the tree scenario, which makes perfect sense the way you describe it.
Great point about what's really going on while we're distracted by craziness, even though I got sidetracked for a moment when you mentioned flashing boobs. And the rest of your comments are absolutely accurate. If you're not posting here on a regular basis, you really need to be!
@jpb252- Unsurprisingly, I ran out of cartoon space before I ran out of idiocies worth mentioning. I'm pretty pissed about the Kate Smith situation. The song "That's Why Darkies Were Born" is a satire intended to mock those who actually held belittling notions of blacks. This sort of thing was the "thin edge of the wedge" starting to hammer towards actual social justice. And Smith was an unstoppable force when it came to raising funds in wartime and celebrating our nation's patriotic spirit.
Whether the Left likes it or not, we stand on the shoulders of giants. Throwing those giants into quicksand isn't going to end well for those temporarily on top.
Jack Colby said...
RE de Blasio: I expect that Amazon's comfort with their decision NOT to locate a campus in NYC is rising by leaps & bounds.
If you look at the skyscraper policy, it doesn't really ban skyscrapers; it just makes them more expensive to build, with some of that additional cost funneling into the city's coffers in the form of licenses and fines. The result will be a decline in new construction. The big story is that if this goes into law, the city is positioned to then go to the owners/operators of the already existing skyscrapers and extract a pound of flesh from them, too.
I don't think de B. will be happy until Manhattan is emptied of all those who see things even a little differently from him. Another victory for "diversity."
Navyvet said...
DeBlasio the Nutcase was very likely happy when his Muslim buddies took down a couple of NYC's skyscrapers.
Alfonso Bedoya said...
Re the crazy news stories....Stilton, I swear I (underlined) was the one who was going stark raving nuts! The cartoon hit me at just in time. Thanks to you, I've cancelled my appointment with the shrink and will instead down a much-need JD on the rocks instead.
Far cheaper, and almost immediately effective.
John D. Egbert said...
@ Fish Out of Water: I believe it was Ronaldus Magnus who so accurately opined that "The closest thing to eternal life is a Federal Government program."
John said...
Dear wife and I spent almost 18 months cruising the eastern Caribbean down to Venezuela in our 40 foot ketch (we had to be south of 10 degrees latitude for hurricane season due to boat insurance requirements) back in the early 90s. We were (okay, I was) stressed out from work and had an opportunity to take sabbaticals.
For all of that time we were happily and contentedly completely clueless about national and world news. The only news that was important was the weather forecast and where the next cruiser party was going to be held.
Maybe I should go boat shopping again.
Igor said...
We'd say more, but the session time is up.
Please pay the receptionist on the way out.
"Stop the World, I want to get off!" <== Now, more than ever!!
John the Econ said...
The upside is that it appears as though the Democrat's platform for 2020 is going to be based on "crazy". The downside is that a growing proportion of the American populace is now largely "crazy".
Di Blasio's Skyscrapers: On "Earth Day" the guy who is driven to the gym in a parade of SUVs lectured that skyscrapers are NYC's greatest threat to the climate. Got that New Yorkers? Your mayor thinks we'd all be better off if your office building or apartment looked more like a prison tower. But then again, considering where Progressivism is taking our biggest cities, perhaps you'll feel safer behind a windowless, fortified edifice.
Because that's working so well everywhere else: So Dallas wants to be more like LA, San Francisco, and Seattle with hoards of feral homeless and criminals doing whatever they please because they know absolutely nothing of consequence will happen to them. That sounds like a great plan for social disorder. (But don't believe me. Take if from the mouth of this loser in Seattle who's figured out that he's "conquered the criminal justice system") If live in Dallas and your not doing a concealed carry now, you might want to think about that. I've never been to Dallas, (beyond passing through on I-20 on a move east) and I'm pretty sure I'll never visit now.
Easter Worshipers: Noticing that both Hillary Clinton & Barack Obama said the exact same thing, I can only assume that this was the official poll-tested talking points memo that was issued by the Democrats. Funny that nobody refers to Mohammedans as "Ramadan worshipers". And quite a different tone that the tweets issued in the wake of the New Zealand massacre.
Bernie's voters: Bernie understands that clueless millennials won't be enough to push the Democrats over the edge. In addition to the non-citizens who are already voting, he's going to need criminals as well. So expect even more pandering to the criminal class.
Hillary calling for an indictment, of anybody: You really can't elaborate more on that.
Buttigieg thinks I'm getting subsidized by illegals: I wish! Unfortunately in my western mountain town, we're sadly deficient in illegal aliens. There are no illegals trolling the parking lot at Home Depot to help me with my yard work. Getting even my tiny car detailed here costs over $300! Never mind what a housekeeper costs.
Sorry, Buttigieg, but people making less than minimum wage subsidize nothing. Since they tend to live a dozen or more to a single house, they're not going to help your property tax base. But thanks for pointing out to everyone that South Bend never recovered from the exodus of manufacturing in the '60s & '70s, and that you're experience is limited to managing a city of a mere 100,000 people. (And they mock Trump for a lack of experience)
All of the above transparent insanity, and yet remember that these are the people who argue that Trump is mentally unstable.
Shelly said...
What composes the left - Congressional Democrats, the biased media, Hollywood and academia - have lost their collective (see what I did there?) minds since Trump's election and have doubled down on the insanity with the commencement of their nomination season. Because they are truly idiots, they fail to see that this behavior is what got Trump elected in the first place and will guarantee his overwhelming reelection. Stilton, your list barely scratches the surface of their insanity. Do they really want another civil war? Because if they do, they will be on the short end of the stick.
Emmentaler Limburger said...
@Geoff King: Pheh! Not news. That's been going on in Ivy League schools for a century or more - as evidenced by all their shingles hanging in the halls of government.
chefspenser said...
Stilton...look at this!
John the Econ said...
The Babylon Bee:
Colby Muenster said...
@Pat Cummings,
But, but... the Liberal policies worked so well in Detroit, right?
Being ever the optimist, I believe sanity will eventually prevail in our gubmint. I also truly believe a majority of the Congress critters do not possess the ignorant and misguided thought process of the likes of AOC or Bernie.... for now.
DeBlabbio.... Perhaps he's a genius. Make enough stupid laws and people will move out of the city. Then your population goes down, then your budget goes down, and your crime goes down, right? Problem is, the people leaving are the law abiding people who actually contribute. NYC is going to turn into a larger version of Seattle or San Francisco.
Beans said...
Hey, Stilton, do what I do:
Imagine a cool mountain opening surrounded by trees, with a stream running through it. The wind gently rustles the leaves of the trees. Birds chirp and sing, frolicking in their happy lives. Squirrels rustle in the piles of leaves. Feel the cool, clean air gently tussle your hair. Feel the cool water wash over your hands and arms. Hear the gentle sounds of bubbles leaking out of the person you're holding under the water...
Ahhh, relaxation at it's finest...
I feel so much better now.
Rod said...
RE: The NY new tall buildings proposal. It's just another example of liberal activism.
Their proposals, speeches & actions are almost always about one or more of these top 10's
(1) Accusing others of malfeasance which usually describes exactly what they've been doing.
(2) Making Stuff up: Good on them; Bad on others. Like tattletales & kindergarten.
(3) Finding ways to transfer other people's money to their benefit.
(4) Or being more blunt about it: Grab more money directly, but keep themselves exempt
(5) Detract from or cover-up the misdoings of themselves and their associates.
(6) Rig the elections process or Stuff ballot boxes.
(7) Politicize everything possible.
(8) Pouting, self-pity or protest; and claim victimization every time they can.
(9) Deny everything bad, even the obvious. Inverse being Claim all success as their own.
And in this case the old reliable:
(10) Propose something that sounds good & will attract idealistic shit-for-brains voters; but to which no factual metrics can be applied for decades or more. Meanwhile just about every place & every instance where they run the show is a mess. Example: Don't buy any bottled water from Flint, Michigan
All it takes to see it is: Wake up, learn the facts, & think. And that is an entirely unbiased option; open to anyone & everyone with the sense and awareness to do it
Stilton Jarlsberg said...
@Jack Colby- De Blasio should admit that the environmental problems aren't with the buildings themselves which, if left vacant and unpowered, would have no impact at all. No, the real problem is people and commerce - which de Blasio should eliminate from NYC with all possible speed. Then again, maybe he's doing that already...
@Navyvet- I didn't say it, but I sure as hell thought it. De Blasio, of all people, should be aware that "skyscrapers in New York City" represent more than just buildings to most real Americans.
@Alfonso Bedoya- I really didn't have a choice about what to blog today. There's galloping insanity everywhere we look! And truth be told, a nice glass of liquor is about as effective as a lot of psychotherapy or meditation (albeit within limits).
@John D. Egbert- I sure as Hell can't improve on Mr. Reagan's astute observation!
@John- There's a lot to be said in favor of turning off the "news" these days. 99% of it is designed to cause aggravation, acrimony, and fear - while simultaneously being without substance or long-lasting meaning. There's something to be said for the "ignorance is bliss" crowd, at least when it comes to avoiding complete crap.
@Igor- Currently, Medicare is paying for my sessions. Which only seems fair, since it's the government and other people who drive me crazy.
@John the Econ- It's that universal craziness that makes this an un-fun situation. Wacky is no longer recognized or treated as such. And that's dangerous.
Regarding de Blasio, why doesn't he just encourage New Yorkers to get the hell out of Dodge and move to flyover country? Not that we want an influx of progressive twits.
Living in a Dallas suburb, I'm just slack-jawed over the announcement that "anything you steal under $750 is free!" And mind you, that's per incident. Hit multiple stores each day, then hit 'em again every day thereafter. As long as you don't re-sell the loot, you're in the clear. Hell, I might just start making the drive to Dallas each day to swipe some stuff. It beats working, right?
The lockstep "Easter worshippers" language pissed the hell out of me. It wouldn't be hard for these a**holes to at least pretend to treat religions equally, but they still won't do it. Radical Islam is great, Christianity is barbaric, and (wink-wink) all believers in anything are idiots anyway. How I loathe Barry, Hillary, and their ilk.
Regarding Bernie's "get out the vote" effort for murderers, rapists, and terrorists, I've got nothing but disdain. Someone needs to ask Bernie if, by his logic, prisoners are being denied their 2nd Amendment rights and should be given guns while in lockup. Hey, rights are rights...right?
Hillary remarking on Trump's alleged mendacity is too much for me to stomach. I keep reading that more dirt has been found on Hillary, but if anyone ever really tries to bring her (or Barry) to justice, I may have a heart attack. Though it'd be worth it.
Regarding Buttigieg, he actually was claiming that illegals are great about paying taxes but are reluctant to claim benefits, therefore giving them WAY too big a burden in supporting the rest of us. He's starting to make AOC seem less stupid...
Stilton Jarlsberg said...
@Shelly- Yes, yes, yes. I didn't vote "for" Trump, I voted against everything the Left (and much of our culture) has become. And I'll do it again in a heartbeat.
@Emmentaler Limburger- You make a fine point, but I couldn't help but release a wistful sigh at your phrase "hanging in the halls of government."
@chefspenser- It's an encouraging story on the face of it, but will ANYTHING come of it? History says no, hope says yes. We'll know which soon enough.
@John the Econ- Babylon Bee has been knocking it out of the park lately. Also, like The Onion, they sometimes force me to doublecheck the source so I don't mistake their stories for reality.
@Colby Muenster- I HOPE sanity will eventually prevail, but I'm not optimistic. Social media has made it possible for millions upon millions of people to exist using the same effed-up "hive mind" while losing the ability to understand anything complicated. From an evolutionary standpoint, that's big, big trouble.
@Beans- I'm going to put on some new age music and follow your instructions. Thanks!
@Rod- Very well put!
Sam L. said...
Spaz hands be a bugger if you're shooting a Tommy Gun.
Susan Fineman said...
Every time I read your column I think..."Here is the voice of reason!" Your delivery is hysterical and brilliant. I always look forward to the next installment!
Anonymous said...
"Stilton's Palsy,"
It may be better named than you know.
It is genetic, passed on by your mother’s side.
A nerve/brain function
In our family we call it "The Bonse shakes."
I have it, as well as the nurse at my docs.
(With my approval she calls for help when drawing blood.)
Research "tremors"
Ignore the movie posts.
No pill cures, only brain surgery.
I will put up with the shakes, thank you.
Judi King said...
@ Stilton: Sorry other people's insanity is affecting you so negatively. Cheers to you for having the courage to tell the truth and not remain silent.
@ Shelly: Love the "collective minds" thing. I've been using that line for a long time.
Stilton Jarlsberg said...
@Sam L- You make an excellent point.!
@Susan Fineman- What a nice thing to say! I don't pretend to be wise, but I do try to shoot for "voice of reason" and adding a little humor to the craziness.
@Anonymous- Actually, it was my Dad who had odd tics and twitches. At a young age, he was diagnosed with "St. Vitus Dance," though that was apparently incorrect since it didn't kill him (it did keep him from serving in WWII, but his condition was legit - he flicked and flinched decades after the war ended). In my own case, I think a combination of medicines screwed with something in my brain setting lose the interpretive dancer yearning to get out, with stress being a frequent (but not exclusive) trigger. I've always run a bit high on the stress meter - I just didn't have physical manifestations until now.
Happily, after a year (!) things are getting better. My condition isn't a "problem" so much as an "annoyance" these days. And learning to turn down stress is a good thing. I just wish the world would cooperate a bit more! (grin)
@Judi King- The insanity of others didn't cause my condition and I'm not actually under more stress than, well, most of my life. I just had something physical happen that changed the way my body dealt with it, and whatever that change was (or is) it's getting better.
As far as telling the truth and not remaining silent, there may be a little courage involved, but there's a bigger component of venting, as well as my desire to lighten the load of other like-minded folks with a little levity. Both are good for me, as is my interaction with this marvelous (and somewhat eccentric) community!
Geoff King said...
Damn Stilton, you're not replying to my comments is getting to be an ongoing thing. If I wasn't so self-confident, I might develop a complex!
Geoff King said...
Granted zombie pigs are a bit off topic, but they are current news and we all can name a former Secretary of State that resembles the genre.
Sortahwitte said...
I, too, tried therapy with a nut herder. I never really understood what he was trying to show, do, direct, answer. Then, if you can imagine, he made it seem as if all the fault was mine. After some finger pointing with the middle finger (both of us) I went to the next sort of treatment which was wellbutrin xl. I never knew if the xl meant an extremely large dose or it meant it came with bucket seats and a floor shift. I did read the paper work that came with the prescription. After telling me all the ways I might die after taking this medicine, it got to the last sentence.
It said basically, if you are taking this med, you are seriously screwed to the onion.
Well, hell. A turnip would know that.
Stilton Jarlsberg said...
@Geoff King- Geez, dude, take a hint! No, no - only kidding! Sorry about that. When I'm replying to a bunch of people at once, sometimes new comments are made while I'm still typing...and those can sometimes get overlooked, which is what happened here. Why it's always YOU, I don't know (wry grin) but I assure you it's not intentional! And yeah, reanimated zombie pig brains strike me as a pretty interesting topic, and one which could lend itself well to political metaphors!
@Sortahwitte- Actually, I'm working with a good therapist who doesn't get into goofy psycho-babble or weird trips of any kind. She mostly just helps me put my various worries into a more realistic and "present" context. No Freudian nonsense or trying to dissect my childhood - just practical advice.
And I'm a longtime Prozac user. Not everyone needs to be on antidepressants, but I did. Life changing, really. I then got an additional prescription of Wellbutrin which MIGHT have been the triggering mechanism for me developing body spasms and involuntary movements (or it might have been an interaction with some strong antibiotics I was taking for diverticulitis).
I'm still on the Prozac, but off everything else. And even if my mental wiring isn't up to code, I still manage to have fun (grin).
Anonymous said...
When crap like that makes me sad I hold my assault rifle and pet the cat.
Onkel Totenkopf
james daily said...
Stilt: I am rethinking George Wallace's statement in 1968, "There is not a dime's worth of difference between the Republicans and Democrats." Mainly because D.C. has had both parties in power and nothing has changed to fix problems, just acerbates the ones we have. Then, there is the line from the movie, "Kingfish" where John Goodman said the difference between Republicans and Democrats is the Republicans will skin you from the neck down and the Democrats from the ass up. Both of those statements seems to be more apropos now when we see the Rs turning on their own President and the democrats pulling out every item that can slow down the progress made in the last two years. This is about the same as the old movie studios passing around the Oscars to each other so they all benefited.
I think may I should be on meds, probably Valium taken with Scotch.
Rod said...
In all fairness Stilt: How about you pick a day when he's posted a zinger and every one of us pitch in to cover the gap. We ALL reply to Geoff's comment. He's a regular here, interesting & entertaining; it's a right thing to do. And maybe it will help you with that twitch. [grinning at both of you]
John the Econ said...
@Stilton, there's no question that the inmates are now running the asylum.
He already has:
New York City's Population Is Shrinking
And you're right. After the Progressives make my health care, housing, and what-not "free", the rest of my needs could easily be met through petty theft. My bet is that over time, grocery stores will begin to resemble banks, assuming that there are any more grocery stores. Progressives like to whine about "food deserts", and yet at the same time they advocate policy that virtually guarantees that outcome.
Radical Islam is great: This is where I go into my "counterinsurgency" mode. Yeah, Islam is great. Conservatives supposedly wanted to send women back to the '50s. Islam will send them back to the 7th century. Tired of all the sexual & gender insanity? Islam isn't, because they don't tolerate it. Over the rise of the pajama-beta boys? They'll be gone in a generation when they're replaced with real men. No more whining about "toxic masculinity". Tired of being called a "Nazi"? These guys actually sided with the Nazis. Think America's past with slavery was embarrassing? No problem; these guys were the world's best slavers. I'll feel bad for my Jewish friends, but this is what supporting Democrats for generations gets you.
I like your idea of restoring 2nd Amendment rights to felons. Why not?
Hillary: As I've been saying for decades now, the Clintons deal with the devil precludes any legal ramifications. In this life. I don't even try to imagine what their consequences will be in the next life. I'm thinking stuff like Hillary having to be a Walmart greeter for eternity.
Buttigieg: Another Beto-male.
Gee M said...
how things work:
Dems use this "Moebius Strip" logic...
Rich people getting poor people to vote for rich people by telling them that other rich people are the reason they're poor.
This is effective due to the well-known fact that 2 out of 3 Lefties are dumber than the other one. Fact.
Pete (Detroit) said...
Yanno, restoring right to arms to felons in prison would probably cut WAY down on prison over crowding... have o figure out how to keep the employees safe - or, fuggit, just air drop supplies in, and let them figure out who cooks what. Or whom...
Nag Dabbit! Verified AGAIN!!! (at least I passed in one, this time...)
NEED to get 'my' laptop back, and quit reading on the work one.. YEESH!
John the Econ said...
South Bend, Indiana has a population of around 100,000. If illegals are that much of an economic bonus to the tax base, I don't know why Buttigieg (or any other of these Progressive sanctuary city types) aren't sending buses down to the border to bring them in. In fact, I'd like to see Trump drop 10-or-20 thousand of them on South Bend, just so we can all see what an economic miracle we're missing out on here. | https://stiltonsplace.blogspot.com/2019/04/i-shrink-to-forget.html | isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2020-24
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} | 5,686 | NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) — The NYPD released surveillance video Wednesday night detailing some stinky business they say is linked to Occupy Wall Street protesters.
Police said that on evening of March 14, a number of Occupy demonstrators dragged large quantities of human urine and feces in containers to an open-air plaza before pouring the waste down a flight of stairs.
The incident occurred at the corner of Nassau and Cedar streets in Lower Manhattan.
Authorities said that that same night, about 20 minutes later, one of the suspects entered a Chase ATM vestibule on Water Street and poured human waste inside.
Police have released surveillance video of both incidents.
After a witness provided a license plate number of the van allegedly used to transport the waste, authorities apprehended 25-year-old Jordan Brooks Amos, of Philadelphia, two days after the incidents.
Police said Amos is the registered owner of the van. He was charged with criminal possession of a weapon after a stun gun was recovered inside his vehicle.
Amos also faces charges including unlawful possession of a noxious matter and aggravated unlicensed operation of a motor vehicle.
Shocked by this story? Share your thoughts in the comments section below…
Comments (328)
1. slobo says:
Rub his nose it it…
2. geno says:
These are the people that Obama and Pelosi support.
1. danthefan says:
your right, obama sais they are the reason he ran for president. neither of them has even mentioned them in months. they are union trained and union paid.
1. Colin Mattoon says:
UNLESS YOU ARE GOING TO POUR IT ON THE CAR OF AN EXECUTIVE THIS ACCOMPLISHES NOTHING EXCEPT MAKING A POOR JANITOR HATE HIS LIFE. If you want to make a statement you probably shouldnt victimize someone you claim to represent (the 99%) in the process
2. Smokey says:
This is the new Democratic Party! Obama and Pelosi are so supportive!
1. Red Burton says:
Indeed, Smokey! The RNC needs to get busy with a photo montage of these dirty, misguided cretins and tie them directly to Barack Obama and Sister Nancy. “… letting people know that we understand their struggles and we are on their side…” is a direct quote from Barry Hussein Soetoro Obama Barack Hussein and needs to be in the faces of voters along with this gem: “Under my policies, energy prices will necessarily skyrocket.” We need to call this president on his policies and positions and begin the barrage. Lord knows the media won’t bother.
3. astralweeks says:
My, they continue to demonstrate what a classy bunch they are, don’t they?
1. bikermailman says:
Remember when the Tea Partiers did this sort of thing? Neither do I. Yeah…JUST like the Tea Party.
2. ObamaFartSniffer says:
Don’t expect the NY Times, LA Times, Boston Herald or the MSM to report on this – they are too preoccupied with the violent Tea Party.
4. JoKe says:
Obama has returned us to the Bill Ayers era of terror politics.
5. Ken says:
OWS = classless half wits.
6. Steven from Brooklyn says:
When your Mommy locks the basement door after she reads your trite you’ll be in all summer. change your underware also.
7. ozinnh says:
T Payne:
It’s called a bio-hazard you nit wit!
Ask any nurse or med student what kind of bad germs/viruses/diseases are found in feces and then realize how utterly stupid and dangerous this was.
8. Kelvin says:
This it the Obama and Democratic Pary base, OWS filthy cretins, anarchists, marxists and assorted human debris.
Tell us more how they are just like the Tea Party.
1. Patriot45 says:
Obama OWS 2012
9. Robert g says:
OWS should be forced to clean up the mess with their tongues.
1. kgustave says:
10. The Realist says:
So now the “Occupy” CORPORATION’s business plan includes collecting and dumping human waste. Is that really a good use of our tax dollars?
1. Browncoat says:
Nation’s respect and admiration? Mmmmm… okay. How far are you from Bellvue because you might need to be calling 911 instead of posting here. Seriously…
2. Kelvin says:
clearly you have feces for brain
3. budro says:
satire? if not, than a noble idealist, but proably educated in liberal public schools.
1. Rumple says:
As you so clearly demonstrate the ignorance of when to use then rather than the word than. Enjoy English much?
4. Mark says:
You’re a riot all by yourself. A laugh riot, that is. You’ve really got the language down, don’t you? About the only thing left out was the “running dogs of capitalism.”
11. Monkeydeblanco SierraHotel says:
Did they notify OSHA? Did they have the proper MSDS sheets? Was a compliance memo on file with the EPA?
1. Josh says:
Too funny!
12. G says:
Who needs credit cards? Oh, and why haven’t you joined a a credit union yet?
13. IronKnuckle says:
Inciting a riot is a felony. If you plan on doing so, I hope you’ll first dial 911 and give the police advance notice so they know where to arrest you. Thanks, idiot.
14. Jeff Rosen ret NYPD Sgt says:
Yup, just like the tea party.
1. Fargin Bastiges says:
Please name one incident to support your remark.
1. ozinnh says:
Sgt is being sarcastic.
The left likes to describe the OWS movement as being exactly like the TEA Party.
2. Duke McKnuckles says:
How stupid can you be?
2. Melvin says:
And you base your remark on??? Hmm I thought better of New York’s finest. Your attitude backs up my theory in why you only retired a mere Sgt.
1. rountry says:
c’mon dummy he’s being sarcastic
15. Mike says:
1. The Realist says:
What does one have to do with the other?
1. Jim says:
“God bless them for their spontaneity,” Pelosi told reporters regarding OWS. “It’s young, it’s spontaneous, it’s focused and it’s going to be effective.”
2. gobnait says:
The Democrats have wholeheartedly embraced the OWS movement and encouraged its activities.
1. NVRAT says:
Was it BIden who said “God Bless the OWS folks” ?
1. Heather says:
Somehow I doubt that God looks on with pride at these heathens, let alone is wanting to bless their lawlessness.
2. miked says:
3. diana kunselman says:
This is backed by George Soros, and all the communist left wing groups. This what you can expect if Obama is re-elected. When we allow anarchists to rule, and this is exactly what this is, we can expect more of this. Why were these people allowed to trod on ordinary citizens and businesses for so long. Don’t they have rights too? These people should be prosecuted fully if they are ever found. If you this this is a small incident, then wait, it will only escalate. Google Saul Alinsky, Cloward-Piven, this is the future if this president is allowed another 4 yrs.
1. ike says:
Where do you think they colllected the waste? Soros’ diaper and bedpan
16. Anna says:
Yea I’ll bet they had Chase’s CFO come down and clean that up. Not the poor janitor making under 30k a year. Nice job occupiers, way to bring down the man.
1. Pete says:
Great comment. I’m sure that janitor is a greedy 1% guy who has 14 houses and stomps on the heads of defenseless baby seals. I’m sure that taught us all a lesson! How dare we have money in banks! How dare we use ATM! How dare businesses make money and employ a majority of the 99%! Get a job that doesn’t involve collecting urine and feces and dumping it, grab a shower, and stop asking for other people to support you. Ignorant, plebeian fools!
2. Browncoat says:
Yes… thanks Anna.
17. Shawn says:
Now if you wish to clean up your area, I charge 500.00 a hour and they will be made to lick the floors clean…..
18. Shawn says:
Occupy gitmo for bio warfare until next year..
19. Moderate Conservative says:
I can’t reply to the comments. Is censoring the replies?
20. cnredd says:
Why would I be shocked at this video?….This is what Occupy calls “Wednesday”…
Political Wrinkles
21. KK says:
What the people who did this don’t think about is the janitor who makes minimum wage (who has to clean up this massive health hazzard). Shame on them for creating hardship for the very people they are supposedly sticking up for!
1. krp says:
The police should clean it up and collect it as evidence.. Then check it for DNA samples and see if there is any match and keep them in the database, so that the pervs that did this can be linked definitively to it.
22. Sunshine Connie says:
When I was young and working to get a toehold in the working world, I worked in a State Hospital where the patients were retarded (not developmentally disabled but flat out retarded). They thought it great fun to paint with what their bodies created. OWS miscreants mimic the profoundly retarded. How special they are.
23. IronKnuckle says:
A journalist conducted a straw poll of actual people at the Zuccoti Park protest last year and found that something like 30% or more would support violence. The police should not do any favors for these people. They’re breaking the law, so grasp at the opportunity and put these people behind bars where they won’t hurt people.
1. me says:
Trespassing, bio terrorism employing bio hazardous material, vandalism to name the obvious.
24. Mickey says:
Any excuse to play with their excrement is a good one, to a liberal.
1. unkibill says:
Don’t monkies do that too? (just making a casual observation)
25. Sympathy for the devil says:
Here’s what kills me, we’re falling apart as a nation, people are upset because no one is doing anything about it. I may not agree with the tactics or even some of their beliefs, but as an American and as a supporter of the constitution, i believe they have a grievance against their GOV. When they won’t listen when we were polite and respectful (the tea party), you have to resort to different strategies to be heard. Aside from all of the that, these are your fellow countrymen and women, some of you wish so hurtful to people who may have had a job and paid taxes, maybe were foreclosed on and have no other options. Clearly this is a time for binding together as Americans and taking back our GOV.
1. DaddyB says:
You make a good point about the polite and respectful TEA (Taxed Enough Already) gatherings. All the media did was dwell on the insignificant number that perhaps stepped over the line of civility. A line that applies to conservatives only it would seem. The media had no interest in the gripes of the majority. The media and progressives of this country have no idea how intolerant and bigoted they are. The TEA Party people were unfairly demonized, maligned and lampooned at every turn.
Lesson learned: Take to the streets next time. Take to the streets in a big way. If violence is what gets their attention, so be it. The spirit of ’89 is coming. C’est compris?
1. Notdatty says:
I do not care to join in the ranks of these filthy disrespectful anarchists, DaddyB
1. astralweeks says:
DaddyB, they’re just useful idiots for the Democrat party, that is even bigger gov’t.
2. Big People says:
OWS should be considerate of their countrymen as well including the NYPD, the residents, and their own neighbor within their dirty camp.
26. Locke says:
Criminal possession of a weapon and unlawful possession of a noxious matter?
It isn’t criminal to posess a weapon it is protected by the second amendment!
It’s illegal to have waste material? NO! You can be arrested for dumping in a toilet, then? It’s the spreading of the material on someone else’s property that’s illegal. They can charge you for having urine in your bladder or feces in your intestines?
Are the cops serious? Can’t they ever stop making up stuid, non-existent ‘crimes’. The charges should be revelvant to the crime, this was damage to private property, vandalism and disruption of a business. They should be made to clean it up and pay for the materials, damages,losses, health checks, fines, fees and do jail time.
I agree the flea and tick filth are animals, but the cops need to start giving real charges and stop making things up.
1. David Kramer says:
Inmates in prison do this. Feces and urine can carry disease. That is why they are charged with the noxious matter. As for the weapon charge, in New York you are not allowed to defend yourself.
By the way, why do all Democrats just fling poo when in a debate? Is that all they have?
1. Locke says:
I realise it carries disease, that’s why I mentioned the health checks. They didn’t fling it on anyone though, that would be assault. So I still don’t see that as anything but a bogus charge.
The law on guns in New York is unconstitutional, but a taser isn’t a firearm anyway.
I can’t answer for Democrats, but yes, that is my experience with them as well.
I would like to move somewhere they don’t exist.
1. Mickey says:
And burning a cross on a b l a c k family’s lawn is just a misdemeanor trespassing charge, not a “hate crime.” Right?
Come on…..agree with me. I dare you. Or are you a hypocrite?
I’m allowed to dump filth all over the place as long as it passes “health checks” after the fact? Is that what you’re saying? Wow! Does that apply to large industrial corporations too, or just hippies?
1. diana kunselman says:
mickey, this was a public accessed area, not a land fill. This is a typical spin you idiots put on EVERYTHING. liberalism is a mental disease which has been perpetuated by George Soros. Any sane person would not accept this happening in a bank lobby or an ATM lobby. No one will ever reach you people because you are to far gone.
1. Locke says:
Well said, Diana.
2. Locke says:
I don’t believe in hate crimes laws.
Crimes by nature are hateful.
That said, one burning a cross on another person’s property should be charged with arson, harassment and intimidation. We don’t need hate crime laws, it redundant and stupid.
If you dump filth you should be required personally to clean it up, pay for the materials and time of others involved and do jail time, regardless if you are an individual stinkin’ hippie or the owner of a large corrupt industrial corporation.
2. Democrats Fling Poo When Angry says:
For crying out loud, he was charged with an illegal weapon, not a firearm. Read the article first before ranting.
1. Tidewater Guy says:
Just so, DFPWA. Presumably a claymore or a halberd or a cutlass would also be “illegal weapons.” So would a can of bear spray.
If this betokens anything, I hope it’s that NYPD has abandoned its catch-and-release approach to OWS. Y’all have probqably noticed that the occutards (thanks, ThrowObummerOut!) prevail only in cities with liberal Dem governments. This has been going on for six months. Hizzoner Mayor Bloomberg should set up a detainee camp up in Duchess County with a double ring of razor wire and only tents for shelter and MREs to eat. That should convince the detainees taht protest isn’t cost-free.
Does anyone remember the 1968 Dem Convention in Chicago, when the conventioneers threw baggies of pee and poo from their hotel windows at cops? Chicago’s Finest were not amused.
1. krp says:
I can them OWSWipes. and they are part of the OccuBowel Movement
2. Locke says:
I did read it and the law is unconstitutional.
2. OWS Vandalizes Churches says:
tasers are illegal in NYC.
But Pepper Saray is not – so I have some in case I ever run into the OWS mob that hurled eggs at me previously because i walked by wearing a suit.
3. krp says:
Unless they check the DNA of the “samples” they cannot be for sure who was involved. They arrested this guy on a tip from a witness giving a license plate. They don’t have enough evidence to place this guy at the scene. When they looked up the van, they found the taser and whatever he had in his van. They charged him with what they had clear evidence on, I would assume. If they can get more evidence and more eyewitnesses, then the DA would add more serious charges.
That’s the American way, That is our criminal justice system, and I wouldn’t have t any other way. Just because an assault, or vandalism took place, they simply cannot arrest him for that until they have sufficient proof.
4. h8theh8ers says:
the charge of Criminal Possession of a weapon was for a stun gun found in his vehicle when he was stopped. The rest of your suggestions are not codes in NYS or NJ. Please read the story and the LAW before you comment.
27. bullrider says:
I must be in the “1%” because my percentage group does not use bodily waste like chimpanzees would.
1. David Kramer says:
You are not a Democrat methinks. All Democrats have to debate is flinging poo, that is why they all do it.
28. pinouye says:
This cannot be a true story…I haven’t seen it on HuffingtonPost…lol.
29. pinouye says:
These are the people that Pelosi backs…
Not just Pelosi but Obama too. ROT THEIR SOULS!
1. pinouye says:
Very true…but she is the one that sticks out…calling the Tea Party astro-turf. Well astro-turf this!!!
30. Moderate Conservative says:
Who are most of these right wing fascist nuts commenting on this story?
OWS is just responding against the corporate plutocracy that has taken
over our government. Look at the lessons of our founders i.e. our
constitution and the bill of rights, which our government is slowing
trying to dismantle with the Patriot Act (and our governments own
“secret” interpretation of it) and the National Defense Authorization Act
just recently passed, etc. Get your ignorant heads off of fox for a while
and start researching what is reality.
Check out the preparations for the next national assault on our freedoms:
If you have any independent brain, ask yourself: why is this being done now?
1. bullrider says:
Because Obama is in power and who knows where all this will lead. I trust him as far as I could throw a small car.
2. David Kramer says:
So I can assume you are then not going to vote for Obama and other Democrat poo flingers? Or are you just here to look stupid?
3. Real Rick says:
Moderate Conservative my rear end! I really am conservative and I’m stocking up with weapons. These punks and degenerates with ows need to be put away. Arm-up America! ARM-UP!!!
Oh, and go back to the fairies on Huffy-Post
1. Nash says:
No, you’re an alarmist looney-tune posturing as a conservative.
2. Prison_Industrial_Complex says:
Rick, you willing to have your tax dollars increased to keep the “punks and degenerates” “put away”?
4. diana kunselman says:
You are not a moderate conservative. The replies are appropriate for the actions that we done. Fox is the only place you get the truth, it certainly is not the MSM. Get off this corporate crap. Stop blaming corporations for our country’s problems. DO NOT PAINT YOURSELF AS A CONSERVATIVE MODERATE. We need our companies, banks, businesses. No one here is right wing, stop hiding behind your fake status!
5. krp says:
In 1944, George Orwell stated that “Fascism” is the most meaningless word in the English language. Thus, anyone that uses the term “fascist” or “fascism” demostrates themselves to be too ignorance, too “out of touch” and too uneducated to be permitted to participate in an intelligent discussion.
31. stoptouchingthatmabel says:
This waste of space should be charged as a terrorist as well as improper disposal of hazardous waste.
1. David Kramer says:
Flinging poo, the typical response of the Democrat party.
32. Danbury says:
Buckets of Obama? After all he has endorsed the OWS loonies.
33. Looks like Malia isn’t in Mexico after all.
Oh well, girls will be girls…
34. Mike says:
I just can’t believe this was done by OWS. I think Bush got the Tea Party to do it to make OWS/Obozo/Pelosi look bad. (roflmao)
1. Sammie Jo says:
Yup! That’s what happened! rotf
What a bunch of classy people in this movement, of course dumping buckets of crap and pee will make everyone jump over to their side.
These people need to be locked up in mental institutions.
2. krp says:
They arrested a 25 year old. Everybody knows that the TEA Party is just a bunch of old white men.
35. SunnyR says:
Comrade Obozo should be proud of this gaggle of dissidents, morons and degenerates who were created by his administration and Media Matters to help him distract from his 3.5 years of incompetence. These human maggots are an embarrassment to the United States and they should be arrested, tried and JAILED. Animals!!
1. ed hoeger says:
What kind of spring will he name it
2. William says:
You read like a daily news report from Fox. Why not apply there for
a job?
1. Dallas Grozny says:
yes, because we all know how those tea party rallies were synonymous with rape, vandalism, violent assaults on police and civilians, trespassing, public drunkenness, indecent exposure, and destruction of public property…oh, wait, those weren’t the tea partiers. those were the OCCUPIERS. silly me. and if the only place you can hear this truth is fox, maybe you should reconsider just how honest and ethical your news sources are.
1. William says:
good advice, I’ll start with your post.
1. Jason says:
Attempt at comeback failed. “Thats like sayin I know you are but what am I!”
1. Nash says:
You might want to learn how to use quotation marks before you embark on your noble mission to judge other people’s internet posts. The internet has no need for more illiterate retards.
1. Matt says:
Retards is a very derogatory remark against those that are mentally challenged. You should be ashamed of your insult against this group of individuals. These people did not ask or chose to have their affliction. And yet you probably fancy yourself a wonderful, caring person.
1. Nash says:
Split hairs all you want. The majority of posters on this page can’t tell the difference between the president and a Muslim or any other number of common stupidities. Maybe I need to be more specific and call out the ‘intellectually challenged’ or ‘rationality-limited.’
2. Don says:
re·tard·ed [ri-tahr-did]
characterized by retardation: a retarded child.
Quick! Someone sue the dictionary!
2. bullrider says:
Be much better to apply for a job at ABC, CBS, MSNBC, or CNN – because all they have are Obama shoe-lickers and anything that doesn’t make him look good, it’s just SHHHH!!!! Those networks need someone to tell what is happening, but they are not there to inform – only to indoctrinate.
36. CleanYourRoom says:
So, do these OWS idiots think the “1%” bank presidents are the ones that will have to clean this mess up? You and I know it’s some poor hardworking janitor that OWS would claim to support. OWS, you want to support the working people (or “hope” to be working people)? Stop making messes wherever you go because it’s not the “1%” who are forced to clean up after you.
1. bullrider says:
They do not think at ALL. As long as they are being obnoxious they think they are doing something. I guess that is all they know how to do or else they might do something intelligent instead.
2. Paul in the BX says:
And who made this mess again? And you know this because. . . .???
3. Ellie Lightt says:
make the occupy protestors use there tongues and lick it up — probably make them smell better —
4. LOL says:
Noo Yawkahs won’t be able to smell the difference.
5. Orpheus75 says:
very well stated!
6. VotersOfNY says:
They caught one of the guys who did this. Too bad we don’t have judges with balls like Sheriff Joe in Arizona who would make them clean it up or spend a month in Rikers. Think that might teach them a lesson? Oh yeah.
7. Tammy Faye says:
We still don’t think — Do we.
8. cody says:
Does NOT surprise me at all… For brain-washed (if any brains!) extremists and politicians, this is the OLD NORMAL.
9. AJ says:
I still say that when these yoyos have hundreds of babies out of wedlock begininning 9 months after the first OWS gatherings, no knowledge of who the sper m donors are, they will have the working class, tax paying Americans pick up the tab from the get go, free healthcare, foodstamps, all welfare/medicaid benefits, for one and all. It makes any one with common sense and morals feel like things are going to HAVE To change. America literally is becoming a “waste”land run by the delusional, lazy followers of a pathetic
“P” iece “O” f “T” rash “U” ppity “S” ycophant &/or “S” h it….
Speech still free right?
1. krp says:
Thats why Obama is demanding that everyone provide FREE abortions and birth control.
10. Betty St Clair says:
the only thing they are are promoting are Obama’s plan to “spread the wealth”. Your wealth, my wealth. Get it? they want what you have and they spread filth to promote the spread the wealth agenda, otherwise they would be dumping filth on the Obama cabinet members homes. they are from wall street. Check out their backgrounds and see how many came from there.
11. Rockbobster says:
These leftwing moonbats are in desperate need of some nightstick therapy
12. Dark Space says:
Ah, they’re just trying to create jobs for janitors. I’m sure its all part of their plan and they thought it out in great detail ahead of time, just like the entire OWS protest movement was meticulously planned and thought out…. /sarcasm
37. CFL says:
Remember when the Tea Party protesters were throwing feces and urine all over the place? Oh, I forgot, that’s OWS’s calling card. Obama Bin Golfin should be proud of his answer to the Tea Party!
38. NYPDFinest says:
Don’t call it excrement. It’s Obama love juices
1. ed hoeger says:
Thats why people pass out while he speaks
39. Gregory Miller von Richter says:
Going back to my college days, when student demonstration against the war in Vietnam War had large demonstrations, it was not uncommon for those who supported the war to put “Plants” in the crowds and start trouble. I am not sure this is the case with OWS yet, but this may be an answer. What better way to get police involved than hiring troublemakers to embarrass the organization. It is more common than one would believe. OWS needs to know who they take in.
1. David Shovan says:
You have to be kidding right. Moron
2. Zipperhead says:
They don’t need plants to make them look bad. They are doing a fine job of it without any help, to a person.
3. whoeveriwant2b says:
Are you a fiction writer? If so, you need to make it a little more believable.
4. bullrider says:
Look at the clowns, fools, weirdo’s, and generally unemployed / nonproductive people in OWS and tell me that they are all just regular fine people and someone is trying to make them look bad….
Most of us (who still have jobs) are too busy WORKING and paying our TAXES and trying to afford Obama’s $4.50/gallon gasoline to have time to act out in the streets for months on end. OWS needs to be exiled. Guantanamo?
1. Nash says:
When you “hard-working, tax-paying Americans” actually do some good for this world, all your whining and complaining might start to make some sense. In all your infinite wisdom and diligence, why the hell did you geniuses never manage to vote in leaders who were anything more than a bunch of liars, crooks, and self-righteous degenerates? Probably because you’re just as worthless and vulgar as they are. You reactionary conservative assholes deserve OWS if you’re stupid enough to believe that people like Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum give a flying f**k about your well-being. Bad conservatives and bad liberals should be tied together and melted down into fertilizer.
5. 1marg says:
You mean they’re paying people to poop and dump? Doesn’t sound like he find any takers in the Republican Party, the Tea Party…so the only ones remaining are other lefty loonies.
Back in the days you refer to it was the SDS that started trouble…Students for a Democratic Society (COMMUNISTS.)
40. marykay says:
These are the people Nancy Pelosi called the finest of American citizens. Go figure?
1. bullrider says:
They are at least 1/2% better than SHE is. Or 1/2% worse. But when she talks about the tea party, the crocodile tears begin to flow. Those old people asking questions of their government frighten her so.
41. E Paul DuPont says:
It’s past time that the banks and investment houses hire some goons squads to deal with these communists and the professors who filled their heads with marxist crap.
1. Mimi says:
Here! Here! I couldn’t agree more! Academia is rife with Marxist activist – and their theories are beyond incoherent – they’re simply idiotic!
42. Mo says:
Let’s take our country back before the nation we once knew is gone forever. Join the Council of Conservative Citizens today!
43. VotersOfNY says:
This is why cops should be beating the sh!t out of these protesters. They are filthy animals. They don’t deserve to be treated with any respect. You need to learn to respect if you want to be respected. Good for you cops when you break the heads of these useless wastes of human life.
44. William says:
This is one of the sillier stories. After all the violence they committed in the
last several days, the NYPD/Bloomberg need to feed fantasies like these.
1. William is blind says:
William you must be blind.How do you try to put blame on police and Bloomberg for this.What about the stun gun they caught these OWS lowlifes with.As a New Yorker I am getting tired of these morons and what about the people who have to clean up this hazard.
1. William says:
Millions and millions of police dollars to bash, stop and frisk
and spy on New Yorkers, but not much left over for hungry
kids, or homeless. Like on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday in
Liberty Park & Union Square the police intiate rioting. Rights
to assemble and free speech exist, whether sanitation is needed
or not. Bloomberg needs to sanitize his heart.
1. Nash says:
Don’t attempt to contradict these geniuses. Most of them are probably suburban white trash from New Jersey who haven’t been to New York City since their first-grade class trip to the Museum of Natural History
2. krp says:
That’s a load of BS, Wilhelm.
The right to free speech DOES NOT include the right to yell FIRE! in a crowded theater. The right to free speech DOES NOT excuse a person from the responsibility of their speech.
The same applies to the right to “peaceably assemble”. That does not give license to create a disturbance or a health hazard. PERIOD. YOU ARE STILL RESPONSIBLE FOR THE ACTIONS OF YOUR “RIGHTS”
2. OWS Vandalizes Churches says:
Blame blame blame.
Every time OWS shows up somewhere, they vandalize it, then they cry that cops enforce the law.
Let NYC’s elected officials know we DO NOT support the violent, misguided and taxpayer cash wasting ways of OWS!
You Cannot change America by Squatting in a park or Vandalizing Churches!
45. bill says:
Bring Rudy back…get rid of this little twink at City Hall!
46. OWS Vandalizes Churches says:
Why is it EVERY TIME Occupy gathers they Vandalize a Church, or Rape someone or Attack Cops who are enforcing the law?
Why can’t they get their message out without resorting to Violence?
I cannot STAND the Tea Party – but they managed to have huge rallies without rapes, murders, violence or leaving trash behind. They also have put their politicians in races for office to try to make change.
OWS just squats in parks demanding loan forgiveness and think that will change America. I AM the 99% and OWS DOES NOT SPEAK FOR ME.
47. Jean says:
I think that innocent until proven guilty is the correct term..Are we positive this is someone who is acting on behalf of the OWS or somebody who is acting on their own to discredit the movement…Thousands of protestors were out there..I see only one on the video..Why are you calling them animals and lowlifes??? Do you know them personally???
1. Cw4it says:
That’s because they are low life’s….just like the 60’s generation of demonstrators. Throw them all in jail or in the insane asylum. It’s where they belong.
2. Jean fell when young says:
Jean you cannot be that stupid. Look what this fake OWS did when they took over that house .They destroyed it took all walls down garbage and feces all over.And the family they were claiming to be moving in was a farce.If you believe in OWS I have a bridge to sell you.
3. bullrider says:
OWS has a “track record” of using the world at large as their toilet. You want to believe they are nice people? Invite them to stay with you, dummy.
4. LIZ says:
I can safely call you a half wit, even though i havent met you personally, one video is enough, who is the idiot now?
48. xxx says:
You two gullible idiots will believe anything fed to you.
49. Lowlifes says:
Ows is the worst movement ever – stand for nothing and full of spoiled aholes that do not realize it.
1. bullrider says:
It should in fact be known as “the bowel movement”.
50. Rick says:
Do you bleeding heart a#@holes still support these animals?
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