Are you sure we’re talking about the same religion? There are no commandments like the dekalog in Islam.
It does include them in paraphrases scattered through the book and when it comes to that particular commandment also with “slight” limitations. Indeed so slight that it only applies to “inviolable people” (which are only muslims, how convenient). But even for them there are exceptions to the rule, given the right reasons like getting raped.
On the other hand there are over 220 passages which call for diverse forms of violence against basically everyone else. I am a science geek more or less and like maths and statistics. And that maths tells me a lot about the structure of the “religion of peace”.
We have a similar problem in certain enclaves here, but I think it’s important to separate things done by people who happen to be Muslims from things done by people because they are Muslims.
We have a significant group of Lebanese scum in Sydney who are on their third generation living on welfare and crime and not afraid to shoot up police stations and otherwise display their complete contempt for the society and laws which support them. They are Muslims, and sometimes aggressively so, but in reality they’re scum because that’s their background from Lebanon and they’ve been transplanted here without the restraint of whatever controls existed in Lebanon, which operated in a rather less benevolent fashion than Australia. Similar problem to wildlife issues where we’ve introduced foreign animals with no natural predators and they just run wild.
Their Islamic identity is not the source of their bad conduct, nor for that matter is their Lebanese identity as not all Lebanese are like them, so it’s mistaken to identify them as part of an Islamic, or Lebanese, problem. It’s a problem with some people who happen to be, in this case, Lebanese and Muslim. But we get maintstream news reports like
So now we know the facts, straight from the Supreme Court, that a group of Lebanese Muslim gang rapists from south-western Sydney hunted their victims on the basis of their ethnicity and subjected them to hours of degrading, dehumanising torture.
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/07/13/1026185124700.html
There is nothing in that or similar reports to demonstrate that the crimes occurred because the offenders were Muslim, but it still gets mentioned where you don’t see a report about an Italian Catholic or a Greek Orthodox or Lebanese Maronite offender.
One of the major problems in the West is well intentioned but misguided immigration policies which give refuge to people whose backgrounds and experiences make them incapable of living in an entirely different society. The difficulty is that that applies only to some of the people who are allowed in under such policies. Others will adapt to the new society, without necessarily abandoning their own culture but without demanding that the dominant society adapt itself to theirs. If they behave themselves they’re entitled to refuge, but if they don’t they forfeit the right to further consideration.
And I don’t give a stuff about how terrible their experiences were elsewhere if it leads to bad behaviour in their new country, like this.
A SUDANESE refugee who embarked on a three-day rape spree and sliced an elderly woman’s throat a month after reaching Australia will serve at least the next 17 years in jail.
Hakeem Hakeem, 21, was yesterday sentenced to 24 years’ jail, with a non-parole period of 17 years, for a string of depraved sexual attacks in Melbourne’s southeast in March 2005.
The Supreme Court heard that, just one month after arriving in Australia, Hakeem set out on a drug and alcohol-fuelled campaign of terror on the streets of Dandenong.
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/our_sudanese_question/ (Don’t pay too much attention to what Bolt says about other things. He tends to be a bit right wing and selective in his evidence and views.)
Contrast that with an Aussie woman who saw a Sudanese woman she knew weeping in a supermarket. The Sudanese came here as refugee after a very hard time in Sudan and refugee camps. The Aussie asked her what was wrong. She replied.
‘Nothing. I’m crying because I’m so happy. I’m surrounded by all this food.’
She was so grateful to be here. And she wasn’t going to cause trouble.
That doesn’t get reported in the press, nor does anything else positive about communities that are targeted as problems.
Even supposedly factual reporting plays the race card.
[b]Fears our crime being imported
Liam Houlihan
March 09, 2008
PEOPLE born overseas committed one in seven of crimes in Victoria last financial year, including a quarter of rapes and one in five murders.[/b]
Exclusive police statistics also show immigrants were behind a quarter of robberies, a fifth of sex assaults, abductions and kidnappings, and 3792 assaults.
But the 2006 Census shows that 1.17 million people, or 26 per cent of Victoria’s population, were born overseas.
The anatomy of crime in Victoria, obtained by the Sunday Herald Sun, shows those born in Somalia, Lebanon and New Zealand had the highest crime-per-population rates in Victoria.
They are followed by Turkish, Vietnamese and then Australian-born criminals.
An analysis of the police statistics and 2006 Census figures shows on average one in nine Victorians born in Somalia committed a crime in the state last year.
One in 20 Lebanon-born Victorians were offenders compared with one in 31 born in Australia.
http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,23342911-2862,00.html
If 26% of the population is born overseas, why highlight in the opening paragraph that they committed 25% of rapes and 20% of murders? Their rape offences are proportionate to their percentage in the community (subject to an absence of data about relative age distributions in local and overseas born communities) and below average for murder. The same applies to the other specified offences, in none of which are they over represented. But the clear import of the opening paragraph and the hysterical headline is that those born overseas commit more crimes than locals. (The figures might be rather different if children born of overseas born parents were included on that side of the ledger, as they tend to be a lot worse than their parents.)
The crime problem isn’t so much with any given national or racial or religious group but with immigration policies which fail to deport problem migrants at the first sign of trouble. Every nation has enough of its own criminals without importing more. My inclination is that migrants, from anywhere, who commit anything more serious than traffic offences should be candidates for deportation and should automatically be deported for any offence involving violence or substantial dishonesty. Get rid of a few for such things and the rest of them will have to choose between staying and behaving themselves in a country that’s a lot better than the one they left or going back to it. But we won’t do it because it might be sending them back to persecution or death, so our concern ensures that they stay here to re-create the shitholes they fled and that we’re too weak to send them back to for doing it.
Theo van Gogh assasination, silencing the free spech in Holland
By Ronald Rovers
[ul]
[li]In the Morning Nov 2 in a busy street in east Amsterdam, a 26-year-old Dutch Moroccan named Mohammed Bouyeri pulled out a gun and shot controversial filmmaker Theo van Gogh, who was riding a bike to his office. Van Gogh hit the ground and stumbled across the street to a nearby building. He didn’t make it. As the Moroccan strode toward him, van Gogh shouted, “We can still talk about it! Don’t do it! Don’t do it.” But the Moroccan didn’t stop. He shot him again, slit van Gogh’s throat and stuck a letter to his chest with a knife. He was slaughtered like an animal, witnesses said. “Cut like a tire,” said one. Van Gogh, the Dutch master’s great-grand-nephew, was 47 years old.[/ul][/li]After shooting van Gogh, Bouyeri fled to a nearby park, where he was arrested after a gunfight with the police. One police officer was wounded and Bouyeri himself was shot in the leg and taken to a police hospital.
http://aussie_news_views.typepad.com/aussie_news_views/images/van_gogh_dead_on_foot_path_1.jpg
The letter pinned to van Gogh’s chest contained accusations aimed not at him but at Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali refugee and liberal parliamentarian, who for years has been fighting for women’s rights in the Netherlands’ widespread Islamic community. Earlier this year, Hirsi Ali and van Gogh had made “Submission,” a short fiction film that was shown on Dutch public television. In the film, a Muslim woman is forced into an arranged marriage, abused by her husband, raped by her uncle and then brutally punished for adultery. Her body, visible through transparent garments, shows painted verses from the Koran. The film, van Gogh said in a TV interview, was "intended to provoke discussion on the position of enslaved Muslim women. It’s directed at the fanatics, the fundamentalists.
Written in Dutch, the bloody letter called Hirsi Ali an “infidel fundamentalist” who “terrorizes Islam” and “marches with the soldiers of evil.” With her “hostilities,” she “unleashed a boomerang and it’s just a matter of time before this boomerang will seal your destiny.” In capital letters it said: “AYAAN HIRSI ALI, YOU WILL SMASH YOURSELF ON ISLAM!” The letter ended with a kind of chant: “I know for sure that you, O America, are going to meet with disaster. I know for sure that you, O Europe, are going to meet with disaster. I know for sure that you, O Holland, are going to meet with disaster.”
Hirsi Ali fled into hiding the day of van Gogh’s murder and the next day published a reaction in the Rotterdam daily, NRC Handelsblad. “I am sad because Holland has lost its innocence,” she wrote. “Theo’s naiveté wasn’t that it [murder] couldn’t happen here, but that it couldn’t happen to him. He said: ‘I am the village idiot, they won’t hurt me.’”
But they did. As part of his fearless bravado, van Gogh underestimated the wrath of his enemies – and perhaps the cultural storm at the core of Dutch society.
The rage directed at van Gogh stems from the uneasy coexistence between the liberal Netherlands and Islamic fundamentalism. For decades, the country has had an open-door policy; it is now home to more than 1 million immigrants, mainly from Islamic countries. In the process of ensuring that Muslim immigrants are treated as equal citizens, the Dutch government has allowed mosques to flourish, some of which preach a radical brand of Islam that runs counter to the Netherlands’ liberal values. It’s this climate of “politically correct” tolerance that incited van Gogh and spurred him to strike back in his writings and films.
In fact, the big-bellied, chain-smoking director had just completed another bomb-throwing film, “06-05.”
It concerns the murder of right-wing politician Pim Fortuyn, a writer, professor and outspoken opinion leader who opposed the Dutch government’s investment in a new fighter jet, the Joint Strike Fighter. Like van Gogh, who called Fortuyn “the divine bald one,” Fortuyn detested the politically correct atmosphere that he said pervaded the country. In the spring of 2002, the flamboyant gay libertarian won Rotterdam local elections by an overwhelming majority, and it looked like he’d do the same in national parliament a few months later. But just before election day, Fortuyn was murdered.
On his Web site, the Healthy Smoker, van Gogh had predicted the assassination: “I suspect Fortuyn will be the first in a line of politically incorrect heretics to be eliminated,” he wrote. “This is what our multicultural society has brought us: a climate of intimidation in which all sorts of goatfuckers can issue their threats freely.” Fortuyn, however, was not shot by a Muslim extremist but by an animal-rights activist for “using Muslims as scapegoats,” as the murderer, a quiet, earnest-looking man, later explained in court.
Notably, van Gogh was murdered exactly 911 days after Fortuyn. Anger toward him had certainly been rising to a boiling point all year. In May, he was slated to act as chairman of a public debate called “Happy Chaos” at the Amsterdam City Theatre. Dyab Abou Jahjah, the leader of a relatively small but provocative Belgian Islamic organization, refused to sit at the table with van Gogh.
One of the organizers claimed Jahjah said, “We’re not taking any more of that pig.” When Jahjah left the stage, van Gogh took the microphone and said: “So this is what some Muslims think of democracy!” After Jahjah left, he said to the crowd: “Why would he be afraid to talk to me? After all, he’s the prophet’s pimp and he has bodyguards.” The debate was canceled.
Needless to say, this didn’t enhance van Gogh’s standing with Dutch Muslims. Nor is the filmmaker’s posthumous reputation likely to improve with the Dutch government and military when “06-05” is released next month. As van Gogh said when he was making the film, “I’ll do my best to seriously insult quite a few people.”
Full story here:
http://dir.salon.com/story/news/feature/2004/11/24/vangogh/index2.html
PK
Your posted article does no more than confirm the well known fact that the world has an endless supply of religious and other nuts, some of whom are Muslims, prepared to kill people they disagree with.
Does that say anything about the attitudes and likely actions of the millions of others who share the same nominal religion?
Is every Muslim like Bouyeri?
Not in my experience, and I work in an area where I pass hundreds of Muslims every day among their community of thousands, and I deal with some of them and they observe and uphold high standards of personal conduct which shame many Westerners. And some of them are crooks, just like every other community and religion.
It’s just as easy to post articles which show that Christians are murdering bastards about to engage in a worldwide slaughter of, say, homosexuals, not to mention inflaming the ‘immigrants are ruining the country’ sentiments. But what does that prove, that matters beyond the individual case?
Christian extremism raises alarm
A trial resumes today for a Slavic man charged with killing a gay man in Sacramento, Calif.
By Ben Arnoldy | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
from the January 4, 2008 editionSacramento, Calif. - A hate-crime trial reconvenes Friday in a case that’s dividing Sacramento and drawing attention from organizations that monitor extremists.
Alex Shevchenko has been arraigned for a hate crime tied to the assault and eventual death of Satender Singh in July. According to prosecutors, Mr. Shevchenko and Andrey Vusik taunted Mr. Singh in a park because they thought he was gay. Mr. Vusik eventually threw a punch that toppled Singh, dashing his head, they charge.
Gay leaders in Sacramento say the incident followed several years of escalating tensions with some Slavic immigrants.
“The gut feeling of the [gay] community is that preaching among the local Russian evangelical community is breeding hate and that something would happen. And Satender was the something that happened,” says Ed Bennett, a gay Democratic activist.
While Slavic leaders say their community is being unfairly scapegoated for legitimate political protests and deeply held religious beliefs, some monitors warn that an emerging group called the Watchmen on the Walls may be fomenting a dangerous atmosphere within the ranks of Slavic immigrants here.
“This group has engaged in extremely vicious antigay propaganda, and oftentimes it is that kind of propaganda that is taken by hate criminals as permission to go ahead and attack,” says Mark Potok, editor of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s “Intelligence Report,” which tracks hate crimes nationwide.
The international Watchman on the Walls emerged within the past couple of years, forged by two longtime antigay activists – Scott Lively and Kenneth Hutcherson of the US – and two newer Slavic leaders, one in Sacramento and one in the Baltic nation of Latvia.
Mr. Lively has a following among some Slavic protesters here with his controversial book, “The Pink Swastika,” which argues that homosexuals played a formative role in Nazism.
The Watchmen is a Christian movement that doesn’t teach hate or seek out violent followers, says Mr. Hutcherson, who is a pastor in Washington State. “God’s word does not allow us to hate. It tells us to stand up for righteousness and call a sin a sin,” he says. He rejects, however, the idea of loving the sinner while hating the sin. “The Bible says when a sinner will not separate himself from a sin then he is condemned with it. The one thing I’m trying to do is get heterosexuals out of the closet. We are the majority,” he says.
Videos of Watchmen conferences abroad suggest some leaders are less modulated, and their audience less against violence. One video shows Lively giving a version of Singh’s killing different from reported facts, including the notion that Singh was undressing in front of children. The audience cheered twice as Lively recounted the punch and the death of Singh – a reaction Lively rebuked, saying: “We don’t want homosexuals to be killed. We want them to be saved.”
“What sets them apart is the rhetoric that they use,” says Jim Burroway, editor of the Box Turtle Bulletin, which monitors gay hate groups. “They use the imagery of war, of us being in a war against them, of militancy. They really do speak the rhetoric of theocracy,” he says.
Monitors like Mr. Burroway and Mr. Potok claim no direct connection between the Watchmen and Singh’s death.
“As things stand right now, we certainly aren’t contending that the Watchmen on the Walls are behind the killing,” says Potok. But talk can have consequences, he adds, and Watchmen views are spread in Sacramento by two founders: Alexey Ledyaev, a pastor from Latvia, and Vlad Kusakin, host of a Russian-language radio show.
Confrontations between the gay and Slavic communities have erupted only within the past few years. Some menacing protesters now wear Watchmen T-shirts, says Nate Feldman, a gay activist who’s gathering film footage of the protesters. Mr. Feldman says that during the 2006 pride parade in Sacramento he was spat on and shoved by a group of antigay demonstrators.
Other gays and lesbians tell of protests held outside private homes or protesters recognizing them and rattling off their names and addresses. This holiday season, protesters sang Christmas carols outside major retailers while displaying and handing out antigay messages.
Slavic leaders estimate that their Sacramento community numbers around 100,000. They are mainly ethnic Ukranians, Moldovans, and Russians – many of whom gained entrance to the US as Christian asylum seekers after the Soviet Union collapsed. The Russians tend to be Baptist, the Ukranians, Pentecostal.
Many grew up persecuted in the Soviet Union, watching as school officials slighted their children’s progress. Some now feel that US educators look down on their Christian children, say Slavic leaders.
Several Slavic leaders including Roman Romaso, executive director of the Slavic Assistance Center, say the street protesters are a small minority.
“As much as I know Watchmen on the Walls I don’t agree with them because they call out people in the street and some are not acting adequately,” says Mr. Romaso. “My understanding of how to fight is to work with the legislature and build coalitions.”
One gay Russian-speaker – who requests anonymity for personal safety – expresses dismay that the death of Singh hasn’t galvanized more moderate Slavic voices. The “mythologizing” of gays as the enemy continues in the local Russian-language media, he says.
“It’s all about gays and their agenda. Gays are some evil group that is so organized. I didn’t know that I belonged to this very powerful group of people,” he says. He acknowledges that having Russian-speakers come out of the closet would help change views. “But who is going to do that? I would expose myself to so much hate from people who don’t know me.”
http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/0104/p03s01-ussc.html
Well, here’s some lovely “Christians.” You see, these people from the Fred Phelps and his gaggle of white trash Baptist Church of idiots protest at US military funerals to CELEBRATE the death of US servicemen in the War in Iraq as some sort of God’s punishment of the US for being a “homosexually tolerant” country…
(No, I am not making this up!) Does this have a wider implication on Christianity then?
Well, it suggests that Christians, apart from being unfeeling bastards exulting at others’ deaths and misery as if someone had just flown a plane into a big building as a great victory against their enemy, the Great American Satan:
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Support God’s hatred of the USA (So much for ‘in God in we trust’.)
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And therefore are traitors to the USA.
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Thank God for dead US soldiers.
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And therefore are traitors to the USA
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See God as the enemy.
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Therefore God is the enemy of the USA
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Know God supports the NRA and has a celestial scope aimed at Uncle Sam.
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Thereofore God is the enemy of the USA. (But not the NRA?)
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Know that God hates lots of things, especially tears of dead US soldiers’ loved ones.
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Therefore God is the enemy of the USA.
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Are a bit confused about exactly what God supports and hates and about what He and they think, assuming they think. Or even have brains.
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Are stupid enough to stand in a roadway, where some of God’s American enemies might show them what a well driven American V8 can do, never mind IED’s.
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Overall, are just plain fucking stupid. And dangerous. Like Muslim and other religious nutcases who don’t represent the mainstream in any religion.
Our tolerance will bite us in the ass in case of the muslims. Name just a single muslim country that is tolerant towards anything from our jewish/christian western civilization besides technogadgets and allows for example freedom of religion or speech. And this is not a coincidental correlation, their culture is based on their faith and thus their societies with everything that comes with it. Christianity is the most persecuted religion on earth, guess who does most of that.
It’s a grave mistake to import and tolerate that culture as long as those societies haven’t developed a similar intrinsic level of tolerance themselves. The matter of fact is that Islam is the most violent and intolerant religion on earth both by definition in their holy book and in the practical reality of it, there is simply no way to ignore that.
A nice little anecdote would be one from around where I live. The city of Wiesbaden helped muslims build a mosque if they signed a contract in which they promised to abide by the basic law of germany (which is outrageous enough for me that this isn’t automatically a given). So they partially financed the thing and helped with permissions etc. and guess what happens as soon as the thing is finished: They import a preacher of hate and now the mosk needs being observed by the federal office for protection of the constitution. And unfortunatly that isn’t just a single coincident. If I were in charge I would have demolished the place immediatly for breaking the contract and shipped the 300 members of the society that built the mosque and invited the priest back to where they belong.
And btw. comparing christian nutjobs to muslim nutjobs is comparing apples to violent, genocidal, suicide bombing zucchinis.
Our tolerance will bite us in the ass in case of the muslims.
Already did it.
The rage and the pride, reflections about western society and radical Islam.
By Oriana Fallaci ( La Rabbia e l’Orgoglio in Italian originally published in “Il corriere della sera” the newspaper of the evening, Milano )
You ask me to speak, this time. You ask me to break, at least on this occasion, my self imposed silence. Which I have imposed on myself for years in order not to be sucked into the fray. And I am doing it. Because I have heard that even in Italy some are rejoicing, like I saw the Palestinians rejoice on TV the other night. “Victory, Victory!”. Men, women, children. Admitting that one who is capable of such an act can be defined a Man, Woman or Child. I have heard that some fat cats, politicians or so-called politicians, intellectuals or so-called intellectuals, and other individuals that do not deserve the classification of being a citizen, have been acting substantially in the same manner as those in Gaza. They say: [COLOR=darkred]“Good, the Americans deserve it!”[/COLOR]. And I am very, very, very angry. With a cold furious anger, lucid and rational.
An anger that eliminates every obstacle, every indulgence. That compels me to respond to them and above all to spit on them. I spit on them. As angry as I, the American poet Maya Angelou yesterday roared: “Be angry. It’s good to be angry, it’s healthy.” I don’t know if it is healthy for me to be angry, but I know it is not going to be healthy for them, the admirers of Osama Bin Laden, and for those who express understanding or sympathy or solidarity for him. You have lit a fuse which for too long has been harboring the desire to explode. You will see. You also ask me to tell how I have lived this Apocalypse. To give my story. I will therefore start with that.
Full article here (a must read):
Um, if you go back to the crusades, you’ll find examples of Muslim tolerance of Christians and Jews in the “Holy Lands,” until the Christian hordes came in and massacred entire cities…
BTW, that’s how the West regained much of its scientific knowledge, art and culture after the fall of the Roman Empires…
And I think Christians, or at least those raised under the pretensions of it, can be just as fine of a bunch of killers as Islamics are…
We need look no further that the Holocaust, the (Atheist and rational) Red terror on Stalin’s purges, those killed by bombing and Western led sanctions, and McVeigh’s destruction of the Oklahoma Federal Building for that…
And I think your debate is devolving into separate subjects here. Bad immigration policies and the overall beliefs of Islam. But please don’t tye the latter into some hegemonic conspiracy of the former…
That was a thousand years ago and after the territory was conquered by muslims in the first place. The significance for today is exactly 0, like the amount of muslim tolerance towards anyone of different faith today in the Dar al-Islam. And you should really read more about the period prior to the crusades if you believe in the muslim tolerance and christian aggression theory.
The “lost” knowledge was preserved by scholars from the eastern christian churches in byzantium long before the muslims conquered the region and they would have continued to do so even if the muslims hadn’t conquered (rather violently) the region.
It were also mostly those orthodox christians who translated the stuff into arabic. That’s a part of the story that’s often conveniently left out. So the overall achievement of the arabs was to carry the translated texts to spain where other christian translated it back. Much like the “arabic” numbers, which happen to come from india.
It isn’t devolving since I pointed out that you cannot separate the subjects. The overall beliefs of Islam are the very foundation for those societies and everything that happens today whether in africa, europe, the middle east or asia. We import guaranteed future trouble since islam cannot be integrated into western societies without abandoning much of what defines the latter and thus ultimatly destroying it.
I have btw. the impression that you hardly know anything about the “overall beliefs of Islam” and simply defend it because it is being critizised.
Assuming that you’ve correctly identified the problem, what’s the solution?
And btw. comparing christian nutjobs to muslim nutjobs is comparing apples to violent, genocidal, suicide bombing zucchinis.
The Incas might have a different view, if the Spanish had left any after their Christian crusade.
Get the people with the dangerous attitudes back to their country of origin.
We have the technical means to identify them and the rest is a 30$ airplane ticket away.
It makes no sense to allow a culture with an inherent pretence for domination to form small but growing enclaves in our society if you want long term peace and stability for everyone. Do you believe it is coincidental that 95% of the violent hotspots on earth are in the frontier areas of the Dar-al Islam. Well I don’t and I honestly don’t understand how other hobbyhistorians who like me should be used to think in larger timeframes can’t smell the trouble there.
That’s a couple of hundret years ago and like the crusades bears no significance for today. And the inca religion would be another classical example of a not so suitable religion for a democracy, with all the human sacrifice and stuff.
I’m more or less in favour of that in theory, but in practice how do we identify people with ‘dangerous attitudes’?
How do we define ‘dangerous attitudes’?
I’d say it includes putting out the sort of arrogant Islamic (and predominantly Arab, which is another part of the problem) ‘Aussie girls deserve to be raped because they’re sluts and infiedels so, nudge nudge wink wink, it’s alright for Lebanese Muslim boys to rape them’ shit which is routinely preached in certain mosques here, e.g.
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/column_backing_a_bigot/ and enthusiastically practised by some of their adherents http://www.abc.net.au/am/stories/s699823.htm
I don’t know anyone, including me, who isn’t prepared to contribute to a plane ticket to anywhere that’s not here for those so called sheikhs, and to put a bullet in the neck of the bastards who gave practical effect to their contempt for women outside their own religion.
But what about the thousands in their communities who endorse their views? I reckon they’re by far the bigger threat. Deporting their idiot leaders will just reinforce that community’s antipathy towards the non-Islamic community and confirm their paranoid belief that they’re somehow being victimised by the wider community they chose to join for reasons which defy understanding if it’s so alien to their primitive attitudes and conduct. So just getting rid of a few prominent dickheads will make things worse rather than better.
Where are the objective grounds to get rid of their supporters?
Once we start making attitudes and expressing offensive opinions a deportable crime, it’s a short step to further political thought control and assaults on freedom of speech for what governments see as risks to them. We end up with McCarthyism writ large.
The reasons for getting rid of these clowns are also reasons for eroding our democratic rights, while the reasons for not getting rid of them are the reasons that ensure that people who are opposed to our democratic rights will be able to continue as a cancer in our societies.
As I’ve often said, the problem with democracy is that it has the seeds of its own destruction in the values it upholds and practises. So what do we want to do? Start undermining our democratic rights ourselves to get rid of these clowns, or sit back and let them undermine our democracy while we uphold their right to do it? Seems to me that we’re buggered whatever we do. Unless our democracies are strong enough to accommodate and resist such threats, which we’ll be able to judge in about a century, or less.
Practical implementation is of course open for debate, but that’s the point, it isn’t even being debated, it’s simply ignored.
A fair point.
And guess why?
Here, anyway. Because it suits each of our own political parties able to form a government to curry favour (no pun intended) with certain ethnic groups because their leaders can deliver the community votes that swing a seat.
Once elected by that community, no politician is going to go against it.
Most politicians are craven when it comes to risking their electoral success and they’re all unwilling to risk upsetting a minority which might deliver them electoral success. So they shut up.
So, again, democracy works against its own interests in maintaining a democracy.
Also, add in bullshit like religious and racial tolerance legislation which takes political correctness to strasopherically stupid levels and provides religious zealots with a new playground to beat each other over the head about religious disputes which have no place in the courts or anywhere but churches and among whoever chooses to follow a religion.
http://www.theage.com.au/news/National/Church-found-to-have-vilified-Muslims/2004/12/17/1102787256016.html
http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=5362
We end up with politicians and news media cowed by the extreme reactions to, say, the Danish cartoons so that very few politicians and people in public life are willing to make a stand on what, privately, just about everyone sees as an important issue that needs some clear and decisive action.
Still, what can you expect in a legislatively prescribed pluralistic, non-discriminatory, equal opportunity, multi-cultural, religiously and racial tolerant society like mine?
This: I know of a teacher (Anglo) in a government school with a large Islamic / Arab enrolment who ended up facing disciplinary proceedings after remonstrating strongly with Arab boys who were loudly exultant in the school yard and classrooms on the day of 9/11 (She objected to their joy and dancing and so on at innocent people being killed.). Their parents complained to the school about her being racist and the headmaster (Anglo) initiated disciplinary proceedings. Makes sense, doesn’t it. :rolleyes:
Who do we blame for that? Primitive Arabs / Muslims who prefer to see their problems as caused by the West rather than the corrupt medieval regimes which run their nations, or supposedly educated and rational and balanced Westerners? I blame the latter, at the school level and at every level of government where people need to wake up to themselves and say in some cases: No. This is unacceptable behaviour. If you don’t like it, fuck off to some country where you’ll fit in.
And, guess what? They don’t fit in to those countries either. Some of our biggest advocates for bin Laden etc actually migrated here because we gave them much more freedom to practise their version of Islam than in their home countries, such as this tool, http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/arrested-a-man-apart-who-fought-to-stay-in-australia/2005/11/08/1131407637648.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdul_Nacer_Benbrika
However, this gets back to the point Nick made about immigration policies being the problem.
We should never have let that prick in (Abu Bakr / Benbrika, not Nick :D).
Which raises a wider issue about why it is that the West takes in people who are refugees from specific conflicts when they should be accommodated in nations with similar cultures in the region. Then again, if you look at the way most of those places in those regions treat their own people (e.g. Sudan, Zimbabwe, Algeria. Burma, Pakistan) you can understand why anyone with a bit of dash would want to get out.
What I don’t understand is why they want to turn the place they’ve come to for refuge into a new version of the shithole they fled for a better life.
Actually, there are small Christian and even Jewish communities throughout the Muslim world even today. They are harassed in Iran and such places, but generally tolerated. And why should I read more about the period of before the Crusades if it has “0” significance today? Will I find more information how on inherently evil all Muslims are?
As far as your “theory” statement, there is no “theory” being forwarded. Both sides were intolerant and aggressive once the fighting began. But one can hardly contrast the moral codes of either army, nor the political and economic actions that drove them, as in any way holy. After all, it was Christian Europeans that gathered an army of children, and had the Pope consecrate them, as they were sent to the Middle East again, in order to get rid of them and enrich slave traders?
The Crusades are very much present in this debate, because it is often sited as justification for Islamic terror. If you think that there is no bearing on today’s situation, then I guessed you missed the political fallout when George Bush proclaimed a “crusade” against al Qaeda, which is widely seen as a very poor choice of words. The truth is that when the few extremist groups like al Qaeda or The Muslim Brotherhood refer back to this “golden age” as the prime mover of their movements, they are often fabricating a past that never really existed to begin with. They are masking their stated goals of returning to traditional Islam with what is radical, revisionist Islam…
The “lost” knowledge was preserved by scholars from the eastern christian churches in byzantium long before the muslims conquered the region and they would have continued to do so even if the muslims hadn’t conquered (rather violently) the region.
But the Muslims used the knowledge and were inherently superior in mathematics and knowledge. That’s why they were bandaging their wounded while the Crusaders cauterized their wounds…
It were also mostly those orthodox christians who translated the stuff into arabic. That’s a part of the story that’s often conveniently left out. So the overall achievement of the arabs was to carry the translated texts to spain where other christian translated it back. Much like the “arabic” numbers, which happen to come from india.
Of course, but that doesn’t mean that there were no Muslim scholars, nor does it mean that they didn’t appreciate knowledge…Certainly more than many of the illiterates populating Europe at the time…
It isn’t devolving since I pointed out that you cannot separate the subjects. The overall beliefs of Islam are the very foundation for those societies and everything that happens today whether in africa, europe, the middle east or asia.
How in any way are Muslim societies in Africa similar to the ones in say the Pacific rim. That’s a pretty silly, conspiratorial statement actually. You’re denying that culture, economics, history, etc. There is no essential bind that Islam provides. If anything, the religion is rather divisive. Do I really have to explain the history or how Western colonialists essentially redrew the map of the Middle East in nation-states that have created basket cases like Iraq? The Shiite-Sunni-Druze schisms etc.? Or that Muslim societies are much more likely to go to war against each other and the the vast majority of victims in Islamic inspired terrorism are actually other Muslims (one of the reasons that the US gov’t stopped reported the numbers killed worldwide in terror attacks - because they skyrocketed after the breakdown [post-Invasion] of Iraq)…
We import guaranteed future trouble since islam cannot be integrated into western societies without abandoning much of what defines the latter and thus ultimatly destroying it.
But it is! In the US, and Canada to an extent. We simply do not have the cultural problems you have…
I have btw. the impression that you hardly know anything about the “overall beliefs of Islam” and simply defend it because it is being critizised.
LOL Well, I’m no scholar, as I have little use for organized religion in general. But between the two of us, I think we know who has referred to the “Prophet” Mohammad as a pedophile, and have pointed out irrationalities and contradictions or the Koran. But, can’t we say much the same thing about the Bible? You know as well as I do that one can cherrypick passages of the Koran in order to make Muslims look twisted and inherently evil, or post photos at protests. We can do that with most religious texts actually. The fundamental ignorance here is Western, you see, what you often attribute as religiously inspired idiocy of Muslims is actually cultural. The burka for instance was around before Mohammad, and is more a cultural item than a religious one (there’s nothing about it in the Koran, and a passage basically instructing women not to flash their tits seems to be the basis of it). And suicide bombing is actually prohibited by the Koran, which has in itself become a twisted ruthless vision. We can even talk about the 72-virgins waiting for the martyred, and how that is actually based on 72-raisins waiting for the “martyrs.”
Yes, and no.
Indonesia is the largest, by population, Islamic nation in the world and also the most moderate.
However, extremist elements are doing their best to change that, such as Abu Bakar Bashir (wiki will do for a summary on this slimy vicious little cunt who has been up to his neck in a war against everyone who doesn’t share his version of Islam) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Bakar_Bashir
The common feature outside a few places like Pakistan or Afghanistan where Islam is endemically linked to local forms of primitivism is that Arab influence generates extremism.
Generally from Saudi Arabia and its Wahabbi version of Islam and the endless stream of dollars which flow from it.
Meanwhile Saudi Arabia is supported by the US, among others, because it’s chockers with oil.
While Hamas in its current form is largely a Frankenstein’s monster unintentionally created by Israel trying to be clever.
So, in the end, who is really underwriting the export of virulent forms of Islam while supposedly fighting a war against Islamic terror?
Well then check the stats how the minorities developed in the last decades in those areas. An example would be turkey, 20% of the population was christian in 1920 (even after the armenian genocide) today it’s less than 0.2%. Religious minorities are being harassed in every imaginable way in every single country with a muslim majority. The radicalisation up to violence level might be a rather new development (though it’s more a wave pattern throughout history) but that’s how the islamic world present itself today.
But there was only a one sided aggressiveness before the fighting in the crusades began. I’ll give you the intolerant and immoral on both sides though.
Ok, it is present in the general debate, but that doesn’t really make it a valid point.
Didn’t say there weren’t smart and educated people who also happened to be muslims back then, but eversince they pretty much fell back to stoneage levels compared to the western world.
The point is this “muslims saved ancient knowledge otherwise lost forever” is simply stupid propaganda. There was a general downward gradient in knowledge from persia and the eastern mediterranean to the northwest of europe and the muslims stumbled upon those gems while swinging the sword to spread their faith. All those areas of knowledge were christian btw. and didn’t really choose to become islamic territory.
I don’t deny other factors, they are of course also contributing to certain developments but since you asked, the similarities are based in the hadits, the koran and the sharia. And how does the fact that the different denominations even fight each other help us? As you might have noticed in iraq for example, the common enemy there is the christian minority. While they might not agree on certain aspects of their own religion they do agree on that with overwhelming majority.
That’s your current perception with a population of about half a percent. And Canada already starts experiencing quite the same “cultural problem” as we do in europe since the muslims there already accumulated enough numbers.
Did you know that the koran gives explicit instructions how to behave in minority situations. They’re supposed to behave as long as they’re a distant minority but under no circumstance allow the social system of the non islamic majority population to ever really become their own.
I am no scholar either and I share your general approach when it comes to religion. I only started reading on the topic a few months back and I did and do so with as much objectivity as possible like I do it with historical documents. But what I found so far is that much of the views held by westerners about the generally peaceful attitude of that religion is wishful thinking. You don’t need to cherrypick either. 200 out of 6000 Verses are a direct call to violence against mostly people of other faiths, preferably jews. That’s more than three percent. And the koran doesn’t use allegories, quite contrary to the bible. The violent parts of the old testaments are usually exactly that.
You’ll have a hard time to find that many violent parts in the old testament anyway which is not even the crucial part for christianity. And you won’t find a single call for violence in the new testament since jesus preached the exact opposite. Christianity and Islam are not even remotely comparable on a theoretical theological basis. And todays reality is a reflection of that fact. That wouldn’t even be a problem to me if Islam would inherently restrict itself to the spiritual world like every other religion. But Islam has explicit and unalterable social and political ambitions which makes it quite different from any other religion still practiced today.
Now I don’t say that all or even a majority of muslims are bad people. But to me that isn’t a because of but more of an in spite of thing. Particularly here in europe, where the good people I know (those who actually integrated into our society) are as much muslim as I am christian, meaning not practicing any religion, more born into the background, but that’s it.
But Mohammed was a pedophile, he married a six year old and f****** her when she was nine, that’s a historic fact.
Just as a general consideration, how much of what Islam is accused of is more related to ethnic customs and practices, whether it be ‘honour killings’ (there’s a joke!) or female genital mutilation (the male form being standard in Islam and Judaism and therefore not a problem, least of all in the West where rabid child protection laws still exempt Jews, and by default Muslims, from this barbaric religious mutilation :rolleyes:) or arranged marriages with under age children (which isn’t uncommon in societies that have never heard of Islam http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/03/18/2192182.htm?site=nt , not to mention various Indian and Pakistani Middle Eastern cultures or, apparently, even in the good old USA http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/03/18/2192182.htm?site=nt ).
I’m putting this forward because a lot of the Western hostility to Muslims springs from what are seen in the West as the quite primitive attitudes and practices they have to various things, but it’s always debatable whether those attitudes and practices spring from Islam or from ethnic cultures. There’s endless debate about it from both Koranic scholars and ethnic scholars, which always leads to the conclusion that you can argue to any result if it suits your purpose.
I’m old enough to remember similar hostility to Italians, Balts, dagoes, reffos and so on who came to Australia after WWII and who were held in contempt by most Aussies for their strange cuisine and crazy protection of their daughters from the ever present threat of rape, but they’ve all settled down and we’re on the third or fourth generation of those people who in general have fitted in to, and in various ways modified for its benefit, the wider community.
So, while I’m all in favour of getting rid of dangerous scum, I think it’s always dangerous to do to it on the basis of religion or whatever.
Now, just theoretically speaking, what do you do if a hypothetical religion would pose a threat to you and your way of living by completely negating its right of existence?