Muslim uproar - (Merged)

[VipertheSniper]

An Italian Nun was killed in the capital of Somalia today. Peace-loving religion my ass.

[scandium]

Late to the show here, but if I have this right so far... the Pope made some comments about Islam that offended the Muslim Community... and the Subsim community is offended that they are so easily offended. err ok... and the beat goes on.

[XabbaRus]

No Scandium the pope gave a lecture and a portion of it was misinterpreted as a general attack on Islam and there have been protests around the world some of which involved burning two churches and we are just saying how we are fed up with them getting offended at everyone who says anything about Islam.

Read the lecture you can find it on the BBC news website and then you'll see what the fuss is about.

[Skybird]

Originally Posted by scandium

Late to the show here, but if I have this right so far... the Pope made some comments about Islam that offended the Muslim Community... and the Subsim community is offended that they are so easily offended. err ok... and the beat goes on.

Parallel to Muslim actions of the last 48 hours: does that statement of yours mean subsim-community has one Mullah-killing, two mosque burnings and a call for murdering the Imam of Mekkah free now...?

They are already pushing further. This morning the Muslim Brotherhood said they found the comments of Benedict sufficient (as if we depend on them founding anything sufficient...). Just some hours later they have changed their mind and said, they now wanted more apology.

Again.

Central commitee of Muslims in Germany called it "a beginning of a reasonable dialogue". I thought we had that since the early or mid-sixties...?! What have they done in all those decades, in all those meetings? Dreaming? And while the church bend more and more towards them, and kept it's lips sealed about hundreds of thousnads of Catholics being murdered by Muslims in progroms in the last deacdes, islam itself did not give an inch, and only demanded more and more and more and called that a dialogue...!?

Again.

Speech held on Thursday. First hysteria on Tuesday. Today is Sunday. After five days - still not a single Muslims explained in reason and argument into any microphone or camera what it actually is by what Benedict should have offended Islam by his own deeds and words. They only say "He offended us. We were offended." But they cannot explain in which way, by what, how it worked. Anyone else here who doesn't know why he is doing what he is doing?

-----

Kid:"Wanna candies, mama!"
Mom:"No candies we have in the house currently, son, and you already spend all your pocket money to buy some yourself. and speak in complete sentences, will you, you're old enough."
Kid:"But wanna have! Wanna have! Bäähhhh! Wannaaaaa hääääveee! buhuhhuuuu."
Mom: "Shut up now, try to behave like a big boy."
Kid:"Cäääändies! Giimmeeeehuhuuhuuhuhu! Wanna hääääve! Bääähähähääää! Bähähäh!" (stomping feet.)
Mom: (rolling eyes, mumbling)"How did I deserve this child?" Then hiding behind the door while kid is throwing kitchen knifes at her.

[The Avon Lady]

Originally Posted by scandium

Late to the show here

Understatement.

[scandium]

Originally Posted by The Avon Lady

Understatement.

*shrug* I stopped paying attention to the Pope when I was 12 and Jihad Watch isn't part of my daily reading (nor even my weekly reading). I could pretty much care less about fundies of any stripe - but I do still find the fear and loathing of the big bad Muslim boogeyman, and the out of all proportion attention it gets, moderately amusing.

To use Skybird's child analogy, the best response IMHO is to ignore it, since attention is exactly what it craves, and by rewarding bad behaviour with attention (whether positive or negative) you merely encourage the undesired behaviour; a protest isn't terribly effective if its ignored completely, however its very effective if it gathers headlines and people talk about it as though it actually mattered.

By the way, this is not the same as ignoring a "problem", since the underlying issues and tensions that these protests are merely symptomatic of have always been ignored and I'd be surprised if they're ever properly addressed in any of our lifetimes.

[Yahoshua]

"....the best response IMHO is to ignore it...."

[The Avon Lady]

Originally Posted by Yahoshua

[Skybird]

Why weakening one's own stand by making bad comparisons? Islam does not so much compare to fascism, which is very much specific an ideolgy for a certain way of thinking deriving from the context of time and place (Nazi-era, Italy, Germany). Islam as the ideology that focusses and centres on Muhammad and uses terms and concepts and thought patterns that did not fall down from heaven to earth but that exclusively derive from Muhammad's sly thinking (that's why I call Islam by precise definition: Muhammadanism) is no offspring of these, but it surely falls under the definition of totalitarianism (like fascism does, too).

We do ourselves no favour by mixing up terminology and offering the other side a chance for counterattack and/or distraction for free by that, just to have a catchy phrase like "Islamo-facism" at hand. It is Islamo-totalitarianism, not fascism.

Originally Posted by The dialogue that never was

WHY ISLAM MUST BE CONSIDERED AS TOTALITARIANISM

The MS Encarta 2005, German version, defines totalitarianism like this:

And:

Islam, understood in the meaning as laid out in the Quran and the example set by Muhammad’s life, fulfils these conditions.

And the Wikipedia defines Islam like this:

Again, Islam, understood in the meaning as laid out in the Quran and the example set by Muhammad’s life, fulfils these conditions.

The theory of totalitarianism is under criticism for summarizing too many different regimes of different ages and cultures under the same general typology. Some of these arguments are valid, imo, but nevertheless I think many of them are not valid with regard to Islam. I am aware of this dispute around the term, but for the purpose of this essay I refuse to go deeper into it. And honestly said, some of this criticism appears to be hairsplitting only anyway, in an attempt to raise Western understanding and tolerance for brutal regimes of the past and present.

http://people.freenet.de/Skybird/DialogueWithIslam.rtf

[Skybird]

Originally Posted by The Avon Lady

Nibelungenlieder...

[Takeda Shingen]

Originally Posted by Skybird

Nibelungenlieder...

Did someone call for our resident Wagnerian?

Alberich, from Das Rheingold, Scene III. Very apt for Islamic terrorism:

Die in linder Lüfte Weh'n
da oben ihr lebt,
lacht und liebt:
mit goldner Faust
euch Göttliche fang' ich mir alle!
Wie ich der Liebe abgesagt,
alles, was lebt,
soll ihr entsagen!
Mit Golde gekirrt,
nach Gold nur sollt ihr noch gieren!
Auf wonnigen Höh'n,
in seligem Weben
wiegt ihr euch;
den Schwarzalben
verachtet ihr ewigen Schwelger!
Habt acht!
Habt acht!
Denn dient ihr Männer
erst meiner Macht,
eure schmucken Frau'n,
die mein Frei'n verschmäht,
sie zwingt zur Lust sich der Zwerg,
lacht Liebe ihm nicht!
Haha, haha!
Habt ihr's gehört?
Habt acht!
Habt acht vor dem nächtlichen Heer,
entsteigt des Niblungen Hort
aus stummer Tiefe zu Tag!

[Skybird]

I was thinking more on the phase of the story when Etzel's hall already stood in flames and the knights of Burgund killed ten Huns for every one of their own getting killed... - "Das ist der Nibelungen Treu..." Or in modern language: Semper fi.

Edit: just red it a second and a third time. "Very apt for Islamic terrorism." You are right, Tak.

[Skybird]

That says it all:

Der Vorsitzende des türkischen Direktorats für Religiöse Angelegenheiten, Ali Bardakoglu, bezeichnete Benedikts Klarstellung als indirekt und unzureichend. Der Papst habe am Sonntag nur die Reaktionen in der muslimischen Welt bedauert, nicht aber, das 600 Jahre alte Zitat überhaupt verwendet zu haben

from: http://www.faz.net/s/Rub28FC768942F3...~Scontent.html

The chairman of the Turkish directorship for Religious Affairs, Ali Bardagoklu, said that Benededict's clarification only was indirect, and insufficient. The pope only had regretted the reaction of the muslim world, but not to even have used that 600 year old quotation.


Thank you for making the point this all is about so very much clear for everyone, Mr. Bardagoklu. The point is: stop thinking free and speaking free, and start thinking and speaking Islamic, and censor history so that Islam can only appear in the brightest of light, even if it is not true or deserved.

[The Avon Lady]

Dear Scandium:

Head-in-the-Sand Liberals
Western civilization really is at risk from Muslim extremists.
By Sam Harris, SAM HARRIS is the author of "The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason." His next book, "Letter to a Christian Nation," will be published this week by Knopf. samharris.org.

September 18, 2006


TWO YEARS AGO I published a book highly critical of religion, "The End of Faith." In it, I argued that the world's major religions are genuinely incompatible, inevitably cause conflict and now prevent the emergence of a viable, global civilization. In response, I have received many thousands of letters and e-mails from priests, journalists, scientists, politicians, soldiers, rabbis, actors, aid workers, students — from people young and old who occupy every point on the spectrum of belief and nonbelief.

This has offered me a special opportunity to see how people of all creeds and political persuasions react when religion is criticized. I am here to report that liberals and conservatives respond very differently to the notion that religion can be a direct cause of human conflict.

This difference does not bode well for the future of liberalism.

Perhaps I should establish my liberal bone fides at the outset. I'd like to see taxes raised on the wealthy, drugs decriminalized and homosexuals free to marry. I also think that the Bush administration deserves most of the criticism it has received in the last six years — especially with respect to its waging of the war in Iraq, its scuttling of science and its fiscal irresponsibility.

But my correspondence with liberals has convinced me that liberalism has grown dangerously out of touch with the realities of our world — specifically with what devout Muslims actually believe about the West, about paradise and about the ultimate ascendance of their faith.

On questions of national security, I am now as wary of my fellow liberals as I am of the religious demagogues on the Christian right.

This may seem like frank acquiescence to the charge that "liberals are soft on terrorism." It is, and they are.

A cult of death is forming in the Muslim world — for reasons that are perfectly explicable in terms of the Islamic doctrines of martyrdom and jihad. The truth is that we are not fighting a "war on terror." We are fighting a pestilential theology and a longing for paradise.

This is not to say that we are at war with all Muslims. But we are absolutely at war with those who believe that death in defense of the faith is the highest possible good, that cartoonists should be killed for caricaturing the prophet and that any Muslim who loses his faith should be butchered for apostasy.

Unfortunately, such religious extremism is not as fringe a phenomenon as we might hope. Numerous studies have found that the most radicalized Muslims tend to have better-than-average educations and economic opportunities.

Given the degree to which religious ideas are still sheltered from criticism in every society, it is actually possible for a person to have the economic and intellectual resources to build a nuclear bomb — and to believe that he will get 72 virgins in paradise. And yet, despite abundant evidence to the contrary, liberals continue to imagine that Muslim terrorism springs from economic despair, lack of education and American militarism.

At its most extreme, liberal denial has found expression in a growing subculture of conspiracy theorists who believe that the atrocities of 9/11 were orchestrated by our own government. A nationwide poll conducted by the Scripps Survey Research Center at Ohio University found that more than a third of Americans suspect that the federal government "assisted in the 9/11 terrorist attacks or took no action to stop them so the United States could go to war in the Middle East;" 16% believe that the twin towers collapsed not because fully-fueled passenger jets smashed into them but because agents of the Bush administration had secretly rigged them to explode.

Such an astonishing eruption of masochistic unreason could well mark the decline of liberalism, if not the decline of Western civilization. There are books, films and conferences organized around this phantasmagoria, and they offer an unusually clear view of the debilitating dogma that lurks at the heart of liberalism: Western power is utterly malevolent, while the powerless people of the Earth can be counted on to embrace reason and tolerance, if only given sufficient economic opportunities.

I don't know how many more engineers and architects need to blow themselves up, fly planes into buildings or saw the heads off of journalists before this fantasy will dissipate. The truth is that there is every reason to believe that a terrifying number of the world's Muslims now view all political and moral questions in terms of their affiliation with Islam. This leads them to rally to the cause of other Muslims no matter how sociopathic their behavior. This benighted religious solidarity may be the greatest problem facing civilization and yet it is regularly misconstrued, ignored or obfuscated by liberals.

Given the mendacity and shocking incompetence of the Bush administration — especially its mishandling of the war in Iraq — liberals can find much to lament in the conservative approach to fighting the war on terror. Unfortunately, liberals hate the current administration with such fury that they regularly fail to acknowledge just how dangerous and depraved our enemies in the Muslim world are.

Recent condemnations of the Bush administration's use of the phrase "Islamic fascism" are a case in point. There is no question that the phrase is imprecise — Islamists are not technically fascists, and the term ignores a variety of schisms that exist even among Islamists — but it is by no means an example of wartime propaganda, as has been repeatedly alleged by liberals.

In their analyses of U.S. and Israeli foreign policy, liberals can be relied on to overlook the most basic moral distinctions. For instance, they ignore the fact that Muslims intentionally murder noncombatants, while we and the Israelis (as a rule) seek to avoid doing so. Muslims routinely use human shields, and this accounts for much of the collateral damage we and the Israelis cause; the political discourse throughout much of the Muslim world, especially with respect to Jews, is explicitly and unabashedly genocidal.

Given these distinctions, there is no question that the Israelis now hold the moral high ground in their conflict with Hamas and Hezbollah. And yet liberals in the United States and Europe often speak as though the truth were otherwise.

We are entering an age of unchecked nuclear proliferation and, it seems likely, nuclear terrorism. There is, therefore, no future in which aspiring martyrs will make good neighbors for us. Unless liberals realize that there are tens of millions of people in the Muslim world who are far scarier than Dick Cheney, they will be unable to protect civilization from its genuine enemies.

Increasingly, Americans will come to believe that the only people hard-headed enough to fight the religious lunatics of the Muslim world are the religious lunatics of the West. Indeed, it is telling that the people who speak with the greatest moral clarity about the current wars in the Middle East are members of the Christian right, whose infatuation with biblical prophecy is nearly as troubling as the ideology of our enemies. Religious dogmatism is now playing both sides of the board in a very dangerous game.

While liberals should be the ones pointing the way beyond this Iron Age madness, they are rendering themselves increasingly irrelevant. Being generally reasonable and tolerant of diversity, liberals should be especially sensitive to the dangers of religious literalism. But they aren't.

The same failure of liberalism is evident in Western Europe, where the dogma of multiculturalism has left a secular Europe very slow to address the looming problem of religious extremism among its immigrants. The people who speak most sensibly about the threat that Islam poses to Europe are actually fascists.

To say that this does not bode well for liberalism is an understatement: It does not bode well for the future of civilization.

[Immacolata]

Before the Muhammed cartoon incident, I would have flat out rejected that article. A few broken eggs does not an omelet make.

Before the Pope-quotes-dead-king-incident, I was asking myself if the problem was ever really going to be solved.

Now I am starting to belief that no matter what we do, or don't do, short of converting ourselves to islam, there will be no respite, no shelter from random terrorist acts, made to cause as much spectacle in the media as possible.

They are a fickle lot, and they will take offense at anything when the opportunity arises, in order to widen their appeal, and sinister types their recruitment base.

We either shed the ancient yoke of religion or get some serious synkretism running, and fast. Or forget about world peace.

But first we will have to stop kowtowing to the radicals, just because we really really really would like their oil. Untill the last drop of oil has been sucked out of the ME soil, the region will flare up time after time, and no stability will come over it.