Anti-Islaam Film

[Hoodie]

The more i've actually looked at Sharia Law its pretty interesting and very different than the way the western media presents it. In Saudia Arabia Sharia Law allows people inside prison to have conjugal visits for example.

 

it also allows men to thigh-fuck babies.

[chenGOD]

Hey guess what - of all the churches surveyed in the US 100% of them had a text advocating severe violence, stoning of women, rape, adultery etc etc.

Of all the terrorist attacks to take place on american soil, the vast majority have been perpetrated by American citizens who were not muslims.

 

 

• The Clash of Ignorance
   
  

• 
  

by Edward Said

Samuel Huntington's article "The Clash of Civilizations?" appeared in the Summer 1993 issue of Foreign Affairs, where it immediately attracted a surprising amount of attention and reaction. Because the article was intended to supply Americans with an original thesis about "a new phase" in world politics after the end of the cold war, Huntington's terms of argument seemed compellingly large, bold, even visionary. He very clearly had his eye on rivals in the policy-making ranks, theorists such as Francis Fukuyama and his "end of history" ideas, as well as the legions who had celebrated the onset of globalism, tribalism and the dissipation of the state. But they, he allowed, had understood only some aspects of this new period. He was about to announce the "crucial, indeed a central, aspect" of what "global politics is likely to be in the coming years." Unhesitatingly he pressed on:

"It is my hypothesis that the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural. Nation states will remain the most powerful actors in world affairs, but the principal conflicts of global politics will occur between nations and groups of different civilizations. The clash of civilizations will dominate global politics. The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future."

Most of the argument in the pages that followed relied on a vague notion of something Huntington called "civilization identity" and "the interactions among seven or eight [sic] major civilizations," of which the conflict between two of them, Islam and the West, gets the lion's share of his attention. In this belligerent kind of thought, he relies heavily on a 1990 article by the veteran Orientalist Bernard Lewis, whose ideological colors are manifest in its title, "The Roots of Muslim Rage." In both articles, the personification of enormous entities called "the West" and "Islam" is recklessly affirmed, as if hugely complicated matters like identity and culture existed in a cartoonlike world where Popeye and Bluto bash each other mercilessly, with one always more virtuous pugilist getting the upper hand over his adversary. Certainly neither Huntington nor Lewis has much time to spare for the internal dynamics and plurality of every civilization, or for the fact that the major contest in most modern cultures concerns the definition or interpretation of each culture, or for the unattractive possibility that a great deal of demagogy and downright ignorance is involved in presuming to speak for a whole religion or civilization. No, the West is the West, and Islam is Islam.

The challenge for Western policy-makers, says Huntington, is to make sure that the West gets stronger and fends off all the others, Islam in particular. More troubling is Huntington's assumption that his perspective, which is to survey the entire world from a perch outside all ordinary attachments and hidden loyalties, is the correct one, as if everyone else were scurrying around looking for the answers that he has already found. In fact, Huntington is an ideologist, someone who wants to make "civilizations" and "identities" into what they are not: shut-down, sealed-off entities that have been purged of the myriad currents and countercurrents that animate human history, and that over centuries have made it possible for that history not only to contain wars of religion and imperial conquest but also to be one of exchange, cross-fertilization and sharing. This far less visible history is ignored in the rush to highlight the ludicrously compressed and constricted warfare that "the clash of civilizations" argues is the reality. When he published his book by the same title in 1996, Huntington tried to give his argument a little more subtlety and many, many more footnotes; all he did, however, was confuse himself and demonstrate what a clumsy writer and inelegant thinker he was.

The basic paradigm of West versus the rest (the cold war opposition reformulated) remained untouched, and this is what has persisted, often insidiously and implicitly, in discussion since the terrible events of September 11. The carefully planned and horrendous, pathologically motivated suicide attack and mass slaughter by a small group of deranged militants has been turned into proof of Huntington's thesis. Instead of seeing it for what it is--the capture of big ideas (I use the word loosely) by a tiny band of crazed fanatics for criminal purposes--international luminaries from former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto to Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi have pontificated about Islam's troubles, and in the latter's case have used Huntington's ideas to rant on about the West's superiority, how "we" have Mozart and Michelangelo and they don't. (Berlusconi has since made a halfhearted apology for his insult to "Islam.")

But why not instead see parallels, admittedly less spectacular in their destructiveness, for Osama bin Laden and his followers in cults like the Branch Davidians or the disciples of the Rev. Jim Jones at Guyana or the Japanese Aum Shinrikyo? Even the normally sober British weekly The Economist, in its issue of September 22-28, can't resist reaching for the vast generalization, praising Huntington extravagantly for his "cruel and sweeping, but nonetheless acute" observations about Islam. "Today," the journal says with unseemly solemnity, Huntington writes that "the world's billion or so Muslims are 'convinced of the superiority of their culture, and obsessed with the inferiority of their power.'" Did he canvas 100 Indonesians, 200 Moroccans, 500 Egyptians and fifty Bosnians? Even if he did, what sort of sample is that?

Uncountable are the editorials in every American and European newspaper and magazine of note adding to this vocabulary of gigantism and apocalypse, each use of which is plainly designed not to edify but to inflame the reader's indignant passion as a member of the "West," and what we need to do. Churchillian rhetoric is used inappropriately by self-appointed combatants in the West's, and especially America's, war against its haters, despoilers, destroyers, with scant attention to complex histories that defy such reductiveness and have seeped from one territory into another, in the process overriding the boundaries that are supposed to separate us all into divided armed camps.

This is the problem with unedifying labels like Islam and the West: They mislead and confuse the mind, which is trying to make sense of a disorderly reality that won't be pigeonholed or strapped down as easily as all that. I remember interrupting a man who, after a lecture I had given at a West Bank university in 1994, rose from the audience and started to attack my ideas as "Western," as opposed to the strict Islamic ones he espoused. "Why are you wearing a suit and tie?" was the first retort that came to mind. "They're Western too." He sat down with an embarrassed smile on his face, but I recalled the incident when information on the September 11 terrorists started to come in: how they had mastered all the technical details required to inflict their homicidal evil on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and the aircraft they had commandeered. Where does one draw the line between "Western" technology and, as Berlusconi declared, "Islam's" inability to be a part of "modernity"?

One cannot easily do so, of course. How finally inadequate are the labels, generalizations and cultural assertions. At some level, for instance, primitive passions and sophisticated know-how converge in ways that give the lie to a fortified boundary not only between "West" and "Islam" but also between past and present, us and them, to say nothing of the very concepts of identity and nationality about which there is unending disagreement and debate. A unilateral decision made to draw lines in the sand, to undertake crusades, to oppose their evil with our good, to extirpate terrorism and, in Paul Wolfowitz's nihilistic vocabulary, to end nations entirely, doesn't make the supposed entities any easier to see; rather, it speaks to how much simpler it is to make bellicose statements for the purpose of mobilizing collective passions than to reflect, examine, sort out what it is we are dealing with in reality, the interconnectedness of innumerable lives, "ours" as well as "theirs."

In a remarkable series of three articles published between January and March 1999 in Dawn, Pakistan's most respected weekly, the late Eqbal Ahmad, writing for a Muslim audience, analyzed what he called the roots of the religious right, coming down very harshly on the mutilations of Islam by absolutists and fanatical tyrants whose obsession with regulating personal behavior promotes "an Islamic order reduced to a penal code, stripped of its humanism, aesthetics, intellectual quests, and spiritual devotion." And this "entails an absolute assertion of one, generally de-contextualized, aspect of religion and a total disregard of another. The phenomenon distorts religion, debases tradition, and twists the political process wherever it unfolds." As a timely instance of this debasement, Ahmad proceeds first to present the rich, complex, pluralist meaning of the word jihad and then goes on to show that in the word's current confinement to indiscriminate war against presumed enemies, it is impossible "to recognize the Islamic--religion, society, culture, history or politics--as lived and experienced by Muslims through the ages." The modern Islamists, Ahmad concludes, are "concerned with power, not with the soul; with the mobilization of people for political purposes rather than with sharing and alleviating their sufferings and aspirations. Theirs is a very limited and time-bound political agenda." What has made matters worse is that similar distortions and zealotry occur in the "Jewish" and "Christian" universes of discourse.

It was Conrad, more powerfully than any of his readers at the end of the nineteenth century could have imagined, who understood that the distinctions between civilized London and "the heart of darkness" quickly collapsed in extreme situations, and that the heights of European civilization could instantaneously fall into the most barbarous practices without preparation or transition. And it was Conrad also, in The Secret Agent (1907), who described terrorism's affinity for abstractions like "pure science" (and by extension for "Islam" or "the West"), as well as the terrorist's ultimate moral degradation.

For there are closer ties between apparently warring civilizations than most of us would like to believe; both Freud and Nietzsche showed how the traffic across carefully maintained, even policed boundaries moves with often terrifying ease. But then such fluid ideas, full of ambiguity and skepticism about notions that we hold on to, scarcely furnish us with suitable, practical guidelines for situations such as the one we face now. Hence the altogether more reassuring battle orders (a crusade, good versus evil, freedom against fear, etc.) drawn out of Huntington's alleged opposition between Islam and the West, from which official discourse drew its vocabulary in the first days after the September 11 attacks. There's since been a noticeable de-escalation in that discourse, but to judge from the steady amount of hate speech and actions, plus reports of law enforcement efforts directed against Arabs, Muslims and Indians all over the country, the paradigm stays on.

One further reason for its persistence is the increased presence of Muslims all over Europe and the United States. Think of the populations today of France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Britain, America, even Sweden, and you must concede that Islam is no longer on the fringes of the West but at its center. But what is so threatening about that presence? Buried in the collective culture are memories of the first great Arab-Islamic conquests, which began in the seventh century and which, as the celebrated Belgian historian Henri Pirenne wrote in his landmark book Mohammed and Charlemagne (1939), shattered once and for all the ancient unity of the Mediterranean, destroyed the Christian-Roman synthesis and gave rise to a new civilization dominated by northern powers (Germany and Carolingian France) whose mission, he seemed to be saying, is to resume defense of the "West" against its historical-cultural enemies. What Pirenne left out, alas, is that in the creation of this new line of defense the West drew on the humanism, science, philosophy, sociology and historiography of Islam, which had already interposed itself between Charlemagne's world and classical antiquity. Islam is inside from the start, as even Dante, great enemy of Mohammed, had to concede when he placed the Prophet at the very heart of his Inferno.

Then there is the persisting legacy of monotheism itself, the Abrahamic religions, as Louis Massignon aptly called them. Beginning with Judaism and Christianity, each is a successor haunted by what came before; for Muslims, Islam fulfills and ends the line of prophecy. There is still no decent history or demystification of the many-sided contest among these three followers--not one of them by any means a monolithic, unified camp--of the most jealous of all gods, even though the bloody modern convergence on Palestine furnishes a rich secular instance of what has been so tragically irreconcilable about them. Not surprisingly, then, Muslims and Christians speak readily of crusades and jihads, both of them eliding the Judaic presence with often sublime insouciance. Such an agenda, says Eqbal Ahmad, is "very reassuring to the men and women who are stranded in the middle of the ford, between the deep waters of tradition and modernity."

But we are all swimming in those waters, Westerners and Muslims and others alike. And since the waters are part of the ocean of history, trying to plow or divide them with barriers is futile. These are tense times, but it is better to think in terms of powerful and powerless communities, the secular politics of reason and ignorance, and universal principles of justice and injustice, than to wander off in search of vast abstractions that may give momentary satisfaction but little self-knowledge or informed analysis. "The Clash of civilizations" thesis is a gimmick like "The War of the Worlds," better for reinforcing defensive self-pride than for critical understanding of the bewildering interdependence of our time.

 

Watch more here:

http://thenewliberator.wordpress.com/2009/09/27/edward-said-the-myth-of-the-clash-of-civilizations/

 

Oh and I guess some context would be good - Said is responding to a 1993 article by political scientist Samuel Huntington entitled "the Clash of Civilization" (which he would later expand into a book). This article (and the subsequent book) played a large role in shaping American foreign policy with regard to the middle east.

You can read it here:

http://www.polsci.wvu.edu/faculty/hauser/PS103/Readings/HuntingtonClashOfCivilizationsForAffSummer93.pdf

 

It's an interesting article, but the Said critique is very valid.

[syd syside]

Furthermore an article by Wafa Sultan, "a self described enlightened and liberated Muslim, a psychiatrist who emigrated to the US from Syria", raises issues that I wish Leftist activists would address.

 

While the United Nations obsessively attacks Israel, it merely reveals its own abysmal human rights record -- neglecting Muslim women's rights; ignoring freedoms of faith and conscience; turning a blind eye to the fate of Muslim apostates sentenced to death; failing to address the brutal treatment of Christians and other citizens of Islamic nations, and for ignoring the rights of non-Muslim foreigners living or working in Muslim countries.

 

A Palestinian women's organization reported that Muslim men perpetrate some 40 honor killings annually in the West Bank alone, not including the vast majority of honor killing and abuse of women that go unreported -- as Islamic society maintains secrecy in upholding the popular belief that those "cursed with a sin, [should] hide it."

Where is the UN Human Rights Commission's outcry over the Muslim world's honor killing epidemic? Has the UN adopted the same Islamic philosophy, hiding a societal sin to protect Muslim honor?

Where is the UN condemnation of Sharia law that forgives abusive and murderous men whose wives are assumed sinful? What has the UN done to stop and forbid this appalling trend?

 

--

 

One young Arab woman, a student, wrote to me only last month:

"They deprive us of any right to think, and ... remind us each time, how we will burn in hell. They terrorize us, and they do the same with the children. I would like that to stop. I try very hard to change things. I created a little group against sexism. And I hope to be able to defend Arab women one day."

 

 

 

http://www.gatestone...an-rights-abuse

[syd syside]

Hey guess what - of all the churches surveyed in the US 100% of them had a text advocating severe violence, stoning of women, rape, adultery etc etc.

Of all the terrorist attacks to take place on american soil, the vast majority have been perpetrated by American citizens who were not muslims.

 

What? 100% of all churches? Can you expand on how this would be the case.

 

And comparing domestic terrorism of non-Muslim Americans with Muslim Americans seems a bit biased considering how many more non-Muslim Americans there are...

 

I don't advocate for any church however so if you are suggestion Christians advocate more violence than Muslims that could be accurate but that doesn't excuse Muslims advocating violence.

 

I'll give this article a read.

[syd syside]

which stalls the Israeli/Palestinian resolution and which puts doubts in Westerners and makes integration more difficult.

 

you're damned if you do, damned if you don't. What would you choose to believe if you lived in say Pakistan and a drone killed 10 of your neighbors? Even if you weren't an 'islamic extremist' would you be more pissed off that your neighbors are dead for no reason or pissed off the other islamists for giving your religion a bad name to ignorant moronic americans? It really is the most bizarre argument in the world that you're making, one that i used to hear on fox news quite often.

 

I like also how you conveniently omit that Israel's government, who treats Palestinians as second class citizens has a large role to play in the lack of a resolution. How would you feel if you were a Palestinian man in his 60s and you had to wait at a check point for a half hour then show your papers to a snot nosed 18 year old punk with a machine gun wearing a cartoonishly over-sized helmet every time you wanted to go to work? probably pretty pissed off

 

Your argument is that most Muslims aren't pissed off at human right violations in their country because most of their neighbors have been killed by American drone bombings? I am not advocating drone bombings so I don't know how that is counter to my complaints with how Islamic states conduct themselves.

[joshuatxuk]

50 percent is still very high in my opinion.

 

true - and I could also queue a lot of alarming statistics about, I dunno, American Christians and their views on gays, non-Christians, the Arab-Israeli conflict, etc...but as mentioned earlier that's a different context and way different level altogether, even if the parallels are strikingly similar

 

Advocating Sharia Law is a bit different than not wanting gay marriage as well. I just don't see the equivalency and I find trying to make them a wash a bit odd considering the reality of the situation.

 

Sharia law is currently more homophobic and oppressive in practice than the laws proposed by Christian fundamentalists in America. That's obvious. But the Bible is just as fucking backwards and still interpreted by zealots in countries without the same equal rights laws here in the States and in Europe. Just look at Uganda, where Christian groups (85% of the population) are trying to strengthen the already discriminatory laws against LGBTs to both death penalty and life sentences. It's all the same doctrinal bullshit.

 

Also, for the record I don't, and can't, speak for the left. For example, I can say I'm often baffled by the far left who are fiercely anti-Israel but seemingly apathetic to the oppressive ideology of those in power (Hamas, Hezbollah) in the Palestinian territories. But that doesn't mean that Arabs don't have the right to be pissed off at the West for influencing their lives so much so often through war, diplomatic sanctions, and regime change. So I can acknowledge valid grievances can go hand-in-hand with religious protests, but I can't condone it fully. I dunno, I guess I'm in agreement with Hitchens in the vid below on that.

 

I don't consider myself a right-winger either, which should be obvious if you've seen any of my other recent political rants. I'm someone how scoffs at people who end up being apologists for Islam more so than fundamental Christianity or Judaism, especially at the whole "religion of peace" phrase. I think I can say that I agree that mainline Christians are not as violent or quick to act in the manner of mobs or terrorism as Muslims, but I must stress that has to do with the influence of a social history that advocates democracy and liberty more often in "Christian" countries than Muslim ones in the present day. There will never be Christian mobs storming Arab embassies in the US because of their restraint, but because our police and military would prevent such a plot from even unfolding before it occurred.

 

 

 

The more i've actually looked at Sharia Law its pretty interesting and very different than the way the western media presents it. In Saudia Arabia Sharia Law allows people inside prison to have conjugal visits for example.

 

it also allows men to thigh-fuck babies.

 

Citation please? Don't get me wrong, I completely believe you, considering the example set by the prophet himself:

 

"Aisha was the daughter of Muhammad's close friend Abu Bakr. She was initially betrothed to Jubayr ibn Mut'im, a Muslim whose father, though pagan, was friendly to the Muslims. When Khawlah bint Hakimsuggested that Muhammad marry Aisha after the death of Muhammad's first wife (Khadija), the previous agreement regarding marriage of Aisha with ibn Mut'im was put aside by common consent.^[11] Aisha was six or seven years old when betrothed to Muhammad.^[11][15][16] Traditional sources state that she stayed in her parents' home until the age of nine when the marriage was consummated with Muhammad, then 53, in Medina,^{[16][17][18][19]} with the single exception of al-Tabari, who records that she was ten.^[15]"

 

[SR4]

Good god.

 

Religion is not a separate factor from American intervention and suppression.

 

If I am a citizen of Iran, and my country has experienced economic turmoil at the drop of a hat because of CIA and U.S. sponsored pressure, of course Im going to act out. But if on top of all that someone in my moment of desperation inducts me into a group with money, power, etc. etc. and also claims that fighting the U.S. is a religiously righteous thing to do, it makes it far easier for disillusioned youth to act out and join these organizations than they would otherwise.

 

I can guarantee you the Crusades never, ever would have happened anywhere near the magnitude they did had the Pope not convinced feudal lords that they had a religious responsibility to go east and fight to the death. They had more than enough to worry about in their own localized power struggles.

 

Do people seriously not understand how these things are intertwined? Religion is not the sole reason for all evil on earth, to claim such a position is beyond severe retardation. Religion can exploit in a way that other power structures might not be able to, and it becomes all the more effective in its extreme means when you are appealing to a downtrodden population that feel like outside forces have them cornered.

[syd syside]

Good god.

 

Religion is not a separate factor from American intervention and suppression.

 

If I am a citizen of Iran, and my country has experienced economic turmoil at the drop of a hat because of CIA and U.S. sponsored pressure, of course Im going to act out. But if on top of all that someone in my moment of desperation inducts me into a group with money, power, etc. etc. and also claims that fighting the U.S. is a religiously righteous thing to do, it makes it far easier for disillusioned youth to act out and join these organizations than they would otherwise.

 

I can guarantee you the Crusades never, ever would have happened anywhere near the magnitude they did had the Pope not convinced feudal lords that they had a religious responsibility to go east and fight to the death. They had more than enough to worry about in their own localized power struggles.

 

Do people seriously not understand how these things are intertwined? Religion is not the sole reason for all evil on earth, to claim such a position is beyond severe retardation. Religion can exploit in a way that other power structures might not be able to, and it becomes all the more effective in its extreme means when you are appealing to a downtrodden population that feel like outside forces have them cornered.

 

Who is saying Religion is the sole reason? If this is directed at me at least be specific.

[SR4]

no its not directed at you, there seems to be a lot of "No you fool, X is to blame, not Y!" They are both part of the same equation.

[Hoodie]

The more i've actually looked at Sharia Law its pretty interesting and very different than the way the western media presents it. In Saudia Arabia Sharia Law allows people inside prison to have conjugal visits for example.

 

it also allows men to thigh-fuck babies.

 

Citation please? Don't get me wrong, I completely believe you, considering the example set by the prophet himself:

 

"Aisha was the daughter of Muhammad's close friend Abu Bakr. She was initially betrothed to Jubayr ibn Mut'im, a Muslim whose father, though pagan, was friendly to the Muslims. When Khawlah bint Hakimsuggested that Muhammad marry Aisha after the death of Muhammad's first wife (Khadija), the previous agreement regarding marriage of Aisha with ibn Mut'im was put aside by common consent.^[11] Aisha was six or seven years old when betrothed to Muhammad.^[11][15][16] Traditional sources state that she stayed in her parents' home until the age of nine when the marriage was consummated with Muhammad, then 53, in Medina,^{[16][17][18][19]} with the single exception of al-Tabari, who records that she was ten.^[15]"

 

 

honestly, i'm not even sure anymore. i first read about "thighing" a year or two ago on a website that looked pretty legitimate (it was run by a muslim-turned-atheist guy). it said that the prophet muhammad (PEACE AND BLESSINGS OF ALLAH BE ON HIM) used to stick his cock between his six year old wife's thighs and practice edging, so people thought that made it ok because only penetrative sex is bad and they started doing it to babies. but now when i look it up, all that comes up are these shitty, anti-islam propaganda blogs. i'm not sure what to think anymore. i mean, the catholic church has institutionalized child abuse, so it's not a huge stretch to say that islam might've too.

 

i'm also pretty sure that religion is just an excuse for these riots. these people are poor, tired, hungry, beaten up, etc. and the stupid movie was the straw that broke the camel's back and made them flip out. if it wasn't the movie, it would've been something else.

[chenGOD]

Good god.

 

Religion is not a separate factor from American intervention and suppression.

 

If I am a citizen of Iran, and my country has experienced economic turmoil at the drop of a hat because of CIA and U.S. sponsored pressure, of course Im going to act out. But if on top of all that someone in my moment of desperation inducts me into a group with money, power, etc. etc. and also claims that fighting the U.S. is a religiously righteous thing to do, it makes it far easier for disillusioned youth to act out and join these organizations than they would otherwise.

 

I can guarantee you the Crusades never, ever would have happened anywhere near the magnitude they did had the Pope not convinced feudal lords that they had a religious responsibility to go east and fight to the death. They had more than enough to worry about in their own localized power struggles.

 

Do people seriously not understand how these things are intertwined? Religion is not the sole reason for all evil on earth, to claim such a position is beyond severe retardation. Religion can exploit in a way that other power structures might not be able to, and it becomes all the more effective in its extreme means when you are appealing to a downtrodden population that feel like outside forces have them cornered.

 

The guy that came to our discussion today actually wrote a book called "A World Without Islam", where he argues that even without religion, Western interactions with the middle east would not be too terribly different. I haven't read the book yet, nor will I until after term is finished, but it's an interesting premise. i would also add that he was remarkably not what i expected at all given my past interactions with ex-CIA analysts. His discussion on Libya would have pleased Robbie to some degree even.

 

Compson - yes 100% of churches have a bible. A text which is remarkable for its violence, mistreatment of women and the other examples I offered up.

[syd syside]

Compson - yes 100% of churches have a bible. A text which is remarkable for its violence, mistreatment of women and the other examples I offered up.

 

So you are suggesting that Christianity promotes more violence? What about this statistic from that survey : 75% of the mosques are Shariah-adherent (on a scale of 1-10, they are 7 or higher).

 

Do 75% of Christian churches support blasphemy laws? Do you think people should have the right to disobey Islamic law and don't you think its odd American Muslims would be supportive of Sharia Law when America fought against blasphemy laws back in the 1700s?

[murve33]

Compson - yes 100% of churches have a bible. A text which is remarkable for its violence, mistreatment of women and the other examples I offered up.

 

So you are suggesting that Christianity promotes more violence? What about this statistic from that survey : 75% of the mosques are Shariah-adherent (on a scale of 1-10, they are 7 or higher).

 

Do 75% of Christian churches support blasphemy laws? Do you think people should have the right to disobey Islamic law and don't you think its odd American Muslims would be supportive of Sharia Law when America fought against blasphemy laws back in the 1700s?

Fuckin-hell, Compson. 75% are pro-Morsi. Quit generalizing.

[syd syside]

Source?

 

Regardless Sharia Law shouldn't be tolerable and I don't understand why the liberal left seems to oppose attacking Islam when they have been active in criticizing Christianity.

[murve33]

Compson, you're the one who posted the original source. But here you go: http://frontpagemag.com/2012/nonie-darwish/over-75-of-egyptian-americans-voted-for-islamist/

 

"again Egyptian immigrants voted over 75% for Mursi"

[eugene]

Which of course explains the huge protestant population in South Korea, Japan, and China and their rapid success.

ideas and methods spread around, you know. it would actually be fun to compare deng's post-mao bomb "getting rich is not shameful" (or something like that) to that shift from catholic ideas about wealth acquisition to protestant ones.

also success and capitalism are not the same.

[awepittance]

Thomas propagandist Friedman had this insightful thing to say today in the New York Times

 

 

That Cairo protester is right: We should respect the faiths and prophets of others. But that runs both ways. Our president and major newspapers consistently condemn hate speech against other religions. How about yours?

 

yours being a reference to all those bad Muslims out there who have refused to condemn others. funny how a lot of the people saying things like this were almost all advocates of extreme wars of aggression. but i guess advocating the bombing of a country that didn't attack us isn't hate speech, right?

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=ZwFaSpca_3Q

[syd syside]

Compson, you're the one who posted the original source. But here you go: http://frontpagemag....d-for-islamist/

 

"again Egyptian immigrants voted over 75% for Mursi"

 

Which is the Muslim Brotherhood/Islamist candidate? I don't understand how that refutes or makes survey supporting Sharia Law a generalization? If anything it backs up the survey.

[syd syside]

Here is a good speech that kind of wraps up my feelings on this by the founder of Human Rights Watch. This seems to relate to my observation of some "Progressives", people who claim to be supporters of Human Rights fear being called a bigot so much that they distort the truth or ignore it.

 

Robert L. Bernstein is the former president and chairman of Random House and founding chairman emeritus of Human Rights Watch.

 

Human Rights Watch and the Middle East

 

I continued to follow the work of Human Rights Watch and about six years ago became a member of the Middle East North Africa Advisory Committee because I had become concerned about what had appeared to me to be questionable attacks on the State of Israel. These were not violations of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights but of the laws of war, Geneva Conventions and international humanitarian law. There has been an asymmetrical war – you might call it a war of attrition in different ways involving Israel – not only with Palestinians but sometimes involving other Arab states, but of course, involving Iran and its non-state proxies Hezbollah and Hamas. In reporting on this conflict, Human Rights Watch – frequently joined by the UN – faulted Israel as the principal offender.

 

It seemed to me that if you talked about freedom of speech, the rights of women, an open education and freedom of religion – that there was only one state in the Middle East that was concerned with those issues. In changing the public debate to issues of war, Human Rights Watch and others in what they described as being evenhanded, described Israel far from being an advocate of human rights, but instead as one of its principal offenders. Like many others, I knew little about the laws of war, Geneva Conventions and international law, and in my high regard for Human Rights Watch, I was certainly inclined to believe what Human Rights Watch was reporting. However, as I saw Human Rights Watch’s attacks on almost every issue become more and more hostile, I wondered if their new focus on war was accurate.

 

In one such small incident, the UN Human Rights Commission, so critical of Israel that any fair-minded person would disqualify them from participating in attempts to settle issues involving Israel, got the idea that they could get prominent Jews known for their anti-Israel views to head their investigations. Even before Richard Goldstone, they appointed Richard Falk, professor at Princeton, to be the UN rapporteur for the West Bank and Gaza. Richard Falk had written an article comparing Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza to Hitler’s treatment of the Jews in the Holocaust. Israel, believing this should have disqualified him for the job, would not allow him into the country. Human Rights Watch leapt to his defense, putting out a press release comparing Israel with North Korea and Burma in not cooperating with the UN. I think you might be surprised to learn the release was written by Joe Stork – Deputy Director of Human Rights Watch Middle East Division – whose previous job for many, many years, was as an editor of a pro-Palestinian newsletter.

 

He continues with his outlook on Arabs and Arab Governments and why it is important for Human Right Organizations/Activists and Muslims (especially those who no longer live under Sharia Law) to do a better job for the sake of progress in Human Rights.

 

People, I believe, are the same everywhere and I believe that, given the chance, good things can happen. I’ve learned it over and over again, starting with seeing Germany and Japan change so dramatically after a devastating war – and more recently with South Africa, South Korea and with many countries in South America.

 

I believe the Arab people, given the chance, would not be opting for committing genocide of Israel – as Iran, supported by Hamas and Hezbollah, does. I believe the Arab people, like any people, would opt for a better life for themselves. The great majority would want it on this earth, not in the hereafter, and I question very much whether they would want to go to war if there were any other possible way of avoiding it. We will never know until their governments allow free speech, or until human rights organizations do a better job of trying to ferret out what the people actually think, as opposed to their government.

 

http://www.unwatch.o...7489&ct=8884881

 

Perhaps this phenomenon helps explain why problems don't get solved, and why there is little progress in getting to peace and security.

[chenGOD]

Which of course explains the huge protestant population in South Korea, Japan, and China and their rapid success.

ideas and methods spread around, you know. it would actually be fun to compare deng's post-mao bomb "getting rich is not shameful" (or something like that) to that shift from catholic ideas about wealth acquisition to protestant ones.

also success and capitalism are not the same.

Right, so it's not a uniquely cultural aspect, rather it is the set of economic institutions which provided incentives to grow/reinvest capital.

South Korea, Japan, and now China all grew through capitalist economies.

[awepittance]

Perhaps this phenomenon helps explain why problems don't get solved, and why there is little progress in getting to peace and security.

 

perhaps it doesnt, it's very selective to say what you've just outlined above, again plays a large role in why so many muslims in arab countries have resentment towards the united states. We didn't invade iraq or afghanistan because of some sort of human rights problem in the middle east. but maybe i'm totally off base, and rising anti american protests are not the 'problems' you speak of, if so ignore what i said.

[syd syside]

Perhaps this phenomenon helps explain why problems don't get solved, and why there is little progress in getting to peace and security.

 

perhaps it doesnt, it's very selective to say what you've just outlined above, again plays a large role in why so many muslims in arab countries have resentment towards the united states. We didn't invade iraq or afghanistan because of some sort of human rights problem in the middle east. but maybe i'm totally off base, and rising anti american protests are not the 'problems' you speak of, if so ignore what i said.

 

That's a separate issue that definitely and rightfully contributes to anti-american protests but that still does not give human rights violations in Islamic states a free pass or moral high ground. I think the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were waged with the intent of increasing hate towards the West, solidifying the belief amongst Muslims that what the West stands for (freedom of education, womens rights etc) are evil and therefore preventing positive change in the region by giving religious extremist more power. This fuels conflict which is good for the Western powers because it gives them the continued right for Imperialism and Police State. The "liberal left" plays its part in this process by focusing on Israel/US aggression and making progressives feel sympathetic towards the Middle East. Which is fine. The problem is this sympathy is a silencer of legitimate human right abuses taking place in the Middle East and in turn divides the West politically, allowing both parties to continue their aggression though more discreetly (as we have seen under Obama).

 

I am wary that the Middle East will strike a major blow to Israel and this will lead to a full scale war in the Middle East. Progressives should be more focused on both sides of this issue to help Muslims understand that it is not a religious war, but a humanitarian war. But this is becoming increasingly difficult to accomplish after a decade of failed US foreign policy. Our credibility as humanitarians has drained and all that is left is an Us vs Them mentality from both sides of the religious extremes.

[Rubin Farr]

[joshuatxuk]

Good god.

 

Religion is not a separate factor from American intervention and suppression.

 

If I am a citizen of Iran, and my country has experienced economic turmoil at the drop of a hat because of CIA and U.S. sponsored pressure, of course Im going to act out. But if on top of all that someone in my moment of desperation inducts me into a group with money, power, etc. etc. and also claims that fighting the U.S. is a religiously righteous thing to do, it makes it far easier for disillusioned youth to act out and join these organizations than they would otherwise.

 

I can guarantee you the Crusades never, ever would have happened anywhere near the magnitude they did had the Pope not convinced feudal lords that they had a religious responsibility to go east and fight to the death. They had more than enough to worry about in their own localized power struggles.

 

Do people seriously not understand how these things are intertwined? Religion is not the sole reason for all evil on earth, to claim such a position is beyond severe retardation. Religion can exploit in a way that other power structures might not be able to, and it becomes all the more effective in its extreme means when you are appealing to a downtrodden population that feel like outside forces have them cornered.

 

Well said.

[eugene]

Which of course explains the huge protestant population in South Korea, Japan, and China and their rapid success.

ideas and methods spread around, you know. it would actually be fun to compare deng's post-mao bomb "getting rich is not shameful" (or something like that) to that shift from catholic ideas about wealth acquisition to protestant ones.

also success and capitalism are not the same.

Right, so it's not a uniquely cultural aspect, rather it is the set of economic institutions which provided incentives to grow/reinvest capital.

South Korea, Japan, and now China all grew through capitalist economies.

and what are those institutions ? they're aren't a product of material determinants only, the actual institutionalisation (of pretty much anything) is a societal/cultural process.