From the photograher, Dean Shaddock: This was captured as I collected my things from airport security (Detroit Metro Concourse A). I think of it as something like a Rorschach test. Is an elderly Catholic nun being frisked by a Muslim security agent the celebration of blind justice? Or is it simply an admission of absurdity? http://www.flickr.com/photos
The following story comes my way via Dhimmi Watch. While Muslims frisk nuns at American aeroports the Pope is questioning Islamic fascism and Muslim supremacy. Will more people end up dead the way they did last time Muslims rampaged and murdered because the Pope questioned Islamic violence? Yes, a nun was murdered by Muslims when the Pope spoke of Islamic violence. This time? Maybe the Muslims will be too busy frisking nuns to get around to killing the Pope. We'll see.
SIMON CALDWELL, "Pope in 'freedom' blast at Islam" Daily Mail, 21 Sept 2007
The Pope has again risked provoking the wrath of the Islamic world, by criticising its treatment of Christians.
Benedict XVI attacked Muslim nations where Christians are either persecuted or given the status of second-class citizens under the Shariah Islamic law.
He also defended the rights of Muslims to convert to Christianity, an act which warrants the death penalty in many Islamic countries.
His comments came almost exactly a year after he provoked a wave of anger among Muslims by quoting a Byzantine emperor who linked Islam to violence.
Yesterday, near Rome, the 80-year-old pontiff made a speech in "defence of religious liberty", which, he said "is a fundamental, irrepressible, inalienable and inviolable right".
In a clear reference to Islam, he said: "The exercise of this freedom also includes the right to change religion, which should be guaranteed not only legally, but also in daily practice."
Addressing the problem of Islamic extremism, he added: "Terrorism is a serious problem whose perpetrators often claim to act in God's name and harbour an inexcusable contempt for human life."
Last September, radical British Muslims said Pope Benedict should be executed for "insulting" the Prophet Mohammed.
Throughout the Middle East and Africa, Christians were subjected to violence in retribution for his remarks.
His latest comments, however, come just days after one of the Church of England's-senior bishops warned that Muslim leaders here must speak out in defence of the right to change faith.
The Bishop of Rochester, Michael Nazir-Ali, told Channel 4's Dispatches programme of his fears for the safety of the estimated 3,000 Muslims who have converted to other faiths in this country.
A poll earlier this year of more than 1,000 young adult British Muslims found that 36 per cent believe those who convert to another faith should be punished by death.
Pope Benedict is particularly concerned about the persecution of Christians in Iraq since the invasion of 2003.
Before then, there were about 1.2million Christians in the country. But the number has dropped to below 600,000.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk
10 comments:
Dag,
Since you believe in a filibuster for a universal modernity, it is not immediately apparent exactly how you would articulate the problem with a Muslim working in security in the modern West. I mean, if we can't ever trust them, then our position should be to quarantine the Islamic world in its entirety - but that cannot, it seems to me, be a likely way to modernize the Islamic world.
Do you think that, at present, we should 1) not have Muslim immigration into the West; 2) just not allow Muslims who are taking a step into the modern Western workforce to work in security sensitive positions 3) Just not allow Muslims who wear hijabs, or show other signs of orthodoxy, to work in security.
In other words, can we have a positive agenda to assimilate Muslims to a universal modernity, one that encourages them to buy into and help defend our Western values; or are they, by simple fact of professing Islam in any shape or form, so untrustworthy, or so honestly opposed to Western society, that they can only be assimilated by school teachers with guns? And has any people who have been quarantined with guns ever been assimilated to its enemy's culture? Surely only those who have been orphaned from their families and raised by their captors... Is it fair to suggest that, in your view, we must choose between orphaning all the Muslim children of the world, or quarantining all the Muslims and forgetting about a universal modernity? Or is there some way to bring the Muslim adults into a universal modernity too? Or do I have your sense of the choices all wrong? Is there some less violent way to encourage mass out-migration from Islam, or to change Islam itself?
In terms that address the reality of what we are today, with our limited human, cultural, intellectual, and other resources - and not what we should or might be - what can be our policy for dealing with Muslims? If they can't share the same rights as everyone else (because some percentage of Muslims are deadly Jihadis and we can never be sure which, among the whole, those are) like the right to apply for any job, then presumably they shouldn't be here at all.
What should be the stand of a conservative human rights organization on such issues, especially an organization that wants other people in the West, with their aversions to mass killing, to listen to it. If you care to answer these questions, feel free to refer for contrast to this guy's argument (I don't think you would agree with him) that many people are not capable of living like modern Western people and since we cannot change Muslims we should simply isolate them and stop pretending there is such a thing as "Islamo-fascism" to contrast with "moderate" Muslims.
I should point out my own preference is for policies that allow Muslims a way out: e.g., yes you can immigrate, and work in security, under condition that you swear an oath of loyalty to our constitution and values, swear that you will oppose all violent forms of Jihad and the desire to impose Sharia law in the West. You would swear that people have a right to leave Islam with no harm. Similar rules would obtain to licensing mosques and imams. Immigrants would also have to remain employed for a reasonable period and have guarantors to that effect. Immigration for welfare would be tightly controlled. Failure to meet all these terms would result in deportation.
see also. Muslim immigrants and mosque licensees, and tv broadcasters and publishers, should be made to swear an oath of loyalty to their Western nations, making clear it supersedes any loyalty to the politicized Umma and any "peaceful political Jihad", under risk of appropriate penalties. If a security worker does that, and what I suggest above, will you accept her at the airport?
Sorry about the delay in responding, I'm pressed for time right now. Will try to respond in some better detail in the morning.
For now, let me add only that a loyalty oath is only as good as the person giving it; and to be blunt, on Islam there is no such possibility as loyalty to anything to other than Allah.
Islam is not the same kind of religion that we see in modern Christianity in many of its sickly forms. There is no Islamic equivalent of the New Age ersatz nonsense of Presbyterianism and the other caprophagic dog-boys of the WCC. To its credit in my view, Islam is a vibrant and demanding and and unique religion of people who sincerely believe in something they accept a the nature of the Good. Of course they go too far, even unto madness and murder. They make themselves th enemies of the world by doing so.They are unforgivable for their crimes against Humanity and against their own children. Nevertheless, one can have some respect in a fashion, at a remote distance, for a movement of those who are uncompromising in their belief in the right of the Good. If Islam were a private religion rather than a public triumphalist imperialism one could even like Islam to an extent. Perhaps.
But there are three kinds of Islam, none of them the mysterious and never-seen "moderate" Islam. that does not exist. It cannot exist n Islam because it is, for those who understand what Islam is, an oxymoron. One believes in the literal and immutable message of Allah mediated through Mohammed or one does not, and that's all there is to it. The message is the supremacy of Islam over every aspect of everything, of the total control of Allah of all. Thus, there is no such thing as law in the physical universe. Allah, should he wish it, can override the laws of physics. There can be no states, for such state would rival Allah for prestige, and this is idolatry. There is, in short, only Allah, and nothing else is anything of worth or interest. Nothing at all is important but Allah. If Allah decides to burn all Korans, Allah can do so. If Allah decides to banish Mohammed from Paradise and send all Muslims to Hell on a whim, that is the Good of Allah. There is, then, no anything but Allah. Therefore, there is no Truth outside Allah and Islam. You can see the point I make here: There is no truth but the truth of Islam. Nothing else is a matter of importance. One can lie, cheat, steal, rape, murder, commit any kind of crime imaginable or otherwise; and so long as Allah has not forbidden it it is no crime at all. Thus, to lie to an infidel is not a crime; to pledge an oath to an Infidel government is not a crime, not even a consideration. It's just mouth noises.
I'll return to this as I find time tomorrow.
a loyalty oath is only as good as the person giving it; and to be blunt, on Islam there is no such possibility as loyalty to anything to other than Allah.
-but a human being can make loyalty to his tribe/nation essential; one need not be a good Muslim, according to any particular understanding of a good Muslim. To say an oath by a Muslim is no good is to presume he is a perfect Muslim in the same interpretation fundamentalists have. But, no religion can simply be some pure idea purely held by all. Some Muslims hate the fundamentalists and are fighting with us, like in Afghanistan. Do we disavow our allies as soon as they are no longer useful?
There is no such thing as perfect literalism. Even "literalism" is an interpretation of a text. Even Muslims need leaders telling them how to think. And there are people in the West today trying to find interpretations that allow them to make certain accommodations. One of the points of making a loyalty oath with consequences is to pressure people to make the right accommodations, to put them on a path to assimilation to a world where church and state must be separated. There are, for example, elected Muslims in the Conservative Party parliamentary caucus in Ottawa. They seem to have accommodated themselves to our rules and ways. Or do you refuse to trust them too?
Also, the point of a loyalty oath is to make clear that there will be consequences for breaking it, so that 1) if and when we must start fighting seriously, we will be fighting by our sense of right and wrong - and we will have started to undermine the nihilist relativism in our own culture by making clear and important statements about what is fundamental to our nation - and so we will not be as likely to rip ourselves apart in "white guilt" when we start deportations, imprisonments, or whatever. But if we start by just writing off one sixth of humanity, it offends our sense of justice and the values we want to fight for. Even if we hold our values in ignorance of the real world and its threats, we still need to be pragmatic and not offend our own fantasies, if we want our many fantasists to fight for our nation; 2) we start to erode the fantasies of those not-fully-committed Muslims who are already here and give the impression that participating in Friday night beheading video parties, or whatever, may come back to haunt one. Human beings are often cowards and impressionable as such; we are not some idealized vision of x y or z.
Moderate Islam does exist, in the sense that there are all kinds of cautious, not fundamentalist, Muslims, who are more interested in worldly things than religion. They are the less-than-perfect Muslims (not to be confused with the reformers). There are also many states in this world that are run by Muslims, often rather secular ones. These are of course often a target for Jihadis; but still, to say such states, states that demand loyalty in their own terms, just can't exist because of an idealized fundamentalist reading, when in fact they do exist, doesn't give the impression that you want to deal with what is, and not just with what the serious Jihadis fantasize about. Have you have been captured by the imagination of your enemy? Are we really to treat every Arab running some small business in Canada like he is Osama bin Laden? How can we do that and not destroy our own sense of justice?
Truepeers left a couple of comments above that I'm trying to keep up with. Below I try to address the first paragraph:
[And now I see two more comments!]
There is no injunction in Islam to wear a hijab. To wear a hijab is to declare oneself a Muslim of a certain persuasion, of a militant and politically radical persuasion.
Peers writes: "Since you believe in a filibuster for a universal modernity, it is not immediately apparent exactly how you would articulate the problem with a Muslim working in security in the modern West."
Where, one might well ask, do I find any authority to advocate the filibuster for universal Modernity? Where do I find a foundation in positive law or natural practice that justifies my view that Modernist civilization, i.e. American liberal democracy, must be triumphant in the world at all costs, even so costly as to include decimation of the populations of primitive nations? What do I place my faith in Manifest Destiny on? Racial superiority of Americans? Obviously not, since there is no "racial" or ethnic American. My intolerant temper? I'm an easy-going guy in real life. The voice of God? I consistently claim to be an atheist. Some special insight from the aether? I make a living in a very practical world of commerce and exchange in which foolery would leave me starving. So whence the Manifest Destiny? As a down-to-earth guy who travels around the world I've had the privilege of experiencing life with others of all sorts, and all of them, to my experience, are Human. I'm pretty much non-judgmental in most cases of strange customs and behaviors. I often shrug at things most would tear their flesh in the face of. Life is often hard and sometimes disgustingly brutal, and it's not my place to condemn it just because. But there are limits I cannot rightly transgress without shaming myself, not due to any high moral code I might have but simply because I am Human too. Others doing what I dislike? I don't care. Others doing evil? I do care. I do distinguish, and in the face of evil its a matter of "I might not be able to define it but I know it when I see it." Simplistic and proletarian? Provincial and ethnocentric? Unfamiliar with the latest sociological theories from a junior college in Kansas? OK, I confess, that's me to the bone. How do I justify with any authority at all my strivings for universal morality and the filibustering needed to bring it about? What gives me the right to demand an imposition of Modernity on others? Who the Hell am I?
I do question the Authority of the Moral. I do not see the Authority as revealed, or if so, then not to me, the final arbitrator of my own decision regarding its authority; hence, I have no set Authority on which to base my authority of the Universal. It leaves me on sandy ground when I argue for the filibustering of the universal Modernity I so demandingly and uncompromisingly work for. A posteriori, if nothing else, I argue against pain for the satisfaction of another with no gain for the recipient, such as no cutting and burning of the flesh of another if not for medical and or surgical benefit of the man under the hot knife. No gratuitous torture just for fun. Yes, there are legitimate arguments to be made for sadism for fun, but I'm not going to make them. I rely to the extent I must, on simple Reason, on not doing gratuitous harm. When I see it, I rebel against it. If I see children whipped into frenzies of maniac violence against people they do not know, if I see adults charging children to kill and die, then I do not see this as a valid expression of the Good, and I don't care about the "root causes." I'm not so philosophical as all that. I'm just one man and within that confined space and role I fight for the right, a priori, of children to have their natural born life time. If culture and religion are seen as so important that culture and religion must sacrifice children to support its continuation, then I wish that culture and religion to die and let children survive without it. I base my stance on the negative, then, on the non-authority of those who would kill their own children. That leaves me with the authority of living children to rear over the dead bodies of parents who would have otherwise killed their babies. But am I causing this child-murder by "forcing" parents to murder their children? Is my call to filibuster the "root cause" that impels parents to kill their children? Would things be fine in the family if I were to stay home and mind my own business? Am I the immoral agency? One must decide; and having decided, then one must settle on the decision. How bad am I? And if not, then what?
I have to go by outward signs of identity in the case of parents in the world. If I see a parent in a hijab, then it is a sign of Islamic fervor. It is not a necessary Muslim accoutrement. The hijab is a sign of militant political and standard Islam in its violent and aggressive triumphalist mode rather than in its scholastic Medieval mode. The hijab is a sign of radical jihad against the kufar, i.e. us. The hijab is a sign of anti-establishmentarianism. It is a semiotic sign of war against airplanes and passengers within. We cannot trust such a person, knowing as we do the sign of militant Islam in the guise of a hijab. No, we cannot trust them. Or, we must trust them to be true to their stated hatred of the West and of all things non-Islamic, in other words, 'no,' we cannot trust them.
Peers writes: "I mean, if we can't ever trust them, then our position should be to quarantine the Islamic world in its entirety - but that cannot, it seems to me, be a likely way to modernize the Islamic world."
To see a woman in a position of responsibility for the safety of citizens and legitimate residents, e.g. an airport security guard, wearing a hijab, is to see an enemy in charge of our security. This woman is declaring openly her hatred of non-Islam. She objects? The lady doth protest too much. It is a sign of militant triumphalism, is that hijab. The Koran and hadiths and the sira do not require it, and it is only worn to show in this day and age a sign of Islamic triumphalism. We cannot trust such a person, regardless of whether she wears it by choice or is forced by family and cultural practice to wear it. Not all Hitler Youth were sincere believers, as Ratzinger points out believably. Not all hijabers are sincerely committed to 'killing all the unbelievers where ever they find them,' to nearly quote the Koran verbatim. Maybe some are not. I don't want to take that chance that only some of them are insincere as Muslims.
What of those Muslims who would flee it if only they could? It's not allowed. It is canonical Islam to murder apostates, as we have in too many quotations from the Koran, hadiths, and current fatwahs to ignore. If we tolerate hijabs in security officers at our airports in the hope that such a wearer is only making a fashion statement or is at worst coerced to wear it by family and fellow Muslims, then what protection can a potential apostate hope for from our land of the free and the home of the brave? what do we offer here if that's what we offer? If there is a law for some that isn't for others, then there is no law at all for anyone. And if we do not protect those who would flee from Islam, then why did we protect Germans in WWIII, one of whom grew up to be the current pope? Protect the Germans in WWII? Well, yes, we didn't de-nazify the nation for nothing. Nor did we destroy it only to wreak vengeance on them. Am I kidding? Did we wage war on Germany to save Germans? And if so, by what right? Yes, they were waging an aggressive and genocidal war against the world, but where is the authority to prevent them for doing so? Did we in effect filibuster against Germany to impose Modernity on them? We did not quarantine the Germans, which we could well have done if we hadn't first decided to exterminate them with atomic bombs. No one would have gasped, no one would have blinked, no one would have cared. But we did not exterminate the Germans. We gave them another chance to live and redeem themselves. We saved ourselves. Imagine how we would feel today had we wiped out Germany then. Germany was no great place, though they had some high achievements in history. Germany was little better economically or socially than was Italy or Egypt in 1900. Things do change. Italy today is Modern. So too is Germany. So too can be the Muslim world if Egypt if they may be. But they will only be dead if we do nothing but wait till we hate them so much that we kill them all in a rage.
We see Muslimas frisking nuns at our airports. We see a gathering rage and a frustration as Muslim doctors wage war on civilians in Britain and Canada and elsewhere. We see dhimmi fools running head-long into the war that need not be. We must stop now, assess our position, and, as my look-alike Marat claims, deal with a few thousand now rather than with many thousands later. Stop the madness of dhimmitude now, save those who can be saved, and carry on into calm Modernity of cleanliness and security for all.
Truepeers writes a long comment and there is more to address, which I cannot at this hour complete. I'll try to do more tomorrow.
Do you think that, at present, we should 1) not have Muslim immigration into the West; 2) just not allow Muslims who are taking a step into the modern Western workforce to work in security sensitive positions 3) Just not allow Muslims who wear hijabs, or show other signs of orthodoxy, to work in security.
In other words, can we have a positive agenda to assimilate Muslims to a universal modernity, one that encourages them to buy into and help defend our Western values; or are they, by simple fact of professing Islam in any shape or form, so untrustworthy, or so honestly opposed to Western society, that they can only be assimilated by school teachers with guns? And has any people who have been quarantined with guns ever been assimilated to its enemy's culture? Surely only those who have been orphaned from their families and raised by their captors... Is it fair to suggest that, in your view, we must choose between orphaning all the Muslim children of the world, or quarantining all the Muslims and forgetting about a universal modernity? Or is there some way to bring the Muslim adults into a universal modernity too? Or do I have your sense of the choices all wrong? Is there some less violent way to encourage mass out-migration from Islam, or to change Islam itself?
In terms that address the reality of what we are today, with our limited human, cultural, intellectual, and other resources - and not what we should or might be - what can be our policy for dealing with Muslims? If they can't share the same rights as everyone else (because some percentage of Muslims are deadly Jihadis and we can never be sure which, among the whole, those are) like the right to apply for any job, then presumably they shouldn't be here at all.
What should be the stand of a conservative human rights organization on such issues, especially an organization that wants other people in the West, with their aversions to mass killing, to listen to it. If you care to answer these questions, feel free to refer for contrast to this guy's argument (I don't think you would agree with him) that many people are not capable of living like modern Western people and since we cannot change Muslims we should simply isolate them and stop pretending there is such a thing as "Islamo-fascism" to contrast with "moderate" Muslims.
Sun Sep 23, 12:37:00 AM PDT
truepeers said...
I should point out my own preference is for policies that allow Muslims a way out: e.g., yes you can immigrate, and work in security, under condition that you swear an oath of loyalty to our constitution and values, swear that you will oppose all violent forms of Jihad and the desire to impose Sharia law in the West. You would swear that people have a right to leave Islam with no harm. Similar rules would obtain to licensing mosques and imams. Immigrants would also have to remain employed for a reasonable period and have guarantors to that effect. Immigration for welfare would be tightly controlled. Failure to meet all these terms would result in deportation.
Well, I can see my day going already. I hate typing.
I'm sorry if I request too much of your time, Dag. Please ignore me if you must.
I'll just add for the moment that while there is no Koranic injunction to hijab as head covering, Wikipedia suggests there are hadiths that seem to demand it. Of course that article reads like it was written by people from some junior college in Kansas, but we all know where their ivy league ideas come from.
But anyway, I think I agree with you that such symbols can be read as anti-Western and thus should disqualify one from work in airport security. Still, a serious Jihadi in that event would lose the scarf and just become more determined to do us damage. So, I await your attitude to quarantine vs. divide and modernize. On the other hand, the larger point the hijab discussion proves is that even fundamentalist Islam is a question of interpretation. And I remain of the view that we either have to impose ourselves on this work of interpretation in order to find those Muslims and interpretations
we can support in opposition to those we cannot, or we have to admit we support mass killing which would surely follow any quarantine, or, on the other hand, any surrender to Islam in this worldwide struggle.
To address your last point regarding hadiths, some are strong, and that goes down the list to those considered weak. There, and this is the major problem with Islam as a reformable religious ideology, things are indeed open to interpretation. Some hadiths contradict others, naturally, and some suras are abrogated. Who decides? Well, like in any movement, those with energy and appeal will set the tone, which in Islam is done by the ulema, the Medieval legalist Schoolmen or by the post-modernist Tikfiris, the muscle in the middle acting out the play between the two being the largely illiterate and economically devastated middle peasant ground.
In any case, whether the legalists, the takfiris, or the peasants, all are bent on Islamic domination of the world and its people. Those who want a reform of Islam are the few in the West and the fewer still in the realm of Dar al-Islam who have no say in anything, not now and not in the imaginable future. We in the West stand on the sidelines watching the struggle between the old guard and the new fighting it out for the heart and soul of Islam. Islam will always be a literal and violent movement. Its innate violence is in the texts, and to strip the texts of the violence is to gut the religion to the bone, leaving it not Islam at all but something no Muslim could recognize. So far there's little appetite among Muslims for such a job.
I'll get back to this later.
muslims by ideology are Primitive Man.
Westerners are Civilized Man.
Primitive man must perish in the Conflict.
We spent a lot of time only to find Anon. cutting through the Gordian Knot.
I'll make sure I find time, though, to continue my response to the points above.
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